Female Biography, Novels, Memoirs: Are Women’s Truths in Their “Fictions”?

Level: Undergraduate

Division: The New School for Public Engagement

School: School of Undergraduate Studies

Department: Humanities

Course Number: NLIT 3233

Course Format: Lecture

Location: NYC campus

Permission Required: No

Topics:

• Literature
• Gender and Sexuality Studies

Description:
In this course, we examine women's biographies and autobiographies, from the ancients to the present, to consider how female lives are written, by whom, and for what purposes. We draw on feminist interpretations of Plato's brief portrait of his teacher Diotima in the Symposium; accounts of women by Ovid and Plutarch; the prison diary of an early Christian martyr, Vibia Perpetua; medieval hagiographies of Hildegard of Bingen and others; and the 15th-century confession of Christine de Pizan, in which she imagines a subversive "City of Ladies." We then turn to the barely veiled autobiographical writings of early modern women like poet Anne Askew, burned as a heretic in 1546; 17th-century author and scientist Margaret Cavendish; Mary Wollstonecraft, best known for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); and Mary Hays' groundbreaking Female Biography (1803). In Victorian texts, we observe efforts to codify gender behavior through biography. We see how women's reputations have been determined, in part, by their compliance with or resistance to sexual norms. We conclude with modern and contemporary biographies by and about women that reveal the continuing struggle to identify the distinctive qualities of the "female biography.”