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

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is a private scholar, writing and
editing in Souris, Manitoba.

Susan Ingram’s study of the autobiographical writings of six women who
are better known for their relationships with famous men departs from
the usual “liberating” critical agenda of feminist scholars to
engage both the women and their texts within the context of the emerging
modernism of the early 20th century. Resisting what she identifies as
the Anglo-American critical tendency to conflate modernism with the
avant-garde, Ingram focuses on the documentary and “anti-aesthetic”
nature of the autobiographical writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Lou
Andreas-Salomé, Maitreyi Devi, Asja Lacis, Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, and
Romola Nijinsky. She draws on Nietzsche’s seminal concept of the
creation of self-narrative, as portrayed in Thus Spake Zarathustra, in
her discussion of the six women’s texts as she examines the interplay
between autobiographical writing, an emerging modernist cultural
landscape, and the ethical dimension of literary self-fashioning.

Ingram has divided her work into three sections, grouping together in
each part two authors whose texts share literary and cultural qualities
or challenges. The emphasis throughout, however, is on each woman’s
literary impulse to document an experience and life that reflects a
struggle with—not for—autonomy and independence, and the
representation of the individual and her relationships as cultural
mythology that is characterized by ambiguity and interdependence. This
is a work of scholarship that covers a wide range of topics, from
documentary self-representation, to theories of modernism and the
avant-garde, to the postmodern form of autobiographical criticism that
has become popular within the academic world.

Ingram’s argument presupposes a knowledge of Nietzsche and his work
that might prove an impediment to some readers, and the dense and
intricate interplay of philosophy, cultural theory, and literary
criticism marks this as a text that is not for either the casual reader
or the beginning student. Yet it provides an intriguing and challenging
perspective not only on feminist studies, but also on cultural and
literary criticism, that will prove to be a valuable contribution to
scholarship in those areas.