Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. By Judy Long. New York: New York UP, 1999. x, 184pp.

Reviewed by Kristi Siegel

Near the end of Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/
Text, Judy Long moves from discussing women's life writing to scholarly writing itself. In academic writing, Long explains, women often feel pressured to follow formulaic patterns that censor writing in the first-person singular while encouraging impersonality and detachment. Long comments that, given the book's focus, "concern with graduate training may seem an anomalous note with which to close" (133). Actually, Long's segue does not seem anomalous at all; throughout, she has argued for more empathetic, engaged narration. Ostensibly, four terms--subject, narrator, reader, and text--take on equally active roles in Long's ideal feminist methodology. To create writing that captures a woman's life fully, without erasing any of her culturally devalued, "messy" reality (to use Long's word) all four roles must be sufficiently embodied, interconnected, and situated. Ultimately, however, one term, the narrator, receives the most attention and remains the most suggestive. Further, the narrator's role, in Long's reformulation, provides a particularly rich way to critique and re-vision the myth of the scientific, presumably invisible, objective narrator in biography as well as in life writing in the social sciences. The first chapter, where Long presents her critical framework, and the last half of the book, where she first discusses the traditional scientific narrator/researcher and then applies the concept of a narrator who actively engages her subject, ring with conviction. The three chapters focusing on women's autobiography often tread over familiar territory, revamp a male/female binary that has since been questioned and/or taken up in more complexity, and are marred by generalizations. Though the role of women's autobiography in Long's book may be fathomed, I was left wondering whether it was needed. Clearly, Long could have developed many of the same points, with more connection and detail, by sustaining the topic that dominates the book and best profits from her critical framework: a frank revision of narrator/subject dynamics whether that manifests in biography, life writing in the social sciences, or scholarly writing in general.

Long uses autobiography to introduce the genre's tradition in relation to women and the types of constraints they have often encountered in writing their own autobiographies. Long defends her extensive discussion of autobiography by asserting, that the "reader can take

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

it as read that parallel critique applies to the genres of biography and life history that are taken up in later chapters" (3). The problem is, though, that autobiography cannot simply "stand in" for biography or life writing in the social sciences, and as a consequence, the three chapters treating autobiography fit uncomfortably with the rest of the book. Further, following the three-chapter discussion of autobiography, Long makes little mention of the genre again; it would have been interesting to see how her narrative method might be applied to women's self-writing. Certainly women writing either autobiography or biography can feel parallel constraints due to its androcentric tradition and may also question the worthiness of their "subject." However, autobiography presents different challenges (e.g., the writer is both narrator and subject, an autobiographer generally writes in the first rather than third person, and so forth) and has a much different history than biography or social science life writing. By keeping her focus on biography, Long could have developed its tradition more completely; then, when she does present the history of women's life writing in the social sciences, she would be better able to point out the differences--as well as the parallels--between the two disciplines. For example, in writing life histories, researchers (narrators) often have more power than their subjects and, accordingly, more freedom to direct the narrative. In many instances, biographers have less power; they may be commissioned to write a biography or be writing the life of an "existing" subject who exerts a great deal of control.

However, with or without the discussion on women's autobiography, Long's book proves valuable. Long applies her background in sociology (she is Professor Emerita of Sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University) to draw provocative connections between biography and life writing in the social sciences. In life histories in social research, the narrator is "scripted" to remain invisible, detached, and objective. By using the literary terms narrator and subject instead of researcher and agent, their social science analogues, Long underscores the fictive nature of scientific narrative and textual construction in general. Complete objectivity is both impossible and counterproductive; genuine research results from an empathetic relationship between subject and narrator, a practice fitting the "model of exchange better than the model of scientific control" (69). Further, given that the relationship between the subject and narrator becomes part of the life history's process, the relationship needs to be included in the text rather than being viewed as "mere methodological scaffolding to be discarded when the final result is achieved" (71). Inversely, biographical writing seen in relation to the conventions of traditional scientific writing helps isolate the disembodied, "absent" narrator often evident in both.

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Although the interplay of narrator, subject, reader, and text in her life-writing model provides a viable method for re-visioning both life histories and biographies, at times Long may minimize the difficulties. As an example of her model at work in feminist biography, Long cites Kathleen Barry's biography of Susan B. Anthony. Barry develops "an instrumental empathy" as a narrator by closely studying Anthony's life and ultimately trying to re-create many of Anthony's experiences, e.g., going to the same places, reading her favorite novels, taking the same walks, and even reiterating some of Anthony's speeches. The process, Long contends, allowed Barry to move from the outside of Anthony's life "into the realm of her subject's mind" where Barry was able to identity just what in Anthony's reading would have "inspired the subject" or "defined her to herself" (70). Though Barry's meticulous work offers a step in the right direction, it is unlikely her method allowed the seamless entry into Anthony's mind that Long suggests.

On the other hand, the effectiveness of Long's narrative model is evident when she presents detailed analyses of life writing and biographies that succeed or fail based on the level of subject/narrator engagement and empathy. The vivid first-person narrative of Boxcar Bertha, a woman hobo in the 1930s, seems devoid of "narratorial framing" (79). The narrator's evident lack of desire to control Bertha's story allows her unique life and strong voice to emerge unimpeded. In contrast, Long shows how Gordon Allport, a Harvard professor, exerts considerable narrative control over the letters of Jenny Gove Masterson. In writing the life history, Letters from Jenny (1965), Allport completely disregards one of two narrative threads--Jenny's struggle for economic independence--so that he may focus instead on her troubled relationship with her son. The history that results is unsympathetic, distorted, and reveals Allport's fear of engaging with his subject, a discomfort he camouflages by referring to himself as an "objective scientist" (88).

Long's call for a "new" objectivity based on intersubjectivity and "narratorial self-avowal" is timely and valuable (132). Researchers, biographers, and scholars in general need to consider whether detachment and objectivity produce knowledge or are inherently less ethical and responsible. Fortunately, Judy Long's lucidly written and intelligently argued book provokes her readers to reassess the conventions used in life writing as well as in their own writing.

Mount Mary College