“명성의 탑”과 마가렛 캐븐디쉬의 자전적 글쓰기

Abstract

The Western canon of autobiography has all but ignored women's life- writings, its critical focus being mainly on the lives of what a particular culture considers as representative male figures whose fame would live on through posterity. Cavendish's A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life (1656) challenges this male-centered view of the genre by attempting to carve out for herself a place in the “Fame's Tower” from which women had been excluded. Her autobiographical urge stems from this ambition, the ‘cult of fame’; it, however, terminates, not in telling the truth about herself, but in creating a fiction of the aggrandized and idealized self that purportedly would live on in posterity. But this desire for public fame, that has been accepted as the masculine tradition in autobiography, is thwarted by an opposing feminizing tendency to interiority that ends in self-effacement. The result is that the self her autobiography creates loses its authority as a unique and unified autobiographical subject and her narrative moves into the realm of fiction that allows multiple and even opposing selves. In this way A True Relation addresses the vexing question of autobiography's claim to both facticity and ficticity, raising some fundamental questions about the genre.