Zarathustra's Sisters : Women's Autobiography and the Shaping of Cultural History

Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned. Memoirs as a Supplement to Literary Studies) and the comment in Grigulis's introduction to Lacis's Red Carnation that it is a 'rich source of information ' (1984, 5) are cases in point. Theoretically informed feminist scholarship has since intervened to 'right/write' these 'wrongs' by concentrating on the conditions under which these women wrote and were written. While studies such as Toril Moi's work on Beauvoir and that of Biddy Martin on Andreas-Salome do provide an important, sociologically informed background for their subjects, as feminists these authors choose to highlight their subjects' struggles for, not with, autonomy. Moi, for 14 Zarathustra's Sisters ernism but to the philosophical and social paradigm of modernity, just as Biddy Martin does in her study of Lou Andreas-Salome. What are the methodological implications of making a such jump? As the editors of the series 'Reading Women Writing/ to which it belongs, point out, 'Martin's Woman and Modernity is not simply a reading of Lou Andreas-Salome's writing ... this book attempts to read Salome the "writer, thinker, and lay analyst" institutionally, that is to read her life and work in as well as against its historical, political, and intellectual context' (1991, ix; italics in original). A further step along this critical path is to ask what kind of readings ensue from assuming a selfreflexive stance towards the lives and works in question, that is, not simply situating them in and against their social contexts but reading them as active interventions in that context, that is, as examples of the autobiographical writing outlined above. This matrioyshka modern thus allows for consideration of all relevant, interrelated layers of criticism. It also helps to clarify my choice of the texts of these six women rather than those of others. The reason for not including, for example, a section on the diaries of Anais Nin and Frida Kahlo, or one in which the liaison of Lily Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky is compared with that of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Frederick Philip Grove, or one in which the texts of Anglo-American authors such as Lilian Hellman and Mary McCarthy are examined is that these texts do not evince the same 'modern' (in the sense of Nietzschean avant-garde) spirit as that of my six subjects. 27 The six women in this study have other, more didactic, less aesthetic priorities; they read and write themselves, and set themselves up to be read, in different ways from these other authors. It is these differences that I am attempting to highlight in dubbing them 'Zarathustra's sisters.' Life and Writing as a Bridge to the tiberntensch 28 For that is who I am through and through: reeling, reeling in, raising up, raising, a raiser, cultivator and disciplinarian, who once counseled himself, not for nothing: Become who you are! The Honey Sacrifice/ Zarathustra 29 Nietzsche's writings, especially Also Sprach Zarathustra and its infamous whip comment, were traditionally regarded as too incendiary to be of any use for approaching women's writing. 30 As writers in the 1989 The life of Proust's narrator need not have been, and never was, Nietzsche's own specific ideal. But the framework supplied by this perfect novel which relates what, despite and even through its very imperfections, becomes and is seen to be a perfect life, and which keeps turning endlessly back upon itself, is the best possible model for the eternal recurrence ...

Although the names Mandel'shtam and Nijinsky more commonly evoke the Russian poet and the ballet dancer, their wives, Nadezhda and Romola are also beginning to attract attention. Similarly, the lives and works of Simone de Beauvoir, Lou Andreas-Salome, Asja Lacis, and Maitreyi Devi all have been represented as having been dominated by their association with some of the most important men of Western letters, but they too are coming into their own. These six women all wrote the stories of their own lives, creating powerful narratives that channelled cultural forces at the same time as parrying them. Susan Ingram analyzes the literary, cultural, and ethical effects of these writers whose lives were intertwined with the cultural vibrations of their time, and who heralded the postmodern in having to negotiate their subject positions in the form of a relational autonomy, an ethical sense of alterity, and a strong desire to make an intervention in the cultures of their times.

Interdisciplinary in approach, this study brings together scholarship on auto/biography, post/modernity, ethics, identity, and relationality, and makes available material from a variety of languages, some of which appears in English for the first time. In relating the life-stories of six remarkable women to the increasingly popular genre of academic personal criticism, Ingram concludes that the ambiguous, problematic way these women represent their autonomy encourages us to read such academic criticism with attention to the way it represents and often blurs personal and collective identity.

"Although the names Mandel'shtam and Nijinsky more commonly evoke the Russian poet and the ballet dancer, their wives, Nadezhda and Ramola, are also beginning to attract attention. Similarly, the lives and works of Simone de Beauvoir, Lou Andreas-Salome, Asja Lacis, and Maitreyi Devi, long represented as having been dominated by their association with some of the most important men of Western letters, are now coming into their own. These six women all wrote the stories of their own lives, creating powerful narratives that channelled cultural forces at the same time as parrying them. Susan Ingram analyses the literary, cultural, and ethical effects of these writers, whose lives were intertwined with the cultural vibrations of their time, and who heralded the postmodern in having to negotiate their subject positions in the form of a relational autonomy, an ethical sense of alterity, and a strong desire to intervene in the cultures of their times."--Résumé de l'éditeur "Although the names Mandel'shtam and Nijinsky more commonly evoke the Russian poet and the ballet dancer, their wives, Nadezhda and Ramola, are also beginning to attract attention. Similarly, the lives and works of Simone de Beauvoir, Lou Andreas-Salome, Asja Lacis, and Maitreyi Devi, long represented as having been dominated by their association with some of the most important men of Western letters, are now coming into their own. These six women all wrote the stories of their own lives, creating powerful narratives that channelled cultural forces at the same time as parrying them. Susan Ingram analyses the literary, cultural, and ethical effects of these writers, whose lives were intertwined with the cultural vibrations of their time, and who heralded the postmodern in having to negotiate their subject positions in the form of a relational autonomy, an ethical sense of alterity, and a strong desire to intervene in the cultures of their times."--Jacket. Analyzes the literary, cultural, and ethical effects of six woman writers - Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Romola Nijinsky, Simone de Beauvoir, Lou Andreas-Salome, Asja Lacis, and Maitreyi Devi - whose lives were twined with the cultural vibrations of their time.