So we all had a meeting the other day and it was a bit uncomfortably early for me given I commute to University, but unfortunately circumstances were dictated by when Kenny could book the room. Personally I am an advocate of just wandering into meeting rooms that are empty and locking the door, since academics in general are too flighty to fight you on it and if my lecturer can use marble busts around the place to model his homemade steampunk hat collection we can use meeting rooms at our leisure.
Moving swiftly on though, we turned the discussion to the title of the project. Laura was kind enough to create a poll on our collaboration facebook group on potential titles and we ultimately decided on ‘Portraying the Outsider’. The thing is it’s been made relatively (read explicitly) clear to us we need some overarching aim we need to pursue in this project. We need to have some understanding of what we’re trying to demonstrate in our analysis of these texts, what we learned from studying the person, work and centrally the various biographies of Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams who we know as ‘Jean Rhys’. It seems a bit dry to make this post just minutes from our meeting but I do so because I think we had quite an enlightening and moving discussion. We talked about how we felt the various biographies, including a heated debate about how it can be belittling or disrespectful to try and diagnose people retrospectively with mental illness when the attribution of borderline personality disorder to Rhys is like so many others is merely the reduction of that entire disorder to alcoholism and bad luck in love. Ultimately what came out of it though is an understanding of the difficulty of biography, I thought anyway. Laura made the observation that while we’d accuse certain biographies of attempting to portray Rhys in a certain way or light the Pizzichni’s biography made some attempt at portraying her as a person.
That perhaps is the difficulty of biography is portraying the subject as a human being, of trying to create an understanding of another person. The topic of this writing is a person, they act with sometimes not the best motivations, they have flaws, they hurt, they bleed they cry. You could portray Churchill as a hero but his wife still had to help him to the bathroom when he was briefly partially paralyzed by a stroke. You could portray someone as a troubled, broken human being but they’re still just trying their best. Perhaps this is a study in how you write about an outsider without just ‘portraying’ the outsider. This might even be a study in how you write about someone we wanted to attribute that label too and make a reader understand what it means to be that without just attaching the label to them and writing about your own musing’s on their character.
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