Creating Lives: An Introduction to Biography

Strategies and Activities

My biography primer unit is a ten day unit and the strategies are guided by the knowledge and skills needed to be successful on the biography project. The unit will begin with an examination of biography itself and the components that are included in a life story. To introduce the genre of biography to students, we will begin by assessing prior knowledge and identifying areas of misunderstanding. With an initial discussion of the Greek roots of the word ("bios" meaning life and "graphia" meaning writing) as the starting point followed by the question, "What is biography?" and "Why tell the story of someone else?" Students will explore the fundamental questions of biography. Is biography more like an autopsy or a portrait? What are the authorial responsibilities of writing another person's life? How does a biographer turn a series of facts into a narrative? How much interpretation is allowed on the part of the biographer? In the end, I hope to guide students to the answer that Nigel Hamilton provides in How to do Biography: "Biography, remains, as it has always been, the record and interpretation of real lives–the lives of others and ourselves." ⁷ The following days will be spent deconstructing the craft of writing a biography through an analysis of the life of Sylvia Plath. The essential questions for the unit are "Who is Sylvia Plath?" and "How do we know this?"

Most of the lessons in this unit are connected to literacy. The first of these will be timeline literacy. Students will make timelines of their own lives as an entry point to analyzing what kind of information can be gleaned from timelines, their informational limitations, and their use in helping to generate questions for further study. Students will then examine Sylvia Plath's timeline and create an "emotional timeline" from the information included. An emotional timeline requires the student to not only to place the events along a linear continuum of time (x-axis) but also to assign an emotion to that event with a parallel line above the timeline representing very positive emotions (joy, excitement) and a line underneath the timeline representing very negative emotions (fear, anger, sadness, etc). Students will place the event in Plath's life where it occurred in time as well as the in the place that represents the emotion they believe Plath would have felt at the occurrence of the event. This will force students to make inferences. Students must defend where they put events along the emotional scale and engage in a class debate over the positioning on the timeline of a few of the most important events. For example, students might say that the publishing of Plath's first book of poetry, The Colossus, brought her more joy than having her first baby, and other students would say the opposite. The dialogue is one of interpretation which gets to the heart of the essential problem of biography. This debate, while seemingly pedestrian, is getting students into the habit of interpretation so necessary in writing a biography. It is also a preparation for using argument and evidence to defend one's interpretation. The discussion that the activity elicits is most important. This also allows for a discussion of "fact" versus inference and the role of each in writing a biography.

The culminating strategy will be a discussion of what makes a good question and what questions arise from reading and analyzing Plath's timeline. Questioning is a strategy in itself and one that I often model using Bloom's taxonomy. I challenge students to try to come up with questions that could have multiple answers all using the same source. For example, questions that rely on interpretation for answers. Why did Sylvia Plath commit suicide? Here students can say it was due to the demise of her marriage with Ted Hughes while others might contend she suffered from depression prior to meeting Hughes. Both are assertions made by various Plath biographers. Students are forced to make educated guesses that connect the pivotal moments in Plath's life.

In order to gain more insights into Plath's life and to have an initially approachable biography, students will watch the film Sylvia. ⁸ Students will use a tool for evaluating film introduced by James Percoco in A Passion for the Past called the "historical head." The historical head is the outline of a head where students write the actions, thoughts, questions, and emotions of the character in the film. It is both a factual note-taking activity as well as source of interpretation and curiosity about the characters choices and actions. Students will have a historical head for Sylvia Plath on one side of a sheet of paper and on the other students will either have the historical head of Ted Hughes or Sylvia's mother. Historical heads allow for students to take notes but without being entirely distracted by a set of questions on a worksheet. In the head of Sylvia Plath students might write: "studied in England," "met Ted at a party," "tried to kill herself earlier," "jealous," "flirtatious," "Why does she still want to be with Ted?" or "What happened to her children after she killed herself?" These comments and questions are both broad and narrow. They make room for inferences and interpretations–essential components of biography. The film will add more layers to the story presented in the timeline and perhaps answer some of the questions that students had the previous day. Yet this is also an important opportunity to discuss point of view. The mingling of history and literature that go into making a film "based on a true story" provide students with a clear example of how biography bridges the two genres addressed in the class: history and literature. Just how far a filmmaker should stretch the truth to make a story interesting will make for an interesting discussion about choices and, perhaps, what is "truth" itself.

Using a Socratic seminar method, students will examine the human choices that go into writing and making a biographical movie. I prepare students for Socratic seminars by providing a few guiding questions to help students think about the topic. I also provide conflicting readings to allow students to take sides and debate using evidence from the multiple sources we have used thus far. For homework students will read an article written by Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, condemning the film as well as a positive review of the way the film contributes to Plath's legacy. ⁹ Students are expected to read, think, and prepare questions for the seminar and are graded on their ability to contribute to the discussion either by asking a high-level question or responding to a question using evidence from sources. Questions posed for preparation are: Was Frieda right in not giving the filmmakers permission to use her mother's poems? Would Ted Hughes have approved of this interpretation? What challenges do filmmakers confront when trying to make a relatively short, engaging film that tells the story honestly? Is it possible to tell multiple perspectives in a story? If so, how does one do this?

Students struggle to understand that historical figures lived within a larger society and culture that, in large part, shaped who they were. Since students pay little attention to the context in which they live, my strategy for helping students understand context begins with today. Socratic questioning will help students understand the multiple cultures that define them. How has your race or ethnicity influenced who you are? How has your gender shaped you? How has Lindblom shaped who you are as a person? How has living in Chicago framed your view of life and the world? How does being an American influence your thinking? The critical thinking then narrows and students are asked to analyze actual artifacts that define their age (song lyrics, television ads and clips from television shows, and newspaper articles). Each student in a group of five will examine one artifact using the guided question sheet that includes the questions: What is the main message or argument being presented? What does this artifact say about the time period in which it was created? Students will discuss the artifacts as a group and organize them into categories. Using these categories, students will answer the question: Fifty years from now, what will people say about the context of your childhood based on the artifacts presented here?

Using similar artifacts from the 1950s, students will analyze two documents each using the same guided questions along with the question–Where does this document fit along the timeline of Plath's life? Students examining the Coronet Magazine article from 1953 entitled, "How To Help Your Husband Get Ahead" by Mrs. Dale Carnegie would understand that the message from media sources was for women to play the role of submissive stay-at-home wife who must sublimate her desire for an independent life outside of the home in favor of helping her husband's career. Other students will understand the cultural assumptions inherent in the episode of I Love Lucy when she changes places and attempts to find a job. One particular clip, where Lucy and Ethel clearly have no marketable skills that would help them gain employment, shows the financial dependence of women on their husbands. While humorously presented, this scene shows the financial dependence many women of the time had on their husbands. Another contextual source is the 1955 Smith College commencement address by Adlai Stevenson entitled "A Purpose for Modern Women." Stevenson stated, "Women, especially educated women, have a unique opportunity to influence us, man and boy, and to play a direct part in the unfolding drama of our free society. But I am told that nowadays the young wife or mother is short of time for such subtle arts, that things are not what they used to be; that once immersed in the very pressing and particular problems of domesticity, many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debates for which their education has given them understanding and relish. Once they read Baudelaire. Now it is the Consumers' Guide. Once they wrote poetry. Now it's the laundry list." ¹⁰ Plath, mortarboard on her head, sat listening to these words. While no comment is made of the address in her journal or letters, students can begin to understand the pressures on women like Plath to prioritize marriage and family above all else. After students have analyzed the documents and discussed them in relation to the question, the entire class will read a secondary source on women in the 1950s to assess the accuracy of their assertions.

Source analysis is the focus of the next day and will further help students gain a picture of the various layers that make up the understanding of a life. The strategy for this lesson is the "document shuffle." This strategy is common in Advanced Placement (AP) history courses when examining the documents in a document based question (DBQ). This method was first introduced by Robert DiLorenzo and essentially asks students to interpret a set of documents that relate to one another, organize the documents into categories, and make an argument using the documents and categories to structure the essay. ¹¹ Students will be in groups of five at their table and asked to examine conflicting sources ranging from journal entries, letters (from Sylvia, to Sylvia, and about Sylvia), poetry, The Bell Jar, artwork, and reviews. These sources will be connected to one specific chronological time period of Plath's life (i.e. childhood, college, or early/late marriage). Students will have an essential question that relates the documents (i.e. What do the documents tell us about the childhood of Sylvia Plath?), as well as keeping the main essential questions in mind. The documents tell a conflicting story and require that students look at the author, main message, inferences, and bias. For example, the reflection of Sylvia's mother about her choice not to have her children attend their father's funeral differs markedly from the reflections found in Sylvia's journal. Such inconsistencies will force the students to make judgements about how to present the entire story. Additionally, this strategy requires that students to organize the information and rank the sources from most credible to least credible in order to decide on the argument that is most defendable with evidence.

After analyzing documents, students will attempt to write the story of that time period in Plath's life using their knowledge of Plath, the context of her life, and the primary sources examined. For this exercise and to push students more toward narration that explanation, I will ask them to write the story in first person from one person's perspective. I have chosen to have students write biography before they see actual excerpts from published biographies so that they are not intimidated by the authority or limited by the structure of traditional biographies. I would like them to play with the line between non-fiction and fiction in order to examine the challenges inherent in writing a compelling but honest biography. The final analysis strategy requires students to highlight facts in one color and inference or interpretation in another so that they may overtly see how much of each they have included. Ideally, students should have a balance of colors where the facts presented are interpreted and narrated by the author. A biography too heavy on fact loses its appeal and sounds like a timeline in prose. However, a timeline with little fact lacks the substance required of a professional. I want students to ask Sylvia (as well as Ted and others) a question and have them answer it in a narrative.

The final strategy of the unit is a comparison of the group-made biography from the previous class to similar excerpts from various Plath biographies. Here students can see how biographers used similar sources to craft a narrative that aims to answer the essential questions of the unit. The strategy for this lesson is the "literature circle" where students in the groups from the previous days will examine the interplay between fact and interpretation and the role of author's purpose in interpreting a life. For this I will use excerpts from multiple biographies. ¹² By using the same documents as the biographers, students gain a greater understanding of the interpretive power of biography. Students will once again highlight facts presented by the author in one color and interpretations of the author about those facts in another color to see how the author uses facts to support his or her ideas.

It is at this point that students should be able to see the power of interpretation. Excerpts from multiple biographies will help illuminate the problems inherent in finding a "truth." Edward Butscher, an early biographer and author of Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness invents the term "bitch-goddess" to describe the ambivalent nature of Plath. Linda Wagner-Martin adopted a feminist lens in her book, Sylvia Plath: A Biography, and Anne Stevenson, a poet at living at the same time as Plath, wrote what some have deemed an "unsympathetic" assessment of Plath, called Bitter Fame, with permission of the Plath estate. Stevenson's biography was followed by Paul Alexander's more compassionate, Rough Magic, which one critic deemed as "imagining himself her life in a way which pretends to an insight he cannot possible possess. ¹³ These biographies present conflicting interpretations about Plath's childhood, her relationship with her mother, her marriage and her suicide. All of these biographies had to contend with the anxious living who had a stake in the interpretations presented–her mother, her husband, and her surviving children. Writing a biting commentary on biographical license, Janet Malcom wrote that despite Hughes's attempts to redefine his place in the story that "the harm was done....The narrative of the faithless, heartless Hughes and his Jezebel could not be dislodged." ¹⁴ Aurelia, Plath's mother, faced the same dilemma after the American publication of the The Bell Jar which most believed was closely autobiographical and presented the mother as a horrible woman. This damage to her reputation caused Aurelia to publish Sylvia's letters to her in Letters Home. Ted Hughes's long silence about Sylvia's death also came to an end when he published, Birthday Letters, a collection of poetry written in response to the criticism he faced. These examples show how biography is contested ground where the subject, the writer, and the reader meet.

As a culminating review of the unit, we will return to a general discussion of biography. We will examine the larger questions: What is biography? Is biography more like an autopsy or more like a portrait? Is biography a two-way conversation or a monologue? What are the components of biography? What inherent dangers are there in writing a biography of someone else's life? Can we ever know who Sylvia Plath really was?