Mapping the Private Geography: Autobiography, Identity, and America. By Gerri Reaves. Jefferson, NC. McFarland, 2001. vi, 162 pp.

Reviewed by Jo Malin

Gerri Reaves's thesis in Mapping the Private Geography: Autobiography, Identity, and America is a fascinating one. In her Introduction she writes: "The texts examined here expand the text-self dyad, the focus of autobiography theory, to text-self-place, or autobiography-identity-America." Reaves initially gives her readers an overview of autobiography theory and criticism that places her work at the center of its most pressing issues. First, she asserts that contemporary autobiography theorists using both feminist and poststructuralist theories have thoroughly deconstructed and examined the issue of genre. Autobiography as a genre, as not-biography, not-novel, not-memoir, not-history has been exhaustively examined, she writes. What has thus been revealed is an essentialist notion of the genre that existed in the recent past and what has replaced this notion is a multihued and multifaceted abstraction that includes a much more inclusive grouping of texts. In turn, she takes up the bios of autobiography, the self or identity. In a fashion similar to her discussion of the genre, Reaves narrates a history of poststructural and feminist theory that relates to the identity or subjectivity of the writer of autobiographical texts. She writes: "Theorists and critics have catalogued the problematics of traditional autobiography, calling into question . . . the self as a unified, stable entity existing through time" (11). She reviews three decades of autobiography theory that "documents the unraveling of traditional assumptions about the textual representation of the self"(9), employs Sidonie Smith's work that questions the acceptance of the post-enlightenment self and replaces it with the notion of a subject.

Reaves follows this discussion of autobiography theory's three decades of deconstruction of both the genre and the self with the central point of her analysis. She asserts that there is an important third element in autobiographical writing--place--and she very convincingly makes the case for the inclusion of this element. As she points out, much of our critical language is spatial. As poststructual and feminist theorists, we discuss margins, locations, positionalities. And yet an essentialist notion of stable space pervades much of our critical literature. We assume a fixed geography beneath our feet, as we inhabit a room, a city, and a country. She writes: "This study treats place as the

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

unstable, indefinable complement to the post-metaphysical self, for place, like self, resists simple formulation." (15)

Reaves's own interest is in America as the geographical place that is a central element in three lesser-known American autobiographies by celebrated writers of the early- and mid-twentieth century: Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography, Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, and Sam Shepard's Motel Chronicles. Also a brief analysis of Joan Didion's essays, what she calls her "Places of the Mind," is used as a summary device in her concluding chapter. In this conclusion, Reaves employs Didion's perspective to further deconstruct any "real" constructions of geographical America found in Stein's, Shepard's, and Hellman's texts.

In their autobiographical texts, Stein, Hellman, and Shepard write about their identities as Americans in historical periods when to be an American was far different than it is to be an American today. And yet, not. Reaves writes: "For all three writers, America remains an idea more than a system of government, a federation of states, or even a geographical location." (19). In fact, she cites Didion who, she writes: "repeatedly insists that rather than a concrete place, late twentieth-century America is instead a collective delusion, a private dream, or a monetary intersection of common belief" (121).

The subject of Reaves's text now holds a special interest to me as a reader as it may for all critical readers of autobiography, especially Americans, after the events of September 11, 2001. Today in the beginning of the twenty-first century, America is an idea made more concrete yet abstract, more complex and diverse yet unified, more public yet more private, since terrorists crashed high-jacked planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, DC. As I read Reaves text, my own identity as an American and my geographical location in New York State come to the fore in what seems like an uncontrollable shifting of all of my other identities, including my identity as a reader/critic.

Gerri Reaves's text is very smart and persuasive. Clearly, her depth of knowledge and her acute perception of the role of American identities as substitutes for other more problematic identities in the autobiographical works by these writers informs a nuanced and fresh approach to autobiography study. Each of these texts is remarkably different from each of the others in time period, geographical "siting," and the background of its author. Yet, Reaves has perceived and set forth striking similarities in the ways each has situated herself/himself as an American.

Reaves's introductory and concluding sections are by far the most interesting parts of her study. Yet, the three chapters that focus on the

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individual texts, informed by her introductory remarks, are all solid analyses of the three obscure but interesting autobiographical texts. Reaves's work here is certainly an important addition to the body of scholarship on Stein, Hellman, and Shepard, three major American writers.

Because of its interrogation of the "hologram that is America," for autobiographers and for readers of autobiography, Reaves's text would be interesting for classroom use, particularly for interdisciplinary courses (125). And, in light of recent events, I think her scholarship could open the way for a dialogue about American space that can be enriched by the reading of texts from very diverse decades of the twentieth century that center on this very important issue.

State University of New York, Binghamton