Showing papers in "Tulsa studies in women's literature in 2010"

Feminism in the Age of Digital Archives: The Women Writers Project

Abstract: In March 2008, the Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP, http://www.wwp.brown.edu) held a colloquium entitled “Revealing Women,” which brought together scholars, archivists, and technologists to consider the role of traditional and digital archives in the study and teaching of early modern women’s writing. This event marked the WWP’s twentieth year of work as a digital humanities project: digitizing women’s writing, researching and theorizing technologies of digital representation, exploring new methods of scholarly communication, and supporting scholarship. The most visible achievement during that period has been the publication of Women Writers Online (WWO), an internationally recognized digital collection of women’s writing in English, which has made pre-Victorian women’s writing visible within the new digital canon. These two decades of work have produced innovation on several fronts: theorizing markup technologies, researching the impact of digital scholarly tools, and promoting the availability of writing by women. However, as our anniversary colloquium revealed, this work raises as many questions as it addresses, particularly at the points where these domains intersect. How does the digital work of the WWP engage with current issues in feminist scholarship? How does our digital collection position the digital text in relation to archival sources? Is there a gap—professional, disciplinary, epistemological—between the literary scholar or historian who uses a digital archive such as WWO and the digital humanist who produces and theorizes that archive? The nature of these questions reminds us that the impact of technology on serious scholarship is not simplistically progressive. We see exciting opportunities for feminist scholarship, literary criticism, and digital humanities to converge in the ongoing work of the WWP, as well as reminders that the digital is not the cure-all for our scholarly woes. While there is certainly promise in the ongoing theoretical and pragmatic work being done here, we do not want simply to reproduce the overly-celebratory promise of “new” frontiers. Instead, we understand that an archive like the ever-growing WWO is a conduit through which to experiment with new modes of scholarly intervention—at the level of production as well as

Translating The Second Sex

Abstract: To steal Simone de Beauvoir‟s phrase, much ink has flowed on the subject of the English version. Howard M. Parshley, a zoology professor from Smith College, produced the 1953 translation, but upon the insistence of his publishers, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, he abridged, edited and removed significant and lengthy passages, restructured Beauvoir‟s syntax and style, and simplified much of the complex philosophical language. Margaret Simons, one of the great experts of Simone de Beauvoir from the University of Southern Illinois, brought the issue of the faulty translation to the attention of the public as early as 1983 in a path-breaking article, “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What‟s Missing from The Second Sex”, and then in a book, Beauvoir and The Second Sex. 1 Thus, a

Uneasy Lie the Bones: Alice Sebold's Postfeminist Gothic

Abstract: This essay considers the novels of Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (2002) and The Almost Moon (2007), within the nascent genre of postfeminist gothic. Sebold, the essay argues, revivifies the female Gothic genre in a moment that is invested in minimizing and repressing gendered inequity. The posthumous narrative of The Lovely Bones addresses the “victim/agent” debate within postfeminist discourse while dissipating rage over the heroine’s rape and murder through a variety of textual strategies. By contrast, The Almost Moon’s mad matricidal heroine exposes the rage simmering beneath the surface of postfeminism’s supposedly compliant visage. Both works explore the difficulty of writing about gendered violence and reveal tensions within postfeminist ideology.

"Opening the Door": The Hogarth Press as Virginia Woolf's Outsiders' Society

Abstract: This essay argues that Virginia Woolf’s personal publishing venture, the Hogarth Press, both prefigured and influenced her later vision of a feminist, transnational Outsiders’ Society, a proposal that she outlined in the 1938 text Three Guineas. Woolf imagined an Outsiders’ Society with neither meetings nor leaders that pieced together a multiplicity of private actions to exert political influence. The Hogarth Press, however, was already a material incarnation of this strategy as its translations, feminist works, political pamphlets, and political fiction challenged both the male-dominated British canon and the nationalistic patriarchy that Woolf deplored in Three Guineas.

A Woman Playwright's Revision of a Legendary Epic: Zeynep Avcı's Gilgamesh

Abstract: Zeynep Avci, a Turkish female playwright, has rewritten The Epic of Gilgamesh to break established myths of the patriarchy and create her own mythical patterns in return. In Avci’s Gilgamesh, male bonding is emphasized; however, Avci makes use of the concept of mimetic rivalry to demean the male friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu by attributing supplementary homosexual, erotic overtones to the epic. Through her usage of homophobia, she questions the patriarchal view that regards such male bonding as lethal and base. She also stresses through Ishtar the phallocentric view that perceives female bonding as inferior to male bonding. By reminding her audience of these patriarchal patterns that demean women, Avci also uses the mythical pattern to reveal how patriarchal society tends to weaken itself through its overvaluation of heroism. Moreover, by referring to different versions of the flood story, which can be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the Koran, Avci breaks the chronology of history and establishes the idea that both polytheistic and monotheistic religions depend on the same mythos. Finally, Avci emphasizes that only love is immortal as she tries to break the established myth of reaching immortality through heroic action.

"There is no sin in our love": Homoerotic Desire in the Stories of Two Muslim Women Writers

Abstract: This article explores the conditions that make possible or impossible the articulation of homoerotic desire in the texts of two Muslim women writers, Ismat Chughtai’s “The Quilt” and Alifa Rifaat’s “My World of the Unknown.” Despite the homophobia written into colonial and nationalist discourses, Chughtai’s feminist voice is enabled by a particularly secular and progressive cultural moment in India in the 1940s. Rifaat, on the other hand, speaks out of a deep inner commitment to her faith as well as under the external pressures generated by a radical cultural climate and its effect on gender roles. Both women are ultimately unable to fully privilege homoerotic desire. The argument in this paper explores how far the texts take us, the manner in which each engages the teachings and traditions of the faith, and where, because of internal and external pressures, the writing must stop.

Michael Field in Their Time and Ours

Abstract: THE FOWL AND THE PUSSYCAT: LOVE LETTERS OF MICHAEL FIELD, 1876-1909, edited by Sharon Bickle. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. 268 pp. $49.50. MICHAEL FIELD AND THEIR WORLD, edited by Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007. 255 pp. $55.00. “MICHAEL FIELD”: POETRY, AESTHETICISM AND THE FIN DE SIECLE, by Marion Thain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 270 pp. $90.39 cloth; $39.99 paper. MICHAEL FIELD, THE POET: PUBLISHED AND MANUSCRIPT MATERIALS, by Michael Field, edited by Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009. 384 pp. $26.95.

“Painting While Rome Burns”: Ethics and Aesthetics in Pat Barker’s Life Class and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

Abstract: In his 2005 novel, Saturday, Ian McEwan envisions a scene in which a potential rape is deflected by the aggressor’s mesmerism at a reading of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) The protagonist Henry wonders, “Could it happen, is it within the bounds of the real, that a mere poem could precipitate a mood swing?” 1 Art and beauty overwhelm brutalism, and Henry’s middle-class vision of the good life is eventually restored and secured John Banville, reviewing the novel in The New York Review of Books, describes it as “a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong” 2 Similarly, Elaine Hadley describes this particular moment as an example of “the Victorian fantasy of liberal agency,” and likens Saturday to “Dover Beach” in its “representation of a shared faith in the liberal cultivation of the self as in itself a good” 3 Both Banville and Hadley see McEwan’s assertion of the poem’s transformative capacity as a retreat to liberal humanist notions of selfhood reified by a faith in the transcendent beauty and goodness of art Literary criticism of the early twenty-first century has experienced a determined continuation of the broad ethical inquiry that comprised the “ethical turn” of the 1990s Signalled by early interventions such as J Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading (1987) and Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988) and sustained by both the advocacy of ethical critics such as moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum (Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 1990) and the objections of seasoned sceptics such as Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 1990), the turn to ethics continues to reverberate through contemporary literary critical discourse, leading Daniel Schwarz to commence his opening essay in the 2001 collection, Mapping the Ethical Turn, with the statement: “We are in the midst of a humanistic revival or at least a neohumanist burst of energy” 4 As literary-ethical inquiry has been “relegitimated,” its impact can be felt across all manner of recent critical texts 5 For example, in the 2002 Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000, Dominic Head arranges his fairly extensive survey of post-war British writing around

At the Margins of Menippean Dialogue: Sarah Fielding's "History of Anna Boleyn" and the Muted Female Figures of Lucian's Satiric Underworld

Abstract: Scholarship on ancient and modern dialogues of the dead has had surprisingly little to say about the genre’s persistent antifeminism—and no more to offer about the women writers of Britain’s long eighteenth century who called attention to that hostile undercurrent by authoring scenes of posthumous speech that stretched the gendered limits of the form. This article redresses both oversights by reading the posthumous speech of Sarah Fielding’s Anna Boleyn against the satiric portraits of women in Lucian of Samosata’s Menippean dialogues (second century CE) and in the works of Fielding’s brother Henry. The essay argues that Lucian and his male followers predicate the afterlife of satiric speech on the repeated truncation and distortion of feminine voices; it also expands the critical definition of “Menippean” dialogues to accommodate the alternative story told by women writers. A brief coda then places Fielding’s “History of Anna Boleyn” in a wider feminist context by situating the text alongside her Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia and a pair of underworld dialogues composed by Fielding’s fellow bluestocking, Elizabeth Montagu.

Speaking (in) the Silences: Gender and Anti-Narrative in Carole Maso’s Defiance

Abstract: This essay treats Carole Maso’s novel Defiance as an instance of feminist “anti-narrative.” Toward this end, it considers the novel’s use of direct address, its formal and thematic silences, and its parody of narrative convention. It reflects on the lack of scholarship on the novel and situates it in the context of Maso’s nonfiction to argue that it might be understood as a piece of feminist narratology.

Anita Brookner Reads Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Problem of Moral Imagination

Abstract: Anita Brookner’s novels explore moral, social, and gender issues similarly to her great influences Henry James and Edith Wharton. Her narratology, however, more exhaustively and less decisively analyzes humanity’s limited comprehension and consciousness, reflecting an uncertain postmodern world. Brookner’s fascination, like Wharton’s, with women’s competition for men and the choices some make to win or lose precludes overt feminist themes and emphasizes a Darwinian survival ethic rather than traditional virtue. Brookner also conveys the Jamesian tragedy of lives unfulfilled through misperception and fear, and she insistently returns to themes of innocence betrayed and the disillusion of experience. James’s and Wharton’s characters, however, live among people who witness and appreciate their probity, and their protagonists do not envy or think fortunate those who lack integrity. Conversely, Brookner’s characters believe that their moral compass isolates and defeats them, a failure that happens, significantly, outside other characters’ awareness. Still, Brookner’s morality ultimately resembles Wharton’s and James’s, since her novels, even if unintentionally, praise empathetic, imaginatively introspective characters.

Anita Brookner's Visual World

Abstract: Anita Brookner’s narrative strategies as a fiction-writer grow directly out of her practices in her other profession as an art historian. Like her greater predecessor, Jane Austen—a moralist wrongly categorized as a miniaturist—Brookner both creates her own world and connects to a larger world in multiple ways. One of the chief linkages occurs through repeated evocations of the heritage of Western visual art. Her novels take place in a psychological landscape that opens limitlessly into an allegorical world through references, in particular, to European painting. Brookner thus ennobles and dignifies the tragic-comic sufferings of her characters as they re-enact the recognizable visual tropes found in images by Bellini, Durer, Goya, and other masters. Unfortunately though, Brookner remains best known to the public through the continued circulation of the film version of Hotel du Lac, a 1986 BBC television adaptation that removes her work from the broader contexts of art history and moral allegory and confines it instead to the narrow realms of travelogue and social comedy

The Difference She Makes: Staging Gender Identity in Graffigny's Phaza

Abstract: Francoise de Graffigny’s mid-eighteenth-century play Phaza features a main character who is unknowingly crossed dressed as male. The text provides a rich starting point for exploring questions of gender identity and performance. This article situates Phaza within the fairy-tale tradition in which women authors played a major role. Its analysis draws upon philosophies of narrative identity and theories of gender to show that identity comprises both permanence and performance. Reading Graffigny can make an important difference in our understanding of gender, authorship, and relations between the sexes in Enlightenment France. Phaza’s masquerade sheds light on the ways in which women authors of the era approached and assumed various gender identities. Eighteenth-century texts like Phaza reveal a lineage of ideas that continue to influence feminist thought today and will do so in the future.

A Deleted Manuscript, an Early Story, and a New Approach to the Fiction of Lee Smith

Abstract: In the summer of 2007, I had the opportunity to conduct archival research in the Lee Marshall Smith Collection at North Carolina State University’s D. H. Hill Library. I wanted primarily to investigate materials related to Smith’s 1983 novel Oral History, the work that marks this important and prolific contemporary writer’s “coming of age” as an artist. In both the scope of the story it tells and the experimental nature of its narrative technique, Oral History exceeds anything Smith had previously produced and anticipates the high caliber of her mature work. Set in the mountains of southwestern Virginia in the town of Black Rock and the more remote Hoot Owl Holler, the novel tells the story of four generations of an extended Appalachian clan, the Cantrells; their saga begins in 1898 and spans roughly the next eighty years. Smith also creates an ambitious narrative structure for her novel to complement its historical scope. As critic Linda Bryd explains, Oral History “is told from thirteen different points of view: seven first-person oral narratives and one first-person written narrative interspersed among four pieces told by third-person narrators, sometimes omniscient and sometimes limited to a single perspective.” 1 Within this complex narrative weave, however, some voices remain oddly unheard as certain key female characters do not tell their own stories; instead, their lives remain subject to interpretation by others—both male and female, native Appalachian and outsider. One of the most intriguing of these silences involves the reputed “witch,” Red Emmy, whose supposed curse on the Cantrell family purportedly sets the novel’s tragedy in motion. Interestingly, Smith frequently acknowledges in interviews writing a section from Red Emmy’s perspective and subsequently deleting it in response to editorial suggestion. She told Dorothy Combs Hill in 1985, for instance, Originally, I had a whole section written from the point of view of Red Emmy, who was the witch. It was a very disjointed stream of consciousness thing, because she was crazy. My idea about Red Emmy was that when she was a girl, she was an orphan who had been sexually abused—by a preacher, actually. Everything that happened to Emmy was clear in the narrative. It showed that she wasn’t a witch at all, that the way she was was probably understandable, given all that she had been through. 2

Introduction: Anita Brookner in the World

Abstract: Anita Brookner has enjoyed several successful careers—as a British academic teaching art history at the Courtauld Institute and Cambridge University, as a scholar writing on French Romanticism, and, most notably, as a novelist. Since 1981, she has published twenty-five novels, with the latest of these appearing in 2009, and every one of them has found readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite the acclaim she has received (including Britain’s coveted Booker Prize) and the diverse audiences she has attracted, she has often been described in print, by journalists and critics alike, as a writer whose concerns are narrow and whose talents are those of a miniaturist. Much of this characterization has borne with it a taint of gender bias, expressed through adjectives such as “limited” and even “spinsterish” that traditionally have plagued the careers of women novelists. The year 2008 saw the arrival of her eightieth birthday, a milestone that seemed to call out for a new appraisal of her achievements and a new framework in which to evaluate them in order to bring attention to the unacknowledged breadth and ambition of her fiction. With that end in mind, the three of us—feminist academics specializing in women’s literature and, moreover, unapologetic admirers of Brookner’s novels—began the process by proposing a special session for the 2008 Modern Language Association convention held in San Francisco. This collaborative effort— the first MLA panel ever devoted to her work—took as its title “Anita Brookner in the World: Relocating the Writer at Eighty.” Our intention was not merely to celebrate Brookner’s long career but to recontextualize it. Through our papers, we would reconsider some of the standard ways in which she has been categorized—as a novelist of manners, a psychological realist, and a creator of tragi-comic romances. But most of all, we would re-examine the assumption that hers was a narrow set of interests, realized in a small and claustrophobic fictional sphere. Ultimately, we chose to reframe her work by looking at its engagement with the larger worlds of geography, politics, history, culture, and media. The figure who emerged from this conversation was not an English miniaturist but a transnational writer, crossing borders of gender and genre, as well as of place and location, and addressing expansively the most serious questions of morality, social justice, and art.

Constitutive Trauma in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls Trilogy: The Romance of Reenactment

Abstract: This essay explores how an awareness of trauma theory can transform the experience of reading into an opportunity to bear witness to the cultural contexts and individual traumas that can underlie a narrative, especially a narrative of development that involves deterioration instead of growth and self-actualization. By approaching Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy in this way, this article uncovers the forces that limit Caithleen, the trilogy’s main character: childhood trauma in her family, the difficulties presented by the rural Irish cultural context, the fantasy of heterosexual romance as a salve and supplement for childhood wounds, and the relative dearth of options and social support. These factors—not a personal failure to overcome what are in fact almost insurmountable obstacles—explain Caithleen’s deterioration and collapse of self. Rather than being cause for frustration with her disempowerment, her fate is a call for greater concern over the conditions that caused—and continue to cause—lifelong suffering for women in particular.

Narrative or Network?: Eighteenth-Century Feminist Literary History at the Crossroads

Abstract: Strolling through Hyde Park with their terrestrial guide Lady Intelligence, the goddesses Astrea and Virtue in Delarivier Manley’s Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, Of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, An Island in the Mediteranean (1709) spy a fine lady riding in a coach. Intelligence happens to be carrying a copy of an unpublished poem by the lady. Sharing it with the goddesses, she explains, “The Lady once belong’d to the Court, but marrying into the Country, she made it her business to devote herself to the Muses, and has writ a great many pretty things.”1 A didactic poem follows, addressing life’s disillusionments and the virtues of retirement. Astrea responds to the poem with praise and a suggestion for improvement: “The Lady speaks very feelingly, we need look no further than this, to know she’s her self past that agreeable Age she so much regrets. . . . if she had contracted something of the second and third Stanza, it had not been the worse” (1:171). Astrea also comments on the lady’s privileged material circumstances, which she imagines must have given her time to polish her writing: “I presume she’s one of the happy few, that write out of Pleasure, and not Necessity: By that means its [sic] her own fault, if she publish any thing but what’s good” (1:171). As many contemporary readers would surmise, the “Lady [who] once belong’d to the Court” was Anne Kingsmill Finch, one-time maid of honor to Princess Mary of Modena. Finch had fled London for the countryside in 1689 and returned in 1708, one year before Manley’s incorporation of her poem into Atalantis.2 This scene—one of several in Atalantis in which Manley’s female narrators read, discuss, and evaluate poems by female authors while

Old Pages and New Readings in Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract: These words, written by Virginia Woolf in the manuscript draft of Jacob’s Room, convey a close connection between the ideas in a book and the binding that holds it together. As scholars of literature, we encounter the physical book on a daily basis. Vast narrative landscapes are contained paradoxically within the confining material structure of the book as a solid object. While book history has emerged as a striking field of study in its own right, consideration of the physical book seldom enters the broader literary discourse of modernity. Woolf’s formidable role as publisher, author, and businesswoman foregrounds the importance of the book as a modernist artifact. As a result, the dynamic literary cultures of production, composition, and marketing converge in her canon in illuminating and complex ways. In a recent issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Jane de Gay reviewed Emily Blair’s new book, Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel.2 Gay points to the “domestic architecture” Blair observes in her study and suggests that “adopting the trope of the room” was a construct that allowed Woolf to carve out spaces for women where a break with common ideologies was possible (p. 170). Blair’s book and Gay’s review similarly emphasize Woolf’s exacting dedication to the minutiae of domestic space, following Michael Levenson’s declaration that “Modernism begins in a room.”3 The very titles Woolf gave her works— Jacob’s Room, A Room of One’s Own, “A Haunted House”—instantly evoke the interior architecture of the room. Traditionally, narrative and the book as a physical object have been held together through an analogy of space, something we experience each time we enter a library or cluttered bookshop. Spatial orientation and environmental conditions inflect the experience of reading a text. The imaginative and physical spaces of the narrative overlap with the material spaces of readership and circulation, making the words in a book present in the spaces around us and filling the rooms we inhabit. Attention to the physical space of one

Exiles from Jewish Memory: Anita Brookner's Anglo-Jewish Aesthetic

Abstract: Written three years apart, Brookner’s novels Family and Friends (1985) and The Latecomers (1988) represent significant interventions in the plot of belonging to Britain. Her characters are the fortunate few who found safety and prosperity along with displacement and loss in their escape from another empire: the Third Reich. Both novels represent their characters’ survival as an aesthetic that interlaces conflicting and empty memories of their European past with their ambiguous status as Britons. In these novels, Brookner’s aesthetic constructs the past as both a haunting presence and an irreparable lack.

"Female Poet" as Revolutionary Grotesque: Feminist Transgression in the Poetry of Ch'oe Sŭng-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yŏn-ju

Abstract: In South Korea male poets are simply referred to as siin (poet), while women poets are called yo˘ryu siin (female poet). As yo˘ryu siin, women poets are expected to write sentimental, “pretty” poetry that conforms to Korean poetic traditions as well as gender norms of femininity. In a radical transgression of these norms, the poems of contemporary South Korean poets Ch’oe Su˘ng-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yo˘n-ju function like the body of a female grotesque as they seep from the page, protruding with images of violence, vomit, trash, bodily decay, and death. The poems’ “ugly” images weep an excess which transgresses not only Korean gender norms but the strictures of the yo˘ryu siin literary tradition. By writing poems which are neither gentle nor pretty, Ch’oe, Kim, and Yi employ what this article terms the “poetics of the grotesque” to challenge Korean patriarchal gender constructions and to contest the rosy visions fostered by Korean nationalism. By embracing the seepage of the abject, these poets subvert the restrictive facades of beauty and social acceptability in favor of a grotesque permeability that creates openings within their works through which a new language of Korean womanhood can be voiced. Reading these poets’ works within the framework of Mikhail Bhaktin’s theory of the grotesque and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject illuminates how their works create the problematic body of a female grotesque: a body which claims the unsettling power of ugliness to challenge and transform culture.

Did a Woman Write "The Great American Novel"?: Judging Women's Fiction in the Nineteenth Century and Today

Abstract: In the fall of 2009, as I was preparing to teach a senior capstone course for English majors on the nineteenth-century American novel and questions of literary value and the canon, I went trolling for suggestions of recent secondary readings about canonicity. The response came back loud and clear: “The canon wars are over. We all teach whatever we want to teach, and everything is fine.” My experiences with students suggest that, at least in American literary studies before 1900, the canon wars are not over, or, perhaps, they have entered a new stage. Most of my students had heard of James Fenimore Cooper, and a few had read him, but none (with the exception of one student who had previously taken an early American novel class with me) had even heard of his contemporary Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Most had heard of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a few had previously read Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Although some aspiring fiction writers initially objected to what they felt was an overly intrusive narrator, I succeeded in persuading the class to read Stowe’s novel with respectful attention. All of them had heard of Mark Twain, and all but a tiny minority had read his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Those who had read the novel professed their admiration for the novel as one of the greatest ever written and certainly a prime candidate for the Great American Novel. When I asked them to read Jane Smiley’s infamous essay “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s ‘Masterpiece,’” in which she suggests that Huckleberry Finn was not that great and perhaps Uncle Tom’s Cabin was better, something curious happened.1 Not only did they defend Twain’s novel, but many abruptly turned on Stowe’s. In a radical reversal of their attitudes just a few weeks earlier, many now dismissed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as simplistic, racist, and sub-literary. This chain of events in my classroom represents fairly, I believe, the understanding of American literary history before 1900 that prevails out-

Local, National, Transnational: Situating Women Across Archives

Abstract: As Jennifer Tuttle, Faculty Director of the Maine Women Writers Collection, observed in her opening remarks, “Women in the Archives: Using Archival Collections in Research and Teaching on U. S. Women” was one of a number of recent conferences treating gender and the archive. Noting that there is “something in the air,” Tuttle introduced the symposium as enabling a broadly-conceived reassessment of what archives allow and what they obscure as well as leading us to consider how we may “learn to think about archives differently in order to bring more women to life.” That “something in the air” perhaps most obviously includes the vast technological changes that are shaping our understanding of archives and archival research, enabling, though unevenly, more inclusive collections while democratizing both access to and creation of archives. However, this conference was as concerned with the dusty air of libraries and city streets as it was with cyberspace; as befits a symposium hosted by an archive with an explicitly regional purview, the “local” remained a focus throughout. While the conference attended to both the strengths and challenges related to the local circumstances of archives, the lives they contain, and the researchers and students who access them, it left room for further discussion of another topic “in the air”: transnational and global studies. The organization of this conference was particularly thoughtful, not only attending to a range of disciplinary conversations but also providing ample opportunity for discussion and critique. Panels on “Recovering Archival Sources,” “Collecting, Archiving, and Curating,” “Material Culture and Ephemera,” “Photography and Visual Culture,” “Pedagogy and the Archive,” and “Private Writing and Biography” provided multiple forums for scholars, archivists, teachers, and students to discuss concerns and common ground in the use and preservation of archival sources while a chairs’ roundtable on the final day enabled a more lengthy, thoughtful reflection on the conference as a whole than is usually the case. It was,

The Creative Crone: Aging and the Poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich (review)

Abstract: 1 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Press, 1995); and Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 2 Adolph defines auto-objectification as “the objectification of one’s own body through alignment with an ideology that prioritizes a transcendental, purely discursive and intellectualized ‘self ’” (p. 18). 3 In addition to the five primary novels on which Adolph focuses, she also presents readers with a compelling analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) and her essay “Ellen Terry” (1941), Mollie Panter-Downes’s One Fine Day (1947), and Noel Streatfeild’s Saplings (1945). Her reading of women’s fiction in magazines is equally strong; see her analysis of Steve McNeil’s “She Knew What She Wanted” from the 6 July 1950 issue of Woman’s Own in chapter two.

The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (review)

Abstract: woman, condemned to suffer thus because she is a woman and must not speak, and which, many years later, was wakened into such passionate eloquence”; as such, she regarded Austen’s last novel to be “the progenitor” of Charlotte Brontë’s first (p. 81).1 Similarly bucking contemporaneous critical responses while anticipating postmodern trends is Mary Augusta Ward’s accordance of “the Brontë temperament” with Patrick Brontë’s Protestant Irish heritage as well as to Haworth’s locale in Yorkshire, “the heart of working England” (pp. 147-48). Over seventy years later, Terry Eagleton will promulgate similar arguments.2 That one might read Wilkes’s study of women reviewing women and locate heretofore unperceived threads in literary history seems to prove her larger point, which is that such history is constantly evolving due in no small part to the critic’s role in forging it.