RUTH BENEDICT: Patterns of a Life

by Judith Modell ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1983

More detailed than Mead's Ruth Benedict (1974), this sometimes wordy biography gathers momentum slowly and struggles to make its subject vivid and her work understood. Benedict was a difficult person--plagued by ""blue devils"" and assorted doubts--and she remains a difficult person to capture in print: guarded and self-conscious, she even revised personal journal entries and used poetry to express emotional reactions. She found anthropology after years of looking for something to do; an unhappily childless, increasingly strained marriage had undermined her confidence and would constrict her horizons for some time. Modell's reconstruction of these first 30-plus years is full of appropriate information, even quotations from the poems, but there's no fire here; she wants the patterns to appear--a Benedict concept--but the text is flat, forced, and repetitious. Once Benedict gets to Boas, however, the pace picks up and the text acquires some vitality. Less protective of her subject, Modell explores Benedict's many contributions to anthropology, discusses the significance and impact of her writings, and follows the restless Benedict's rise to prominence in her field. She uncovers some data unknown to or unreported by Mead--the influence of writings by Santayana and Virginia Woolf, a 1930s relationship with chemist Natalie Raymond--and identifies the personal themes that resonate in Benedict's work: tension between the Pueblo Indian ""public face"" and private feelings, or the ""controlled self-presentations"" of the Japanese, for example. Benedict emerges as a woman with a ""visionary faith"" in anthropology and the energy to puzzle out its principles despite strong personal doubts and disappointments. This book won't replace Mead's more gracefully written biography or her earlier offering, An Anthropologist at Work (1959), because Modell hasn't Mead's spirit or capacity to show process; but this is a more complete version of Benedict's life and an appreciative, more fully documented record of her work.

Pub Date: May 1, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION