G. Thomas Couser, Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography.

Lyons, John O.

G. Thomas Couser, Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

The word autobiography was first used (by Robert Southey) in 1809. Until then the form fluttered from one generic term to another. Rousseau gives us his "confessions," Boswell kept his "journal," for Sterne it was "life and opinions" (and here the terms are a joke), and for Franklin it was "memoir." Giving the form a name seems to have changed it. The candidness of the eighteenth-century examples is missing in nineteenth-century personal narratives. The Victorians were reticent about telling the whole truth, especially when it was unseemly. Dickens's widow burned his correspondence, Froude was chastized for telling tales out of school about the Carlyles, and Tennyson insisted that there be no biography of him.

We are now at the flood tide of articles about autobiography. Most of these studies are concerned with showing how writers mask the truth when the subject is themselves. Or rather, how it is masked in spite of the author's wishes since (as the current critical fashion has it) our language makes us and not we it. The result is that this criticism is short with writers who presume to know themselves, and is eager to examine the gap between truth and an author's version of the truth. These two studies display two different methodologies, but each shows the width of that gap.

Couser's work is an extension of his American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode (1979). That book examined the way in which autobiography, from the Puritans to Malcolm X, uses personal experience to argue a religious or political doctrine. Altered Egos considers the matter of "authority" in the writing of autobiography. It is a convention of the form that the author insist on the truth of what he tells. Indeed, since it is his life being presented, no one else can challenge his authority. Yet he turns out to be just another unreliable narrator, and our interest is greatest when considering his mendacity.

Couser begins with a discussion of "counterfeit" authority, using the case of Clifford Irving's life of Howard Hughes. Since this was a "biography" and not an "autobiography" the point is slightly off the mark, although such larceny has its fascination. He then proceeds to the meat of his book, which concerns the autobiographies of Franklin, P.T. Barnum, and Mark Twain. The most interesting, because now the least known, is the story of Barnum's many versions of his life. These were enormously popular in their time, but I doubt that many expected a truthful account from such a prankster. The same might be said of Franklin and Mark Twain. Also, Franklin's audience and purpose changed as he wrote, and Mark Twain told the story of his life throughout his career. It is no wonder there were discrepancies. We might ask why readers should be attracted to works they know are cons. I suspect the answer is less complicated than Couser makes it. The common reader is delighted to be fooled as well as to see others fooled. In such works as these the author and the reader form a kind of partnership in exposing the comic absurdities of the world. When Barnum emptied his crowded side show of nature's wonders with a sign that announced, "This Way to the Egress," he was hardly the victim of his language. Some critics probably joined the departing crowd.

The reader might now expect Couser to proceed to an examination of other autobiographies (Henry Adams, Edward Bok, Santayana, Lincoln Steffens?), but he goes on to discuss works that are not always properly autobiographies, although they fill out the ethnic quilt of American literature. There is Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Couser seems intent here in establishing the truth value (as philosophers now put it) of such works that grow directly out of the crucible of experience (contra Franklin et alia). It seems that just the reverse is true, and that these writers are the ones who are prisoners of literary conventions, and thus "authority" is undermined. Jacobs's book is an escape narrative and follows the conventions of that genre. This is not to say that it is a false account in outline, but that the author uses conventions of the escape narrative to sway the reader. For example, when Jacobs presents her allies in her seven years of hiding, they speak like characters in a mid-Victorian genteel romance; when it is the darkies who would reveal her hiding place to the cruel master, they speak like characters in a minstrel show. Jacobs is here not presenting a disinterested account of her life. It is rather "incidents" that depict the horrors of sexual slavery.

Couser ends with an account of Mary Chestnut's journal, which presents her difficulty in holding her tongue on the immorality of slavery while living among Confederates. He also discusses Black Elk Speaks, a work with such a confused history of composition as to lack all authority. Finally, he treats Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which presents a feminist and separatist argument, and The Education of Richard Rodriguez, An Autobiography, which argues for assimilationism. Couser's sympathies are with Kingston, but by this stage the concern with "authority" is lost.

Henderson's The Victorian Self is a very different matter. It began as a Columbia University dissertation, and a very good one it must have been. It pursues its argument with tenacity, avoids pretentiousness, and employs a prose that is always clear and often graceful. Her argument is that the Victorians, even though they lived in a time that saw the erosion of faith because of the Higher Criticism and advances in the biological sciences, were still bibliolaters who found meaning in their lives through Biblical typologies. To illustrate, Henderson discusses Newman's Apologia, Ruskin's Praeterita, and Gosse's Father and Son. The first is a story of conversion, the second of unconversion, and the last of subversion.

The paradigm for these autobiographers is drawn from a mixture of the lives of Job, Paul, and Augustine (who is here elevated to the level of holy writ). The narrative elements include a fall from grace, a trial of faith, a Pisgah sight of the Promised Land, a temptation, a sudden conversion, etc. The Bible is the largest contributor to the pattern, but there are others: Augustine, Virgil, and Dante often serve as models. This tends to dilute the importance of the Bible in Henderson's argument, but it does not invalidate it.

Newman saw himself as cast in the mold of Paul, and so much of the Apologia is an explanation of how his own conversion was not the result of a sudden blow on the road to Damascus, but rather a slow, organic process. He uses the gradual illumination of Job as an analogue, and this leads him to the "comforts" of his former Oxford associates who considered him a traitor. On the other hand, his new Papist friends were not completely convinced of his sincerity. He found another analogue in Moses, for he would lead England out of bondage to false Protestant and liberal doctrines. Perhaps he felt kinship with Moses, whose long sojourn in the Wilderness paralleled Newman's wanderings in theological confusion. But it is the trial of Paul he finds most analogous to his own experience of his dispute with Charles Kingsley, his prosecutor, or Accuser. And this experience, with its heated dialogue and legalistic language, leads Newman back to the analogy of Job, who "offers a model of inexplicable suffering--and suffering eventually rewarded." Yet a clear reward is not to be Newman's. In the end he despairs of ever coming face to face with the Deity. The Apologia is itself an attempt to achieve this intimacy, but the encounter is with a mirror. Henderson says, "the mirror has a double function: it reflects the self, yet it also has the potential to show the face of Christ." In the nineteenth century that potential was rarely fulfilled.

Ruskin's youth was saturated with the Bible, so when he made the leap to faith in the aesthetic life he still saw his experience through Biblical analogues. But unlike Newman's experience of a gradual conversion, Ruskin's conversion was a recurrent episode. For Newman the flight from Egypt was a flight to the true faith; for Ruskin it was a flight to the aesthetic life. He also finds (unlike Newman) the experiences of Aeneas and Dante to be models. Henderson does not say so, but I suspect that Ruskin's allusions change from the Biblical to the Classical in Praeterita. As in Newman's case, the final vision is of loss and a brutal passing of time. "For the Pisgah sight symbolizes not only fulfillment, but frustration and failure, the ability of the autobiographer to see but not to enter the childhood Eden of his past." The result is a much more modern (but no more resolved) meditation on the nature of the elusive self.

Still more modern (in the sense of secular) is the "subversion" of Gosse's Father and Son. Ruskin might have been raised with the Bible as his main curriculum, but for Gosse it was the only text. His father was half Murdstone and half Gradgrind, so Christianity was a hard doctrine which saw indulgence in the imagination as a serious lapse. Edmund was warned against idolatry, so to test the power of the Deity, he prayed to a chair and was not struck down. God, therefore, is not potent but impotent. Henderson says that such blasphemies result in a "sustained and coherent pattern of typological reversals." Instead of spiritual solace Gosse sought imaginative stimulus in Scott and Shakespeare. This ill-prepared him to be the Infant Samuel his parents expected him to be. Instead of the illumination that is the reward of pious meditation, Gosse was prepared to worship the Golden Calf and adore the Scarlet Woman. Henderson contends that such reversals are defeating because the evil Biblical models are all defeated. There may be a joke here she misses.

She is right, however, to point out that Gosse saw himself as the lost sheep, even the Lamb who must be sacrificed to the pride of the father. His rebellion is to use his father's Evangelicalism poetically rather than typologically. "His miracles are secular, aesthetic, and literary." He uses not only his father's terms, for, even more than Ruskin, Gosse wanders far from Scripture for his illustrations. He might have been slightly Decadent, but he was well-read. "Augustine rejects the world, which he has known all too well, while Gosse embraces it with the fervor of a newly released prisoner."

Henderson gives the reader a bonus in an epilogue which traces the story of David in David Copperfield and Jane Eyre. Much of this is not new, but it is nicely presented. It is a comment on the Victorian novel that it selects the worldly David for an analogue instead of the other-worldly Paul.

John O. Lyons

University of Wisconsin-Madison