Analysis of Normative Otherizing in Biography

There is more of an emphasis in Stanley’s study upon the impact of Jean’s cultural displacement in relation to her literature and identity, rather than as ordering device.

-Belinda Sarstedt in her post on Thomas F. Stanley’s Jean Rhys: A Critical Study

when they do appear, the real events of Rhys life serve as a point of comparison which is used to explain an event or character in one of the stories

-Laura Karpytė in her post on Coral Ann Howell’s Jean Rhys

The Pizzichini biography can be best understood as a rewriting of Angier’s biography but without the forensic analysis and judgement of others.

-Kenneth Diamond writing in his post on Carole Angier’s Jean Rhys: Life and Work

It was previously posited that there was a feeling of consistent pathological and judgmental attempts at retrospectively trying to attribute an explanation for the person of Jean Rhys rather than a relatable biographical account of her life. This was particularly egregious in Angier’s diagnosis of Rhys with Borderline Personality Disorder. This seemed like an obvious topic to subject to the scrutiny of digital textual analysis. One of the pitfalls of digital textual analysis is not all texts are made equal for the process, and the only biography of which a digitized text was easily avalable was Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour. Pizzichini’s account has thus far in the project been presumed to be the best attempt at a disinterested and humanizing account of Rhys’ life and thus the most contrary to this thesis, but perhaps this is why it is the most appropriate to analyze. Having advanced the notion in the discussion of the Louis James biography that this seems to be a pervasive problem in the art of biographical writing then it is conceivable it would be present in some fashion even in the well meaning work of Pizzichini.

Consider a direct scrutiny of how close Pizzichini comes to making the same kind of retrospective medical diagnosis as Angier. As Kenneth Diamond notes in his analysis of the Angier text Pizzichini disagrees with Angier’s proposal here, but does Pizzichini’s perhaps wiser unwillingness to presume to attach a label to someone make any difference if in her biography if she is guilty of the same judgmental behavior? Using the AntConc concordancer (the use of which in Pizzichini is further examined in colleagues’ postsThe Blue Hour was scoured for patterns of the same kind of normative, judgmental attitude that might be underpinning Angier’s position.

A typical criteria for the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder is a proclivity towards alcoholism. Thus ‘alcohol’, ‘drinking’ and associated terms seemed like a good place to start. As it would happen Jean Rhys was an alcoholic, so one would expect to find little positive endorsement of its role in her life. However it doesn’t seem like it would be unfair to expect given what we propose Pizzichini’s project is to see a fair assessment of what the life of Jean Rhys would have been like to live, to see some mention of alcohol or drinking in relation to her that doesn’t otherize her for drinking.

This might seem like a strange notion, it is not to suggest that Pizzichini’s writing has an inherently and unfairly dim view of drinking, but it could certainly seem that way. Unsurprisingly, since again Rhys was an alcoholic, Pizzichini’s mention of Rhys’ drinking is consistently negative, but it is specifically negative as a judgement attribution to her drinking. Rather than providing the context of Rhys’ emotional state when she would drink, trying to create an understanding of why alcohol might be her recourse, all the uses of the relevant terms seem prescriptive of the notion Rhys was necessarily a drunk.  The word alcohol appears a grand total of 5 times in The Blue Hour, every instance of which it is in the context of an almost symptomatic/diagnostic analysis of alcoholism. For example the use of ‘her only solace was alcohol’ on the fate of one of Rhys’ heroines rather than describing her as having fallen on hard times and having became alcoholic in turn there is the implicit need for an attribution of alcoholism to meeting an assumed emotional need. Her solace was alcohol, her respite, she was not a woman on hard times having then become an alcoholic, rather than providing unbiased context open to consideration the leap apparently has to be made she was self medicating. It is apparently a given.

This in fairness seems like a rather contrived and ad hoc interpretation of five sentences, but AntConc’s concordance engine allows the user to use multiple search terms for keyword in context searches. Indeed it is more damning that the concordance results for any variation of drunk or drinking is in the context of a sort of decisive explanation of Rhys’ or someone else’s behaviour.

She got drunk and told him about Dominica.

She gets drunk, swears, spits, and wets herself.

She got drunk and threw empty milk bottles at the fence.

-Some concordance results for drunk in context

Examples like these are further testament to a normative prescriptive agenda. Rather than commenting on what we can assume about her mindset and that drunkenness followed, this happened because she was drunk. Case closed. Some of the most compelling evidence of Pizzichini having an attached normative opinion biasing her portrayal of alcoholism is her characterization of Germaine Richelot sharing a glass of champagne with Rhys over dinner as him ‘indulging’ her. Very minor, almost incidental potential attributions of normative values of the writer to the subject of the biography do not bring us closer to the humanity of the subject, they further us, they otherize the subject, dehumanize them. Jean Rhys’ life is a study in being an outsider and it is in how much apparently easier it is to attribute such cosy designations to the subject’s action than write about the mystery of their humanity that we see the challenges of writing about an outsider. Writing about an outsider requires sympathy with disinterest, it requires precise nuance.

The ad hoc feeling of this line of reasoning though perhaps serves to further the original point made when the folly of retrospective diagnosis was brought up in the Louis James analysis post. It might seem unfair to criticize Pizzichini – whose biography certainly seems the closest to a fair account of another person as a person – for such minor offenses as, by quirk of language using alcoholism as an explanation of Rhys’ behaviour, or casually providing an assumed reason why they might be drinking without really demanding the reader think about why anyone might drink. Alcoholism just one example of something a biographer might think everyone shares a normative conception, so it’s fine to liberally assume the mindset of the alcoholic and move on with the biography. The point of the original post being ultimately, biographers shouldn’t do that, but biography is hard. It is extremely difficult to write biography that really tries to capture the humanity of another person without making assumptions or judgement about their character in even minute ways like this.

This incidentally is also an excellent and relatively atypical endorsement of digital humanities tools like AntConc. There’s a sort of implicit expectation that tools like text concordancers are tools by which we make broad judgments and generalizations, the layman thinks of NGram graphs or KWIC lists by frequency, or word clouds. In reality, these are just as useful if not more in literary criticism for teasing out very minute, very precise details. For example teasing out very subtle biases in biographical writing. The inflections a writer uses around the word alcohol, used 5 times in a 350 page biography, are even more important by virtue of their subtlety if the biography is about an alcoholic.