Biographical

Dan Green's back-and-forth with Dorothy W about biographical criticism raises an interesting question: just what distinguishes biographical criticism from historicism? After all, I'm such a historicist that readers keep insisting I'm a historian (I'm an English professor! In an English department! With a Ph.D. in English!), and yet I usually run screaming from  biographical criticism.  But on what grounds?

In biographical criticism of the very narrow sort that Dan & Dorothy describe, there's a slippage between experience and text.  When we say that Charlotte Bronte based Mr. Brocklehurst on William Carus Wilson, for example, what do we actually mean? Yes, there's a real person named William Carus Wilson, and yes, CB had him in mind when she came up with Brocklehurst.  But:

• We don't know Carus Wilson (unless we're immortal, vampires, or otherwise undead);
• We don't know what very young CB thought of CW; we only have adult CB's recollections of life at Cowan Bridge, as mediated through Mrs. Gaskell;
• We do know that CB admitted that Brocklehurst was a deliberately exaggerated, one-sided take on Wilson. 

What we don't have, in other words, is the original personal experience (if it were even possible to have such a thing) that would make such biographical knowledge useful.  We cannot talk about CB's "revision" of CW's character, since we don't have CB's memories of CW; we cannot interpret Brocklehurst as identical to CW, because such a reading simply goes in a circle.  Hence Juliet Barker's warning that "...it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that the fictional characters and place are accurate representations of the people at Cowan Bridge and the school itself" [1].  CW is not Brocklehurst's referent in any meaningful way.  To write about the CW-Brocklehurst connection as though CW explains Brocklehurst mistakes subjective impressions--impressions filtered through a writer's craft, at that--for not just objectivity, but also plausibility or even verifiability.  Brocklehurst is Brocklehurst, not CW.   As one Victorian critic shrewdly noted apropos of the Brocklehurst/Wilson contretemps,  "[i]t is this absolute irresponsibility of the romancer, this privilege of selecting the facts and imputing the motives, which, added to the artistic gift for deepening the shadows and heightening the effect, makes the novel so far-reaching and so irresistible a libel."  By using biography to explain character, the critic not only pins down the text's meaning, but also pins it down completely outside the text [2].

Biography becomes useful, I think, not when it leads to the supposedly "real" meanings of character or events, but when it leads us back to the text through other texts, films, images, and the like.  The rhetoric, theology, and genres of The Children's Friend (all of which CB invokes and parodies) open up far more productive questions about Jane Eyre than CW as a person (traduced? accurately portrayed?).  Similarly, finding Heathcliff's or Rochester's real-life originals doesn't help the reader, but studying how these characters reinvent both Byron--known to the Brontes only through texts and images--and the Byronic hero does [3]. Or, to use a different line  of inquiry, it's good to know about Thackeray's friendly rivalry with Macaulay--but primarily insofar as that knowledge leads us to read Henry Esmond in conjunction with Macaulay's History of England.  Interpreting that rivalry as the hidden "meaning" of Henry Esmond stops reading in its tracks; thinking about Henry Esmond with the History of England opens up some quite complicated questions about form, history vs. fiction, the speaker's voice, the ironic footnotes, and so forth. 

[1] Juliet Barker, The Brontes (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 120.

[2] Of course, there are genres which invite the reader to do just that--most obviously, the roman a clef. 

[3] See Andrew Elfenbein, for example.

 

Comments

[Amateur Reader]

Very interesting stuff. I would think that the problem could be as bad or worse in the other direction. A historian who for some reason is studying CW would have to struggle to remind herself that he is not really Brocklehurst.