The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal Narratives in Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiographies. By Jo Malin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. xiv, 120pp.

Reviewed by Katrina M. Powell

In her recent book, The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal
Narratives in Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiographies, Jo Malin contends that "these daughters are not simply telling their mothers' stories. They are engaged in conversation" (6). Using Bahktin's notion of the dialogic, Malin argues that the autobiographical texts she explores contain embedded biographies of each of the authors' mothers. Because of each author's literal need to dialogue with her mother, a subsequent textual dialogue is written creating these auto/biographical texts. In this way, Malin argues, these women writers create innovative forms, subverting traditional notions of autobiography. In addition to critically exploring the works of ten women autobiographers (Virginia Woolf, Sara Suleri, Adrienne Rich, Cherrie Moraga, Joan Nestle, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Carolyn Steedman, Kim Chernin, and Drusilla Modjeska), Malin constructs her own innovative form that combines the personal with the academic. She weaves her own autobiographical text into the critical analysis, which deepens the reader's understanding not only of Malin's positionality to the texts, but also of the texts themselves.

In her introduction, Malin provides an in-depth discussion of the feminist theories surrounding maternity, identity, and embeddedness. Drawing on such theorists as Kristeva and Irigaray, Malin problematizes conceptions of mother and daughter and questions the "biological essentialism of the mother-daughter relationship" (3). Once she poses these questions, she provides background in autobiography theory, particularly Lejeune's notion of the autobiographical pact. She explains that according to Lejeune, "the autobiographical space [is] one formed by a pact between reader and author and one in which referentiality is established by the act of publication of a discourse with a proper name" (6). Malin further explains, through feminist theories of autobiography, that the embedded maternal narrative shares the contracted space between reader and writer. Again, she draws on established theorists such as Leigh Gilmore, Sidonie Smith, and Anna Kuhn who have argued that women writers often "cross the generic boundary between biography and autobiography" (7).

Once Malin positions her argument within established autobiography theory, she then turns to her major theoretical point. She uses

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Bahktin's concept of the dialogic in "Discourse in the Novel," and summarizes the way feminist theorists have found his notion of multiplicity and genre-blurring attractive. But Malin's analysis moves beyond this much used theory and emphasizes another of Bakhtin's texts, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," in which there are sections devoted to autobiography. According to Malin, Bahktin explains that the "relationship of the author to his or her hero is theorized and explored as the dialogical relation that is requisite for an aesthetic act to take place. However, the author's creation of a subject or hero is even more, that is, it is the dialogically related creation that allows the author to know himself or herself" (9). Malin then uses this subject creation as a way to analyze the women's texts she addresses. She argues that "in the maternal biographies that daughters include in their own texts, there is a blurring of who is the author and who is the hero of the text" (910). In addition to this breakdown of the mother-daughter dichotomy, Malin also suggests a blurring of genres, arguing that the embedded maternal narratives create an alternative form that is neither autobiography nor biography alone.

In her first analysis chapter, "Conversations about Space and Houses," Malin discusses Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days. Both Woolf's and Suleri's mothers died when the authors were young, and both discuss their mothers in terms of the spaces they inhabited, namely, their houses. Malin argues that in both authors' texts, "much of the dialogue between mother and daughter is about space within the house that `housed' the daughter's childhood" (16). Using the psychological and philosophical theories of Gaston Bachelard, Malin suggests that "the house and its poetic images in texts have `maternal features'" (17). Malin examines Woolf and Suleri's use of spatial metaphors to describe their mothers. For instance, Woolf, Malin points out, "uses the image of a cathedral to describe the experience of her mother's death" (18). The vast and inaccessible spaces of the cathedral symbolize for Woolf the inaccessibility of her own mother, due to her premature death. Focusing on Woolf's late text "Sketch of the Past," Malin points to Woolf's description of her childhood home in relaying the personality traits of her mother, particularly in the way her mother was a presence or atmosphere within the home. She concludes that Woolf's "mother's death is the wound at the center of her life, and her narrative is `built' around it as a house surrounds and contains memories of experiences" (24).

Like Woolf, Suleri's mother died early, but her absence was felt even when she was alive. She was a "guest" in her own house, because she was not a Pakastani citizen like her husband and children. As Malin points out, both authors use architectural and geographical space to

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talk about their mothers. Suleri's sense of space is different than Woolf's, however, because she occupied several houses in two different countries. Suleri also describes how language and culture made her mother, and therefore her, an outsider. But for Suleri herself, her bilingualism enables her to occupy several spaces at once, something her mother is not able to do. Malin's most interesting analysis in this chapter comes toward the end when she suggests that both Woolf and Suleri use building materials as concrete images of their mothers and that their bodily images are "noticeably absent. Death and absence of the maternal body leaves these daughters with a loss of the touch and feel of a woman's body" (31). This loss, Malin suggests, consequently establishes the need for these daughters to dialogue with their mothers in their texts.

In her next chapter, Malin discusses four texts that do "contain dialogues about intimacy and warmth between the bodies of mother and daughter" (31). In "Conversations about Intimacy, Bodies, and Sexuality," Malin discusses Adrienne Rich, Cherrie Moraga, Joan Nestle, and Audre Lorde. Malin explains that in each of these texts, "the writer connects lesbian sexuality with her relationship with her mother" (36). As "autobiographical manifestos" (Sidonie Smith qtd. in Malin 36), each of these texts "adopts a rhetoric grounded in the erotics of the body and also attached to a political agenda" (Malin 36). In Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born, for instance, Malin suggests that Rich "places her subject position and her mother's . . . in the body, using detailed and intimate images" (38). Even so, Rich "tells of an uncomfortable ambivalence toward her mother" (39) and "both desire and anger pervade Rich's attempt to converse with her mother" (41).

While Rich is often angry with her mother and describes a lack of communication between them, Moraga's Loving in the War Years is a "love letter" where she "places her mother and their bilingual conversation at the center" of the text (42). Malin explains that Moraga's return to the Spanish language represents her "desire to reconnect with her Chicana heritage, but she places this desire in a yearning for connection with her mother" (43). Moraga connects her lesbian desire with her earliest childhood experiences, where her mother's voice represents her early desires. According to Malin, Moraga "talks intimately and passionately in a dialogue, with her mother's voice, which centers on the erotics of her sexual desire for the female body including her mother's body" (46).

Joan Nestle's A Restricted Country portrays her mother as an active sexual being, representing not only her own sexual liberation through lesbian identity, but her mother's as well. In this way, Nestle's text differs from Rich's and Moraga's where their sexuality is tied up in

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desire for connection. Instead, Nestle's mother is a model for sexual freedom, which Malin argues provides the groundwork for Nestle's own political activism. Nestle's is the first text Malin discusses that includes letters to and from the mother, incorporating a "real" dialogue between mother and daughter. Nestle's text breaks down the binary between homosexual and heterosexual by establishing a dialogue with her mother that celebrates sexual freedom for all women.

Malin concludes this chapter by examining Audre Lorde's political activism in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography. Like Rich and Moraga, Lorde's love for women is connected to her love for her mother. Citing examples where her mother is physically intimate with Lorde, Malin again explores the way a daughter's text can be intimate and nostalgic, yet simultaneously angry and full of pain. Like Rich, Moraga, and Nestle, "there is the pain of ambivalence in [Lorde's] stories of her life that is tightly connected to her mother's" (52). Malin concludes in this chapter that each of these texts "is about intimacy and bodies" and is "experimental and nonlinear" in ways that traditional autobiographies are not (52).

In "Conversations about Material Things, Longing, and Envy," Malin makes the logical step from discussions of the body and sexuality (or the absence thereof), to the issues of class and materiality that have shaped authors Carolyn Steedman and Dorothy Allison. These authors also discuss the desire of their mothers, but in particular Malin focuses on the way gender and the body influence material desire. Steedman and Allison both write of their mothers' economic status and aspirations. Malin studies Allison's autobiographical novel, Bastard out of Carolina, to show how "motherhood, both as reproduction and material responsibility, gravely affected Allison's mother because of her class position in Southern rural 1950s poverty" (58). Malin briefly notes Allison's motherhood theme in her other texts and concludes that the embedded biography of her mother is a story that must be written first, before she can write about other subjects. Both Allison and Steedman write unexpected stories about motherhood: Allison's mother stays with her daughter's rapist. Steedman's mother "is not portrayed as a sexual victim of her heterosexually inclined body. Instead she (the mother) uses desire and reproduction to try to cross class boundaries, as she uses clothing and other markers to survive and to teach her daughters survival" (64). Steedman's mother's awareness of her economic status is evident in the stories she tells about being a dressmaker's daughter where her family could not afford to dress as nicely as the clientele they made clothes for. Both authors suggest, Malin points out, that their life stories and subjectivities are shaped by their mothers' material desires.

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Malin's final analysis chapter discusses Kim Chernin's In My Mother's House and Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy. In each of these works, Malin highlights the collaborative nature of the writing. Chernin writes about the conversations and interviews with her mother as she establishes "facts" for her narrative, and much of Modjeska's text includes letters and diary entries of her mother's own writing. Malin explores the notions of voice and story and textual construction in the ways these are affected by the multi-voiced natures of Chernin's and Modjeska's texts. In this way, both texts illustrate a literal dialogue with the mother and a merging of voices.

Malin concludes her book with an interesting coda. She explores the notion not only of being a daughter and how her relationship with her mother has shaped her personally and professionally, but she also extends this view on being a mother herself, and how her relationship with her children has shaped her and her writing. This coda is appropriate to Malin's text, in that, by this time, the reader is used to her analysis about herself as a writer and a daughter. One of Malin's primary conclusions about all of the authors she discusses is that they use innovative forms, crossing public and private spaces. Therefore, Malin merges her own public and private spaces by incorporating her own autobiography, which in turn informs her analyses. At the end of each of her analysis chapters, Malin provides insights into her life that correspond with the subject of her chapter. She describes her relationship with her mother, her thoughts regarding her own body, her public and private lives, and how they overlap.

Finally, Malin's analysis chapters support her overall argument that the "narrative practice" of each text "is both autobiography and biography rather than one or the other. It is marked by a breakdown of subject/object categories as well as auto/biographical dichotomies of genre" (11). However, Malin's text only briefly analyzes the ten autobiographical texts, leaving much to be explored within each of them. But her analysis introduces readers to the notion of embedded biographical texts of the mother and provides a starting point to more deeply examine these texts and others. She contributes to autobiography studies a useful and innovative way to read autobiographical narratives and the ways these narratives can contain embedded narratives. Her analysis provides a useful theoretical framework for analyzing other auto/biographical texts and for further exploring the multi-dimensional prose of these and other women writers.

Louisiana State University