Aug 10, 2014

Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist

The Curious Life of GisÃ¨le d'Estoc

Melanie C. Hawthorne

Hosted by Oline Eaton

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Summary

"Why write the biography of a nobody?" That is the question with which Melanie C. Hawthorne begins Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisele d'Estoc (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) but in justifying the writing of such a life and then, in turn, excavating its contours, Hawthorne winds up exploring a number of issues fundamental to the genre of biography. In particular, the biographer's inability fill all gaps, the frequent encounters with dead ends and his/her reliance, at times almost wholly, upon sheer luck. Also, the legacies of the biographers who have gone before us. In d'Estoc's case, as Hawthorne writes, "It is almost as though these experts avoided finding proof of d'Estoc's existence and one has to ask why."

One of the significant contributions of Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist is its transparency- Hawthorne's willingness to include in her text the details of research, alongside serious critical engagement with the notion of what it means to be a researcher in the humanities and why humanities research matters. This flows seamlessly throughout her exploration of d'Estoc's life as she explores the fluidity of life stories, the need to continually rearrange and reevaluate them, "to keep creating unexpected bends on the old narrative paths in order to wake us up to seeing them in a new light." To illustrate this, she uses the story of a 19th century French writer/artist/anarchist, a woman who once pretended to be someone else and whose false identity ultimately historically hijacked the original. It's a story steeped in its times and yet one which also appears surprisingly modern here, and one which- as it is written- highlights fundamental truths about the genre.

One of my favorites is this: "Stories teach us not to take things for granted, and the final lesson of biography is that despite the fact that specific stories always begin and end somewhere, in real life there are no such definitive markers." The story Hawthorne presents of d'Estoc is deliberately left messy, which is- in the end- perhaps its greatest strength.