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By
Nell Irvin Painter
One of the things that make biography so attractive is its intimacy. Biography brings you together with one person. The reader comes to know one person well, kind of like a family member or friend. Unlike scholarship in the humanities or the social sciences, biography seems unencumbered by theory. It seems natural. It seems almost unseemly to speak of biography in terms of culture or theory or ideology. It almost runs counter to the whole reason for biography.
I’m going to talk about two kinds of biography, one I’m calling conventional and one I’m calling subaltern. I’ll talk about these two kinds of biography in relationship to a phenomenon called “the privilege of unknowing.” This address is in two parts. In the first, longer part, I’ll talk about subaltern biography and the privilege of unknowing. I’m going to use my own experience as a biographer of Sojourner Truth as a kind of case study. The second, shorter part will deal with conventional biography. I’ll mention three biographical figures, very briefly – Thomas Jefferson, Charles Lindbergh and William Randolph Hearst. What I’d like you to remember is that the privilege of unknowing allows authors and readers of biographies to ignore much about the lives in question. In the case of subaltern subjects, what we ignore is what is uniquely individual, to read and write as if we did not know that subaltern subjects, especially African-American subjects, lived individual lives, and they lived them sometimes in ways that were not politically correct. Sometimes we read as if each subaltern individual were interchangeable with every other, as if the Negro or the African American or the woman could be just the same as any other. We choose not to know individual difference. In the case of conventional subjects, we ignore the ideology, the tenor of the culture. In those cases, we read and write as if we did not know that conventional subjects, especially privileged white men, lived their lives in the context of a society that might be politically incorrect. We choose not to know the racism and the sexism of the cultural context. I’m going to close with my disappointment over the gulf that continues to separate the portrayal of American society in subaltern biography and the portrayal of American society in conventional, prize-winning biographies. In subaltern biography, disparities of power play gigantic roles, but in conventional biography, in the biography that wins prizes, those biographies seem to come from some other world, a world of perfectly equal opportunity. The thoughtful reader of historical biography sometimes must come away wondering, “How can it be that subaltern subjects and conventional subjects might live in the same culture, the same country, the same time?” Now you know my conclusions. Let me go back, start over, define my terms – historical biography, conventional biography, subaltern biography and the privilege of unknowing. When we talk about biography, we usually divide it. We talk about literary biography, and we talk about historical biography. I’m not going to talk about literary biography, but I want to mention it because most people who write about biography write about literary biography. Historical biography is biography about people who were important historically. Usually they’re political figures or people who held power. Very often they’re white men, and the people who write them use historical methods. That is to say, they go to the archives and they read historical sources and they say, “This happened, this happened and this happened.” It unrolls historically. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about the artwork or the artistry or whatever that the person might have made on the side. So, they concentrate on what happened and give you a person one step at a time. That’s historical biography. Now, I’m only talking about historical biography, but I’m dividing it into two – conventional biography, subaltern biography. Conventional biography is sort of normal biography, great figures, great people, great men. These are the biographies that usually win prizes. The quintessential conventional biography would be a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Those tell you where the person was born, perhaps what the ancestors were, the childhood, the education, the greatness and then the death. Usually, this is about one life, and you don’t get very much about what was going on around the life. You don’t get very much of the culture or the society. Those kinds of biographies usually don’t have theory in them. Subaltern biography is the biography of subjects who are people whose lives are circumscribed in some way. Subalterns can be white women because women still do face limitations in life on account of their sex or their gender. Subaltern biography can be African-American people who are surrounded by prejudice, by racism - especially in the 19th century or before - just a whole series of impediments. Subaltern biography is about people who are relatively powerless. I stress the relatively because not all subaltern people are equally powerless, and one person can change over a lifetime. For instance, when I was a young black girl I was more subaltern than I am now as a chaired professor, not to mention a governor’s lecturer. To a certain extent, we read all biographies for lessons on how to live. How did somebody like me live a life before, how do I face those same challenges? But when we read subaltern biographies, the biographies of women or people of color or other racial or ethnic minorities, we identify with those subjects. For instance, I have heard white women who are biographers of white women express chagrin when they discover that their subject was a lousy parent or was a treacherous friend. “Oh, I’m so disappointed!” Or, for instance, a black male biographer of a famous black man, discovering late in the life that the subject became a party hack. You don’t want to put that part in your book because we read these biographies - and often write them - as if they were us, as if they were our role models, as if they were our family. So, if that white woman is a terrible parent, it says something about another white woman or about her reader or about her biographer. If this black woman turns out to be a liar and a cheat, somehow that says something about me. There’s that kind of tightness in subaltern biography that doesn’t necessarily exist in conventional biography. The privilege of unknowing. Now, this is not my own phrase. It comes from a critic named Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She talks about regimes of truth. What can be said? What must be forgotten? What should be left out? What should be emphasized? For instance, part of our American regime of truth is the openness and equality of opportunity. And then somebody will say, “Hey, hey, wait! What about those people who were enslaved and couldn’t read and write?” That is not part of the regime of truth. We forget that part. Do you see what I mean about what we forget? So, if you exercise the privilege of unknowing, you’re not knowing something you could easily know. You’re choosing not to know. That’s the privilege of unknowing. For instance, if I were standing… no I wouldn’t be standing in front of you a hundred years ago. How am I going to do this? Ummm, this is hard. If, somehow, I were standing in front of you a hundred years ago… you’d be all white men. This is not working. Say Ron Hull were here a hundred years ago and he said, “Every great Nebraskan is on videotape.” A hundred years ago? Well, let’s say that Ron Hull stood in front of you last week and said that every great Nebraskan is on videotape. And, then last week I said, “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. What about the first black woman pioneer who founded the city of Lincoln?” And he’d say, “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.” That would be the privilege of unknowing. Do you see what I mean? We’re all caught up in times. If I take you too far back when you wouldn’t know about a famous black woman, then I couldn’t be there. If I do it yesterday, then you would know better already. I hope you understand. I think you get the point that there are some things we don’t want to know. So, there are some things we don’t want to know because they don’t work with our scholarship, and they don’t work in our everyday life. And, especially in conventional biography, we don’t want to know some things about the context in which individual lives unfurled. I want to give you a case study from Sojourner Truth. I call this part of my lecture “Unknowing Sojourner Truth: Aren’t I a Woman?” Sojourner Truth did not say, “Aren’t I a woman?” Sojourner Truth was born in upstate New York about 1797. She died in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1883. She did go to a women’s rights meeting in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. She did speak up. In 1863, 12 years later, a woman named Frances Dana Gage wrote an article called “Sojourner Truth.” In that article, she said Sojourner Truth went to a meeting in Akron, Ohio. It was a meeting of white women who didn’t want anything to do with black women, but then all the white men started trashing the white women, and the white women started not knowing what to do, and they were all being bowed down, and Sojourner Truth rose up like a force of nature and with great strength said, “I have shucked and I have bound and I have hoed and aren’t I a woman?” And then all the white women said, “Oh, yes, yes, yes! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” And, Sojourner Truth carried the day. Is that the story you know? I won’t take you through all the history, but let me just tell you that I am not the first person to notice that Sojourner Truth did not say, “Aren’t I a woman?” Another biographer, in 1993, noticed that and wrote it. And before that, a whole collection of anti-slavery speeches and articles called the Black Abolitionist Papers also figured that out in the early ‘90s. But I think my book has gotten more attention, so the whole question of “Aren’t I a woman?” and Sojourner Truth has come up with intensity. I discovered that Frances Dana Gage, who was at this meeting and who wrote this article 12 years later, made it up. She invented “Aren’t I a woman?” She invented a whole lot in that article. She was speaking more to Harriet Beecher Stowe than she was to what was going on with Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth did say something to that effect, but she didn’t say those words. If you’re interested in this, look at chapter 18 in “Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol,” and you will find the fine-grain history of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Dana Gage and Sojourner Truth and how that phrase came to be. What I want to concentrate on is the response. I got very good reviews. I will not complain about my reviews, but most historian reviewers talked about Sojourner Truth’s life. They didn’t get into “Aren’t I a woman?” They also didn’t talk much about the photographs because this was all stuff that wasn’t usually found in biographies, especially subaltern biographies. The Women’s Review of Books didn’t review the book. They couldn’t find a reviewer who was willing to go public saying, “Ohhhhhh!” A colleague of mine who teaches at a Southern university told me that she taught my book, and after they read that chapter on “Aren’t I a woman?” that says Sojourner Truth did not say, “Aren’t I a woman?” one of the students came up in tears afterwards and said, “No, no, she had to say it! She had to say it!” Someone I know, a scholar, said – I think, half joking – “I think she said it. It sounds like her.” Earlier this year, I took part in a biographies conference at the New York Public Library, and we were speaking to people who work in the library. These were book people. If anybody would know anything about books, and about reading, these would be the people. In the discussion that came up, I said, “Well, Sojourner Truth didn’t say, ‘Aren’t I a woman?’” And, a woman in the back said, “Wait! Wait! Wait! She must have said it someplace, sometime!” This is a librarian. I said, “I’m sorry. Maybe she did say it someplace, sometime, but I’m a historian and I need a source.” All this is to say that many readers desperately want Sojourner Truth to have said, “Aren’t I a woman?” I keep saying that there are many greatnesses about Sojourner Truth, and there are many reasons to admire her, many reasons to respect what she did, her courage, her ability to keep at feminism and anti-slavery, her overcoming of a wretched childhood. She was a slave until she was 30 years old. There are many reasons to admire Sojourner Truth, but for many people taking away that one little tagline makes Sojourner Truth less a symbol and more of a person. That is a kind of unknowing. I want people to renounce that privilege of unknowing and to admit that a subaltern figure like Sojourner Truth can be an individual, can be a person in her own time, can live a long life, can change over her life. And, it’s a life we need to know in its own integrity, its individuality. What about the privilege of unknowing in conventional biography? In conventional biography usually the figure stands alone, stands free, really unfettered, and the wider society doesn’t weigh very heavily. Sometimes, if it does appear, it’s as the American mood or something like that. So that, unless you’re talking about someone who’s experienced slavery, somebody like Sojourner Truth, you wouldn’t necessarily know that there was slavery around figures who were, say, living in the South. A recent biography of Thomas Jefferson, a prize-winning biography of Thomas Jefferson, “American Sphinx,” never really gets into Thomas Jefferson’s thorny relationships with people around him who were enslaved. You’re saying, “What about Sally Hemings?” This book came out before the recent DNA, but even before the recent DNA we knew that something was going on. So, in this biography we get Thomas Jefferson kind of as a lonely figure who may be surrounded by an institution but not surrounded by people whose freedom is fettered. The Sally Hemings story, in this biography, gets put in an appendix, kind of off back on the side. That virtual silence is a kind of privilege of unknowing. I should also add that Thomas Jefferson said nothing, and his biographer respected that silence. One way of respecting that silence is not to read the materials that come out of African-American studies and African-American history, black women’s history, and the biographer in question this time also did not read that material. Not reading is a way of exercising the privilege of unknowing. Ralph Bunche was a black American figure. Charles Lindbergh was, of course, the famous American flyer, the American hero. In a biography of Ralph Bunche, we encounter Charles Lindbergh as an example of narrow-minded, racist thought. But, if we look at the biography of Lindbergh, we discover a tiny acknowledgment that Lindbergh believed in eugenics. Yes, Lindbergh did go to Nazi Germany, and, yes, he did get the highest award that the Nazis gave. They also gave this award to Henry Ford. But, reading those biographies, you would not know that this way of thinking belonged to thousands of other Americans. To recognize the existence of that kind of thought in early 20th century America is not to condemn all Americans, but to recognize it is to put those figures in a world in which a Ralph Bunche lives, in which a Ralph Bunche faces discrimination and difficulties. So, in terms of the Lindbergh biography, if you did not know United States intellectual history, you would not be able to pick up the hints about Lindbergh’s ideology. Finally, to close, I want to mention a book that I have not had the chance of reading. This was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review in July. It’s a biography of William Randolph Hearst. It’s by a very good historian, by a historian I know. (Of course, all the historians I know are good historians.) At any rate, I don’t say these things to condemn the historians, but rather to condemn a kind of writing of biography. According to the reviewer, the biographer is puzzled that William Randolph Hearst cozied up to Mussolini and cozied up to Hitler. He saw Franklin Roosevelt as a communist dupe. Hearst actually commissioned Mussolini as a columnist. This is something I did not know. And, he asked his editors in New York to tone down their critical coverage of the Nazis in Berlin. According to the reviewer, Hearst misjudged Hitler. According to the reviewer, it was a singular failure that he, Hearst, was blind to the realities of Nazi rule and Nazi anti-Semitism. At the end of his examination of all the material, the biographer confesses that Hearst’s confidence in Hitler remains baffling. It’s just that sort of thing that I’m calling the privilege of unknowing, that a biographer could find a tendency in American life baffling. It’s as if you have to put on a hood and a sheet and go out and burn crosses before people can realize that you believe in things we don’t believe in. But, looking backwards, we ought to be able to know that there existed in the United States in earlier times bigotry, anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and a host of other ideologies that I hope that we’re moving away from. I want to leave you with a hope that you will renounce the privilege of unknowing, in order better to know individuals, in order better to know our past, because we must acknowledge the past and acknowledge the role of the past in individual lives before we can move forward as biographers and as readers. Nell Irvin Painter is Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University and author of “Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol,” published in 1996 to wide acclaim. Painter also wrote “Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction,” which traces ex-slaves as they moved northward after the Civil War. Director of the African American Studies program at Princeton, Painter teaches the history of the United States South. She attended the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Bordeaux, France; and the University of Ghana, West Africa; and took her Ph.D. in history at Harvard University. She taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before joining Princeton’s faculty in 1988.
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We all know that
biography is a hot topic. If you go to Barnes and Noble on the Web, you
will find that biography has its own link. Amazon.com says that it stocks
something like 180,000 biographies. They sell well, and it’s doing well
in the American marketplace.
Why should you generalize
about a culture when you’re talking about one life? You may ask that, and
that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to generalize because theory is
the work of the scholar.
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Phone 402-474-2131 or e-mail nhc@nebraskahumanities.org. |
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