Carolyn A. Barros, Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation.

Ames, Deborah Lee

Carolyn A. Barros, Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation (U of Michigan P, 1998), 248 pp., $42.50 cloth.

Autobiographical theory has, since Georges Gusdorf arguably initiated it and James Olney carved its importance into the literary theory totem, debated how the self is constructed and presented to the reading public. Gusdorf maintained that an autobiographer fashions his/her history into a unified entity; Olney emphasized in his first theoretical analysis the importance of metaphor as a means by which the lifewriter artistically creates him/herself. Since then, theorists have asked such questions as: To what extent does the self even exist? To what degree does our Western, patriarchal culture create the myth of the self?. Can an autobiographer be trusted? Is memory reliable? Is the value of an autobiography found in its successful grounding in the referential? Such questions, while useful, are not, to paraphrase Sidonie Smith in an important essay, those asked by Carolyn Barros. While aware of the span of theoretical questions concerning autobiography, Barros instead concentrates upon her thesis, that the autobiographical act is a narrative which describes events that happened "to me," that is, to the lifewriter.

Barros argues that autobiography is more than the story of the "I," the "auto" of autobiography; it is the story of the changes undergone by the self. Change intrigues Barros, who analyzes five Victorian texts as she considers the ways in which the autobiographers textualize their transformative experiences. She summarizes her analysis of the five autobiographies: "John Henry Cardinal Newman, characterized as Anglican turned Catholic, John Stuart Mill, characterized as reasoning machine turned philosopher of feeling, Charles Darwin, characterized as beetle collector turned naturalist, and Margaret Oliphant, characterized as artist turned breadwinner turned artist, along with Carlyle's fictive personae, tailor and retailored tailor, mark out very different Victorian personae" (201). Barros succinctly states her thesis in this manner: autobiography is often (but not always) a "narrative of transformation," which describes the manner by which the author has changed (10). The emphasis is clearly upon change--an evolution, a transformation, an emergence into the full, autobiographical self.

What better source to demonstrate evolution than Darwin himself?. In a chapter entitled "From Beetle Collector to Acclaimed Naturalist," Barros stresses that Darwin's lifewriting demonstrates her thesis that some autobiographies unveil an evolutionary process of transformation. Those of us with a liberal-arts understanding of biology and natural selection have been taught that Darwin postulated evolutionary changes as a biological imperative, the survival of the fittest, and the celebration of environmental adaptation. As I read Barros' argument, I agreed with her that lifewriters are concerned with what has happened in their lives, yet I saw in the autobiographies themselves less an emphasis on radical change and more a growing development of life-long interests brought to fruition. A Jungian interpretation would stress the essential, unchanging core that each autobiographer presents. Were psychologist James Hillman, an expert on Freud and Jung, to read Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation, he would no doubt challenge Barros' central premise. In his examination entitled The Soul's Code, Hillman draws from ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman concepts, as well as from modern psychology, in postulating that each person has a specific talent that must be expressed. The Greeks called it the daimon, the Romans labeled it genius, the Christians used terms like a calling or one's guardian angel, still others, fate or destiny, but, no matter the nomenclature, Hillman insists that this essence of who an individual is may be observed even in childhood, should the child be exposed to, or uncover, that which is the child's passion. Hillman argues that personal fulfillment and completeness is found when the individual embraces his/her daimon.

By applying Hillman's argument to Darwin's autobiography, the progression from beetle collector to acclaimed naturalist is not so much a process of being transformed from one thing to another as a fuller and deeper realization of the self. Another example could come from Barros' chapter on John Henry Newman. Newman's decision to leave the Anglican Church and become a Catholic sent shock waves across England to the extent that we, in our secular times, can scarcely imagine. Whereas we might see the conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism as a personal preference regarding Christian denominations, Newman and his contemporaries grappled with his conversion as changing religions, something not done without great risk in both temporal and eternal spheres. Newman's conversion, the transformation that concerns Barros, was seen by many as nothing short of betrayal.

However much care Newman takes in his Apologia pro Vita Sua to guide his readers through his religious opinions, thereby encouraging them to understand the process of his transformation from Anglican cleric to Catholic clergyman, he keeps his autobiographical world firmly structured around religion. After an introductory confession of "how great a trial" it is "to write the following history" of himself, Newman begins his textual life by positioning himself vis-a-vis the Bible (23). And if we subscribe to Hillman's argument, then Newman can do no other, for a lively intellectual relationship with God and the church was indeed his daimon, his genius, his calling. Only a few paragraphs into the Apologia, Newman records how he discovered in his "first Latin verse-book" a drawing by his own hand, the sight of which "took my breath away with surprise" (24). He had discovered that he, as a young boy and as prejudiced against Catholics as any other British boy of his station, had drawn a rosary. Tellingly, he does not identify the object by its common noun but rather he describes what it looks like. The rosary causes Newman to reflect that "the strange thing is, how, among the thousand objects which meet a boy's eyes, these in particular should so have fixed themselves in my mind, that I made them thus practically my own" (24). Hillman would interpret that as an inchoate, pre-verbal pointer to Newman's daimon.

Not everyone will agree with James Hillman's argument that each individual has a particular calling, nor will all autobiographical theorists concur with the early thinker on lifewriting, Georges Gusdorf. Gusdorf proposes that lifewriting represents a "reconstructing the unity of a life across time" (37), a unity which may or may not have actually existed, but is imposed upon the written life by the autobiographer. The lifewriter reconsiders, reevaluates, and reconstitutes the life lived, and in the course of writing down that life, an essential unity unfolds. Another early writer on autobiographical theory, Rockwell Gray, while not as prominent a figure as Gusdorf, observes that an autobiography "embraces mutability and ambivalence" (55). Barros would perhaps align herself closer to Gray's assessment than to Gusdorf's, yet it may be that the dialectic of unity and mutability must be present in each significant autobiography. Anyone who has lived has experienced changes and transformations; all of the lifewriters Barros considers discuss the "mutability and ambivalence" that constituted their lives. Still, I wonder if the transformations that Barros identifies are not, in their essences, unity. Newman sought after spiritual truth, Darwin was fascinated by what he observed in nature, to mention the two examples employed in this review. For myself, I interpret the autobiographers as emphasizing less a transformative change and more a deeper becoming. However, scholars interested in autobiography in general or Victorian autobiography in particular will want to read Barros' book, an indepth examination of five crucial texts.

Deborah Lee Ames

Oklahoma State University

Works Cited

Barros, Carolyn. Autobiography: Narrative of Transformation. U of Michigan P, 1998.

Gray, Rockwell. "Autobiography Now." The Kenyon Review ns 4 (Winter 1982): 31-55.

Gusdorf, Georges. "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography." 1956. Tr. James Olney. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton UP, 1980. 28-48.

Hillman, James. The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Random, 1996.

Newman, John Henry. Apologia pro Vita Sua. Ed. Ian Ker. New York: Penguin, 1994.