Text and Image in Women's Life Writing: Picturing The Female Self

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 spe-
cialist 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, espe-
cially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that deepens and diver-
sifies 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
Corinne Bigot
Stephanie Genty
Claire Bazin
Editors
Text and Image in

Women’s Life Writing
Picturing the Female Self
Editors
Valérie Baisnée-Keay Corinne Bigot
University of Paris-Saclay Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
Sceaux, France Toulouse, France
Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni Stephanie Genty

Université Paris 8-Vincennes- Université d’Évry Paris-Saclay
Saint Denis Evry Cedex, France
Saint-Denis, 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
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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 col-
leagues 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.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
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
vii
viii 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
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
Contents ix
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 contem-
porary 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 per-
sonal 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
xi
xii 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 co-
edited 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, includ-
ing Rethinking Gender and Popular Culture in the 21st Century: Marlboro
Men and California Gurls (2017). She is involved in a research project
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
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 femi-
nine 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.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
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 writ-
ing, 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 nar-
ratives 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 litera-
ture, through feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives. Recent publi-
cations 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
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
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 Julie Chen. Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books, 1998.
(Photo by Sibila Savage. Courtesy of Julie Chen) 27
Fig. 2.2 Julie Chen. Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books, 1998.
(Photo by Sibila Savage. Courtesy of Julie Chen) 28
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)81
Wikimediacommons)83
Wikimediacommons)88
Fig. 7.1 Shirley Lim. 2018. Facebook post July 28, 2018.
(Courtesy: S. Lim) 130
Fig. 7.2 Shirley Lim. 2018. Facebook post August 13, 2018.
(Courtesy: S. Lim) 132
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
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975,

Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith 162
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 166
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 170
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 173
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 188
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 192
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) 262
Research and Index, 1977. perspex, white card, wood, paper,
ink, mixed media, 36 units. 18 × 13 cm, 7.1 × 5.1 in.
List of Figures xix

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.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The contemporary proliferation of images has not only affected life writ-
ing 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 dia-
logue 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
1
In art history and visual studies, the disciplines that study visual culture, the terms “picto-
rial” 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).
V. Baisnée-Keay (*)
University of Paris-Saclay, Sceaux, France
e-mail: valerie.baisnee@universite-paris-saclay.fr
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

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
2 V. BAISNÉE-KEAY
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 acknowl-
edge the cultural dimension at the heart of images, and especially how gen-
der 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 writ-
ing, 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 read-
ings of women’s works and may suggest they cannot rise above the per-
sonal. 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 sex-
ual roles. Thus, images of women and by women remain at the center of a
political and cultural struggle: the struggle for women to resist objectifica-
tion 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
1 INTRODUCTION 3
require explaining. For W.J.T. Mitchell (1986), however, there is a meth-

odological issue in trying to define the nature of images. The main prob-
lem 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, hal-
lucinations, 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 extend-
ing 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:
amplifying [anchorage]
text ‘amplifies’ image
unequal
TEXT-IMAGE
RELATIONSHIP reducing [illustration]
image ‘reduces’ text
equal [relay]
4 V. BAISNÉE-KEAY
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 indi-
vidual 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 posi-
tions, 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 suf-
fered from its negative association with images, considered by
2
Mitchell mentions the philosopher Nelson Goodman as the main critic of semiotics.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
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 “post-
memory” to refer to a specific kind of memory situated between personal
memory and History, a term she develops in relation to Holocaust survi-
vors and which she defines as “second-generation memories of cultural or
collective traumatic events and experiences” (1997, 22). However, collec-
tive memory can also be manipulated: there is a “politics of remembering”
within a culture that shapes its vision of the past. Indeed, we are encour-
aged 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 mem-
ory: 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 mythol-
ogy 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.
6 V. BAISNÉE-KEAY
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 emerg-
ing 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 com-
pares memories to the archaeological objects of Pompei or Tutankhamun’s
tomb: “All of the essentials are preserved; even things that seem com-
pletely 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 archae-
ologists. 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 auto-
biography, 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.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
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 cyber-
memories 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 inter-
ests 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 autobi-
ographies 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 increas-
ingly 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
8 V. BAISNÉE-KEAY
though this “invention” is framed by those models a society makes avail-

able. 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 every-
day life. They provide the necessary multiplicity and fluidity to the indi-
vidual’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 one-
self 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).
1 INTRODUCTION 9
contradiction disappears if we distinguish between two types of identity as

Kaufmann does: ordinary identity (what he calls ICO identity),7 or bio-
graphical 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 flu-
idity, 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 commu-
nicative 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 orga-
nized narrative, she acquires a sense of self-continuity as the events of her
life are symbolically integrated into a story. The tendency of autobio-
graphical 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 iden-
tity has appeared: online identity. If social roles no longer define identities,
new communication technologies have given rise to new types of identi-
ties. 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.
10 V. BAISNÉE-KEAY
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 differ-
ent from the “real” one. To answer that question, one needs first to con-
sider 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 perspec-
tive 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 per-
formance 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 auto-
biography and photography alike, the idea that photography and autobi-
ography merely reproduce or represent reality is considered naïve.
Acknowledging the referentiality of a text has even been deemed as tanta-
mount 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.
1 INTRODUCTION 11
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 autobio-
graphical studies: first, memoirs analyzed by poststructuralism are thought
to say more about the present than about the past, as the subject of dis-
course 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 decon-
struction 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/her-
self. 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 photogra-
phy 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 poststructural-
ist distrust for personal images can be found in Roland Barthes’ autobiog-
raphy, 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 photog-
rapher, takes issue with the referentiality of the images, which may omit
12 V. BAISNÉE-KEAY
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 autobi-
ography 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 auto-
biographies 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 metaphys-
ics 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 “punc-
tum,” 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 invalu-
able, unique repositories of the past. As a result, they often feel indispens-
able 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
1 INTRODUCTION 13
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 dis-
plays 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 pro-
cess 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 patriar-
chal control and violence, an effort that is still under way as the contem-
porary #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 subjectiv-
ity” (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 photo-
graphs were first considered as the products of an inexpressive and
14 V. BAISNÉE-KEAY
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 photo-
graph, 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 opposi-
tion 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 pho-
tographic 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).
1 INTRODUCTION 15
transformation from object of the male gaze to subject as a breastless sam-

urai warrior in words and pictures.
As women’s bodies have become truly objectified, women who repre-
sent 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 see-
ing 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 “autobio-
graphical acts [that] situate the body in some kind of material surround
that functions as a theatre of embodied self-representation” (5). An exam-
ple 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 nar-
ratives and representations of the body.
Multiple media are thus available for women to engage with representa-
tions 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 epiph-
anic embodied representations of the female self. One of the iconic pic-
tures 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 epito-
mizes 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.
16 V. BAISNÉE-KEAY
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 corre-
spondence 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 com-
binations 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 referen-
tiality of textual/visual representations through the memoirs of artists
such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Butler, along with the travel writ-
ing 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.
1 INTRODUCTION 17
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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.
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Chicago Press.
———. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
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7 (2): 131–146.
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Online. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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London: Verso.
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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 over-
all. 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 litera-
ture 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 iden-
tity assumed to be a fiction. Writers and artists contended with the
H. D. S. Wong (*)
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
e-mail: hertha@berkeley.edu

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_2
22 H. D. S. WONG
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 decon-
structed: 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 autobiog-
raphies 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 cul-
ture, 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 col-
lection of variables in proximity. Relatively unheard voices and unseen
images of women and underrepresented minorities proliferated in litera-
ture and art, often in hybrid autobiographies composed of image and text.
While, historically, visual and literary studies have been considered sep-
arate 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 disci-
plines 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 illu-
minated manuscripts,3 this is a new category of autobiographical
1
The enduring interest in self-representation has only ramped up with the latest technol-
ogy. 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
2 THINKING THROUGH THE BOOK AND REIMAGINING THE PAGE: JULIE… 23
expression that I call variously “visual autobiography” (a term British pho-

tographer Jo Spence used to refer to her work as early as 1979), “interme-
dia 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 supplementa-
tion 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 histo-
ries 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 juxta-
position 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 inter-
face 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.
24 H. D. S. WONG
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 cat-
egories 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 espe-
cially 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 inter-
face, 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 con-
found the supposed image/text divide, and most importantly, the interac-
tion between viewer/reader and what is viewed/read. Visual
autobiographies, in their multifarious forms, demand an intense engage-
ment 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, unconven-
tional 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 ele-
ments claim our immediate attention, setting a mood and eliciting emo-
tions 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
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 con-

ceptually 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, mate-
rials, text, illustration, format, and structure all work … together to create
4
Artists’ books are not books by or about artists, but books as art.
5
For further consideration of trauma in women’s autobiography, see Egan, Fuchs, Schwab,
and Whitlock.
26 H. D. S. WONG
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 “tac-
tile experience of turning the pages” (3) and the experience of an “inti-
mate” 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 “com-
pelling objects in their own right” (9). She never loses sight of “the book
as a physical object and a time-based medium” (http://www.flyingfish-
press.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 disem-
bodied, 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 expe-
rience 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, kin-
esthetic, 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
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 expecta-
tions, 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)
28 H. D. S. WONG
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 sug-
gest a continuous, circuitous journey in which the autobiographical per-
sona 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)
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 laby-
rinth 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 random-
ness, 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 sur-
faces, 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
30 H. D. S. WONG
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 morn-
ings and afternoons she is afflicted with “worry,” “guilt,” and “anxiety”
on page one and how many times she can claim “calm,” doubt,” com-
fort,” “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 docu-
menting 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 num-
ber (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 prac-
ticing these bits of advice may smooth social relations, they may also invite
hypocrisy: being so polite that you never express what you really feel.
“Always looking your best” and “Never speaking out of turn” are highly
gendered, female-specific advice used to keep women attractive and com-
pliant or at least silent. The decorative pages enhance the positive affirma-
tions, 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, concer-
tina 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 autobio-
graphical 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 remem-
brance
…
for
the way
things might
have been but
weren’t
32 H. D. S. WONG
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 “whis-
pering 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.
Considered as a whole, Bon Bon Mots offers an aesthetic sampling of

artists’ book forms even as they, sometimes seriously, sometimes play-
fully, 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 architec-
tures 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 rela-
tions—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 associ-
ated 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 time-
based 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 pon-
ders not only the nature of subjectivity, but of its construction and rep-
resentation. 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.
34 H. D. S. WONG
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 exam-
ined 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, offer-
ing 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 pro-
duction. For the younger sister, who has remained home, the quilt is an article of everyday
utility and beauty.
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 paint-
ing, 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 multiplic-
ity of selves, affiliations, and locations.8 While this quilt is not autobio-
graphical, 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 construct-
ing the image, Aunt Jemima seemed to be portrayed in extremes” (76).
36 H. D. S. WONG
center of the quilt. The four human figures that frame and surround
Jemima represent her African-Native American mother, daughter, hus-
band, 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 uncon-
ventionally, 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 notewor-
thy 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.
“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 histori-
cal 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, contex-
tual 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.
11
The sizes of the quilts range from 73 inches by 68 inches to 74¾ inches by 94 inches.
38 H. D. S. WONG
Eschewing visual realism and historical literalism, Ringgold recontextu-

alizes 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 conti-
nents 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 autobio-
graphical 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 prej-
udice 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
autobiographical forms. They each construct a matrix of American iden-

tity 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.
40 H. D. S. WONG
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 dimen-
sion 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, bor-
rowed citations, and captionless photographs, this supposed autobiogra-
phy 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: marie-agnes.gay@univ-lyon3.fr

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_3
42 M.-A. GAY
It is clearly the form of this unclassifiable book that is shown to prob-

lematize 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 charac-
ters, 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 postmod-
ernist 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 pub-
lished 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 lin-
guistic 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:
1
Cha was murdered in New York on November 5, 1982, at the age of 31.
2
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/.
3 “[UN]SYSTEMATIC, EVEN WITH THE IMAGE”: TEXT-IMAGE BLURRING… 43
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 representa-
tions of voice, images made of words, image-like texts—no generic bound-
ary or frame has resisted Cha’s attempt to blur all aesthetic lines. After
analyzing Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s disruptive use of text/image dia-
logue as a means to question the very possibility of a stable autobiographi-
cal 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 inevitabil-
ity 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 prac-
tice 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.
44 M.-A. GAY
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 rein-
forced 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 photo-
graphs is an established fact: “[T]he testimonial aspect of photography
[…] derives from its ‘indexicality’ and ‘evidentiality’, two notions empha-
sized by Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag” (Petit and Pozorski 2018,
§14). The photograph of Yu Guan Soon would thus seem both to authen-
ticate 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 sug-
gests 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 can-
not 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 per-
ceives photographs, something Barthes acknowledges: “A specific
4
Shelley Sunn Wong further remarks that “The adherence to calendrical time is […] com-
plicated 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)
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 obvi-
ously 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 photo-
graph in the book, which keeps the referent at a second remove, is obvi-
ously meant to emphasize the elusiveness of the figure represented.6 This
is confirmed by the striking absence of a caption, which blurs the identifi-
cation process, of both the picture itself and its referent.
Obviously, in the present case, one might say that the biographical frag-
ment 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 iden-
tifying 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).
5
She obtained two M.A. in Fine Arts from Berkeley.
6
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-presen-
tation of reality.
46 M.-A. GAY
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 pic-
ture (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 criti-
cal 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 refer-
ence 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 imperson-
ating 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 contra-
dicted 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 compos-
ite 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 multi-
cultural, 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 heri-
tage of the possibilities of representation.’ (Rinder 2001, 19)
Furthermore, the growingly unsettling use of the visual/textual inter-

face 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 mem-
oir 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 frag-
ment—“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 proba-
tionary 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.
48 M.-A. GAY
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 iden-
tify the persons represented or their relationship to Cha. In the first pic-
ture, 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 succes-
sion of photographs soon proves more and more disruptive. It proposes
palimpsestic montages that blur the faces, features slightly different ver-
sions of the same individual several pages apart, and reproduces eleven
times the same family group picture, whose unrecoverable members para-
doxically 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 pleni-
tude” and disrupts “the documentary authority and the evidentiary status
of the photograph” (Hirsch 2002, 243–244). The chaotic visual proces-
sion 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 ref-
erential instability, they systematically lead to blurred meaning and main-
tain 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?
10
https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf0f59n3pf/?brand=oac4.
11
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.
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 compo-
nents 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 under-
stands the distinction between letters and images. As evidenced by the inclu-
sion 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
50 M.-A. GAY
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 har-
bor 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 lin-
guistic 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 conceiv-
able 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 read-
er’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.
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 fit-
ting 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 paradoxi-
cal 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
52 M.-A. GAY
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 identi-
ties produced by centuries of hegemonic discourses; and her highly intel-
lectual 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 analy-
sis, 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 com-
mented 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 rep-
resented. Her very self thus seems to dissolve despite the almost obses-
sional 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 grammati-
cal 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 perfor-
mances in which Cha bodily appeared, this uncanny sense of a proximity
19
She acquired a B.A. and three M.A. from Berkeley in the 1970s.
20
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.
with the unknown is also favored by their oneiric atmosphere and her
spectral-like presence. Her voice was often close to whispers and “hyp-
notic” (Lewallen 2001, 9). In A Ble Wail (1975), Cha is clad in a long
white gown which makes her ghostly, especially in the vaporous atmo-
sphere 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 ante-
moment 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 over-

whelming 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 per-
formance 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 self-
representation.” (Smith and Watson 2002, 5)
22
This letter can stand for the arithmetical symbol zero and its shape is that of a circle fram-
ing a void.
54 M.-A. GAY
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 univer-
sal 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 sur-
face. 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 ap-
pearance 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:
23
https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf2g5001r7/?brand=oac4.
24
It is the same picture as one of those included in Chronology.
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 shad-
ows 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 evoca-
tion 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, end-
ing 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 metaphysi-
cal questioning and anxious “appealing,”25 which perhaps yields a part of
Cha’s autobiographical truth, her ontological anxiety in the face of inevi-
table 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 negotia-
tion 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.
56 M.-A. GAY
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.
Montier, Jean-Pierre. 2018. Le dispositif photolittéraire comme mode de résil-

ience. 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/polyse-
mes.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 pro-
vide 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: aureliam@email.arizona.edu

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_4
60 A. MOUZET
appear in one of the leading magazines of the feminine press, a symbolic

recognition of her womanhood, the four-hand article was not truly liber-
ating (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 med-
ical 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 mar-
ginalized the trans community, turning individuals into objects of curios-
ity, 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 trans-
sexual [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 hetero-
geneity 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.
4 WOMANHOOD 2.0: A VISUAL-VERBAL-VIRTUAL REDEFINITION… 61
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 under-
standing of trans women’s communities.
This chapter intends to show that, beyond the obvious underlying mar-
keting 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 heteronor-
mative and cisnormative discourses.9 As the author argues, “The media’s
insatiable appetite for transsexual women’s bodies contributes to the sys-
tematic 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 best-
seller list is to sell 10,000 copies, but the New York Times and the publishers do no market-
ing, 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.
62 A. MOUZET
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 plat-
forms (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 ref-
erences 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 some-
one” (Merriam-Webster), a dimension that characterizes Mock’s (re)definition of woman-
hood 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-of-
color-hood] among myriad possibilities.
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 prelimi-
nary 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 sto-
ries 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 direc-
tions (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
64 A. MOUZET
of trans stories,” but also the plurality of Mock’s identities and her multi-
faceted 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 restric-
tions 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, embed-
ded 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 child-
hood 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 men-
tion 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
Had in Kindergarten,” and points her readers/audience towards her sym-

bolic (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 sleeve-
less 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 fluid-
ity, 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 dis-
cusses 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.
66 A. MOUZET
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 plu-
gin 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 main-
stream 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 representa-
tions of trans women and promote her self-brand while advocating for
trans rights. “Such digital practices of self-mediation and networked auto-
biographical 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, snake-
skin 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 encour-
aged 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-
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 sexi-
ness can be considered somewhat reductive and alienating, for a trans
woman, it is, on the contrary, often truly liberating. Trans women’s wom-
anhood 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 recog-
nize—their womanhood. Juliet Jacques has pointed out that some, like
the academic/activist Janice Raymond, perceived “male-to-female trans-
sexuality 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 else-
where: “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 per-
sisting inequities” (Mouzet 2015, 233). Trans women’s stance on femi-
ninity 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 devel-
oped 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).
68 A. MOUZET
On Mock’s website homepage, the biography to the right of her por-

trait 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 biogra-
phy 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
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 impor-
tance 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 iden-
tity 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 six-
part-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 #redefiningreal-
ness. 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.
70 A. MOUZET
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 politi-
cal statements. Mock was able to become a spokesperson for trans com-
munities 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 pro-
vided 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 jour-
nalist, 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 inequi-
ties her peers have to endure.
Being a trans woman of color and having experienced poverty, discrimi-
nation 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 great-
est push factor for trans girls engaged in the sex trade is poverty, stemming
from homelessness (often brought on by parents and/or guardians refus-
ing 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.
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 commu-
nity, 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 cul-
tural definition of narcissism attached to identity politics functions to under-
mine 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 strat-
egies. 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 cam-
paign. 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 intersec-
tional identities and her belonging to a long line of African American
women who resisted oppression: “I stand here as someone who has writ-
ten herself onto this stage to unapologetically proclaim that I am a trans
woman-writer-activist-revolutionary of color. And I stand here today
72 A. MOUZET
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, extin-
guished 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 histori-
cally 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).
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 banish-
ing 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 jour-
ney 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 communi-
ties and individuals. Every story is an invitation to society to learn to
embrace its diversity and the richness of our humanity. Far from the ego-
centric 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
74 A. MOUZET
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 advocat-
ing 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 com-
munity 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).
———. 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 #redefin-
ingrealness. 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 writ-
ings, 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 interpreta-
tions 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: edyta.frelik@umcs.edu.pl

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_5
78 E. FRELIK
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 proté-
gés and associates. What is especially intriguing is that O’Keeffe con-
sciously 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 femi-
nine 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 mod-
ernist project. What frustrated her most was that, no matter what new
imagery and style she experimented with, her innovations were persis-
tently 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).
5 AUTHORITATIVELY HER/SELF: GEORGIA O’KEEFFE’S LIFE WRITING 79
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 credi-
bility 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 profes-
sional” (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
80 E. FRELIK
than Man feels it. And one of the chief generating forces crystallizing into
art is undoubtedly elemental feeling—Woman’s & Man’s are differenti-
ated 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 photo-
graphs 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 sol-
emn, natural and poised, mysterious and ostentatious, delicate and pro-
vocative (Fig. 5.1). But whose gaze is recorded in these pictures, Stieglitz’s
or hers? Or do we have a case of collusion here?
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 cumber-
some 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 satis-
fies 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
82 E. FRELIK
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)—inno-
cent, 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.
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 paint-
brush. Throughout her life, she produced a great number of letters which
she wrote to numerous friends and colleagues. But the bulk of her corre-
spondence was with Stieglitz. Between 1915 and 1946, they exchanged
over 5000 letters, which, according to Greenough, the editor of two col-
lections 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.
84 E. FRELIK
O’Keeffe’s outstanding epistolary output has allowed researchers to accu-

rately 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, intel-
lection, 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 under-
standable 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 autobio-
graphical” is by default truthful and free of deceit is erroneous since writ-
ing 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 autobio-
graphical 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.
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 collabo-
rated with her, recollects, “few explicit instructions on the content and
character of the book […] except to ‘make it beautiful and make it hon-
est’” (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 per-
sonal 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 relation-
ship 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 autono-
mous and, as Smith and Watson have it, always “in dialogue with multiple
and disparate addressees or audiences” (2002, 9). Ultimately, the impor-
tant 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
86 E. FRELIK
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, unsurpris-
ingly, 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) artless-
ness 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 necessar-
ily 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 notwithstand-
ing—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 forget-
ting 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 blunt-
ness of her rebuke she intimated that the source of their disagreement was
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 occa-
sioned 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 matura-
tion 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
88 E. FRELIK
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, unwill-
ing 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
reluctance to speak about herself was a renewed interest in her work gen-
erated by the 1970 Whitney retrospective exhibition and the accompany-
ing 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 rea-
sons” (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 detri-
mental 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 documen-
tary 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 opportu-
nity 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 pub-
licly sanctioned iconic image she had had to passively endorse and con-
form 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 con-
fronts not one life, but two. One is the self that others see—the social,
historical person, with achievements, personal appearance, social relation-
ships. 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
90 E. FRELIK
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 mea-
sures 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 paint-
ings happen.” She also dispenses with another conventional autobio-
graphical 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 “con-
tradict the claims of the verbal text.” Briefly put, photographs in an auto-
biography 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.”
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 some-
what 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 abstrac-
tion, 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—char-
coal, 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)
92 E. FRELIK
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 water-
color, 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 her-
self. Even though her facial features are not rendered, many critics con-
sider 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)
Teasing the reader about the possibilities and limits of visual (self-)repre-
sentation, 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 skepti-
cism 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 cor-
respondence. 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 pre-
cisely 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
94 E. FRELIK
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 mat-
ters, 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 mem-
bers 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 combina-
tions 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 feel-
ings and perceptions in a direct act of communion with her works. Words
that critics might interject into that exchange rarely facilitated that pro-
cess, 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 reflec-
tive 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
ability to spin “provocative” and “unornamented” passages, Rose discern-

ingly points to one important analogy between her writing and her paint-
ing: “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, phi-
losophy, 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—subjec-
tive, and thus partial, like all others, but with an authority no one else
could claim or pretend.
5
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 fac-
tor in her personal life.
96 E. FRELIK
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.
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 com-

ics, 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 cul-
tural discussion of lesbian and queer identities. She concludes that by fail-
ing 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

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_6
102 H. THOMAS
volume of Essential Dykes to the reader, asking them to decide for them-
selves whether lesbians are essentially the same as everyone else or essen-
tially 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 spe-
cifically, insofar as they disrupt conventional modes of representation
through their visual/verbal hybridity, non-linear approaches to temporal-
ity, and alternative constructions of the narrative around the self.
Simultaneously, they open a space where complicated relationships to fam-
ily, 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 norma-
tive frameworks. The graphic memoir thus materializes a queer/ed home,2
rooted and mobile, a refuge against the processes of othering, objectifica-
tion, 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 nar-
ratives 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 radi-
cal 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.
6 FUN HOMES AND QUEER HOUSES OF MEMORY IN ALISON BECHDEL’S… 103
coined expression, as the vantage point from which to reconsider the

childhood “fun home.” I will focus here on Bechdel’s first graphic mem-
oir, 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 (construct-
ing a structure for the archives of self and collective). Through its compos-
ite 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 “authen-
ticity” (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
104 H. THOMAS
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 catego-
ries: 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 transi-
tional homes for Bechdel during major moments of her identity construc-
tion. 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 trans-
formed (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 con-
tainment 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 nar-
rative with images of staged scenes and re-drawn photographs, maps,
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 grow-
ing self-awareness of her own queerness in a Bildungsroman-like trajec-
tory that takes her from the childhood house to university and back again,
but also, beyond that, by interrogating normative frameworks that typi-
cally 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 writ-
ten 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, dis-
sonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the con-
stituent 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 col-
lection, recollection, identity, and ideas of belonging as they have become
106 H. THOMAS
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 nar-
ratives—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 vary-
ing and ever-evolving characteristics and conventions, to the point that a
specific hybrid field of study, “graphic narrative theory,” has been gradu-
ally 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 nar-
ratives 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 com-
plex, 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 sus-
tained reflection about the fluctuating parameters of autobiography. Bart
Beaty sums up the stakes when he points out that, in the wake of the post-
structuralist “death of the Author,” “autobiography in comics holds the
possibility of giving the author birth for the first time” (143–144), some-
thing Elisabeth El Refaie echoes in her study Autobiographical Comics,
where she discusses the means by which autobiographical graphic narra-
tives 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 temporal-
ity—by maintaining a constant hybridization that extends further than
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 associ-
ate 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 tempt-
ing 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 identi-
ties (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 mem-
ory 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 mem-
ory 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
108 H. THOMAS
about his first queer experiences. The tension between the stagnant, linear
temporality of the drive, and the subtly circular, fluid temporality engen-
dered 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 compli-
cates our understanding of archives as a site that does not just interweave
the personal with the political, but that also possesses a queer/ed tempo-
rality 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 mem-
oir functions as an archive that articulates the personal and collective
aspects of queer and lesbian identities. In a 2006 review of Fun Home by
Sean Wilsey, Bechdel is quoted as stating, “I’ve always been a careful archi-
vist of my own life. […] I’ve kept a journal since I was 10. I’ve been log-
ging 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 over-
looked, as both books chart the narrative arc from childhood to adult-
hood: 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 strug-
gles with her romantic relationships, therapy, and the writing and publish-
ing process for what will become Fun Home. As Julia Watson remarks, “By
interpreting her familial story as a narrative of middle-class American fam-
ily 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 gen-
eral and particular, social and individual. The “detritus” from childhood is
represented on the page as literal artifacts, with Bechdel pulling out vari-
ous 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 exam-
ples” by “following a meticulous inductive methodology” (ED xiv). The
background images of pinned insects assert the parallel between entomo-
logical 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”).
110 H. THOMAS
xv), intentionally including herself in this experiment, and implicitly reject-

ing 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 les-
bian essence, bound to fail, has morphed into something else: “I had set
out to name the unnamed, to depict the undepicted, to make lesbians vis-
ible, 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 undesir-
able. 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 predi-
cated 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 appre-
hended on different terms and where Bechdel has the means of control-
ling 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.
genre as a queered or queerable space, where the queer fragmented self

can be re-membered into something that exceeds attempts at homogeni-
zation 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 struc-
ture of the formation of her subjectivity. We see this notably in the repro-
ductions 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 declara-
tive 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 representa-
tion. 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, por-
traits 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 autobio-
graphical interrogation about the self into supposedly non-autobiographical work in a man-
ner that is unique to the medium of the graphic narrative.
112 H. THOMAS
type of a makeshift, ambivalent home for Bechdel that propel her toward
rethinking how and where she belongs and how her identity is being con-
structed. To better understand her father in Fun Home, she keeps map-
ping 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 refract-
ing 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 referential-
ity 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 sur-
rounded 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 insolv-
able 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
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 regenera-
tive for Alison because she works against repression, toward a reposition-
ing that helps her relate rather than separate herself. Disentangling herself
from the “fun home” of her childhood, she can turn to the graphic mem-
oir, 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 com-
plexity 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, fig-
ured as an “artists’ colony,” where residents “ate together, but otherwise
were absorbed in [their] separate pursuits” (FH 134), shows each member
114 H. THOMAS
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 documenta-
tion. 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 rela-
tions 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 con-
stant dual tension within the self between repression and liberation, con-
tainment 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 com-
plexity of the mother-daughter relationship: the question appears because
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 (mean-
ing, 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 func-
tion of empathy. The title thus highlights the need for a mutual recogni-
tion 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 intention-
ally. Within the queer semiotic framework, the chosen family is a refuge
that guarantees freedom, acceptance, and life. By interrogating her rela-
tionship 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 reimagin-
ing 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 mem-
oirs offer a structure that re-members fragmented, disjointed understand-
ings 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 stag-
nant, 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 some-
thing queer exceed its own time” (299)—to move into the future as a
queer self.
116 H. THOMAS
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 liter-
ally 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 audi-
ence—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.
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CHAPTER 7
Framing Herself Then and Now: Shirley

Geok-lin Lim’s Self-Writing and the Evolving
Practice of Photo Albums
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 experi-
ences 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

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_7
120 N. ALEXOAE-ZAGNI
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 belong-
ing, both familial and artistic, a quest that comes across as marked by invis-
ibility, stasis, and hopelessness. If anything, the final sections of the memoir
do offer the promise of being part of a community that sustains and sup-
ports, 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 pho-
tographs 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 sec-
ond 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 benefi-
cial 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.
7 FRAMING HERSELF THEN AND NOW: SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM’S… 121
My analyses will look at the photo album as part of this overarching ges-
ture 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, commu-
nication 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 pre-
dominating 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).
1996, 10). In textually resuscitating actions and events, words and sensa-
tions, 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 pater-
nal 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 mem-
oir—is part of this quest: the gaze is wrapped around them and as the
writing cannot come from a trustworthy relationship to memory, the tex-
tual 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 objec-
tification”—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)
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 tex-
tualization 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 adju-
vant 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 sig-
nify anew her own place within the family. Expanding the scope of the
lens, in a manner not much dissimilar to Barthes’s studium—the “applica-
tion,” “commitment” to what is under one’s gaze (Barthes 1981a,
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 mak-
ing 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 photo-

graphs 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 jour-
ney 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.
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 geo-
graphical and cultural dimensions in that it depicts the writer, her son, and
her husband in front of her mother’s burial place. These biographical pho-
tographs 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 hus-
band 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 excel-
lence,” 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 inser-
tion of the photographs which illustrate a past and prefigure a future.
Nevertheless, ironically, what comes across most poignantly is the incon-
gruity between the photos that can be presented and are arranged coher-
ently—the photo album—and the revelation, through writing, that
memory is in fact faulty and blurred.
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 enunciat-
ing 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 suffi-
ciently 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 indi-
vidual’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 cre-
atively and look mindfully” (Wong 2018, 10)—and acknowledges that
images do not make sense in and by themselves. This undertaking is a
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, dissocia-
tions. 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 mean-
ings, 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 existen-
tial uprootedness and transience that followed Lim into adulthood might
calm down and morph into something else on these other Pacific shores.
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 har-
moniously grow and thrive. This is quite impossible but not totally so, in
these times when identity is being performed and written in other envi-
ronments, 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 noth-
ing 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 chal-
lenge of the self as singular, autonomous, unchanging, and self-sufficient
and its conceptualizations as fluid, active, flexible, and changeable through-
out 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 ensem-
ble 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,
to represent her life and self through these social, networked, multime-
dia ways.
The California-based academic and writer makes different uses of dif-
ferent “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 photo-
graphs 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 loca-
tion 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 elimi-
nated, 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 tradi-
tions—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 chroni-
cled indeed the narrator’s lack of sustenance, going from sheer lack of
food when living under financial stress with her father (“hunger was con-
tinuous 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 nor-
mal that food and cooking are used as comfort and anchorage while
images and posts of them fulfill one of the main functions of
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 communi-
cating them to others” (ibid.), Lim’s posting and sharing of images derive
their significance from what they convey in respect to the writer’s posi-
tioning 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 differ-
ent 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 con-
nection conditioning thus the membership to the virtual curated commu-
nity. 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)
of “moments of being” becomes a space to express and process the con-

tours 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, con-
firmation, and communication of bonds which also brings to the fore how
“lived experience” is entwined, in our contemporary culture, with “medi-
ated 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 expres-
sion, 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 ‘discov-
ering’ (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).
Fig. 7.2 Shirley Lim. 2018. Facebook post August 13, 2018. (Courtesy: S. Lim)
or hashtags imbedded into the page, at times allowing even for synchro-
nous communication.
Indeed, taking fully advantage of Facebook’s affordances as an inter-
face, 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 pro-
cess and produce meaning at the intersection of multimodal frameworks,
meanings unavailable in either words or images alone. The photo captur-
ing 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 embedded-
ness 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.
Conclusion
This essay has traced the telling of personal and cultural stories as expand-
ing from the memoir, a rather traditional form of self-narration, to encom-
pass 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 net-
worked and connected self, claiming virtual space for herself and her
“friends,” shaping and reshaping itself constantly, thriving in hybrid lin-
guistic 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.
References
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———. 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/.
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Chandler, Daniel. 1998. Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on
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short/webident.html.
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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.
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Lejeune, Philippe. 2014. Autobiography and New Communication Tools. Trans.
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Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. 1996. Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American
Memoir of Homelands. New York: The Feminist Press.
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traces autobiographiques, ed. Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vray, 103–106.
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219–225. University of Tulsa. [doctoral dissertation, electronic version].
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Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Van Dijck, José. 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. [Kindle Version].
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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 experi-
ences and the story behind the dish. Although cookbooks have increas-
ingly 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: Corinne.bigot@univ-tlse2.fr

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_8
138 C. BIGOT
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 cul-
ture, 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 culi-
nary 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 culi-
nary autobiography claims for herself a sense of place, heritage, and his-
tory 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 illustra-
tions in culinary memoirs. Yet, most culinary memoirs include photo-
graphs, 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 photo-
graphs, illustrated narrative and recipes is whether the authors create nos-
talgic collages that fix stories, gestures, and photos, or whether they create
alternative “lieux de mémoire” (Nora 1989, 12) as they attempt to pre-
serve and pass on the memories of ordinary women’s skills and knowl-
edge. French historian Pierre Nora explains: “lieux de mémoire originate
with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must
8 NOSTALGIC ALBUMS OR ALTERNATIVE LIEUX DE MÉMOIRE?… 139
deliberately create archives, […] because such activities no longer occur

naturally” (Nora 1989, 12). He goes on to insist that without “commem-
orative 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 unprob-
lematic text-image interplay in Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine creates a
feeling of nostalgia, which evokes the sisters’ attempt to collect and pre-
serve 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 dia-
logue 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 repre-
sents 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
140 C. BIGOT
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 illus-
tration on the dust jacket for the hardbound edition,1 which can be best
described as an “imagetext” (Hirsch 1997, 271), displays an intimate con-
nection 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’ grand-
parents. 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 fam-
ily 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 sis-
ters’ 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.
(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, memo-
ries, and recipes, there are also gaps and silences in the text-image dia-
logue. 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’ his-
tory. 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 interest-
ing is the effect of a haunting presence suggested by the text-image inter-
face 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).
142 C. BIGOT
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.
enough, Carole and Norma Jean Darden play down their own profes-
sional achievements—there is no mention of their catering business nor of
Norma Jean’s successful restaurant—and the few photographs of them-
selves 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 narra-
tives 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.
144 C. BIGOT
Just as the text-image dialogue in Spoonbread tells the story of an

African-American family, it also illustrates the memoir’s agenda to “cele-
brate 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 four-
teen, with no money in his pockets, became a successful businessman (5).
The so-called “family legend” (3), is preceded by a studio portrait show-
ing 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 trav-
elled further to attend all-black colleges.3 The sisters included a photo-
graph 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 pho-
tographs and stories are meant to show that they were overcome. A snap-
shot 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 photo-
graph 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).
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 photo-
graphs also tell. The story of the ravioli recipe(s) illustrates the dual enter-
prise 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 adjust-
ments 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 alterna-
tive 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 sto-
ries, 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 cul-
ture, 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’ col-
lection of recipes and stories shows that “black culinary culture is not cir-
cumscribed 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 associ-
ated with African-American cuisine also feature quite late in the memoir—
for instance, chitlins, pig ears, and okras (305, 314, 317) are relegated to
146 C. BIGOT
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 tradi-
tional 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
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 proj-
ect 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 photo-
graphs, 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 explic-
itly 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 com-
ments (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.
148 C. BIGOT
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 roll-
ing 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 rela-
tives 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 frag-
mentary 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 illus-
trate 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 video-
tape” (208), no doubt in an attempt to store up and fix the elusive magic.
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 dia-
logue 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 col-
lected recipes. They have translated the magic, literally fixing it and pre-
serving 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 autobiogra-
phies 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 photo-
graph 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 vege-
tables, 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 kin-
ship, and shared meals are directly related to the construction and repro-
duction 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
150 C. BIGOT
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 par-
ents 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 inter-
faces 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 hand-
writing 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 evi-
dence of an implied common experience. This is best illustrated by the
ravioli-manti video anecdote, which clearly serves as a metaphor indicat-
ing 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 every-
one’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,
preserve, and share. Most of the informal snapshots feature scenes that can
elicit recognition in any reader—children reading a book, a woman enjoy-
ing 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 recogni-
tion, 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 pro-
motional 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 tech-
niques 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.
152 C. BIGOT
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 con-
cerned 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 ances-
tors’ 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 his-
tory 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.
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 eth-
niques/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: elisabeth.bouzonviller@univ-st-etienne.fr

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_9
158 E. BOUZONVILLER
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, paint-
ings, 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 her-
self. 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’ (stem-
ming 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 vulner-
able 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)
9 ZELDA FITZGERALD’S SELF-PORTRAITURE: A STRENUOUS… 159
Zelda’s own life narrative as she herself tried to express it through her writ-
ing, 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 pro-
fessional 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 conserva-
tive 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 nev-
ertheless 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)
160 E. BOUZONVILLER
with “early success.”5 Many pictures were taken of them throughout their
lives and they often chronicled their eventful existence, intending to dis-
play 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 con-
sumer society of the roaring twenties, “the aspirin age” during which peo-
ple 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 scrap-
books and, in her own way, she contributed to a posthumous glamorous
image of her parents with this publication which displays numerous pho-
tographs 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 “scrap-
books 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 pre-
ceded 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).
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 cou-
ple’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 woman-
hood 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 arche-
type 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,” sug-
gesting 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 pro-
posed a drawing for the dust jacket of Scott’s novel, The Beautiful and
6
Cf note 3.
7
The draft of Scott’s first novel was initially entitled “The Romantic Egotist” (Bruccoli
1991, 94-99).
162 E. BOUZONVILLER
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).
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 nov-
elist’s wife. In terms of self-representation, the frail silhouette in the cham-
pagne 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 humor-
ously 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 writ-
ing 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.
164 E. BOUZONVILLER
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 man-
ner of having Gloria’s deterioration turn on her taste in coats has scarcely
been equaled by Henry James” (389). This humorous hyperbolic assess-
ment offers an insight into Zelda’s revolutionary taste in literature. It also
expresses her approach to modern womanhood within society, which actu-
ally 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 liber-
ating as expected. Under the 1920 caption, the article opens with the sen-
tence “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
9
See Dreiser, Cather, Hardy.
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 appendi-
citis” alludes to Scott’s own sudden worries during a trip to California
(424). This taxonomic article seems to erase individual references to empha-
size 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 nar-
rative 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 impres-
sion remains that of endless movement, multiplicity, speed and the unavoid-
able 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 pic-
ture, 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
10
My emphasis.
166 E. BOUZONVILLER
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 accord-
ing 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
11
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.
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 con-
fusing, 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 sug-
gests 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
12
“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.
168 E. BOUZONVILLER
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 wrench-
ing condition rather than the happy state conjured up in previous photo-
graphs, 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 humor-
ous 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 chrono-
logical 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 hos-
pitalized 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 hus-
band from March 1932, she concluded with self-mortification: “I am that
little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately
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 insan-
ity.” (Bruccoli 1991, 410) Whereas he fiercely tried to prevent her from
writing, in particular on topics he felt were his reserved source of inspira-
tion, 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 por-
trait, this drawing is signed with Zelda’s first name and married name in
the bottom right-hand side corner; self-representation is therefore claimed
170 E. BOUZONVILLER
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.
Better than photographs, her drawings and paintings tell the self from
inside. They sketch a bodily experience and build a “narrativ[e] of break-
down 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 writ-
ing 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
172 E. BOUZONVILLER
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 favor-
ites. 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 super-
vision 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 ques-
tion “‘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 ambi-
tions, 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 occa-
sions: 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).
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
174 E. BOUZONVILLER
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 mov-
ing, 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 for-
getting 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 obsta-
cles on her way as a self-performer. She had started as a southern Belle and
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 medi-
ated 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 relin-
quished 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 inter-
est because she was the canonical novelist’s wife, thus erasing the impor-
tance 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 spe-
cific 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
176 E. BOUZONVILLER
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 frag-
ments 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 pon-
dering 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)
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:
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of Yayoi Kusama, Ana Mendieta, and Francesca Woodman. In Mirror Images:
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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.
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———. 2010. Reading Autobiography. A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives
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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 terri-
tory), 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 ini-
tials 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 justi-
fies 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: floriane.reviron.piegay@univ-st-etienne.fr

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_10
180 F. REVIRON-PIÉGAY
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 prepa-
ration 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 anecdot-
al.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 nev-
ertheless 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).
10 ISABELLA BIRD BISHOP’S 1897 JOURNEY UP THE YANGTZE VALLEY… 181
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 insepa-
rable precisely at the time Bird Bishop started taking lessons in photogra-
phy. 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 vol-
umes 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 pres-
tigious 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 reproduc-
tions from Chinese drawings which figure in her travel account. Yet,
reading her letters to John Murray, both before and after publication, one
becomes aware that Bird Bishop was excessively concerned about her neg-
atives 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 emanat-
ing from an object. The text very plausibly explains the way the technol-
ogy 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 photo-
graphs 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).
her own self almost. She presents herself as a very meticulous photogra-
pher, 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 pho-
tographer.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 frustra-
tion in the text more than once (166-167).5
Indeed, mastering the technical aspect was one thing, but taking pho-
tographs, like developing them, was very seldom a solitary practice and
implied interaction with the Other, whether it be the subject of the pho-
tograph 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 some-
times 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 sug-
gests 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 photogra-
pher; 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 other-
wise have enjoyed. […] Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention” (Sontag, 11).
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 com-
plains about. Bird Bishop seems to fail to understand that her camera
hurts the people’s feelings and represents a breach of propriety. Her eager-
ness 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 proxe-
mics, 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 logi-
cal 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 peo-
ple 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 pho-
tographs 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 peo-
ple” (131).
was to theorize much later, namely that “[…] there is something preda-
tory 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 sym-
bolically possessed” (Sontag 1971, 14).
In an effort to rally their support, Bird Bishop also uses her own pho-
tographs 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 “human-
izing” 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 laugh-
ter 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 point-
ing 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 there-
fore 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 zoologi-
cal 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
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 diag-
nosis. […] 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, manda-
rins 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 photo-
graphs, 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 reli-
gious dance, and a death). These figures are telling: the sociological and
ethnological aspects entailed in the discovery of another country are mas-
sively 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 eigh-
teenth century, so taking a large number of architectural photographs was
a means for Bird Bishop to satisfy the common reader (Cody, 12). Most of
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 tem-
ple, porcelain temple, etc.). The text itself, however, is as much about
human encounters as it is about scenery or villages and cities, so the dis-
crepancy 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 descrip-
tion, disgust and pathos vie for prominence (she mentions their “loath-
some” bodies and calls them “he unsightly and unnatural” [77]). There
is some kind of progression in the way the photographs of female charac-
ters 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 accord-
ing to race, ethnicity and so on. The fragmentation resulting from the
close chest shot and the legend both dehumanize the woman, the scien-
tific 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);
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).
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 ele-
ment 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 subal-
tern, 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 occa-
sions, 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” tradi-
tion (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 evoca-
tion 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.
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 admira-
tion 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, hesi-
tating 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 inclu-
sion of photographs in her texts really adumbrate Susan Sontag’s sugges-
tion 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).
of this mostly very personal travel account, heavily relying on the impres-
sions of a narrator who flaunts her femininity the better to vie with mascu-
line 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 pos-
ture. 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 impres-
sion 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 char-
acter 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 photo-
graphs (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).
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
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 photo-
graph, 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 some-
thing 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 identi-
fication 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 sum-
mer of 1897, that is to say, just before she embarked upon her journey up the Yangtze River.
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 depar-
ture, who dined with the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and who has
just dedicated her book to the Marquess of Salisbury, K.G. with his per-
mission. 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 retro-
spectively 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 alter-
ity of the Manchu women and makes it hers while remaining herself absolutely.
are reminded of “the fundamental tension between the process of self-

fictionalization and the travel-writer cum photographer’s claims to verac-
ity” (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 selec-
tion of photographs she included in her text. She considered that photog-
raphy 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 spar-
ingly. 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 photo-
graphic 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 femi-
ninity, 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 behav-
iour 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 photo-
graph in black-and-white necessarily fails to give a truthful image of reality.
The photographs thus participate in the text’s ambiguous relationship to
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 etymo-
logical sense of “making clearer” or bringing into light. Sometimes, the
relationship between text and image can be jarring: then, they tell a com-
pletely 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).
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: nathalie.saudo@u-picardie.fr

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_11
200 N. SAUDO-WELBY
painter,2 Elizabeth Butler published her autobiography, which she illus-

trated 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 “exceed-
ingly 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 mili-
taire, 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 height-
ened 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 appear-
ance […] 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).
11 A WOMAN’S LIFE OF WAR PICTURES: ELIZABETH BUTLER (1846–1933) 201
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 legiti-
mate 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
5
Elizabeth’s sister Alice went on to become the poetess Alice Meynell.
6
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 improv-
ing her skill at painting landscapes.
202 N. SAUDO-WELBY
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] sketch-
books 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 perspira-
tion 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 ques-
tion 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 repre-
sents an ecclesiastical scene, two “masculine” subjects which also drew Elizabeth Thompson’s
interest.
(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 pub-
lic 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 develop-
ment 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/col-
lection/405915/the-roll-call
204 N. SAUDO-WELBY
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 symp-
tom 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 approach-
ing 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 scat-
tered 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 neces-
sary 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
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 reli-
gious work are full of humour. The Magnificat was painted to satisfy her
mother’s hope that she would join the more respectable “ruck” of reli-
gious 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 exhibi-
tion 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 com-
pliance on her part. There is no rebellion in her attitude, and the
206 N. SAUDO-WELBY
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 pos-
sible 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 encour-
ages 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).
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 legiti-
macy 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, experi-
ence 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 com-
missioner, 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/
208 N. SAUDO-WELBY
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 detri-
mental 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
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 out-
side 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 experimen-
tal 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.
210 N. SAUDO-WELBY
so immersed in a veteran’s stories that she starts performing them her-

self (27).
The movements of the young girl imitating the English Guards reassert
the established truth while also interrogating it: the official version of his-
tory 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, pres-
ents 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 con-
fuses 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
18
Jacques Derrida, 1978, 1979, 53.
19
Idem.
20
François Bodichon notes that French military painters started working from photogra-
phy as early as the mid-nineteenth century, but that this remained rare until the early twen-
tieth century. Butler writes that she “never used a Kodak [her]self” (183).
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 pic-
ture 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 histori-
cal 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 dis-
tance 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 ame-
nities 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
212 N. SAUDO-WELBY
a resemblance to name-dropping: Alfred Tennyson, Alma-Tadema, Marcus

Stone, John Tenniel, George Du Maurier, with whom she dances a qua-
drille, as well their Majesties, King Edward VII, the Queen and the descen-
dants 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 ugli-
ness” (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 con-
flict, 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 depict-
ing 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).
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 fre-
quented 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:
Devereux, Jo. 2016. The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The
Education and Careers of Six Professionals. Jefferson: McFarland.
23
See also p. 41.
214 N. SAUDO-WELBY
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 por-
trait?” (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

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_12
216 S. GENTY
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 paint-
ing 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 con-
trast 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 appear-
ance, 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-de-
pression-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, edi-
tor Jim Silberman of Summit books refers to Portrait in Black and Grey in contract negotia-
tions, and in November of that same year, the contract with British publisher Heinemann is
12 WHISTLER’S (MOTHER’S) DAUGHTER: IMAGE-TEXT RELATIONS… 217
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 patriar-
chal 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 col-
lages 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://heresiesfilm-
project.org/archive/. Accessed 22 April 2021.
218 S. GENTY
Four generations of the French family tree are nearly perfectly repro-
duced 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 well-
known photographers.6 The names of both the parents and the grandpar-
ents 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 condi-
tion 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)
6
The source of each photograph is given on the copyright page of the novel.
7
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.”
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 collec-
tive. 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 ref-
erential 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 autobiog-
raphy, 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 per-
sonal 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.
220 S. GENTY
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 mem-
ory 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 impor-
tance 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 fic-
tion and nonfiction, between autobiography and other forms of life writ-
ing, 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
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 opposi-
tion 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 over-
lapping. 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 palimp-
sestic or paratextual juxtaposition of word and image; and 4) temporal, through the tele-
scoped or serial juxtaposition of word and image.
222 S. GENTY
turn” in which the life of an individual is seen as illuminating their histori-

cal 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 eco-
nomic, 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’ mem-
ory. (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 immi-
grant 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 con-
firm this personally.
photograph. Before turning the page, the reader may pause to consider
the faces and places, and the spaces between them: the wide-eyed girl sit-
ting 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 hard-
ship; 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 photo-
graphs 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 cov-
ered many historical events.
224 S. GENTY
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 afflu-
ent 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
13
The first photograph is attributed to Bob Adelman, the second to Wayne Miller. Magnum.
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 partici-
pants 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 “con-
necting” 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 depres-
sion 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 transfor-
mative 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, form-
ing 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 peo-
14
In the novel, French spells Williamsburg with an “h” at the end: Williamsburgh. See
page 33.
226 S. GENTY
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-half-
year-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 condi-
tion: 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 recogni-
tion, 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.
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 laugh-
ter 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 consist-
ing 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 rela-
tion 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.
228 S. GENTY
markers that point towards a past presence, to something that has hap-
pened in this place” (Kuhn (1995) 2002, 4) which, detective-like, daugh-
ters 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 recon-
structions 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 photo-
graphic 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”
(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 pre-
cisely 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 par-
cel 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 pas-
sions 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 ritu-
alized cult of domesticity” (Krauss 1984, 57).19 According to Krauss, the
photographic record “is an agent in the collective fantasy of family cohe-
sion,” the camera “part of the theater that the family constructs to con-
vince itself that it is together and whole” (Ibid, 57). French uses her
narrator to poke holes in the construct by once again providing a contex-
tualized 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.
230 S. GENTY
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 col-
lection, as well as “photographs” that she admits she did not take at all.
These “verbal images” include the photographer herself, whose inappro-
priate dress and unmade face earned her a cool greeting from her disap-
proving 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 acciden-
tally 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 expres-
sions 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 “bril-
liance 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
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 pic-
ture 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” photog-
rapher, 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 pho-
tographer’s gender allegiance at this point in her life and the future shed-
ding 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
232 S. GENTY
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 port-
folio 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 subli-
mated 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 narra-
tive” initiated by the author’s family photos is revealed to be incomplete
by the narrator’s comments, which both contextualize and correct them.
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, pro-
voke 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 ren-
der 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 pas-
sionate 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.
234 S. GENTY
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 seri-
ous 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 prac-
tice: 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 repre-
sentation 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—show-

ing 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.
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 pic-
ture 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 wom-
en’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
236 S. GENTY
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, insuf-
ficient 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 nar-
rative about family life and its representations, breaking the hold of a con-
ventional 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 represen-
tations 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 primar-
ily 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
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
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.
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.
238 S. GENTY
Smith, Lindsay. 1992. The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory.
In New Feminist Discourses, ed. Isobel Armstrong, 238–262. London:
Routledge.
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: fernandezmmarta@uniovi.es

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_13
242 M. FERNÁNDEZ-MORALES
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 matu-
rity 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 cam-
era; 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 dra-
matic 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 psychothera-
pist 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 commu-
nicate 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 num-
bers, but positions, hence the reference.
13 “IT IS DIFFICULT TO FIND THE WORDS”: THE TEXT-IMAGE INTERFACE… 243
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 prin-
ciples 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 punctua-
tion 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 can-
cer, 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 rela-
tives. 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).
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 inter-
pretive filter that conditions both the production and the reception of the
book. The final aim of this study is to prove that Kohlman maintains con-
trol 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
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 compli-
cated 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.)
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 differ-
ent 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 them-
selves being looked at” (2003, 47). Through the juxtaposition of photo-
graphs 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 photog-
rapher 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 shar-
ing 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.
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 prob-
lematized 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 interdepen-
dent 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 environ-
ment 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 humor-
ous exhibitionism in which she plays all the roles (2002, 63). In her auto-
biographical 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/.
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 photo-
graphs, camping, and mothering with a smile on her face. Her perfor-
mance 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 featur-
ing 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 celebra-
tory 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 vul-
nerable 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 sick-
ness 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 life-
styles” (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 wilder-
ness, 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.
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 conven-
tion” 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 sub-
jects 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 bat-
tle” (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 mas-
tectomy, an intravenous cannula is visible on her left arm, and she is wear-
ing 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.
quality,” drawing “attention to the markings that technology leaves on the

body” (2013, 83). In it, Deshazer (2013, 30) identifies the Mohawk hair-
cut 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 can-
not 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 insist-
ing 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:
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 discus-
sion of the role of photography in postmodern autobiographical texts, it
can open some interesting narrative questions (2007, 233). At this par-
ticular point in the book, the interaction of the self-portrait and the writ-
ten word enriches the narrative by problematizing a stage in the cancer
process, because in her first textual piece Kohlman had informed her read-
ers 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 smug-
gling breast implants across the US border!” (n.p.).
9
See the tenth picture at http://arts.cphoto.net/Html/jzxs/jpsx/142206869.html.
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 litera-
ture 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 clos-
ing “Loving Letters.” In hindsight, they transform from items of celebra-
tion 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 attrac-
tive 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 con-
cludes: “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 col-
leagues, she confides: “one of us might say, ahh [sic.], yes, but did you see
the beautiful lady today? The ‘beautiful lady,’ the strong, calm, warm-
hearted 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 pho-
tographer 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
10
See the thirteenth picture at http://arts.cphoto.net/Html/jzxs/jpsx/142206869.html.
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 androgy-
nous 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 represen-
tation 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 under-
stood positively as part of the very necessary and pending process of mak-
ing illness visible in earnest and normalizing the presence of sick people
outside the medical environment. Conversely, the enlargement, publica-
tion, 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 com-
modification 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.
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 imag-
ery 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 photo-
graphs 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.
in her selection of words in the texts (“choice,” “decision,” “responsibil-

ity”) and in what she opts for in terms of visual self-representation: suc-
cessful 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 sick-
ness 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 can-
cer prevail in the narrative. As experiencer, like many writers of illness auto-
biography, 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 vulnerabil-
ity (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 cer-
tain 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, woman-
hood, 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.
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.
———. 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
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.
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.
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: j.l.wierzchowska@uw.edu.pl

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84875-0_14
260 J. WIERZCHOWSKA
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 expe-
rience 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 installa-
tion 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 character-
ized as “anti-aesthetic, anti-expressive and anti-subjective in approach and
tenor” (Best 2014, 1).1 Like many feminist art works of the time, includ-
ing Carolee Schneemann’s performance art, Cindy Sherman’s photo-
graphs 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 rela-
tionship 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 bold-
ness 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 repeti-
tiveness of the object is a wink to the formal tenets of minimalism/conceptualism, for exam-
ple, 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).
14 CREATING TOGETHER AN “UNEXPECTED HOME”: NAVIGATING… 261
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 main-
tain that, in addition to the conventional—that is textual—autobiographi-
cal forms, such as memoirs and diaries, there are numerous visual modes,
such as sculpture, painting, photography, collage, installations and perfor-
mance art that are not usually recognized as autobiographical acts (5–6).
They call for an inclusion of these diverse creations, with a particular atten-
tion 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 dis-
ciplines, 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 vari-
ous 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 difficul-
ties 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 acquisi-
tion, 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).
262 J. WIERZCHOWSKA
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 cap-
tions that feature a multiplicity of narrative voices: the artist-mother’s con-
textualization 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.
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 argu-
ments 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 border-
space, 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 liv-
ing 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 signi-
fier 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.
264 J. WIERZCHOWSKA
the “recycling and co-affecting” through which “an ephemeral, compos-

ite, 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 birth-
ing body must be denied in a culture centered on the paternal. She dis-
cusses 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 inter-
rupted 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 alter-
native 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 cri-
tique to form a theory which allows to use one’s autobiographical experi-
ence 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 primor-
dial loss of the mother (2006, 218). The symbolic womb becomes, as
Catherine B. Silver puts it, “a breathing space of reattunement and
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 pediatri-
cian, 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 existen-
tial 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 dia-
gram 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.
266 J. WIERZCHOWSKA

perspex, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 36 units. 18 × 13 cm,
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 pres-
ent 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 sin-
gular 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

Perspex, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, units 6, 6a and 6b.18 × 13 cm,
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 ubiqui-
tous 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
268 J. WIERZCHOWSKA
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 frag-
mentary 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 picto-
grams/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 mater-

nal 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.
First of all, all eleven gift-objects represent common plant and animal
species–weeds, bugs and moths—often unheeded and rendered insignifi-
cant, 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 yel-
low cup-shaped flowers, is also poisonous; the dandelion, another herba-
ceous 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, simi-
larly 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 blos-
som 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 sug-
gest, 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:
270 J. WIERZCHOWSKA
the cupped flowers, the cave-like snail, the clitoris-shaped moths all analo-
gize the female body. As such, they also converse with Jung’s archetype of
the Mother, whom he associates with “things and places standing for fer-
tility 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 undeni-
able 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:
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 fore-
closure 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 cor-
relate 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 chal-
lenges the fragmented representations of pregnancy. This difficulty to con-
tain 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 mater-
nal. 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 mater-
nal 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 dis-
avowing 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 “cre-
ation through the anus [so that] a man can give birth just as well as a
272 J. WIERZCHOWSKA
woman” (Rank 1959 in Ettinger 2004, 70). Yet, in both conversations,

the mother curtails his omnipotent fantasies, explaining the sexual differ-
ence 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 author-
ity. The dialogues illustrate situations in which, in the words of Ettinger,
“[t]he fragile I senses the vulnerability in the Other in resonance, conso-
nance, and dissonance before and beyond thinking” (2014, 19). Tucked
between the carefully preserved gift-objects in panel one and the represen-
tation 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
vulnerability and limitedness (2014, 19). The Documentation’s heteroge-

neous narratives, immersed in disparate yet interconnected visual environ-
ments, register the pain, joy and ephemerality of the mothering labor. The
images, objects and diagrams are accompanied by disparate texts—includ-
ing 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]ndividua-
tion 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 con-
ceptualize 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 dis-
ciplines 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 institu-
tionalized 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 inevi-
table relations that a man has with a woman.” Among these women, he
distinguishes:
274 J. WIERZCHOWSKA
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 limita-
tions 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 mani-
fested 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 embod-
ied 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
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 commit-
ment, 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 “pro-
ducer 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 Agency/agent, 2, 37, 63, 68, 131,

Abel, 72 168, 185, 209, 229,
Absence, 13, 45, 48, 53, 54, 86, 107, 243–250, 254
119, 122, 139, 163, Alexoae-Zagni, Nicoleta, 151n4
189–191, 250 Alterity, 63, 194n17
Abstraction–Alexis (1928), 93 Amazon, 206, 207, 210, 248
Abstraction–White Rose III (1927), 92 Among the White Moon Faces: An
Accident/accidental, 36, 123, 216, Asian-American Memoir of
223, 229–233, 236 Homelands (1996), 119–121,
Adams, Timothy Dow, 11, 219, 127–129, 134
220, 228 Animation, 69
Aesthetic, 4, 33, 34n7, 42, 43, 49, 52, animated images, 69
52n20, 93, 123, 206, 233–236, Archival (graphic) memoir, 110
242, 253, 267 Archives, 30, 101–103, 102n2, 108,
feminist aesthetic, 219 109, 113, 139, 147–151, 221
African-American/African American, Are You My Mother? (2012), 103, 105,
34–38, 34n7, 36n10, 59, 71, 106, 108, 109, 111–116
72n15, 72n16, 74n17, 93, 137, Arrangement in Grey and Black
138, 141, 143–146, 144n3, (1871), 215, 216, 216n4,
150, 152 224, 235
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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284 INDEX
“Art for art’s sake,” 219 Benjamin, Walter, 14

Artist Berger, John, 234n21, 246
battle artist, 199, 205, 207 Bergson, Henri, 79
woman artist, 34, 78, 89, 200 Bible, the/biblical, 72, 72n15
Artist’s books, 90 Biographical turn, the, 222
Asian American, 128, 134 Biography, 89
Authenticity, 12, 73, 84, 85, 103, 106, Bird Bishop, Isabella, 16, 179–196
107, 133, 219, 229, 233–235 Black, 35, 35n8, 36, 42, 71, 72,
Authority, 48, 80, 95, 161, 184, 194, 72n15, 74, 87, 138, 144, 144n3,
207, 209, 211, 274 145, 184, 216, 225, 245, 249,
Autobiographical Comics, 106 254, 271
Autobiography, 1, 2, 6, 7, 9–12, 14, black woman, 65, 72, 146
22–25, 25n5, 38, 41, 55, 60, 61, Black Lives Matter, 73
61n6, 67, 73, 77, 89, 93, 94, Blue Lines (1916), 91
106, 128, 131, 138, 139, 145, Body, 2, 11, 13–16, 22, 36, 42–44,
149, 176, 200, 202, 212n21, 52n20, 53, 53n21, 60, 60n2,
215–237, 241–255, 263, 263n3 60n3, 61, 63, 64, 68, 73, 78, 80,
autobiographical, 88, 90, 243, 244, 82, 92, 111, 113, 124, 148, 151,
250, 252, 254, 262, 263, 168, 171, 174, 175, 187, 189,
266, 275 242, 246–250, 255,
Autoethnography 266–273, 276
authoethnographic culinary Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of
memoir, 143 Books (1998), 27, 28, 33
Automediality, 61 Bruccoli, Mathew J., 158, 160–165,
automedial narrative/text, 63, 161n7, 167–169, 167n12,
69, 73, 74 171, 175
Autotopographical, 142 Brunet, François, 143, 147
Avrahami, Einat, 247, 255 Bryer, Jackson, 158, 169, 171, 172
Butler, Elizabeth, 16, 199–213
B
Barthes, Roland, 3, 11–14, 44, 45, C
121–126, 189, 193, 217, 219, Cain, 72
223, 226, 228, 233, 250 California, 41, 43n3, 127, 128,
Baym, Nancy K., 128, 129 133, 165
Beaty, Bart, 106 Camera Lucida: Reflections on
Beautiful and Damned, The (1922), Photography (1981), 11, 12, 122,
162, 163 124, 217, 233
Beauty (female beauty), 250 Camera Work, 94
Beauty Out of Damage (1993), 243 Cancer
Bechdel, Alison, 16, 101–116 autobiography, 241–255
INDEX 285
brain cancer, 243, 245, 249 D

breast cancer, 15, 242, 244, 248, Daedalus, 112
249, 251, 253 Darden, Carole, 138, 140–145, 147,
cancer patient, 242, 245, 251, 148, 151, 152
254, 255 Darden, Norma Jean, 138, 140–145,
narrative, 244, 249, 251, 255 147, 148, 151, 152
photography, 242 Dark Abstraction (1924), 93
Canyon with Crows (1917), 92 Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love
Cathartic process, 60 Letters of F. Scott and Zelda
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, Fitzgerald (2002), 158
8, 16, 41 Death, 11, 22, 31, 36, 36n10, 42, 44,
Chast, Roz, 106 54, 69, 80, 85, 95, 104, 106,
Chave, Anna, 80, 95 109, 113, 140, 172n14, 174,
Chen, Julie, 15, 16, 21–39 186, 216, 218, 219, 223, 228,
Cheng, Anne Anlin, 41 232, 244, 247, 248, 252, 253,
Chicago, Judy, 88 270–273, 276
Choice biography, 248 mortality, 244
Chronology, 107, 125 Depression, 164, 225
Chute, Hillary, 107, 110, 112, 113 Derrida, Jacques, 55, 210
Cis Deshazer, Mary K, 242, 248, 250, 251
cisgender, 62 Diary, 1, 7, 42, 80, 111, 129, 131,
cis women, 67 163, 200–204, 200n3, 206, 209,
Cis feminists/feminism, 67 211, 212, 263
“Cis gaze,” 62, 63, 73 Diaspora/diasporic, 134, 138
Class, social, 230 Dictée (1982), 8, 16, 41–43, 47–49,
Colonial imaginary, 60 48n11, 51, 54, 55
“Commemorative vigilance,” 139, Digital, 4, 7, 8, 10, 16, 22n1, 63, 66,
147, 151 121, 128, 131, 133
Community, 10, 16, 60–63, Digital space(s), 66
60n3, 66, 69–74, 70n14, Distantiation, 45, 110, 111
102, 102n1, 108, 109n3, Documentary, 24, 46–48, 47n7, 80,
113, 119–121, 129–131, 133, 89, 151, 181, 185–190, 200,
134, 137, 138, 143, 147, 221n10, 254
148, 150 Drawing, 15, 78, 82, 84, 92, 101,
Conway, Kathlyn, 242, 242n3, 103–105, 111, 112, 138, 147,
252, 253 151, 158, 159, 161, 163,
Cook, Terry, 108 169–171, 175, 181, 186,
Cookbook, 137, 138, 147 202, 250
Couser, Thomas, 14, 244, 245, 249 Dubriwny, Tasha, 248, 249
Culinary memoir/culinary Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF,
autobiography, 137–152 1983-2008), 101–103, 109n3,
Cult of domesticity, 67n13, 229 111n5, 112
286 INDEX
E Female icon(s), 78
Ekphrasis, 121, 121n1, 123, 126, Feminist, gaze the, 231
134, 189 Feminist/feminism, 2, 13, 21, 67,
El Refaie, Elisabeth, 106 67n13, 72n16, 87, 88, 163, 212,
Elegy, 31, 32, 244 216, 219, 225, 228, 229,
Ellis, Havelock, 79 231–236, 242, 248, 262,
Embodied memory, 150–152 262n2, 266
Empower/empowerment, 66, 255 Femmage, 217, 217n5
Epitext, 142 Fernández-Morales, Marta, 14
Ernaux, Annie, 6, 165 Fictionalized, 215–237
Essential Dykes to Watch Out For Fiction/non-fiction, 21, 95, 116, 160,
(2008), 101, 103 168, 169, 220, 228
Ethnic, 21, 22, 41, 137–152 Figurative/non-figurative, 79, 216
Ethnography/ethnographic, Fitzgerald, Francis Scott, 158–160,
24, 146, 147, 180, 181, 159n4, 163–166, 169, 171,
187, 221n10 174, 175
Ettinger, Bracha, 265–267, Fitzgerald, Zelda, 16, 157–176
270, 272–277 Fitzgerald Smith, Frances (Scottie),
Exegesis, 226, 236 158, 160–162, 165–168, 170,
Experiencer, 244, 245, 254, 255 171, 173–175
Flapper, the, 159, 161–163,
169, 175
F Fragmentation/fragmented self, 8,
Facebook (FB), 6, 10, 22n1, 64, 66, 107, 110–113, 174, 187
68, 120, 121, 128–134 Frame, 6, 24, 25, 28, 34–38, 43, 45, 50,
Familial, gaze the, 236 53, 55, 65, 66, 103, 107, 110,
Family album, 4–6, 48, 124, 126, 139, 141, 170, 217, 223–231,
125, 131, 140, 141, 220, 233, 236, 237, 243, 246, 268
227, 229–233 framed, 263
Family history, 36, 41, 112, 138, 141, Freeman, Elizabeth, 115
152, 228, 245 French, Marilyn, 11, 16, 215–237
Family myth, 139–143 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 79, 275, 276
Family photographer, 229, 235 Fun Home (2006), 16, 103,
Family photographs, 6, 16, 126, 140, 105–109, 111–116
142, 147, 150, 165, 217, 218,
221, 224, 229
Family Secrets. Acts of Memory and G
Imagination (1995), 121, 219n8 Gardner, Jared, 106
Family Snaps: The Meanings of GATE, 62
Domestic Photography (1991), 220 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 74, 74n18
Female, gaze the, 235 Gay, Marie-Agnès, 8
INDEX 287
Gaze, 11, 14, 15, 53, 60, 62, 66, 69, H

70, 77, 80, 110, 116, 122, 123, Hall, Stuart, 255
163, 169, 170, 187, 188, 190, Halperin, David, 105
191, 213, 225, 226, 231, 235, Hamilton, Juan, 89, 90
236, 243, 246, 251 Hartley, Marsden, 79, 82, 95
Gaze, Eurocentric, 187 Hedges, Elaine, 234
Gender, 2, 5, 7, 10, 16, 38, 62, 78, 80, Heinzman, Andrew, 69
87, 105, 116, 146, 194, 200, 202, Herman, David, 106
204–207, 210–212, 222, 224, Her Mother’s Daughter (1987), 11,
225, 230, 231, 233, 236, 245 216–222, 224, 225, 229, 232,
Gender confirmation surgery (GCS/ 235, 236
GRS/GAS), 59–61, 59n1, 60n4 Herstory, 78, 81–87, 246
Gender dysphoria, 64 Heteronormative, 61, 66, 110,
Gender identity, 10, 64, 70 113, 114
Gender stereotype, 65 Hine, Lewis, 219, 222, 222n11
Genette, Gérard, 139, 142 Hirsch, Marianne, 5, 11, 48,
Genius-Hero, the, 266, 273 122, 123, 140, 142, 149,
Genre/generic, 1, 2, 8, 43, 46, 60–63, 158, 158n3, 217, 222, 223,
71, 80, 103, 106, 107, 111, 114, 226, 226n16, 227n18, 229,
145, 181, 183, 186, 190, 202, 230, 236
205, 206, 212, 212n21, 219, History/historical/period/events, 1,
249, 275 1n1, 2, 4–6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16,
Genty, Stephanie, 12 21–26, 22n2, 22n3, 34–38,
Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters 34n7, 41, 44, 44n4, 53n21,
(1987), 81, 82, 83n2, 60n3, 68, 71, 82, 89, 95, 108,
84n4, 87, 95 112, 122, 127, 128, 138, 139,
Georgia O’Keeffe (1976), 77, 89 141, 143–147, 149, 151, 152,
Giard, Luce, 148, 149 158n3, 160, 167, 171, 174, 176,
Glyph, 111 180, 183, 183n6, 186, 199–201,
Google, 64 202n7, 207, 208, 210–212,
Graphic memoir, 1, 15, 16, 101–116 219–228, 223n12, 233, 235,
Graphic narrative theory, 106 236, 245, 246, 253, 262,
Graphics Interchange Format (GIFs), 264, 277
61, 62, 69–71 Holland, Patricia, 220
Greek mythology, 104, 112 Homepage, 66, 68, 73
Green-Grey Abstraction (1931), 93 Horvat, Ana, 60, 63
Greenough, Sarah, 80, 82, 82n1, 83, Houses of memory, 101
83n2, 85 Hybrid/hybridity, 8, 22, 23, 51, 90,
Groensteen, Thierry, 106 102, 103, 105–108, 110–112,
Grotesque body, 174 114, 134, 217, 243, 244,
Gusdorf, Georges, 176 254, 275
288 INDEX
I K
Illness narrative, 244–250 Kafka, Franz, 227, 227n17
Illustrated narrative, 138 Kaufmann, Jean-Claude, 7–9, 9n7
Illustration, 23, 25, 90, 138, 140, Kelly, Mary, 15, 262–277
179–181, 185, 186, 191, 233, Kelly, Traci Marie, 138, 139, 143, 145
234, 246, 254n12 Kinship, 120, 149, 150, 193
Imagetext/image-text, 10–13, 16, Kohlman, Lynn, 14, 241–255
22n3, 23, 24, 33, 34, 37, 38, Kootz, Samuel, 82
140, 142, 143, 150, 215–237 Korea/Korean, 42, 43, 45n6, 49,
Immigrant, 41, 138, 144, 145, 152, 180n1, 193, 193n13
222, 225 Krauss, Rosalind, 219, 229
Inclusive, 22n3, 67 Kristeva, Julia, 269, 271
Inness, Sherrie, 137, 138, 145, 146 Kuhn, Annette, 6, 121, 145, 149,
Instagram, 6, 22n1, 62, 64, 66, 68 219n8, 220, 222, 228, 229, 236
Installation, 13, 15, 23,
262–264, 267–269
Interface, 16, 23–25, 27, 33, 34, 37, L
42, 43, 47, 49, 51, 133, 138, Labyrinth, 28, 29, 104
141, 142, 146, 149, 150, 159, Lacan, Jacques, 11, 265, 266, 270,
220, 221, 221n10, 235, 237, 273, 276
241–255, 263, 265 Lanahan, Eleanor, 158, 159, 162,
Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, 165–169, 172, 172n14, 174–176
Image, Performance (2002), 2, Lee, Jamie Ann, 102n2, 105, 108
15, 23, 49, 84, 220, 263 Lejeune, Philippe, 6, 7, 134
Internet, 7, 10, 62, 66, 128 Lesbian, 101, 102, 102n1, 108–112,
Intersectionality/intersectional 116, 235
identity, 42, 71, 263 Lewallen, Constance M., 42, 46, 47,
Inter-subjectivity, 38, 265 50, 51, 53
Intertextuality, 112 LGBTQ rights, 21
Irigaray, Luce, 266, 269, 270 Lieux de mémoire, 137–152
Italian-American, 140 “Lifeshaping Moment Janet Mock
Had in Kindergarten,
The,” 64, 65
J Life writing, 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 14–16,
Jacob, Mira, 106 60, 61, 61n6, 63–66, 73, 77–95,
Jacques, Juliet, 67 128, 217, 220, 243, 263, 276
Jain, S. Lochlann, 245, 253, 253n11 Life writing 2.0, 73
Janet Mock/janetmock.com, 63, Light Writing and Life Writing,
66, 68, 72 Photography in Autobiography
Joan of Arc, 46 (2000), 220
Jorgensen, Christine, 63 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 119–134
Jung, 267, 272 Lisle, Laurie, 84, 85
INDEX 289
Ljumberg, Christina, 251, 254 Memory

Lorde, Audre, 72n16 cultural, 5, 138
Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, The distortion of, 109, 114
(2007), 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, representation of, 107
146, 148, 150, 151 Memory work, 7, 145, 149, 219,
Lynes, Barbara Buhler, 78, 94 220, 222
Lynn Front to Back (2005), 14, 241, “Meta-photographic text,” 217
243, 244, 253–255 Milford, Nancy, 157, 157n1, 159,
162, 172
Miller, Nancy K., 169
M Minotaur, 104
Magnum, 223, 223n12, 224n13 Mitchell, W. J. T., 1n1, 3, 4, 4n2, 12,
Maguire, Emma, 64, 66 22n2, 23–25, 217, 221, 236
Making Comics (2006), 106 Mock, Janet, 16, 59–74
Male gaze, the, 15, 62, 77, 110, 163, Modeling/model/top model, 4, 8,
170, 243 14, 37, 87, 106, 150, 160, 171,
Marginalized, communities, 108 204, 207, 208, 216, 220,
Mastectomy, 241, 242, 249, 250, 253 221n10, 231, 241–248, 250,
Maternal, the, 262, 265–270, 273, 251, 253–255
274, 276 Mode of representation, 102
maternal body, 276 Modernism (American), 78, 89
maternal Other, 270, 274 Modernist (female) artist, 42, 80
Matrixial, the, 262–277 Mother-artist, 262n2, 276
matrixial borderspace, 262–277 Mother/motherhood/mother figure,
Matuschka, 242, 243 16, 34, 34n6, 36, 37, 43–45, 48,
McCloud, Scott, 15, 106 48n11, 60, 103, 107, 109, 112,
Mediated, 5, 11, 66, 130, 131, 175 114, 115, 120–122, 125, 143,
unmediated, 10, 21, 79, 220 146, 150, 151, 158, 165, 166,
Medium/media, 2, 4–7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 168, 174, 189, 201n6, 205,
21, 22, 22n1, 26, 33, 53n21, 215–237, 242, 243, 245, 252,
61–66, 62n10, 68, 70, 71, 73, 253, 262, 264–268,
94, 102, 105, 106, 109, 111n5, 270–272, 274–276
121, 128, 131, 133, 134, 159, mothering, 275
171, 172, 175, 180, 185, 263, Mouzet, Aurélia, 67
264, 268, 269 My Faraway One: Selected Letters of
Memento Mori, 244 Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred
Memoir, 1, 2, 4, 8, 11, 15, 16, 22, Stieglitz, 1915-1933 (2011),
45–47, 61–65, 61n8, 68–70, 83n2, 85
101–116, 119, 120, 122, 127, Myth/family myth/mythmaking, 12,
128, 134, 137–152, 158, 169, 14, 22, 67n13, 139–144, 219,
200, 226n15, 242, 263 244, 252, 253, 272, 273
290 INDEX
N P
Narcissism/narcissistic, 2, 15, 71 Painting/military painting, 14, 22–24,
Narrating/narrative self, 11, 65, 73, 35, 37, 45, 50, 54, 77, 79, 82,
243, 247 84–86, 88–95, 141, 158, 159,
Narrative/travel narrative, 1, 4, 9, 10, 168, 171, 172, 172n14,
12, 14, 15, 22n3, 25, 34–36, 42, 174–176, 200–205, 201n6,
45, 49, 60–65, 60n2, 68–70, 202n7, 206n10, 207–209,
72–74, 80, 84, 89–91, 93, 102, 207n12, 215–217, 224, 263
104–110, 111n5, 113, 121, Paper dolls, 166, 168, 175
123–126, 128, 133, 134, Paratext, 24, 181
138–145, 158, 159, 165, 167, Parody, 112, 212n21
171, 175, 179–182, 180n1, 186, Passing, 27, 29, 31, 32, 55, 65,
195, 211, 217, 219–221, 65n12, 69, 165, 171, 217n5
222n11, 223–225, 227, 229, Patriarchy/patriarchal, 13, 42, 66–68,
235, 236, 242n1, 243–251, 253, 205, 210, 217–219, 231, 235,
255, 262–264, 270, 271, 236, 262n2
273, 275 Performance/performer, 10, 15, 23,
National identity, 222 42, 51–53, 53n21, 63, 157–176,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 210 209, 248, 262, 263
Nora, Pierre, 138, 139, 147 Peritext, 139, 142, 144
Norm/normative, 80, 102, 105, 113, Personal, public spaces, 109, 129
116, 159, 176, 200 Photographed self, 69
Norman, Dorothy, 80 Photographer, 2, 11, 13–15, 23, 78,
Normative forms of narrativization, 80, 88, 181–183, 183n6, 186,
102, 105, 115, 123, 133, 187, 190, 191, 194, 195, 215,
139, 266 218, 221, 223n12, 227,
229–235, 242, 243, 245, 246,
250–252, 255
O Photography/Photograph, 1, 2, 4, 6,
Objectification, 2, 102, 122, 223 8, 10–14, 16, 41–48, 45n6,
O’Keeffe, Georgia, 77, 81 47n7, 50, 54, 69, 80–84, 87, 88,
Art and Letters, 81, 82, 87, 93–95 90, 103, 104, 107, 120,
My Faraway One, 82, 84 122–127, 129, 131, 133,
On Photography, 1977, 227n17, 244 137–152, 158, 160, 165, 167,
Orchid, an, 1941, 92 168, 171, 180–196, 180n1,
Orvell, Miles, 80 191n12, 196n18, 207n12,
Otherization/othering, 60, 61, 63, 210n20, 216–226, 218n6,
69, 102, 181, 248, 269, 273, 275 222n11, 224n13, 228–233, 236,
Other, the, 181–183, 188, 274, 275 237, 242, 243, 246–248,
otherness, 276 250–254, 262–264, 268, 269
INDEX 291
Picturing Identity: Contemporary Queer identity/queer self, 101, 104,

American Autobiography in Image 107, 109, 114, 115
and Text (2018), 263 Queer(ing) memoirs, 102, 103, 105,
Platform, 61, 62, 64, 66, 70, 73, 121 108, 114
Podcast, 64 Queerness, 102n2, 104–107,
Poem, 3, 28, 31, 32, 50, 119, 111, 113
120, 203 Queer theory, 105
Poetry, 14, 42, 47, 50, 95, 149, 152 Quilt
Pollock, Griselda, 87, 89 quilt-as-canvas, 35
Pop culture, 65, 112 story quilt, 16, 21–39, 263
Portrait, 8, 11, 13, 36, 46, 47, 50, 68,
80, 87, 88, 93, 94, 111, 122,
125, 126, 140, 143–145, 159, R
160, 169, 187, 189–196, 215, Rancière, Jacques, 3, 4, 12–14
220, 223, 227, 228, 233, 235, Rank, Otto, 266, 272, 274
249, 253 Raymond, Janice, 67
Postmemory, 5, 158, 158n3, 176 Reader, the, 14–16, 24–29, 33, 36,
Post-Partum Document (1983), 38, 44, 45, 45n6, 48–50, 55,
265n4, 267, 275, 276 60–66, 69, 72, 73, 78, 84,
Pregnancy, 164, 272–274 90–93, 102, 106, 109, 115, 121,
pregnant body, 267–269, 272, 273 123, 125–127, 133, 134, 138,
Presence, 12, 13, 45, 48, 52–54, 107, 147, 149, 151, 171, 175, 176,
108, 110, 116, 120, 122, 123, 180, 180n1, 182, 186, 190, 191,
129, 141, 142, 148, 174, 216, 193, 195, 196, 211, 212,
224, 228, 230, 243, 253, 222–224, 226, 233, 235, 244,
254, 273 245, 251
Prose film, 149 Recipe, 137–152
Prose picture, 148–150, 227, 227n18, “Reciprocal vision,” 185
230, 233, 236 Referent/referential/referentiality,
Prosser, Jay, 60, 61 4, 10–13, 16, 26, 44, 45, 47,
Psychoanalysis, 227, 271, 273, 277 48, 102, 112, 125–127,
Punctum, 12, 14, 123, 193, 226, 250 215–217, 219, 221, 224,
Pyne, Kathleen, 82 228, 235
Reification/reified, 60, 63,
68, 187n8
Q reifying, 247
“Queer belongings” (2007), 115 Reinventing Comics (2000), 106
Queered home/queered space, Relational/relationality, 22–24, 27,
111, 116 37, 38, 44, 102, 112–116, 134,
Queered mode of representation, 102 221n10, 237, 243, 250, 252,
Queered temporality, 108 265, 267, 276
292 INDEX
Representation/representational, 2, 4, 159, 163, 169–171, 176, 243,

8, 13–16, 21, 22, 33, 39, 43, 45, 244, 246, 248, 255
46, 52, 53, 66, 68, 69, 93, 94, self-representational, 92
102, 103, 107, 111, 114, 116, Sex change, 63
120, 121, 121n1, 126, 127, 143, Sex industry/sex worker, 59, 70
170, 175, 208, 209, 211, 216, Shared history, 138, 149, 151
217, 219–221, 225, 227, 229, Shell and Old Shingle VII (1926), 92
233–236, 253, 255, 263, 268, She-ro, 248
273–275, 277 Signifying, 74, 127, 133
Riis, Jacob A, 219, 222, 222n11, 226 Sketch/sketchbook, 113, 170, 171,
Ringgold, Faith, 15, 16, 21–39, 263 200–202, 210, 211
Romantic Egoists, The: A Pictorial Slave narratives, 36
Autobiography from the Scrapbooks Smith, Lindsay, 231, 237
and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Smith, Sidonie, 2, 5, 15, 23, 24, 42,
Fitzgerald (1974), 158 44, 49, 53n21, 61, 80, 84, 85,
Rose, Barbara, 77, 88, 90, 93, 95 89–91, 128, 133, 138, 139, 147,
Rose, Jacqueline, 110 159, 163, 170, 171, 175, 217,
Rosenfeld, Paul, 79, 82 220, 221, 243, 244, 246, 254,
263, 265
Social media, 2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 22n1, 61,
S 62, 62n10, 64, 66, 70, 71, 121,
Samurai warrior, 15, 243, 249, 250 133, 134
Satrapi, Marjane, 106 Sontag, Susan, 44, 126, 158n3, 160,
Save Me the Waltz (1932), 167–169, 183–185, 183n6, 190, 219,
172, 174 227n17, 231, 232, 244, 250, 253
Scar, 242, 249, 254 Space/personal space/public space,
Schenone, Laura, 138–142, 27, 29, 33, 34, 44, 51–54, 63,
144, 146–152 64, 66, 67, 73, 90, 102–105,
Scrapbook, 139, 150, 160, 165, 108–114, 116, 120–122,
171, 175 128–131, 134, 138, 151, 216,
Sedgwick, Eve, 105 221, 223, 230, 231, 233, 245,
Seidel, Kathryn Lee, 172, 174 266, 267, 272, 276
Selfie, 71, 73 spatial, 243
Self-narrative, 9, 61, 66, 73, 90, 159, Spence, Jo, 23, 220
167, 171 Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine.
Self-portrait, 11, 15, 84, 85, 88, 92, Recipes and Reminiscences of a
159, 161, 167, 169, 170, 174, Family (1978), 138
175, 181, 206, 220, 242, 246, Stein, Gertrude, 94, 172
247, 251 Steinem, Gloria, 88
Self-representation, 1, 2, 8, 9, 15, 16, Stereotypes of femininity, 67
22n1, 23, 25, 38, 42, 52, 53n21, Stieglitz, Alfred, 78, 81, 83, 88, 94
73, 77, 78, 85, 92, 93, 133, 143, “Storysharing,” 72, 73
INDEX 293
Storytelling, 38, 65, 73, 244 autobiography/ trans life writing/

Studio photograph/studio portrait, trans memoir/trans narrative/
126, 140, 141, 143–145, 191, trans stories, 60–66
196, 196n18 community/ trans girl/ trans
Studium, 12, 14, 123, 251 people/ trans woman, 59, 60,
Subjectivity, 13, 16, 24, 26, 27, 30, 60n3, 62–74, 70n14
31, 33, 36, 36n10, 38, 39, 95, feminism, 67
110–112, 114, 115, 221, 226, rights, 59, 66, 71
247, 265, 266 transness/trans identity, 60n2,
Super Soul Sunday, 64 63–65, 73
Surgery transsexuality, 63, 67
cancer, 249 Transition/transitioning, 61, 63,
gender reassignment, 60n4, 62 125, 139
System of Comics (2007), 106 Transmedia, 63–66
Trauma, 5, 6, 25, 25n5, 110, 122,
158, 158n3, 200n2
T Traumatic memory, 110
Temporality Travel narrative, 183
modes of, 114 Travel writing, 16, 180n2,
representation of, 107 181, 191n12
Text-image, 3, 4, 16, 23, 41, Truth, 12, 55, 60, 72, 89, 105, 126,
138–144, 146, 148, 149, 151, 127, 141, 208–211, 219, 220,
152, 229, 241–255 225–229, 233–236
Textual/visual matrix, 91–94 Tumblr, 62, 64, 66, 71, 72
Theophano, Janet, 137 Turkle, Sherry, 128
Thomas, Heloïse, 16 Twitter, 22n1, 62, 64, 66, 68
Time, 6, 9, 16, 23–27, 29–33, 44n4,
48, 53, 65, 77, 79, 83n2, 88, 92,
102n2, 106, 107, 114–116, 120, U
124–126, 128, 133, 137, 143, Ulysses (1920), 112
145, 157, 160, 161, 163, Understanding Comics (1993), 106
165–168, 171, 172, 175, 181,
182, 184n7, 185, 190, 191, 193,
195, 200, 200n2, 200n3, 207, V
207n11, 208, 212, 212n22, 213, Van Dyne, Susan R., 105
216, 218, 223, 226, 231, 242, Verbal images, 49–52, 227, 230,
244, 246, 249, 253, 262, 262n2, 232, 236
263, 267, 270, 271, 276 Verbo-visual, 142, 150
temporal, 243 Victorian, 80, 212, 216n2, 217
Toomer, Jean, 93–95 Video, 42, 51–53, 61, 62, 64, 65,
Trans 68–71, 73, 142, 142n2, 147,
author/writer, 59, 61, 65, 73 148, 150, 151
294 INDEX
Viewer, 24–26, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 55, Whistler, James MacNeill, 215–217,
82, 92, 94, 123, 143, 151, 176, 216n2, 219, 224, 225, 233, 235
191, 204, 206, 215, 229, Whistler’s mother, 215–237
250, 262n1 Whitlock, Gillian, 16, 131
Violate/violation, 185 Wierzchowska, Justyna, 15, 276
Visibility, 2, 13, 63, 110, 126, 175 Wilke, Hannah, 247, 248
Visual narrative, 104, 222, 232, 247, Winfrey, Oprah, 64
270, 273 Winnicott, Donald, 112, 115, 267
Visual text, 142 Woman [One Portrait], A (1921), 80
Visual/textual, 16, 42, 47, 51, 91–94, Woman artist, 34, 78, 89, 200, 266
221, 263 Womanhood, 59–74, 79, 161,
Visual/verbal hybridity, 102 164, 255
Visual/verbal/virtual, 61 “Womanhood 2.0,” 59–74
Voyeurism, 14, 184 “Woman in Art,” 79
Vulnerability Woman of color, 62–64, 69–71
‘vulnerable empowered woman,’ Women’s March on Washington, the
248, 249, 255 (2017), 71
willful vulnerability, 255 Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, 15, 126, 263
Wood, Julia, 65, 67, 68
Woolf, Virginia, 112, 204, 205
W
Wagner, Anne Middleton, 79, 80, 95
Wallot, Jean-Pierre, 102, 108 Y
War artist, 202 The Yangtze Valley and Beyond
Watercolors, 91, 92, 199, 213 (1899), 179–196
Watson, Julia, 2, 15, 23, 24, 42, 44, YouTube, 22n1, 62, 64–66, 68, 69,
49, 53n21, 61, 80, 84, 85, 73, 142n2, 151
89–91, 109, 128, 133, 138, 139,
147, 159, 163, 170, 171, 175,
217, 220, 221, 237, 243, 244, Z
246, 254, 263, 265 Zelda, Fitzgerald, 157
Waves, the (1931), 112 Zelda: An Illustrated Life. The Private
Ways of Seeing (1972), 234n21 World of Zelda Fitzgerald
Web/Web 2.0/websites, 10, 16, 29, (1996), 158
38, 42n2, 62–64, 62n10, 66, 68, Zelda Fitzgerald
71, 73, 129, 140n1, 149, 150 A Biography (1970), 157
Wendt, Ingrid, 234 The Collected Writings (1992),
Whistler, Anna McNeill, 216, 225, 231 158, 163

Text and Image in Women's Life Writing: Picturing The Female Self

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING

SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS

Text and Image in

More information about this series at

Text and Image in

Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni Stephanie Genty

ISSN 2730-9185 ISSN 2730-9193 (electronic)

Part I Imagining Identity 19

2 Thinking Through the Book and Reimagining the Page:

3 “[Un]systematic, even with the image”: Text-­image

4 Womanhood 2.0: A Visual-Verbal-Virtual Redefinition

5 Authoritatively Her/Self: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Life Writing 77

Part II Reframing Memories 99

6 Fun Homes and Queer Houses of Memory in Alison

7 Framing Herself Then and Now: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s

8 Nostalgic Albums or Alternative Lieux de mémoire?

Part III Elusive Textual/Visual Referentiality 155

9 Zelda Fitzgerald’s Self-Portraiture: A Strenuous

10 Isabella Bird Bishop’s 1897 Journey up the Yangtze

11 A Woman’s Life of War Pictures: Elizabeth Butler

12 Whistler’s (Mother’s) Daughter: Image-Text Relations

Part IV Visual/Textual Embodiment 239

13 “It Is Difficult to Find the Words”: The Text-­Image

14 Creating Together an “Unexpected Home”: Navigating

Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni is Associate Professor at Université Paris 8

Zealand Women’s Autobiographies (2014). She is a member of University

about young people’s “produsage” of gender and sexual identities through

Floriane Reviron-Piégay is Senior Lecturer in nineteenth- and twentieth-­

and writes about autobiography, visual culture, and American literature,

Fitzgerald Estate Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975,

Fig. 14.3 Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Documentation V,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

establishment of autobiography as a genre. Today, it is the explosion of the

require explaining. For W.J.T. Mitchell (1986), however, there is a meth-

However, semiotics’ claim to englobe all systems of meaning, making

Images and Memory

philosophers as untrue or fantastical. Yet, as Ricœur (2000) points out, we

personal, thus avoiding an excessive gendering of the self. Annie Ernaux’s

resuscitate memories. There is no need for a subject to remember.

though this “invention” is framed by those models a society makes avail-

contradiction disappears if we distinguish between two types of identity as

Image/Text and the Question of Referentiality

as Eakin (1992) argues in his study of reference in autobiography, Touching

more than they reveal, or allow for multiple readings—and ultimately

Images and Embodiment

mechanical process of reproduction, inferior to painting in terms of bodily

And photography, formerly accused of opposing its mechanical, soulless

transformation from object of the male gaze to subject as a breastless sam-

story quilts examine how each creates webs of image-text interfaces,

Kaufmann, Jean-Claude. 2004. L’invention de soi : une théorie de l’identité. Paris:

Thinking Through the Book

Hertha D. Sweet Wong

A period of intense social upheaval and technological innovation, the last

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

question of how to do creative work if there was no history or agreed

expression that I call variously “visual autobiography” (a term British pho-

explicitly cites “sociohistorical sources” that provide a cultural context for

readers/viewers more intensely active participation, since moving between

Julie Chen’s Artists’ Books: Architectures

Julie Chen, Chinese-Japanese American artist and educator, makes con-

a unified whole” (1). Striving to keep a balance between craftsperson and

Top level: “*Over and over/always the same/one thing/after another”

While the traditional trajectory of a Western elegy mirrors stages of loss:

Part I Imagining Identity 19

2 Thinking Through the Book and Reimagining the Page:

3 “[Un]systematic, even with the image”: Text-image

4 Womanhood 2.0: A Visual-Verbal-Virtual Redefinition

5 Authoritatively Her/Self: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Life Writing 77

Part II Reframing Memories 99

6 Fun Homes and Queer Houses of Memory in Alison

7 Framing Herself Then and Now: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s

8 Nostalgic Albums or Alternative Lieux de mémoire?

Part III Elusive Textual/Visual Referentiality 155

9 Zelda Fitzgerald’s Self-Portraiture: A Strenuous

10 Isabella Bird Bishop’s 1897 Journey up the Yangtze

11 A Woman’s Life of War Pictures: Elizabeth Butler

12 Whistler’s (Mother’s) Daughter: Image-Text Relations

Part IV Visual/Textual Embodiment 239

13 “It Is Difficult to Find the Words”: The Text-Image

14 Creating Together an “Unexpected Home”: Navigating

Floriane Reviron-Piégay is Senior Lecturer in nineteenth- and twentieth-

“[Un]systematic, even with the image”: Text-