Rebecca Styler

Editorial: Lives in Relation

In what ways does life writing explore relational selfhood? How do auto/ biographies, diaries, letters, and portraits represent inter-personal as well as personal experience? In shaping the account of a life, what role is played by the relationships between the subject and his/her family, peers, religious and political movements, or intellectual discourses? How does the text give form to the relationship between biographer, subject, and imagined reader? What records of collective life do we have and what critical methods can we adopt to challenge the individualistic tendency that has prevailed in traditional approaches to auto/ biography? The papers in this volume emerged from a conference called ‘Lives in Relation’ which was held at the University of Lincoln, UK, in 2009, and which sought to address the issues above, by bringing together contributions from the humanities disciplines on life writing in its various forms. The theme of relationality was chosen with the sense that there has been a shift within life writing (both its practice and criticism) away from the traditional emphasis on the autonomous individual who stands out of his or her milieu in favour of considerations of the relationality inherent in individual lives. The concept of the autonomous, unified self, the source of its own meaning and action as a selfdetermined agent, has been challenged by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic approaches to selfhood and language. In addition, feminist critics have demonstrated the inadequacy of individualism for understanding traditions of women’s life writing, both in terms of their textual forms and conceptions of personal identity. These critical approaches have contributed to new ways of writing and interpreting life narratives. In terms of scholarship on life writing, we have now moved beyond a gendered reading of relationality as a distinctly feminine category or female practice, to recognise the relational structures underpinning all life writing texts*a claim borne out by two essays in this volume: Holly Furneaux’s discussion of John Forster’s biography of Charles Dickens as a testament to male friendship, and Arlene Leis’ consideration of the artist Jean-François Rigaud’s group portraits as emblems of professional association. As a consequence of this critical shift, life writing in forms with obviously relational structures, such as the letter and family memoir, have gained in status in relation Life Writing VOLUME 8 NUMBER 3 (SEPTEMBER 2011)

Josephine Butler’s Serial Auto/Biography: Writing the Changing Self through the Lives of Others

ABSTRACT Josephine Butler, controversial and pioneering feminist reformer of the late nineteenth century, never wrote an autobiography, but she articulated self-understandings indirectly through writing deeply self-reflexive constructions of others’ lives. While this strategy has been recognised in isolated biographies, I show Butler’s auto/biography as a serial process, comparing John Grey of Dilston with Catharine of Siena to show how Butler’s conceptions of herself changed significantly in the early part of her career. She moves from modelling herself on the gender-transcendent liberal reformer, to modelling herself on the radical female prophet, whose sex was a vital qualification for spiritual and political power. Finding she could no longer position her feminist campaign within the broad cause of Victorian liberal reform, Butler turned from her paternal examplar to a medieval female saint-prophet, whose authority was located in her outsider status and in her intrinsically womanly nature. This comparative discussion, enlightened by reference to Butler’s unpublished letters, shows Butler’s change from positioning her public work within the reform tradition of liberalism to that of apocalyptic feminism. It also sheds a new light on Victorian women’s coded strategies of self-representation, and more generically into the use of sequential biographies as vehicles for articulating changing self-conceptions.

Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination

Tragedy of Richard III becomes, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, a poetic interrogation of historical truth and a pervasively ironic stance towards retributive justice; the debt of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Lyly involves modulating a drama of courtly illusion and firm linguistic control into one of social disruption and metaphysical disturbance; the reworking of plot motifs from Every Man out of his Humour in Twelfth Night transposes corrective satire into emotional education and “humour” comedy into psychological turmoil. Some of the juxtapositions are more illuminating than others. Discussions of the relationship between The Taming of A Shrew and The Taming of the Shrew, between Hamlet and Antonio’s Revenge, or between Philaster and Cymbeline, for instance, rehearse fairly well-established points, although Clare is never less than intelligent and readable. As has lately been argued by Bart van Es in Shakespeare in Company (2013), Shakespeare’s work changed significantly after he became a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594, becoming less reminiscent of the “medley” dramaturgy typical of the Queen’s Men, and more rooted in complex characterisation (with the security of a permanent troupe) and tight plotting. Clare also notes this shift, seeing the middle period plays testing the merit of competing aesthetic theories in dialogue with Lyly, Marlowe and Jonson. In the late plays, with the Blackfriars as well as the Globe in mind, Shakespeare both responds to a revived “medley” technique as found in Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me—which he and Fletcher recast into more of a chamber work in Henry VIII, or All is True—and practises a variant of it himself in Cymbeline, whose tonal incongruities and mannerist shifts of perspective bring it close to The Knight of the Burning Pestle, performed only a few years earlier. There are one or two reservations to record. It is surprising to find no mention of Ford, whose indebtedness to Shakespeare’s tragedies is well-known, or of Middleton, whose collaborations with Shakespeare are not discussed. Nor is there any reference to David Womersley’s Divinity and State (2010), which argues convincingly for a dialogic relationship between the plays of Shakespeare and Anthony Munday. Nevertheless, this book is a welcome incitement to a conversation among critics about conversations between creative writers.

Faith, Feeling, Reality

How are we to approach the religious poetry of Anne Bronte? Written in the 1840s, her collection of short lyrics and longer didactic verse appear somewhat alien to the modern reader. Drenched in the language of evangelical belief, the poems swing between spiritual ecstasy, guilt, doubt and resignation, demonstrating a religious intensity alien to the secular reader and even, I think, to many modern readers who do hold a position of faith. On first impressions, Bronte’s work appears bound to her historical moment, of significance only in relation to the religious discourses current in the early to mid-nineteenth century. We hear echoes of Methodist enthusiasm and the hymns of Charles Wesley, of Puritan self-disgust such as that evinced by William Cowper and John Bunyan, of the Romantic epiphany familiar to readers of Wordsworth, and of the agonised inquiry into God’s nature and existence which fed into the stream of Victorian doubt. If we assume, as does J.R. de J. Jackson, that the goal of the historicist critic is ‘to read past works of literature in the way in which they were read when they were new’ (quoted in Hawthorn 1996, 76), then it is in these contexts that Bronte’s work must be understood; as historically-minded critics, our task is to appreciate Bronte’s writing as a rich engagement with understandings of faith in her own era (see, for example, Styler 2010).