B io g ra p h y as H is to r y

A u th o r(s): Lois W. B a n n e r
Source: The A m e r ic a n H is to ric a l R e v ie w , Vol. 114, No. 3 (T u n ., 2009), pp. 579-586
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 AHR Roundtable
Biography as History

LOIS W. BANNER

I f ir s t en cou n tered biography as a genre of history in the 1960s, when I was a Ph.D.
candidate in the Columbia University history department specializing in U.S. politics
during the early republic. Intrigued by Thomas Jefferson, I wrote a paper on the
already large number of Jefferson biographies, which even then constituted a com­
plex biographical tradition about him. By the early 1970s, inspired by the emerging
feminist movement, I joined those historians who, similarly motivated, were creating
the modern field of women’s history.
From the beginning of our endeavor, we stressed the importance of uncovering
the life stories of women forebears to serve as role models to define ourselves and
our careers in a male-dominated, masculinized profession. In 1967, Gerda Lerner
pioneered the study of women’s history in U.S. history with a dual biography of Sarah
and Angelina Grimké, sisters who rejected the slavery of their childhood in Charles­
ton, South Carolina, to relocate in Philadelphia, where they became leaders in the
antebellum anti-slavery movement. Kathryn Kish Sklar began her distinguished ca­
reer with a biography of nineteenth-century educator Catherine Beecher, following
it with a study of Progressive reformer Florence Kelley. In 1979,1 wrote a biography
of Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the Little, Brown Library of American Biography.1
By the 1980s, the study of gender appeared, expanding women’s history to include
men and sexual minorities. In a pathbreaking 1986 article on gender in the American
Historical Review, Joan Scott identified the analysis of “subjective identity” and its
relationship to social organizations and cultural representations as a central way to
proceed in understanding gender, with biography an effective tool. In her 2006 His­
tory Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge o f Feminism, medievalist Judith Bennett
pointed out that several shifts toward biography had occurred among historians of
women, inspired by Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return o f Martin Guerre (1983) and
Women on the Margins (1995). (In a recent AHR Forum on Scott’s 1986 article on
gender, Scott noted that Davis had influenced her to take up the subject.) In a 2004

1 Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (New York, 1967),
revised and expanded as The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for W oman’s Rights and A b ­
olition (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity
(New Haven, Conn., 1973); Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise o f Women’s Political
Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven, Conn., 1995); Lois W. Banner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for
W oman’s Rights (Boston, 1980).

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580 Lois W. Banner

survey of books, articles, and dissertations in women’s history, Lerner concluded that
about one-fourth had adopted a biographical approach.2
Historians in general, however, often rank biography as an inferior type of his­
tory. They see it as inherently limited because it involves only one life, derives from
a belles-lettres tradition rather than a scientific or sociological one, and is often
written by non-academic historians who attract a lot of readers but lack the rigor of
Ph.D.-trained scholars. Scholarly developments over the course of the twentieth cen­
tury have also contributed to the defining of biography as second-rate. Such a down­
grading was implicit in the approach of the “new critics” in literary studies in the
1930s, who called for analyzing texts apart from the lives of their authors; in the
“new” social historians of the 1960s, who focused on demography, statistics, and
groups; and in the deconstructionists of the 1970s, who wrote about “the death of
the author” and saw texts as independent entities.3
Having written social and cultural history as well as biography, I propose that
there are many similarities between these genres. At its best, biography, like history,
is based on archival research, interweaves historical categories and methodologies,
reflects current political and theoretical concerns, and raises complex issues of truth
and proof. It challenges the analyst to move beyond easy platitudes to engage in what
Clifford Geertz famously called “thick description.”4 Moreover, given the long tra­
dition among biographers of writing accessible prose, biography challenges the his­
torian to produce lucid writing—not always the standard among academic scholars.
No sophisticated biographer any longer reduces a life to a few categories or
merely chronicles day-to-day experience, glossing over historical, literary, and geo­
graphical contexts. Psychohistorical interpretations remain valuable, especially in
view of the fact that the biographical use of psychohistory has become much more
sophisticated since its introduction in the 1920s in the form of a crude Freudianism
dominated by the Oedipus complex or the search for a “primal event” that deter­
mined a life trajectory. The theories of neo-Freudians, Eriksonians, Kleinians, and
others have been effectively used to understand lives, as in the biographies written
by Fawn Brodie, especially her biography of Thomas Jefferson. In that work she
employs a number of insights from Freud and Erikson to inform her narrative with­
out overwhelming it.5
What is now called the “new biography” first appeared in the 1990s. Its practi­
tioners have been especially influenced by feminist, postmodern, and race theorists.

2 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review
91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-1075; Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge o f
Feminism (Philadelphia, 2006), 24; Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return o f Martin Guerre (Cambridge,
Mass., 1983); Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass., 1995);
Gerda Lerner, “U.S. Women’s History: Past, Present, and Future,” Journal o f Women’s History 16, no.
4 (2004): 10-27; Joan W. Scott, “Unanswered Questions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (De­
cember 2008): 1422.
3 See Steve Weinberg, “Biography: The Bastard Child of Academe,” Chronicle o f Higher Education
54 (May 9, 2008): 1-5.
4 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in Geertz, The
Interpretation o f Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 3-30.
5 Laura Marcus, “The Newness of the ‘New Biography’: Biographical Theory and Practice in the
Early Twentieth Century,” in Peter France and William St. Clair, eds., Mapping Lives: The Uses o f Bi­
ography (New York, 2002), 193-218; Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: A n Intimate Biography (New
York, 1974).

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 Biography as History 581

Feminists and postmodernists focus on the diversity and complexity of movements

and institutions and decry what they call “essentialism,” while theorists of race chal­
lenge the belief that “women” and “men” are unified categories of identity that do
not vary by race. Biographers practicing the new biography stress the shifting and
multifaceted nature of individual personality. In an impressive essay on the new
biography, Jo Burr Margadant argues that there is no such thing as a “coherent self,”
no unified “I.” The only “selves” that exist, according to Margadant, are those that
individuals “perform” to create an impression of coherence.6
I appreciate Margadant’s position, but I do not entirely agree with her. For her
stance implies a denial of the probability that elements of personality developed in
childhood can remain coherent over a lifetime, or that the social and cultural mo­
dalities that influence personality development can encourage the production of a
fixed core within an individual persona. Even today, many psychologists, whatever
their theoretical training, probe a client’s memories of childhood in order to access
basic elements of personality.
Life-cycle theorists, who trace their approach to Renaissance precedents, as in
the famed “ages of man” speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, posit the existence
of life stages determined both by the aging process and by cultural definitions of
those stages through which each individual passes—with predictable crises along the
way. According to these theorists, human personalities are periodically rearranged
in line with cultural imperatives, internal biology (fluctuating hormonal production,
for example), and cumulative life experience—what we sometimes call wisdom. Con­
versely, some life-cycle analysts conclude that by their thirties, most individuals are
incapable of much personality change.7
In Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s spoof of the genre of biography based loosely on
the persona of her friend Vita Sackville-West, Woolf tracked her central character
through centuries of gender-crossing from male to female and back again. In that
text Woolf, who often commented on biography, wrote that “a biography is con­
sidered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven lives, whereas a person may
well have as many as a thousand.”8 Woolf’s statement anticipates the deconstructive
stance of today’s new biographers in defining identity as multifaceted. But the satire
implicit in her remarks implies the opposite: no matter the fault lines in individual
personality, fixity may exist at the core of identity as well as in the culture that sur­
rounds it, as in the Victorianism, modernism, and patriarchy that Woolf identified
in other writings as influencing her own construction of self. We are not just a Babel
of voices. Nor is the culture that surrounds us.
In line with its emphasis on the self as variegated, the new biography also em­
phasizes the power of culture in shaping the self, in accord with the belief that cul­
ture, not nature, is the primary force molding individual personality. That position
has been a central tenet of feminist theory since it emerged in the 1970s, and the
argument has been reinforced more recently by theorists of “performativity.”9 These
6 Jo Burr Margadant, ed., The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France
(Berkeley, Calif., 2000), 7.
7 See my In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power; and Sexuality (New York, 1992).
8 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; repr., New York, 1956), 309.
9 The classic text on “performativity” is Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
o f Identity (New York, 1990).

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582 Lois W. Banner

theorists view human personality in general and gender character in particular as

roles that individuals play—roles scripted primarily by the surrounding culture. In­
dividuals internalize these roles, on the one hand, and rebel against them, on the
other, both policing and individuating themselves according to cultural conventions.
The reverse is also the case. If we regard the individual as the “text” and the
surrounding culture as the “context,” it follows that the individual “text” not only
reflects the “context” but also influences it, in a reciprocal interaction that, following
Mikhail Bakhtin, I call dialogic. From Napoleon creating an empire to Eleanor Roos­
evelt successfully lobbying for blacks and women during the New Deal, individuals
influence historical development. And from this perspective, studying the life story
of an individual might be seen as akin to studying the history of a city, a region, or
a state as a way of understanding broad social and cultural phenomena. As Mar-
gadant writes, “cultural politics are most easily examined as well as empathetically
imagined in the individual life.”10
“Empathetically imagined”: that phrase in Margadant’s statement speaks to the
human desire for interconnection with others as well as to biography’s appeal in
charting analogies and inspirations by which its readers can understand and construct
their own lives. Such impulses—which are ethical and personal in dimension—have
remained key elements of biography ever since the form’s halcyon days in the nine­
teenth century, when it was often considered to be an ethical endeavor focused on
surveying the heroic lives of eminent men in order to uplift and inspire its readers.
No less than historians in general, biographers are detectives and interpreters,
attempting to illuminate the past and to interweave its threads in new and compelling
patterns. A life deeply lived, like any complex historical narrative, moves across
space, time, and areas of human involvement both capriciously and predictably, val­
idating certain accepted historical constructions while challenging others. Under­
standing a life may require that a biographer retrain in new kinds of historical in­
vestigation, such as oral history—to interview friends, relatives, and associates of the
biographical subject—or psychohistory—to probe underlying motivations. The his­
torian writing a biography may have to move beyond his or her geographic period
or field of specialization to engage decades of development and new fields of knowl­
edge. A life span of seventy years, after all, encompasses nearly a century of historical
development.
Biography raises issues of ancestry, kinship, family, and friendship. It invariably
involves the history of sexuality; it may involve the histories of ethnicity, class, race,
medicine, religion, education, workforce participation, and even architecture and
interior design. Biography is also related to matters of dress and appearance: how
a person looked, including such things as clothing and cosmetics, may be as important
to understanding that person as any other variable in his or her life. How do we
explore the history of race in the twentieth century without consulting the life story
of Josephine Baker, who dominated the Parisian stage in the 1920s and influenced
the look of women across two continents? In her brilliant biography of Marie An­
toinette, Caroline Weber demonstrates the importance to the origins of the French
Revolution of the clothing that Marie Antoinette wore, while in an important bio-
10 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, Tex., 1988); Margadant, The New
Biography, 7.

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 Biography as History 583

graphical essay, Mary Sheriff explores the French queen’s relationship to the ge­
ography of Versailles and to the paintings done of her.11
No less than other types of history, biography raises issues of revisionism and
historiography key to the historical enterprise. Important individuals, like important
events, can spawn multiple and diverse studies, as in the never-ending stream of
biographies of the “founding fathers” of the United States and of Abraham Lincoln.
The lives of these men have become sounding boards for what the nation thinks
of itself. More recently, the life of ur-imperialist Theodore Roosevelt has become
paradigmatic for students of the imperial presidency looking for historical roots for
their subject. And distinguished biographies sometimes provide the most insightful
histories of events and experiences, as does Elinor Accampo’s biography of Nelly
Roussel on maternity and femaleness in Third Republic France, or biographies of
U.S. civil rights leaders on the broad dimensions of that movement.12
Moreover, biographical narratives may intersect with new historical fields. Stu­
dents of colonialism and of population movements are demonstrating that through­
out history, individuals—whether well-known or unknown—journeyed across con­
tinents and oceans in pursuit of adventure or economic opportunity, or because they
were following husbands and families, or because they were forced to do so after
having been sold into slavery. Biographers tracking the lives of such individuals may
have to become transnational historians, themselves crossing oceans in pursuit of
records about their subjects, and even learning new languages to be able to read their
sources. Actors and entertainers have often been peripatetic, journeying worldwide
on theater tours. International elites created transnational networks, including cafe
society in the 1920s and the jet set in the 1950s. These transnational individuals
challenge the notion of “nation” itself, opening up the field of history to the pos­
sibility of new frameworks.13
And biography may be “collective,” involving a comparison of several lives or an
analysis of a number of lives together, linked through a central theme. I still read
Lytton Strachey’s 1922 Eminent Victorians and Richard Hofstadter’s 1958 The Amer­
ican Political Tradition for the felicity of these authors’ prose and their insights into
writing history through collective biography. What better way to understand Vic­
torian marriage than to read Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives? In that book Rose an­
alyzed the lives of a number of famed English married couples in the nineteenth
century to show how those marriages functioned.14
I followed the comparative approach in my biographical study of Ruth Benedict
and Margaret Mead, whose lives as friends, lovers, and professional collaborators
II Caroline Weber, What Marie Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution (New York, 2006); Mary
D. Sheriff, “The Portrait of the Queen,” in Dena Goodman, ed., Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body
o f a Queen (New York, 2003), 45-71.
12 Elinor Accampo, Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics o f Female Pain in
Third Republic France (Baltimore, 2006); John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times o f Bayard
Rustin (New York, 2003); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical
Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003).
13 On the importance of biography to transnational history, see, for example, David Lambert and
Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, 2006).
14 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1922; repr., New York, 2002); Richard Hofstadter, The Am er­
ican Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1958; repr., Cambridge, Mass., 1996); Phyllis Rose,
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (New York, 1983).

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584 Lois W. Banner

were deeply intertwined. In order to write a “thick” study of their lives, I had to delve
into intellectual history, the history of the professions, and the history of the concepts
of race and racism. To write about Benedict’s upbringing, I had to learn about the
history of the Baptist Church. To write about Mead’s religious beliefs, I had to learn
about the Episcopal Church. To understand their anthropological fieldwork, I had
to study the Pueblo Indians and the tribal indigenous people in Samoa and New
Guinea. To elucidate Mead and Benedict’s individual selves, sexually different from
the norm, I had to investigate the history of lesbianism and bisexuality and to master
“queer theory.” Then I had to read and analyze the 50,000 letters, documents, and
other written materials about their lives in the Margaret Mead Papers at the Library
of Congress, and figure out how to intertwine the story of their individual lives with
the times in which they lived.
Given the biographical subjects that I have chosen—Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict—it is clear that I like to write about women who
were prominent in their own day, although I did write a memoir of my high school
best friend who converted to Islam.15 In my preference for prominent women, I go
against the grain of recent theory in biography that calls for a focus on ordinary
people. While I respect this imperative, I am drawn to assessing cultural leaders and
icons who articulated cultural understandings rather than individuals who followed
or contested them. This interest has led me to my current biographical project on
Marilyn Monroe.
For the past four years, I have immersed myself in the scores of biographies,
memoirs, and novels about Marilyn, many of them filled with half-truths and outright
lies. I have become a leader of the Marilyn Monroe Fan Club in Los Angeles, scoured
archives throughout the nation, and interviewed a host of her friends and associates
who are still alive. In her 2005 study of the biographies of Monroe, Sarah Churchwell
skewered all of their authors for ungrounded speculation, poor footnoting, and treat­
ing as fact what was speculation in preceding biographies.16But Churchwell, who did
neither primary research nor oral interviews, didn’t uncover the half of it. In my
journey to understand Monroe, I have found prevarication at every turn. Many in­
dividuals fabricated relationships with her that never occurred and invented situ­
ations in her life that never happened. The story of my research to uncover one of
these hoaxes was featured in the October 2008 cover story on Monroe in Vanity Fair.
My critique of that article was published in the form of a letter to the editor in the
magazine’s December issue.
The matters of identity I have been charting are front and center in the case of
Monroe. For Norma Jeane Baker, Marilyn’s original self, developed many characters
in her quest to create the adult Marilyn Monroe, and she played them to perfection,
both on screen and off. To some of her friends she seemed a gentle child, without
much sex appeal, while to others she was the consummate vamp. She exchanged
poetry with poet Norman Rosten and discussed novels, psychiatry, and mystical re­
ligions with Ralph Roberts, an actor-turned-masseur who was her confidant during

15 Banner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton ; Lois W. Banner, Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict,
and Their Circle (New York, 2003); Banner, Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives o f Two Women
(New York, 1998).
16 Sarah Churchwell, The Many Lives o f Marilyn Monroe (New York, 2004).

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 Biography as History 585

the last two years of her life. For Arthur Miller, she was the consummate earth
mother before he came to regard her as a drug-addicted demon. For Fred Vanderbilt
Field, she was a left-wing radical who supported Fidel Castro. For Louella Parsons,
she was a dignified woman who didn’t stray from the path of virtue.17
Wearing disguises and constructing fabulist stories for reporters and columnists,
she concealed much of her private life from the public. An ingenious trickster,
Norma Jeane Baker created in Marilyn Monroe an epic masquerade as a “dumb
blonde,” whose wiggling walk, jiggling breasts, childlike voice, and pouty lips defined
a major version of femininity for the 1950s at the same time that she satirized it. Yet
unlike other comedic blondes of the twentieth century—Marie Wilson, for exam­
ple—there were always a number of Marilyns, some of whom didn’t display the man­
nerisms.
In line with the approach to biography that all the contributors to this roundtable
have taken, I am interested in how Marilyn’s biography interacts with the history of
her era. To understand her, I have had to become expert in the history of Hollywood,
photography, celebrity, glamour, fandom, and iconography. I have also had to learn
about the treatment of mental illness in the twentieth century, since her mother, her
maternal grandmother, and her maternal grandfather were all institutionalized for
mental disorders. I am constructing my biography as much topically as chronolog­
ically, alternately deconstructing Marilyn and the era in which she lived to elucidate
the “dialogic” connections between them. And I am exploring various theoretical
approaches to understanding gender, especially that of men’s studies scholars who
argue that masculinity was under serious threat in the 1950s. For in the final analysis,
the “truth” about Marilyn may lie in the history of men, not of women.18
My work in biography has expanded my horizons as a scholar, and it has also
enhanced my teaching. It has enabled me to present large bodies of new literature
to my students organized around central themes rooted in biography, expanding
their knowledge base as well as my own, and fascinating them to no end through
speculating on the glamour and ironies of past lives. Moreover, in a present-day
world fraught with peril, my students are looking for role models after whom to
pattern their own lives. They are searching for a critique of the contemporary culture
based on consumption and the cult of celebrity, in which they often feel trapped, and
for ways to understand the lives of celebrities and stars with whom they identify
without knowing why. Reading biographies enables them to generate such critiques
and such understandings.
And empathizing with others through biography quickens for my students the
process of “transference” that is a key to successful learning. By “transference” I
mean that, as in the therapeutic situation, students emotionally identify with the texts
they are reading and with the professors teaching them, thus engaging in a personally
transformative process as they reflect, through biography, on their own lives and

17 Lois W. Banner, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and Whiteness,” Cinema
Journal 47, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 4-29.
18 The men’s studies approach, focused around the concepts of “masculinities” and “hegemonic mas­
culinity,” was generated by a conference at the University of Southern California in 1985, sponsored by
the Program for the Study of Women and Men, now the Gender Studies Program. See Michael A.
Messner and Michael S. Kimmel, M en’s Lives (Boston, 2001). For the “crisis in masculinity” in the 1950s,
see K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York, 2005).

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586 Lois W Banner

pasts and the present in which they are living. Besides, reading biographies is fun,
and writing them challenges academic historians to reach out to a public that seems
to have a never-ending taste for reading about the lives of others.

Lois W. Banner is Professor of History and G ender Studies at the University of

Southern California. She is the author of many articles and books on women and
gender, including four biographies. H er most recent works are Intertwined Lives:
Margaret M ead , R uth Benedict, and Their Circle (Alfred Knopf, 2003) and “The
C reature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and W hiteness,” Cinema
Journal 47, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 4-29. She is a past president of the American
Studies Association and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical
Association. In 2005 she won the Bode-Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement
from the American Studies Association.

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