Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 1991"

Between the East and West: Sui Sin Far—the First Chinese-American Woman Writer

Abstract: Thus sui sin far (Edith Maud Eaton, 1865-1914),1 the fitst Chinese-American woman writei, expressed het feelings as a Eutasian. Among the eatly Chinese immigrant authots, she was virtually the only one who engaged in wtiting imaginative literature rathet than social-anthropological works. Owing to het talents in writing and deep insight into the themes she presents, she achieved great success. At a time when there was strong bias against writers of Chinese ancestty in mainstream Ametican literature, her works were carried by major literary journals and newspapers throughout America, including The Century, The Independent, New Enghnd, The Overhnd Monthly, and The New York Evening Post. Thirty-seven of het previously published stoties—\"my deat children\" as she modestly called them—latet were collected in a volume entitled Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which won critical and populat acclaim.2 \"Quaint, lovable characters are the Chinese,\" said the publishers advettisement in the New York Times, \"who appeal in these unusual and exquisite stoties—stoties that will open an entirely new world to many readers.\"' The fact that her work is favorably reviewed in the newly-published Columbia Literary History of the United

Doe Hunting and Masculinity: Song of Solomon and Go Down, Moses

Abstract: . . . not Lucius Quintus @c @c @c, but Lucas Quintus, not refusing to be called Lucius, because he simply eliminated that word from the name, not denying, declining the name itself, because he used three quarters of it; but simply taking the name and changing, altering it, making no longer the white man's but his own, by himself composed, himself selfprogenitive and nominate, by himself ancestored . . . —William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

Gothic and Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills

Abstract: Extracted from the ten-line epigraph to Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, the fout lines quoted above provide a highly suggestive study in the uses of metonymy. To understand that they distil the essence of the full dialogue between adult and child one need do little more than tead the rest of the epigraph. But to appreciate how they prefigure larger novelistic issues and strategies, how they suggest the genetic and structural nature of Naylot's project requires rather more deliberate attention to successive readings and a sustained search for appropriate critical and theoretical tools. In both form and content the epigraph fotegtounds specific fotmal and ideological qualities of the novel that link it to the tradition of gothic fiction. The explicit references to feat and hell and the implicit resonances of paradox and ambivalence suffice to establish gothic intimations. The sharply dramatized angles of vision represented by the respective voices of gtandmothet and grandchild enact those differences in discursive modalities and semantic intelligence which broadly define intertextuality (Zutbrugg 254). In addition, because the epigraph also prefigures Naylor's strategy of opposing divergent verbal/textual categoties and their implicit assumptions, its form may be defined as dialogical. The ensuing discussion will therefore draw

Those Extraordinary Twins

Abstract: The commonplace view is that consanguineous kinship is real, or literal, kinship. Anthropologists and sociologists usually lump togethet all other kinds as pseudo-kinship (ot kinship by extension), which they then divide into subcategories such as figurai, fictive, and ritual.3 However, the fundamental distinction between \"real\" kinship and \"pseudo\"-kinship—or between literal and figurai structure—is the topic of a still-unresolved debate about whethet kinship is essentially a matter of biology or sociology. For the substance or quality that makes people akin varies from culture to culture, as the skeptical Montaigne insists,4 and it is ambiguous even within a culture. Which is more fundamental, for example, my likeness to my supposed genitoi ot my likeness to God, who created me in his image? Which substance is fundamental: the genes I share with my genitor, the love between my adoptive parent and myself, the milk I sucked from my mothet, the blood I commingled with my blood brother, the wafer and wine I shared at a communal feast, or the dust from which all things (including myself) are made?

The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz and the Eye-Witness

Abstract: Jay gatsby is dead; the narrative is the black fruit of Nick Carraway's tacit pledge to remember: \"I don't like casualness, I don't like waters that close over your head without a bubble or a ripple when you go. The feeling that they shouldn't became a sort of obsession, then finally a horror to me, that Autumn on Long Island. . . .\"2 But is such remembrance necessarily a kind of mourning? My answer is no, because Nick writes in order to preserve rather than to relinquish the dead, to protect a hallucinatory simulation of the shelter that the dead had supplied rather than to acknowledge, not only the fact of the corpse that the rain falls on, but also the anomaly, the startling and repellent presence, of a soggy new world. By no means an occasion for euphoria, a truly new world, and not really new either, but, as is always the case, only staved off until now, newly apprehended when shelter fails. If the mourning is strong, then the dead was an intrinsic part of a system for creating and maintaining sense; that system decapitated, its elements remain, but as gargoyles that no longer express the moral or imaginative meanings that had been assigned to them during the course of life with what is now the dead. Going into a café to meet Pierre, only to find that Pierre has missed the appointment, to reprise a famous anecdote from Being and Nothingness, transforms the cafe phenomenologically into absence-of-

Uncertain Borders: Race, Sex, and Civilization in The Last of the Mohicans

Abstract: ����� .place of the Indian in the American consciousness during the Age of Jackson. This was above all else a period of headlong westward expansion involving wars and treaties that resulted in the dispossession of the original dwellers on the land. "Indians had not mattered so much," Rogin observes, "since the colonial settlements. They would never matter so much again." We need to be reminded of the preeminent national concern with Indians during this period because our historians "have failed," Rogin charges, "to place Indians at the center of Jackson's life. They have interpreted the Age of Jackson from every perspective but Indian destruction, the one from which it actually developed historically."1 The great popularity ofThe Last of the Mohicans argues quite emphatically in support ofRogin's position. Indian wars figured prominently in the national self-image of the time that Cooper first acted on the impulse to become a writer. By the mid-1820s, when he conceived and wrote his best-seller, major developments in Federal Indian Removal Policy were regularly in the public eye. There can be little doubt that Cooper was keenly aware of these ominous signs. The title and dominant thematics ofThe Last ofthe Mohicans are the surest kind ofevidence that he was alert and responsive to the gathering swell of legislation

"Openness," "Closure," and Recent American Poetry

Abstract: It's confusing to me. What is it, NaL·d Poetry, that whole stupid thing. You know, this country has had such a bleak battle between 'free verse' and so-called classically, conceptually formal verse or previous senses of metrical pattern. I keep wishing there was a word that was more accurate. I mean, projective verse is one sense, but that too is a kind of final cliché, it doesn't really locate very much. ... I certainly use closed forms with very decisive patterns that are very familiar. (Faas 194)

Stowe, Dickinson, and the Rhetoric of Modernism

Abstract: The work of nineteenth-century American women writers influenced the development and shape of literary modernism to an extraordinary extent. Yet that influence is hatd to describe in a manner which does justice to the disparate perspectives proposed by feminist scholars: on the one hand the muting of Victorian women asserted by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, and on the other Nina Baym's argument that women \"dominated\" the \"literary marketplace\" from mid-nineteenth century on (50); on the one hand Elaine Showalter's identification of female expressivity with a \"wild zone\" of discourse outside cultural sanctions, and on the other the dissatisfaction of feminist critics like Elisabeth Meese with essentialist theories of linguistic sexual difference; on the one hand the call for canon reformation (Lillian Robinson, Jane Tompkins), and on the other condescension toward the popular, sentimental, or domestic nature of much nineteenth-century literature by women (Ann Douglas). I believe that rhetorical analysis, properly construed, can mediate these theoretical differences and draw a sharper picture of the nineteenth-century female literary voice than one stressing the thematic or formal categories on which literary history, even revisionist literary history, has often depended. In so doing, it reveals lines of filiation among women writers as different as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Emily Dickinson. Rhetoric addresses a concern raised by Baym in explaining why she doesn't \"do feminist literary theory\": \"it becomes clear that the theory of women's language is closely tied to a theory of the feminine person-

The Erotic Travelogue: The Scopophilic Pleasure of Race vs. Gender

Abstract: Let me commence with an overview of our trip. We begin our journey in one of the Parisian brothels desciibed by Ana'is Nin in the Delta of Venus. The brothel is just like home, the safe place of norisk exotic simulation; it is a secure theatre where one pays to watch the burlesque, the striptease, the parade of the deformed, and the humiliation, cruelty, and death of others.1 The point of homogeneity and imagined difference, the btothel is the control center of our excess like the \"house of illusions\" in Genet's The Balcony. Like Madame Irma, we watch and understand the desire for power implicit in our scopophilia. Continuing our journey with Nin's erotica and the film Emmanuelle, we will next arrive at exotic ports where, with the ptivilege accorded camera-laden tourists, we will continue out hazaidless confrontation with racial, ethnic, and sexual difference. In the threatening illusion of heterogeneity produced by our voluntaiy but controlled immersion in foreign cultures, we will ask why erotica often takes the form of a travelogue, why stories of travel are erotic, and how travel, like the brothel, is a form of safe scopophilia that neatly distances, objectifies, and colonizes the multiple sexual, racial, and ethnic differences regularly constructed as the sexual other in soft-core pornography. On the next leg of out journey, we will withdraw from immediate contact with indigenous cultures to the brothel-like safety of our colonizer's homes where we can enjoy watching the erotics of the exotic as they, under our direction and scrutiny, vigorously reassert our own no-

Realism, Reform, and the Audience: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Unreadable Wallpaper

Abstract: The history of Charlotte Peikins Gilman's \"The Yellow Wallpaper\" clearly illustrates problems of canon and audience in American literature. Published in 1892, the work was virtually ignored by readers, despite efforts by William Dean Howells, probably the most influential American critic of his time, to convince editots and audiences of its excellence. Though the stoty is now read as a brilliant and artistically innovative exploration of woman's tole, Gilman herself chose to defend it, not in terms of its \"literaty\" merit or feminist theme, but as an attempt to show S. Weit Mitchell the potential dangets of the \"rest cure,\" his remedy for \"nervous diseases.\" After publishing \"The Yellow Wallpaper\" she wrote no more fiction fot nearly twenty years, and then wrote stories for The Forerunner much more conventional in fotm (and less striking to a modem audience) than her first work. There is, of course, a seemingly logical and simple explanation for Gilman's reaction and for the difference between \"The Yellow WaIlpaper\" and the stoties that appeared latet. Gilman saw herself above all as a reformer dedicated to improving society by showing how the forced dependence of women threatened not only women themselves but society as a whole. \"The Yellow Wallpaper\" failed to reach an audience and, despite its tumored effect on Mitchell's tteatment of \"nervous\" women, did not really make a significant contribution to that effort. Indeed, the genetal neglect of the stoty has led recent commentators such as Annette Kolodny and Jean E. Kennard to suggest that the audi-

"Benito Cereno" and the Failure of Law

Abstract: The decade of the 1850S, in which Melville's short stories were composed and published, was turbulent. It generated both expressions of Southern panic over the possibility of slave revolts and numerous abolitionist tracts calling for the immediate overthrow of slavery. It was the period during which both the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the Dred Scott decision (1857) were written. The pre-Civil War decade also encompassed the Kansas-Nebraska debates, an economic depression in 1854-1856, and extraordinary slave unrest. Controversy over the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 continued to increase, beginning with the return of Thomas Sims from Massachusetts to slavery in 1851 and intensifying with the case of Anthony Burns in 1854. 5 This latter event prompted Thoreau to write: \"I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.\"4

"'Just the fax, ma'am'": Male Sentimentality in the Die Hard Films

Abstract: In the middle of Bruce Willis's blockbuster hit of 1988, Die Hard—the sequel to which came out in 1990—Willis (aka John McClane) groans in pain while his partner murmurs in sympathy over the phone. Willis groans, not because he has been attacked by the German \"terrorists\" who are holding hostage his estranged wife and her coworkers at the Nakatomi Corporation, but because he has eaten a Twinkie. Remember that when we first meet his partner the L. A. cop Al Powell, Powell is buying a load of Twinkies for his pregnant wife. We never see her in either film; instead, Al's partnership with McClane is treated cinematically in the film's conclusion with all the soft-focus, whoozy glamor usually saved for the culmination of heterosexual romance. Why Twinkies? And why do they facilitate male bonding in Die Hard? The peculiar cultural logic that determines the role of Twinkies in postwar American culture calls attention to the sentimentality fueling the Die Hard films—a sentimentality that emerges as the white, heterosexual male's prime defense against the dangers posed to the American ideal of cultural homogeneity by contemporary feminism, post-Civil Rights era race relations, homosexuality, AIDS, and the U.S.'s loss of economic and military status on the international scene. Notably, the masculine anxiety Willis embodies in these films emerges from his allegiance to racial superiority and gender polarity. We will argue in this essay that the Die Hard films erase the history that pro-

Hawthorne's Gentle Reader: (The Hen) House of (Family) Romance

Abstract: ISET before you a veritable hen house (Plato's \"hen\": the One) where chicken and egg are but a reversible gestalt in whose name I shall attempt to lay (out) that configuration of texts we designate as \"Hawthorne.\" What does this proper name provoke? It calls forth (nothing: less than) the dead. Such is the case wherever the scene overtakes the scenario, wherever it takes over, takes the narration from behind. This it does with a vengeance in The Marble Faun, where \"death becomes the companion of the author,\" of the narration itself (Dryden 34). By conferring a shape and temporality upon The Faun, I seek to gather that text within another narration that both recollects backward its historical genesis toward origin and recollects forward or repeats (Kierkegaard) its own performance as story, recites the future of its own fabrication. The event I would locate is, by definition, its primal scene: that scenario by means of which it will defenestrate the frame of its own récit, by means of which it enunciates itSelf. This annunciation is, of course, a noun. I might as well announce it in advance, dismissing all suspense from the outset despite (in spite of) the fact that everything remains suspended upon the tenuous texture of this name. \"Pearl\" is but another name for \"Donatello.\" It's not by chance that \"Hawthorne\" lays \"felonious hands upon a . . . statue of a Pearl-Diver\" (4) in order to re-site Akers at the scene of Kenyon's studio: \"the statue of a beautiful youth, a pearl-fisher, who had got entangled in the weeds at the bottom of the sea, and lay dead among the pearl-oysters\" (117). The

Reading the Walls: The Politics of Architecture in Scribner's Magazine, 1887-1914

Abstract: New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, even Washington—they all are rising bodily, constantly, fast, and their climbing skylines are writing with reckless realism across the heavens the same great story of material progress. It is time to read this writing of the walls.

Foreign Exchange in Denis Johnson's The Stars at Noon

Abstract: In his first novels, Angels and Fislcodoro, Denis Johnson takes readers into foreign territory: the borderland that characters on the edge of society inhabit in Angeis and the post-apocalyptic southern Florida of Fiskadoro are outside most readers' familiarity. In The Stars at Noon Johnson takes readers into a country, Nicaragua, that is literally foreign. Johnson originally intended to write a non-fiction article on Nicaragua, but his visit there changed his mind. The impression of Central America that persisted was one of atmosphere,1 and in The Stars at Noon the atmosphere (the weather and the metaphysical atmosphere of Hell) is the only element of stasis. All else is movement. As Johnson develops his plot and characters, we realize that the movement signifies exchange. The novel's instances of foreign exchange include the exchange of currencies; the exchange of goods, people, information, and other symbols between individuals and governments of countries foreign to each other; exchange of human subjectivity or recognition; and exchange between reader and text. 2 Johnson's anatomy of the ptinciple of exchange that governs all social action prompts a reassessment of the novel's genre—the international tale—and an unsettling of the reader's relation to the text. Johnson's unnamed narrator originally entered Nicaragua with a phony press card issued by Eyes for Peace, a human rights watch group with whom she signed on as a contact person. But in less than a week she lost her stomach for observing poverty, torture, and death, abandoned her job as observer, and moved to Managua. When she wanted to leave, the Nicaraguans, desperate for hard currency, would take only

Representing Representation: Body as Figure, Frame, and Text in The House of the Seven Gables

Abstract: The house of the SEVEN gables is a metaphor become a novel. Using Max Black's terms, the frame of this metaphor is the house; the focus is, primarily, the human body: \"The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also of the long lapse of mortal life . . . that [has] passed within\" (5). Its \"timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a human heart\" (27); it has an \"impending brow\" (28), a \"skeleton-frame\" (136), a \"throat\" (224), a \"battered visage\" (81), and \"an inner heart\" (294). \"This heavy-hearted old mansion\" (219) is capable of sighing (15) and shivering (224), suffers \"the rustiness and infirmity of age\" (20), and has a memory \"full of rich and somber reminiscences\" (27). However, as the traces on its \"exterior face\" (294) indicate, the house is the body as text: its traces could \"form a narrative\" (5), fill a . . . folio volume\" (6). Inside, \"the old structure of our story\" (27), \"the old house of our narrative\" (144) has \"walls . . . lugubriously frescoed\" with \"traditions\" (83); walking its \"foot-worn passages\" recalls \"stories, . . . passages of family history\" (240). Moreover, the human body may be seen as a text in the same terms, as is the case with Clifford's \"furrows—with their record of infinite sorrow, so deeply written across his brow, and so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale\" (138). In its complexity, the metaphor of house/body/text becomes a symbol, a symbol of narrative representation—a symbol aware of its \"criti-

Faulkner and His Critics: Moving into the 90s

Abstract: Is it possible to say something new and interesting about Faulkner? The authot who gets 90 pages in Duke's 1990 revision of Sixteen Modern American Authors (the second most analyzed wtitet, Hemingway, gets only 75) appeats to need few—if any—further testimonies to his greatness. Yet books continue to come out, for in this academic wotld we must publish or end up selling computers. And the conscientious Faulkner scholar hopes not just to publish but to find something worth saying, to open up more avenues from which to approach the work of the greatest Ametican novelist of the 20th century. We might furthet ask ourselves whether Faulknet will be able to maintain this supremacy in a literary arena more and more concerned with issues of race, class, and gender. Canonized by the New Critics, his work may find less sympathy from the post-structuralists. He is, aftet all, often racist, often sexist, and often classist. Furthermore, post-structuralism, with its emphasis on theoty, can sometimes be faulted for favoring ideology over the author. Particularly fot a writer as over-analyzed as Faulkner, it is easy to assume basic critical understanding and concentrate more heavily on the theory than the author. The question arises, then, what role Faulknet plays in Faulkner studies these days. In 1983, in the second edition of Prentice-Hall's Twentieth Century Views of Faulkner, Richatd Brodhead identifies some of the problems facing Faulkner critics:

"Sighs Too Deep for Words": Mysteries of Need in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping

Abstract: In chapter 8 of Marilynne Robinson's novel, Housekeeping, the young narratot Ruth accompanies her aunt Sylvie on a frigid, eatly morning journey by rowboat to a \"secret\" place in the valley. Theit destination is an abandoned homestead, which includes a \"stunted orchard and lilacs and stone doorstep and fallen house, all white with a brine of frost\" (Robinson 151). On her first viewing of the scene, Ruth complains of the cold and het hunget, and wondets \"how anyone could have wanted to live here\" (151). Sylvie makes it cleat by her example that they should wait quietly among some rocks along the shore fot several hours until conditions are right for a second approach. When they eventually return to the ruined dwelling, it is as if \"the light had coaxed a flowering from the frost, which befóte seemed batten and patched as salt\" (Robinson 152). As Ruth becomes entranced by this spectacle of beautiful desolation, Sylvie leaves without warning. At this moment of abandonment (in a text filled with images and thoughts of desertion), the reader is presented with what is perhaps Ruth's most enigmatic and demanding meditation on human needs: