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PARTISAN REVIEW
ment, biographies of women are particularly apt to be shaped by
quests for definition-this is one of the most interesting ways in
which the past now presses upon the present and shapes it. As
contemporaries discover the conditions of life for their "mothers,"
their own sense of how· the world is-and often of how it is
oppressi ve-shifts.
More than any other historiographical mode, personality
biographies, because they incorporate the "family romance," re–
flect relations between generations. For public figures about
whom interest is constant, the period between biographies is
often a generation-each generation produces a revision of the
previous generation'S portrait; for figures about whom interest is
not so constant, a new biography often signals that two genera–
tions have parted ways or clashed with a particular urgency. Lit–
erary figures of the romantic era, of fin-de-siecle Vienna, the
Weimar Republic, or the Bloomsbury Circle, have lent them–
selves several times recently to generational identity quests, at
least in part because these figures were involved in their own
generations' definitions. The legacy of romanticism weighs
heavily in biographies where the focus is personality.
Biographies of this sort are predicated on the assumption
that (in Leon Edel's words) "a secret myth, as well as a manifest
myth [lies] hidden within every creative life." The temptation to
capture a personality is phrased as a challenge
to
decipher a mys–
tery, to read the palimpsest of a text right down
to
the Ur-text.
Thus, for example, Curtis Cate says in the Preface to his
George
Sand: A Biography:
It
is clear that 'the Good Lady of Nohant' was anything but
a monolithic personality and singularly complex. There is a
measure of truth in the acid comment her daughter, So–
lange, once scribbled, after her [sic] death, on on·e of George
Sand's letters: 'Bien malin celui qui debrouillera rna mere.'
(A shrewd one it will be who will unravel my mother.) No
wonder her contemporaries were so often baffled by this
strange sybil with the huge, devouring black eyes who could
be as mute and mysterious as the Sphinx....
Cate's portrait of this complex personality is designed to display
Sand as though she were a character in a novel: through episode
after episode, she acquires all the attributes of a George Sand
