But in the face of such richness, the biographer also encounters difficulties. First of all, it is impossible for any biography to describe in detail all the things that happened in the biographer's life, let alone to express in detail all the biographer's inner emotional activities, and the author has to choose those important life episodes and emotional experiences of Madame Curie's life.
More importantly, biographers have a hidden side of their hearts that they don't want others to know, especially those who are introverted. If the biographer is alive, the biographer must be careful to avoid such questions. If the biographer is a close friend or relative of the biographer, he or she will follow these personalities of the biographer so as not to cause harm to those he or she admires. It is only when some personal information is made public many years after the death of the biographer that the biographer is able to enter more authentically into the inner world of the biographer and reveal his y hidden other side.
As a scientist, Mrs. Curie never wanted anyone to know about her private life. She was reluctant to show her face, did not accept media interviews, and never talked publicly about her emotional life. She kept her scientific activities, her scientific discoveries and her personal life distinctly separate. Before she died, she made a last-ditch effort to protect her privacy. By organizing her papers, she destroyed most of her personal material, leaving only her correspondence with her husband, letters from a long known suitor from her student days, and a diary written after her husband's death. She even asked her close friends to destroy her letters to them, leaving none of the material with Ronzwan, who was a prominent figure in her life.
This paper will analyze and present three biographical works about Madame Curie. The change of time, the different positions of the authors, the differences in evidence, especially the different depths of excavation of the emotional world of Madame Curie, constitute the real image of Madame Curie in different aspects. Only by combining these images can it be a Mrs. Curie who is closer to the real life.
1 Ives's Biography of Madame Curie
Because of her scientific achievements as well as her other prestige, Madame Curie was considered first and foremost a saintly, unrivaled genius of others. The most important shaper of this image was her daughter, Eve? Curie. Ive succeeded in writing a biography of Madame Curie for her mother in 1938, just over three years after her mother's death.
Eve acknowledged at the outset that she was recounting a legend, "Marie Curie's life was characterized by great deeds. Curie's life was so full of great deeds that people like to tell her history like a legend." This biography reinforces the mythic and legendary story of Madame Curie in several ways, portraying her mother as a woman of noble qualities, exceptionally hard work, dedication and devotion, but often unrecognized by society.
One is the poverty of living as an oppressed people in colonized Poland. Mrs. Curie was born in Poland under Russian occupation to a poor family and a mother who died at an early age. Madame Curie "learned early on that life was cruel: cruel to the nation, cruel to the individual." After graduating from high school, she had no money for college and had to rely on working as a tutor to finance her own tuition. (p. 30) The second is the personal life in Warsaw and Paris. Three years of hard, lonely life as a governess in Warsaw: "Lots of work, no money, a few small pleasures, one sad thing." (p. 83). While studying at the University of Paris, one had to be anxious every fall for tuition and living expenses. Thirdly, there was the laborious work of extracting the element radium. Mr. and Mrs. Curie's laboratory was so crude that "no laborer would work in such a place, but Marie and Biel were willing to put up with it here. There was one good thing about the shack: it was so unattractive and shabby that no one would think of forbidding them to use it freely." (p. 166) Fourthly, the misfortune of premature widowhood. in 1906, Mrs. Curie was tragically struck by a carriage and killed. Mr. Curie's death brought more spirit of life and stress in life and work to Madame Curie. "Her previous circumstances were to be considered restful when compared to those she has encountered since. The responsibilities of the 'widowed Madame Curie' would have intimidated a robust, happy and courageous man. She had to bring up two children, provide for them and herself, and undertake a professorship with distinction. She had lost the spiritual wealth of Biergüeri's eminence, yet it must carry on the studies she had undertaken with this companion." (p. 255) Fifth is the physical overdue fatigue suffered from ambulance service on the battlefields during WWI. "She forgot her breakfast, she forgot her dinner; she slept wherever she pleased-in the cottage where the nurses lived, or in a tent in the open air, as she had done in the Hoogstadt Hospital. This college girl, who had formerly endured bitterly cold weather in a penthouse, had effortlessly become a soldier in the war." (p. 287) Sixth is Mrs. Curie's attitude toward wealth. When life was still hard, Mr. and Mrs. Curie took the initiative to give up applying for patents related to radium and disclosed the method of extracting radium, but in the end, Mrs. Curie could not afford to buy 1 gram of radium but had to rely on other people to raise funds.
Eve even more vividly depicts Mrs. Curie's happiness and achievement on the basis of these sufferings. Happiness came from the great love and happy marriage between Madame Curie and Mr. Curie, and achievement came from the discovery of radium and its contribution to science and society. According to Ives, Madame Curie "met and married a man of her genius. Their happiness, by its very nature, was exceptional." (p. 1) On the one hand, Madame Curie was suicidal because of a failed first love and vowed never to fall in love again. Later on, because she had invested her energy in the sea of knowledge, she also did not want to have children and engage in housework like ordinary women. On the other hand, Mr. Curie also had an unfortunate love affair, and since then he avoided women, did not want to fall in love, and vowed never to marry. Therefore, the union of the two is naturally magical, "Marie could only marry this great physicist, only this clever and noble man. Biel could only marry this blonde-haired, gentle, vivacious Polish woman, who could appear both childish and profound in a flash; she was a companion, a spouse, a lover, and a scholar." (p. 141)
Eve sees three contributions to the discovery of radium, the first two in philosophy and physics, "Philosophers had to study philosophy anew, and physicists had to study physics anew"; and "The last moving miracle of radium is that she can benefit mankind, that it can cure a cruel disease-cancer." (p. 194) Since the first two were not understood by the layman, and Ives did not say much about them, radium's effect on cancer became the direct basis for the layman's evaluation of Madame Curie's contribution. This, coupled with Madame Curie's involvement in medical relief work during a world war, further strengthened her contribution to the cure of cancer and weakened her contribution to science.
In evaluating the contributions of the Curies, Ives gives equal credit to her parentage: "We cannot and should not divide these eight years of exploration into some part of Marie's and some part of Biel's achievement: this is something the couple did not want to do." , "We have official credentials to show that the two of them exchanged equal forces with each other in this great conjugal collaboration", "We do not have to separate the work of this couple who loved each other y, in those working notebooks full of formulas, the handwriting of the two was interspersed and mixed together, and their published scientific works are almost always signed by both." (p. 159) It is also true that the contributions of collaborating scientists, especially husband-and-wife collaborators on radium, have been hard to distinguish in the history of science, with similar examples being the woman and son-in-law of Madame Curie, Mr. and Mrs. Joliot-Curie, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, and Mr. and Mrs. Corey, American scientists who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1964.
Despite Ives' insistence at the time of writing that "to add even the slightest embellishment to this fabulous story is, in my opinion, a cardinal sin. I have recounted events that I do know, I have not changed a single important word or fabricated the color of a dress. Things did happen, and all the quoted words were indeed said." (p. 2), but Ives is explicit in her choice of material and in her emphasis.
For example, in response to Madame Curie's reaction to her unsuccessful bid for membership of the Academy of Sciences, Ives uses the simple sentence "She did not add a word of comment on this setback which hardly made her feel bitter." (p. 269) This adds to the image of Madame Curie as a scientist indifferent to reputation. But this does not seem to have been the case, as Madame Curie refused to be nominated for membership from then on, and never published another paper in the journal of the Academy of Sciences, demonstrating her distrust and even hostility toward the Academy.
Another example is the case of Madame Curie's Lanzivan affair, which Ives largely fails to describe, with only a handful of references, not even to Lanzivan's name. "Marie held the office of a man, so her friends, her inner circle, were men. She had a deep influence over its close friends, especially one of them. That was enough. Some have blamed this dedicated scholar for destroying her family and dishonoring her brilliant name, which has become prominent in recent years; though her life was serious, discreet, and particularly pathetic in recent years." (p. 271) Ivor commented briefly on the matter, apparently hoping to use the comments to obscure the facts themselves.
In fact, one of Ivor's purposes in writing a biography of her own mother was also to avoid other people making an issue of the matter, "for fear that others would write biographies first and write them incorrectly." Ivor's biography may also have been the kind of biography her mother would have wanted. Madame Curie wrote a short autobiography with a lot of inside information left unstated and unexplained. Ive's biography is essentially an amplification of Madame Curie's autobiography.
2 Guijo's "Mari? The Life of Marie Curie"
There are many different ways of interpreting a person's life, and each biographer gives the interpretation of the biographer that he or she has in mind. One biography, Marie Curie's Life, by French author Francois Giroud, is a great example of a biographer's interpretation of a person's life. Marie Curie: A Life" is distinctive in its perspective and character.
First, the author begins with the story of the relationship between Casi mir Zorawski, later a professor of mathematics at the Paris Institute of Technology, and Marie? Curie's relationship to open the book, determining that this biography gives prominence to the depiction of Madame Curie's emotional experiences, telling the reader another side of Madame Curie through the thread of her feelings. This also happens to be something that Ives neglects to mention, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In contrast to academic biographies that highlight a scientist's scientific discoveries, this is a typical life biography. The author describes Madame Curie not just as a scientist, but as a woman. She focuses on the influence of four men in Mrs. Curie's life. The first was her first love, Kasmir. When Madame Curie was only 18 years old, Kasmir was 20 years old and was his family's governess. Due to the opposition of the man's parents, the romance, which lasted for six years, broke up. Young love was only an episode in the rich life of Madame Curie, but the impact of this episode on the development of Madame Curie's later life cannot be ignored. Although we cannot assume that the history of science would have been rewritten if Mrs. Curie had married Kasmir, it was only after the failure of her love affair that Mrs. Curie came out of Poland to Paris, France, to begin her scientific career. The second man was her husband, Biel? Mr. Curie. The relationship between Mr. Curie and Madame Curie is the focus of every biography of Madame Curie that goes into detail. Monsieur Curie played an unparalleled role in Madame Curie's love, family, and scientific research, and was the only man Madame Curie spoke openly about in her autobiography. The third man was Andre Debierne, an unkempt, laconic chemist who had a crush on her. "According to those who know him, he is y in love with Mary. Whether this was true or not, he never ceased to be available to her. He was always there, everywhere, in her shadow, until the day of her death." (p. 99) The fourth was Lang Zhiwan who put Mrs. Curie in the middle of a scandal. Lang Zhiwan was a brilliant physicist, and a student and friend of Mr. and Mrs. Curie. Lang Zhiwan was enthusiastic and sociable, but had a terrible relationship with his own wife. After Mr. Curie's death, the widowed Madame Curie and Lang Zhiwan, who was suffering from family conflicts, needed each other's emotional support, and it makes sense that they developed feelings for each other. If Madame Curie had been a male scientist, or if Madame Curie had been a French born and bred female scientist, or if Madame Curie had not won the Nobel Prize, let alone competed for the position of member of the French Academy of Sciences, or if Lanzmann had not been indecisive but resolute in his attitude, such an affair would not have been the center of attention. The author compares the difference in Madame Curie's feelings toward Mr. Curie and Lang zwan. "It was obvious that when she could not love Biel anymore from then on, she loved Lang Zhiwan. Her relationship with Lang's Man was different from the warm, placid one she had with Biel. With Biel, she was convinced that she was the one, the irreplaceable, the dear little girl cherished by a gentle ****ing man of affairs. The relationship with Ronzwan was an intense, passionate, stormy one with an unreliable man, interrupted from time to time by quarrels and deadlines." (p. 169)
Geho's point of view on the problems of Mrs. Curie's emotional career is clear. "We want Marie to be both a saint and a martyr. All the indications are that she was neither, in a word not in a sexual sense. ...... When we try to make her into a saint and a martyr, we not only falsify her image, but we deprive her of the other side, the experience of guilt and the dramatic scenes into which this reticent and humble woman is plunged when her private life is displayed to the public." (p. 99)
Secondly, Guihoer wants to give an alternative scientific history of the discovery of radium. She argues that the early scientific history of the discovery of radium can be summarized as follows, "Biel and Marie Curie worked together in a humble laboratory, but they were happy because they loved each other and discovered radium. Thanks to this discovery made by Biel with the help of his wife, there was a cure for cancer." (p. 79) The conclusion that can be drawn from this description is that Mrs. Curie was in a subordinate position to the process of discovery, and that the scientific significance of the discovery of radium was reduced to a medical tool.
In describing Madame Curie's scientific contributions, the author tries to change the previous impression that people regarded Madame Curie as Mr. Curie's assistant or supporting role. That is to say, in describing and evaluating the scientific achievements made by the two men in relation to the study of radioactivity and the element radium, the author places Madame Curie somewhere above or at least not below Mr. Curie, despite the fact that the two men collaborated with each other in terms of their academic achievements and status. When Becquerel reported the emission of X-ray-like rays in uranium salts, Madame Curie, with characteristic scientific sensitivity, found it a fertile ground for research and immediately decided to concentrate her doctoral thesis research on this phenomenon which she first named radioactivity. Madame Curie was the first to start setting up a laboratory for her research, the key equipment being the piezoelectric quartz electronic counter invented by Mr. Curie. She alone made the bold conjecture that uranium ore contained other elements more radioactive than uranium or thorium. Out of his usual caution, Mr. Curie advised Madame Curie not to rush to publish her observations. Nevertheless, Madame Curie published her first memorandum on the study of radioactivity in time, because "this was her work, this was her hypothesis." (p. 83, where the author writes "she" obliquely for emphasis). Infected by the excitement Madame Curie showed about discovering a new element, Mr. Curie became involved and considered it temporary. From then on, the two collaborated on the research, their handwriting alternating in the lab notebook, and it was never clear whose contribution was greater.
Third, Guilherme gives prominence to Mrs. Curie's self-awareness and self-efficacy. For example, the author argues that "from birth, Marie had three talents conducive to being a good student, and teachers love such students. She had a good memory, concentration, and thirst for knowledge." (p. 9) At the age of 18, she began to recognize the value of her existence, "Who am I and what am I doing here. She may have asked herself this question-her only concern-and her answer was that she was going to be 'an important person'" (p. 5) At the failure of her first relationship, the author writes: "Was she to suffer 'the usual fate of women'? It never occurred to her to accept it. Her talent, her education, her philosophy of life, the type of ambition it possessed-all this made it impossible." (p. 6) The author argues that scientific discovery has nothing to do with chance; chance is simply when we come across some unknown phenomenon. Only a scientific mind, made up of a combination of knowledge, curiosity, intuition, and boldness, can turn phenomena into observational activities, and through observation, think about the effects of the phenomena and search for the causes of the effects. The fact that Mrs. Curie was able to make a contribution to the study of the phenomenon of radioactivity was the result of her encounter with this unknown phenomenon, her ever-vigorous curiosity, and her efforts to find the cause of the phenomenon.
3 Quinn's Marie? A Life of Curie"
Judging from the titles of the two biographies, Quine and Guilhoy have the same aim. They both avoided referring to Marie Curie as "Curie. Curie as "Mrs. Curie," for one thing, to avoid portraying Marie Curie as Mr. Curie. Marie Curie is an accessory to Monsieur Curie rather than an independent individual, and "Madame Curie" is also symbolized by the public, suggesting the image of a "scientist who cured cancer" and a "worker in the discovery of radium".
The use of "Madame Curie" is also symbolized by the public.
Using a wealth of newly acquired family documents and private diaries, Quinn spent seven years completing another book, Marie Curie. A Life of Marie Curie (Marie Curie: A Life). In this biography, Quinn tells a story full of humanity. From studying science at night as a governess at the age of 16, to her romance and scientific partnership with Mr. Curie, we learn about Marie Curie's success. Quinn also describes with much ink the frustrations that accompanied Curie: the extreme sadness and despair after Monsieur Curie's shipwreck, the disappointment of being rejected by the Académie fran?aise, the embarrassment and helplessness of being involved in a love life with a married man. Quinn's all-encompassing account introduces us to a complex, passionate, and talented woman.
The author also devotes a great deal of ink to Madame Curie's campaign for membership in the Academy of Sciences in 1910. Madame Curie's unsuccessful bid was the inevitable result of the French Academy's discrimination against women and exclusion of foreigners. As early as 1903 when the Nobel Prize nomination, the French Academy of Sciences of the four scientists signed the nomination letter nominated only Mr. Curie and Becquerel, completely excluded Madame Curie, said Mr. Curie alone studied "different uranium and thorium ores, and separated two new elements radium and polonium", Madame Curie was treated as Becquerel and Mr. Curie were treated as foreign competitors to both Becquerel and Mr. Curie. The four scientists included her mentor Gabriel Lippmann and another scientist who knew her work well, Gaston Darboux, who became one of the active supporters of Madame Curie's candidacy for academician in 1910. In the case of Madame Curie, the French Academy of Sciences had become a site of power and influence struggles rather than a hall of honor for scientific contributions, and in the end the conservative forces prevailed, and the winning competitor was an older male French scientist, albeit one whose scientific accomplishments and influence on the development of science could not be compared to Madame Curie's. The author comments on the mood of Madame Curie after her defeat: "Marie did not like to lose. When her discoveries were challenged, she fought hard to fend off the attack. Whatever she thought of the Academy, once she had undertaken something, she liked to do it successfully. Moreover, even if it didn't matter that she was a member of the Academy, she really cared about her honor and dignity. Just as she had hated all the attention and misinterpretation in the press when she and Beale had won the Nobel Prize in 1903, she must have been very bitter at this time because her name was being abused by strangers who knew little about her work and who only wanted to stir up readers' attention." (p. 293) From that time on, Madame Curie never bothered to apply for membership and never published a paper in the journal of the French Academy of Sciences.
A scandalous life ensued after Madame Curie's failed candidacy for academician. The author describes in detail the biggest embarrassment in Madame Curie's life, namely the Lanzivan affair, and confirms the existence of Madame Curie's ambiguous relationship with Lanzivan with a large amount of evidence. The author's courage to disclose the truth of this matter also comes from Mrs. Curie's statement that "there is no necessary connection between scientific activity and private life". Mrs. Curie hid her personal life very y and did not want others to peep into her inner life. Her rare self-effacement and seriousness of character suppressed her inner thirst and melancholy, and made her even less understood and misunderstood. Before her death she had asked her friends to destroy the letters she had written to them. She sought to separate her private life from her scientific activities, and on several occasions expressed the view that "I do not think that scientific life is necessarily connected with private life." Mrs. Curie's intention in making this statement was that she did not want people to know about her private life and that the focus should be on her scientific activities. And Quine adopted a different understanding, that moral judgment distinguishes itself from the academic judgment of the scientific contribution of scientists by their scientific ****siblings, and that even if the unsavory aspects of Madame Curie's private life are truthfully revealed, it does not detract from Madame Curie's place and image in the history of science.
Quinn concludes that Mrs. Curie chose not to act wisely in the Ronzwan affair. What made the relationship between Mrs. Curie and Ronzinière dangerous was that the affair went against French tradition. At that time it was common for a rich married French man to have a mistress, a privilege of the husband. As long as his mistress did not throw her weight around, the man was not penalized. "And Madame Curie was not an anonymous mistress, a woman with a humble pedigree who was grateful to be kept by a rich man. She was a woman with her own career, her own income, her own ambitions. This made her a target of jealousy and hatred for others who wanted to expose and humiliate her. And because Marie? Curie was so famous, Ronzwan's jealous wife was able to threaten her with exposure to the public." (p. 295) This makes for a unique triangular relationship between Mrs. Curie and the Lanzivans, which Mrs. Curie did not rationally consider. Ronzwan's fate was very different, "Later, with his wife's acquiescence, Ronzwan had another mistress. But this time he chose a woman of an acceptable type: she was a nameless secretary." (p. 331)
In the biography, Quinn emphasizes the shaping of Madame Curie by the context of the times and the social environment (this is in some contrast to Guilho's biography, which, as noted, seems to place more emphasis on the role of internal factors on Madame Curie). The author argues that the formation of Madame Curie's ideas was inextricably linked to the Polish positivist conception of the time. Polish positivism was characterized, firstly, by a belief in empiricism against metaphysics and, secondly, as a practical approach to solving socio-economic and political problems faced by the current society, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by a view that heralded the importance of science, industry and commerce. For this reason, the author writes: "The Skorodovsky children grew up with such ideas, which seemed to be mentioned less loudly, and naturally turned to the positivist cause. Indeed, Mary continued to live partially in the positivist creed for the rest of her life. She was demanding of empirical evidence, believing that positivism's 'all statements must be supported by evidence that can be tested.'" (p. 64) On the other hand, Polish positivists were also ardent supporters of women's rights, and women's independence became fashionable, with Madame Curie's independent spirit being influenced by her mother and several other women.
Quinn's intentions are obvious. If Eyffe wrote a biography for a specific purpose in a specific setting, Quinn wanted to write a biography that would meet the needs of the contemporary social environment 50 years after the passage of time, i.e., to strip away the veneer of sacralization and idealization that Eyffe had placed on her mother, and to give back to us all the real Madame Curie. Quinn argues that the idealization of Madame Curie has had the opposite effect. Often, Madame Curie is portrayed as a seeker about a passionate, tenacious cure for cancer. She herself, in describing her discovery and the isolation of the element radium, emphasized the hardships and physical exertion of the process rather than the important scientific ideas. Looking back at the history of science, her grueling dedication to the treatment of cancer is far less important than this keen insight into the discovery of radioactivity as an atomic property. It was this idea that led to the modern understanding of the structure of the elements. Thus, the author describes how Madame Curie's success as a scientist came as much from sacrifice and dedication as it did from a thorough intellectual understanding and scientific intuition.
Quinn argues that the idealization of Madame Curie began with the American woman journalist Marie? Melony began. Mellonie was the first journalist to be able to get in close contact with Madame Curie, and initiated a campaign in the United States to raise one gram of radium for her. Throughout the campaign, Mellonie portrayed Madame Curie as a miserable widow, self-sacrificing and indifferent to the material world, especially poverty. The creation of this image was not a unilateral act by Mellonie; Mrs. Curie also identified with and helped to create this image. First of all, Madame Curie's hero-worship of her came at the right time when she was under suspicion after the humiliation of the Ronzwan affair. Second, Madame Curie's scientific conditions in postwar France were not too bad, even better than those of most French scientists, with her own laboratory designed for her specialty. Madame Curie was involved in the making of this poverty myth in order to raise more money for the lab and research. Thirdly, Mellonie's direct link between radium and cancer treatment was to better raise money, whereas Madame Curie knew that her contribution to curing cancer was not direct, and that the radium she received was also used for purely basic research. As a result of Mellonie's efforts, Madame Curie's image was rebranded. The "foreign woman" of the Ronzmann scandal was forgotten, and Mrs. Curie became a modern French national heroine, Joan of Arc.