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Abstract
This essay contributes to conversations about the ethical complexities that arise when a writer transforms a subject’s firsthand accounts into a narrative for a broad readership. It asks if the aesthetic features of Kate Grenville’s One Life: My Mother’s Story (2015) can both prioritize readers’ engagement and allow for an ethical portrayal of the mother-subject.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Rebecca Johinke, Jan Shaw, and Bruce Gardiner for their invaluable feedback on drafts of this essay.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Grenville, One Life, 1.
2 Grenville, “Kate Grenville’s One Life.”
3 Wong, Shapcott, and Parker, “Graphic Lives, Visual Stories,” 319.
4 Mickwitz, “Introduction,” 462.
5 Also worth pursuing, but beyond the scope of this essay, is a discussion of the biographical pact offered in One Life. One could consider the disparity between the reader’s expectation for verifiability (given the nonfiction label on the back cover) and the unmarked speculation in this text. The notion of a biographical pact, adapted from Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, was first proposed by Carrard. See Lejeune, On Autobiography, 3–30; Carrard, “Picturing Minds.”
6 See Jolly, “Survival Writing.”
7 Couser, Vulnerable Subjects, xii.
8 Couser, Vulnerable Subjects, 16.
9 Couser, Vulnerable Subjects, xii.
10 Grenville, “Kate Grenville in Conversation.”
11 Brien, Baker, and Sulway, “Recovering Lives,” 2.
12 Brien, “Conjectural and Speculative Biography,” 25.
13 Brien, “Australian Speculative Biography,” 15.
14 Brien, “Australian Speculative Biography,” 16. Like Brien, Vicars is interested in how fiction can help “facilitat[e] the writing of forgotten, neglected, obscure or otherwise ‘lost’ lives” (“Fiction,” 102). Vicars casts his net, though, far wider than Brien does: he applies the term “fictional biography” to a group of texts which range from those that employ a minimal amount of supplementary fiction to those where fiction predominates.
15 For more on biofiction, see Lackey “Locating and Defining.”
16 Grenville, One Life, 2.
17 Grenville, One Life, 2.
18 Grenville, One Life, 3.
19 Grenville, One Life, 2; “Kate Grenville in Conversation.”
20 Grenville, Conversation with Melissa Lucashenko.
21 Grenville, “Writing One Life.”
22 Grenville, Conversation with Melissa Lucashenko.
23 Grenville, “Kate Grenville Sees.” Grenville’s insertion of an umbrella into the scene of her parents’ (ill-fated) meeting may recall Forster’s Howards End, raising further questions about the relationship between fiction and nonfiction in One Life. With thanks to Bruce Gardiner for pointing this out to me.
24 Grenville, “Writing One Life”; Conversation with Melissa Lucashenko.
25 Grenville, One Life, 202–203.
26 Grenville, Conversation with Melissa Lucashenko.
27 Brien, “Australian Speculative Biography,” 15.
28 Brien, “Australian Speculative Biography,” 18, 21.
29 See, for example, Ward, In My Mother’s Hands; Olsson, Boy, Lost; Wheatley, Her Mother’s Daughter; Modjeska, Poppy; Golden, Inventing Beatrice; and Summers, The Lost Mother. Within this essay, I compare One Life to several other Australian auto|biographical texts but have not included any that are by Aboriginal writers. As a settler scholar, any discussion of Aboriginal life writing I offer needs to be contextualized in a way that exceeds the scope of this essay. As Whitlock puts it, “Aboriginal lives don’t quite ‘fit’ into the forms, themes and categories which organise thinking about literary autobiography because their experience of childhood, death, or education, for example, is marked by race, and produced by systemic and systematic racism. So to incorporate the textual innovations of My Place or Auntie Rita alongside those of, say, Poppy, is to perform a critical sleight of hand” (“From Biography to Autobiography,” 246; Whitlock’s references are to Morgan, My Place; Huggins and Huggins, Auntie Rita; and Modjeska, Poppy). For scholarship on Aboriginal life writing, see, for example, Brewster, Reading Aboriginal and Leane, “Threads and Secrets.”
30 Wheatley, The Life and Myth, ix.
31 Wheatley, Her Mother’s Daughter, 21, 132.
32 Wheatley, Her Mother’s Daughter, 282.
33 Wheatley, Her Mother’s Daughter, 288.
34 Grenville, “Writing One Life.”
35 Grenville, “Writing One Life.”
36 Modjeska, Poppy; Golden, Inventing Beatrice.
37 Grenville, “Writing One Life.”
38 Grenville, “Writing One Life.”
39 Rooney, “Kate Grenville,” 27.
40 Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, 24.
41 Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, 24.
42 For scholarship on the relationship between realist texts and feminist politics, see, for example, Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics and Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I.
43 Kossew, “Kate Grenville’s Transgressive Narratives,” 134.
44 Kossew, “Kate Grenville’s Transgressive Narratives,” 128.
45 Kossew, “Kate Grenville’s Transgressive Narratives,” 134.
46 Grenville, “Can Knowledge?”
47 Craven, “Kate Grenville’s One Life”; Shiells, “One Life”; Brennan, “One Life.”
48 Couser, Memoir, 171.
49 Wong, Shapcott, and Parker, “Graphic Lives, Visual Stories,” 320.
50 Wong, Shapcott, and Parker, “Graphic Lives, Visual Stories,” 311, 313.
51 Couser, Vulnerable Subjects, 41, 42.
52 Couser, Vulnerable Subjects, 35. Eakin also addresses the ethical complexity of collaborative autobiographies, including their “necessarily unequal distribution of power” and how “[t]he details of the collaborative process ... are usually masked” (How Our Lives, 176, 173).
53 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 25, 17.
54 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 25–26.
55 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 17.
56 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 64n9.
57 Cosslett, “Matrilineal Narratives Revisited”; Ní Dhúill, Metabiography.
58 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 232.
59 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 17.
60 Cosslett, “Matrilineal Narratives Revisited,” 141.
61 Cosslett, “Matrilineal Narratives Revisited,” 142.
62 Cosslett, “Matrilineal Narratives Revisited,” 151.
63 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 16–17.
64 Grenville, “Kate Grenville Sees.”
65 The furore surrounding Grenville’s sixth novel, The Secret River, arose soon after it was published in Australia in 2005. The book is set in early nineteenth-century New South Wales and tells a story about a British convict’s claim to Aboriginal land. Grenville’s detractors argued that the book could not be taken seriously as history, to the extent that Grenville was claiming in post-publication press, primarily because her reliance on empathetic imagination is antithetical to historiography. A back-and-forth between Grenville and her critics ensued, which one scholar credits with prompting a “public contemplation of the ways in which history should be made and told” (Pinto, “History,” 187).
66 Clendinnen, “The History Question,” 27–28.
67 Grenville, One Life, 257.
68 Grenville, One Life, 48, 105, 230.
69 O’Rourke, “The Wound Shared.”
70 Grenville, Conversation with Melissa Lucashenko.
71 Grenville, One Life, 50–51.
72 Toolan, Narrative, 61.
73 Grenville, “Kate Grenville in Conversation.”
74 Elliott, “One Life.”
75 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 26.
76 Hirst, “Forget Modern Views.” Pinto alerted me to Hirst’s comments in her chapter “History,” 192.
77 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 231.
78 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 231–232.
79 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 63.
80 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 36.
81 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 12.
82 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 246.
83 Beizer, Thinking through the Mothers, 63.
84 Meretoja’s distinction between subsumptive and non-subsumptive narrative practices, in The Ethics of Storytelling, is also highly relevant to this conversation.
85 Brien, “Australian Speculative Biography,” 16; emphasis added.
86 Brien, “Australian Speculative Biography,” 22; emphasis added.
87 Slocombe, “‘Partial’ Stories,” 226.
88 Slocombe, “‘Partial’ Stories,” 226.
89 Slocombe, “‘Partial’ Stories,” 227.
90 Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, 34.
91 Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 1. Boldrini notes that Lejeune uses the term heterobiography differently. Whereas she uses it to designate a fictive collaboration whereby the writer adopts a historical subject’s “I,” Lejeune uses the term to designate a nonfiction auto|biographical collaboration. See Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 264–265n10; Lejeune, On Autobiography, 185–215.
92 Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 181.
93 Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 159.
94 Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 158.
95 Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 8.
96 As I complete this essay, Grenville is promoting her latest book, A Room Made of Leaves, which is a heterobiography. The book presents as if it is the diary of colonial Sydney woman Elizabeth Macarthur.
97 Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 15–16.
98 Grenville, One Life, 57–58.
99 Toolan, Narrative, 121–122.
100 Toolan, Narrative, 135.
101 Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 161.
102 Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 164–165.
103 Stewart, Autobiography of My Mother, ix.
104 Another example of an Australian auto|biography where a daughter-writer assumes her mother’s voice is A Bunyip Close behind Me by Eugenie Crawford.
105 Limprecht, “Review.”
106 Limprecht, “Review.”
107 Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 163.
108 Malcolm, The Silent Woman, 202.
109 Malcolm, The Silent Woman, 204–205.
110 Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 181.
111 Beizer, Thinking through the Mother, 227, 101; see Felman, What Does a Woman? Stanley makes a similar point when she discusses the value of realist auto|biography while cautioning that “we need to develop the means for a more active readerly engagement with such writings, one which does not take them on trust as sources of fact and information, but rather recognises their role in the construction of particular views of the ‘self’ they present” (The Auto/Biographical I, 255).