Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction by Linda Anderson; Writing beyond the
Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers by Rachel Blau DuPlessis;
Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change by Rita Felski; Living
Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience by Joanne S. Frye;
Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition by Gayle ...
Review by: Ellen Cronan Rose
Signs, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Winter, 1993), pp. 346-375
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174979 .
Accessed: 14/03/2012 04:12
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs.
http://www.jstor.org
REVIEW
ESSAYS
Cronan
Rose
Works reviewed
Anderson, Linda, ed. Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction.
London: Edward Arnold, 1990.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies
of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social
Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Frye, Joanne S. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in
Contemporary Experience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1986.
Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of
Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1989.
Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and SelfRepresentation in Contemporary Women's Fiction. SUNY Series in
Feminist Criticism and Theory. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1991.
Rubenstein, Roberta. Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction.
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Walker, Melissa. Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women's Novels
in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966-1989. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991.
I wish to thank Patricia A. Cooper, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, and the anonymous Signs
346
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
Walker,NancyA. FeministAlternatives:
Ironyand Fantasyin the Contemporary Novel by Women.Jackson: UniversityPress of Mississippi, 1990.
Zimmerman,Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women:LesbianFiction, 19691989. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
N Y A C C O U NT of feminism's relation to fiction by contemporary women writers is obliged to consider the relation of
experience to discourse-how the discourse of contemporary
to which academic critical discourse reflects the assumptions of "common readers" about the relevance of this fiction to their lives; how critiques by women of color and lesbians have raised the question of whose
experience is entered into critical discourse; and how criticism of contemporary women's fiction engages in and is affected by feminist adaptations of various theoretical discourses. These are permeable categories,
which I will range through and among in my discussion of a selection of
recent books by (with one exception) American feminist critics on contemporary fiction by U.S., Canadian, and British women. But first, a brief
and no doubt partial history of how we got here.
Today, as in the eighteenth century when Dr. Johnson coined the term,
"common readers" differ from "professional" readers-college professors, literary critics, and book reviewers-who have to read books
whether they want to or not. Common readers read to find reflections,
confirmations, and clarifications of the problems they confront daily as
adolescents, lovers, parents, citizens. They read, like Doris Lessing's
quintessential common reader, Martha Quest, with this question in
mind: "What has this got to do with me?" (Martha Quest [1952; reprint,
New York: New American Library, 1970], 200). It is this existential
curiosity that differentiates common readers from those who read
Winter
1993
SIGNS
347
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
(mostly pulp) fiction for "escape." Common readers do not read to escape reality but, rather, to understand and to cope with it.
Janet Sass's account of an informal women's reading group she belonged
to in 1971 tells us a lot about who common readersare and what they look
for when they read. Sass writes that the women in the group differedin age,
class, race, educational background, and sexual identification but were
united in the belief that reading literature "was a way to learning about
ourselves and to grow" ("ALiteratureClass of Our Own: Women's Studies
without Walls,"in FemaleStudies:Closer to the Ground- Women'sClasses,
Criticism,Programs- 1972, no. 6, ed. Nancy Hoffman, Cynthia Secor,and
Adrian Tinsley, 2d ed. [Old Westbury,N.Y: FeministPress, 1973], 79-87,
esp. 80). Because they were particularlyinterestedin what literaturehad to
tell them about "women's culture and consciousness" (80), they selected
books by Lessing, George Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir,Jane Addams, Maya
Angelou, Sylvia Plath, and Margaret Mead and were "electrified"to discover that "discussion of women writers' books, because they described
experiences common to us as women-pregnancy, child care, housework,
marriage,loss of virginity-brought together our intellect and our feelings;
made 'book learning' relevant" (81).1
In the early 1970s, common readers' assumptions about the relevance
to "real life" of fictional representations were shared by a number of
feminist literary critics. Adrienne Rich, speaking at the forum "The
Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century" sponsored at the 1971 convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) by its newly formed
Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, uttered a few
sentences that would come to define "feminist criticism":
Re-vision-the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction-is for women more
than a chapter in culturalhistory: it is an act of survival.... A radical
critiqueof literature,feminist in its impulse, would take the work first
of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have
been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well
as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male
prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name-and therefore
live-afresh. [Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as
Re-Vision," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 19661978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 31-49, esp. 35]
1 For more information about
Janet Sass and her group and for an extended profile of
the contemporary common reader,see Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose, The Canon
and the Common Reader (Knoxville: Universityof TennesseePress, 1990), 35-46.
348
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
For discussion of "the case of Doris Lessing" as exemplary of the process by which
contemporary women writers entered the canon, see Kaplan and Rose, 66-89.
Winter
1993
SIGNS
349
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
350
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
(New York: Harcourt, 1973) and Meridian (New York: Harcourt, 1976);
Winter
1993
SIGNS
351
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
anthologies,books, articles,and specialissuesof journals.6With increasing regularity,white, middle-classfeministliteraryscholarswere including chapterson women of color and lesbiansin their studiesof contemporary women writers and inviting contributionsfrom scholars who
representedthese constituencieswhen they compiledessaycollections.In
two landmarkessaysof the firsthalf of the 1980s, white criticsdiscussed
fiction by both black and white contemporarywomen writers:Lessing
and Morrisonin ElizabethAbel's "(E)mergingIdentities:The Dynamics
of FemaleFriendshipin ContemporaryFictionby Women"(Signs:Journal of Womenin Cultureand Society 6, no. 3 [Spring1981]: 413-35),
and Morrison,Walker,Atwood, Drabble,and MarilynFrenchin Margaret Homans's "'Her VeryOwn Howl': The Ambiguitiesof Representation in RecentWomen'sFiction"(Signs9, no. 2 [Winter1984]: 186205). Essaysaboutcontemporaryfictionby womenof color and lesbians,
often by women of color or self-identifiedlesbian scholars,appearedin
some majoressaycollectionsof thatperiod:ElizabethAbel's Writingand
Sexual Difference (Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press, 1982), Abel,
MarianneHirsch,and ElizabethLangland'sThe VoyageIn: Fictionsof
FemaleDevelopment(Hanover,N.H.: UniversityPressof New England,
1983), CathyN. Davidson and E. M. Broner's The Lost Tradition:
Mothersand Daughtersin Literature(New York:Ungar,1980), Gayle
Greene and Coppelia Kahn's Making a Difference:FeministLiterary
Criticism (New York: Methuen, 1985), Catherine Rainwater and
WilliamJ. Scheick'sContemporaryAmericanWomenWriters:Narrative
Strategies(Lexington:UniversityPress of Kentucky,1985), and Elaine
Showalter'sThe New FeministCriticism:Essayson Women,Literature,
and Theory(New York:Pantheon,1985).
SondraO'Neale calls such effortsat editorialintegration"tokenism"
("InhibitingMidwives,UsurpingCreators:The StrugglingEmergenceof
Black Women in AmericanFiction,"in de Lauretis,ed., 145). Valerie
Smith makes the more damningchargethat black women are "fetishized" in white scholarship"in much the same way as they are in mass
culture"where "blackwomen are employed,if not sacrificed,to humanize theirwhite superordinates,to teachthemsomethingaboutthe content
6
See, e.g., Blanche Wiesen Cook, "'Women Alone Stir My Imagination': Lesbianism
and the Cultural Tradition," Signs 4, no. 4 (Summer 1979): 718-39; Margaret Cruikshank, ed., Lesbian Studies: Present and Future (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press,
1982); Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love
between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981); the
Frontiers special issue "Lesbian History" (vol. 4 [Fall 1979]); "The Lesbian Issue" of
Signs (vol. 9, no. 4 [Summer 1984]); Judith McDaniel, "Lesbians and Literature," Sinister Wisdom 1 (1976): 20-23; Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge
Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981; reprint, New York:
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983); and Catharine R. Stimpson, "Zero Degree
Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English," Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1981): 363-80.
352
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
of their own subjectpositions" ("BlackFeministTheory and the Representation of the 'Other,'" in Changing Our Own Words:Essays on
Criticism,Theory,and Writingby Black Women,ed. CherylWall [New
Brunswick,N.J.: RutgersUniversityPress, 1989], 46). JudithRoof devotes an entirechapterof herrecentbook, A Lureof Knowledge:Lesbian
Sexualityand Theory(New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1991), to
configurationsof lesbianismin three anthologies of feminist criticism
publishedin 1985 (Greeneand Kahn'sMakinga Difference,Showalter's
The New FeministCriticism,and JudithNewton and Deborah Rosenfelt'sFeministCriticismand SocialChange[New York:Methuen,1985]).
In Roof's view, the inclusionof essaysby black,lesbian,or blacklesbian
contributorsfalls far short of what is needed to integratemultipledifferencesamong women into feministtheory."The programmaticplacement of black and lesbianas playersin what in 1985 are white, straight
feministargumentspreventsthe recognitionof the radicalimplicationsof
these differingparadigmsor any acceptanceof their contributionsas
theoretical in themselvesrather than as augmentativediversity . . as
backup for a more overarchingand all-encompassingfeministtheory"
(225). As will become evident later in this essay, I find these critiques
bruisinglypersuasive.
In addition to demandingthat white, middle-classfeminist scholars
acknowledgethe significanceof race, class, and sexual preferencein the
constructionof gender,the Barnardconferencebroughtthemface to face
with the challengeto their scholarshipposed by Continentaltheory.Papers on contemporaryfeminist thought in France were presentedby
French, Canadian,and U.S. scholars, and a workshop took place on
"Psychoanalysisand Feminismin France."7In 1975, Elaine Showalter
observedin a Signs review essay on "LiteraryCriticism"that American
feministcriticismand scholarshipwere "stubbornlyempirical,"and she
predictedthat this wouldproveto be a liability.Becausefeministcriticism
looked "deceptivelyeasy,"the "academy"(then-and still-dominated
by white, middle-classmen) did not, and would continuenot to, take it
"very seriously"(Signs 1, no. 2 [Winter1975]: 435-60, esp. 436). It
was, coincidentally,also in 1975 that LauraMulveypublished"Visual
Pleasureand NarrativeCinema"(reprintedin Feminismand Film Theory,ed. ConstancePenley[New York:Routledge,1988], 57-68), which
"appropriated"psychoanalytictheory "as a political weapon, demonstratingthe way the unconsciousof patriarchalsociety has structured
7 In Eisenstein and
Winter
1993
SIGNS
353
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose, eds., Approaches to Teaching Lessing's "The
proaches to Teaching Kingston's "The Woman Warrior" (New York: MLA, 1991). Two
Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (New
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
Winter
1993
SIGNS
355
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
The writers of several of the books under review justify their focus on
realist novels on the grounds that this is the fiction that has meant the
most to women readers-in other words, implicitly endorsing the view I
associated with the early days of feminist criticism and of the women's
movement, that people read novels because they believe these texts have
something to tell them about life. Felski, Gayle Greene, Melissa Walker,
Nancy Walker, and Bonnie Zimmerman are interested in the social and
political functions of fiction, the potential that novels possess to effect
personal and social change. Felski charges literary theorists who emphasize the "self-referential" and "metalinguistic" character of fiction to
remember that literature "is also a medium which can profoundly influence individual and cultural self-understanding in the sphere of everyday
life, charting the changing preoccupations of social groups through symbolic fictions by means of which they make sense of experience" (7). Even
Molly Hite, who thinks Anglo-American reflectionist criticism has done
a disservice to women's innovatory writing practices with its "exaggerated theory of mimesis," the notion that art imitates life, acknowledges
the political utility to feminism of realist fiction by citing Ann Barr Snitow's observation that "since the inception of the form, [realist] novels
have been 'how-to' manuals for groups gathering their identity through
self-description" (Hite, 14, quoting Snitow from her essay "The Front
Line: Notes on Sex in Novels by Women, 1969-1979," Signs 5, no. 4
[Summer 1980]: 702-18, esp. 705).
Greene and Zimmerman testify personally to the transformative effects of reading contemporary women's fiction. Zimmerman recalls the
affirmation she and other lesbian feminists experienced as "a generation
of authors began to write us into existence" (xi). Greene says that she was
so "haunted" by The Golden Notebook that she "returned to it year after
year and finally reorganized my professional life around it, changing my
field from Renaissance to contemporary literature" (57).
Several recent books explicitly relate contemporary women's fiction to
movements for social change. Melissa Walker's Down from the Mountaintop focuses on a group of novels that are in her view directly related
to the "issues, events, and consequences" of the civil rights movement (2).
Zimmerman's The Safe Sea of Women, which surveys some 167 lesbian
novels and short-story collections published between 1969 and 1989, is
governed by the thesis that this literature "helped shape a lesbian consciousness, community, and culture" (2) from the beginning of the
in her review essay, "Refusing the Wisdom of Solomon: Some Recent Feminist Literary
Theory," Signs 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 144-70. For a succinct yet comprehensive survey of the promising but problematic relationship between feminism and postmodernism, see Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge,
1990).
356
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
SIGNS
357
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
1993
SIGNS
359
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
360
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
Winter
1993
SIGNS
361
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
In her Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of TwentiethCentury Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985),
Rachel Blau DuPlessis proposed that "narrative may function on a small
scale the way that ideology functions on a large scale-as a 'system of
representations by which we imagine the world as it is'" (3, quoting
Althusser), thus theorizing what first-generation second wave feminists
intuited-that, as Rich put it, "our language has trapped as well as
liberated us" ("When We Dead Awaken," 35). In DuPlessis's elegant
formulation, ideology is "coiled" in narrative structure, particularly in
the romance plot which, "broadly speaking, is a trope for the sex-gender
system as a whole" (5).16
DuPlessis not only provided a theoretical basis for understanding how
narrative conventions encode cultural mandates but she also argued that
it was possible to "write beyond" the ideological as well as formal constraints of the romance plot, to invent narrative strategies that "express
critical dissent from dominant [cultural as well as literary] narrative" (5).
Nevertheless, though she characterized the disruptions of narrative conventions by twentieth-century women writers as a critique of traditional
gender arrangements, DuPlessis did not suggest that changing "the story"
would effect social/cultural change.
Linda Anderson also discusses the interrelationship of fiction and ideology in the introduction to Plotting Change, a collection of essays she
edited in 1990. She uses the term "intertextuality"-usually given the
strictly literary sense of a text building itself out of other texts-to describe "a way of thinking about experience as already structured by the
modalities of fiction." The stories women "inherit" from culture "are
powerfully oppressive," Anderson writes; and "part of that oppression
lies in their unitary character, their repression of alternative stories, other
possibilities, hidden or secret scripts" (vii). This idea is developed in
greater detail by Molly Hite, who notes that any story is always "somebody's story," privileged over any number of stories that do not get told
because they are suppressed by literary conventions that are always ideologically valenced. Novels by twentieth-century writers such as Jean
Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Lessing, Alice Walker, and Atwood make
"changes in emphasis and value" that "articulate the 'other side' of a
fer significantlyfrom malepostmodernistsand that, therefore,literaryhistoriansand
theoristsshould"revisit"and reconceivepostmodernistfiction.
16
In The Heroine'sText:Readingsin the Frenchand EnglishNovel, 1722-1782
(New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress,1980), Nancy K. Milleralertedreadersto the
way certainnarrativeconventions-in particularthe heterosexualromanceplot of "the
heroine'stext"-reinforce culturalnorms.The firstcriticto makethe connectionwas, of
course,JoannaRuss in her landmarkessay,"WhatCan a HeroineDo? Or Why Women
Can'tWrite,"in Cornillon,3-20. DuPlessisacknowledgesboth Russ'sand Miller's
work.
groundbreaking
362
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
1993
SIGNS
363
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
As Anglo-American
Freudians,Wyattcites NormanHolland,especiallyhis The
Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Norton, 1975); Nancy Chodorow (The Re-
Mitchell (Psychoanalysis and Feminism [New York: Random House, 1975]). Her chief
1993
SIGNS
365
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Wyatt argues has been popular with generations of women readers because it is "split" between rhetorical gestures toward women's emancipation and a "conservative undertow of images" seducing the reader
back to the confinement of heterosexual romance (11). Because Wyatt's
reading of Jane Eyre implies "that reading on the unconscious level is
profoundly conservative" (41) and would thus seem to reinforce the
Anglo-American Freudian psychodynamics of reading she rejects, Wyatt
turns to several other popular girls' books to indicate how reading "on
the unconscious level" can lead to change. Using Pinchas Noy's model of
how unconscious (primary) thought processes, activated by concrete representations rather than abstract explanations, "perform the work of
assimilating new experience into the ongoing structures of the self" (46),
Wyatt argues that while the overt message of such novels as Louisa
Alcott's Little Women (1868) and L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz
(1939) is "be a good girl," girl readers respond to "vivid kinetic and
visual images of female power" in the novels' subtexts and can thus
envisage creative and autonomous futures (50).18 She elaborates this
argument with a close reading of Little Women, which she says tells two
stories: one linear, developmental, and teleological, governed by the father's word; the other circular and static, recalling preoedipal interactions. Yet, far from being regressive, preoedipal desire in Little Women
"liberates Jo's creative potential," in ways Wyatt explains with reference
to Heinz Kohut's theory of narcissism, which emphasizes the positive
contribution to their self-esteem and creativity of reinforcing children's
"grandiose fantasies" (55).19
Again, my personal memories of the powerful influence of Jane Eyre
and the almost equally strong appeal of Little Women and The Wizard of
Oz incline me to give credence to Wyatt's explanation of how reading
might either reinforce ideology or foment change. But when Wyatt suggests in a concluding chapter that adults, as well as children, might be
affected by the kind of unconscious reading she theorized in her chapter
line Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (New York:
Norton, 1985); andJuliaKristeva,particularlyin her Desirein Language,trans.Thomas Gora,AliceJardine,and LeonS. Roudiez,ed. LeonS. Roudiez(New York:Columbia UniversityPress,1980), and Revolutionin PoeticLanguage,trans.MargaretWaller
(New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress,1984).
18See PinchasNoy, "ARevisionof the PsychoanalyticTheoryof the PrimaryProcess," International Journal of Psycho-analysis 50 (1969): 155 -68.
19WyattprefersKohut's"Formsand Transformations
of Narcissism"(Journalof the
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
1993
SIGNS
367
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
368
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
OF WOMEN'S
CRITICISM
FICTION
Rose
Robinson's basic argument is that women's self-representation "proceeds by a double movement: simultaneously against normative constructions of Woman that are continually produced by hegemonic discourses
and social practices, and toward new forms of representation that disrupt
those normative constructions" (11). Separate chapters on Lessing, Angela Carter, and Gayl Jones both distinguish among the ways various
novels enact this "double movement" and serve to illustrate a particular
theoretical text or approach. For example, Lessing's Martha Quest novels
illustrate Paul Smith's "ambitious critique" of theories of subjectivity in
Discerning the Subject ([Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988], 20).
In a brief epilogue at the end of a book that has sustained a 187-page
colloquium with various representatives of "deconstruction, French feminist theory, critiques of colonial discourse, feminist film theory, and
revisionist Afro-American histories"--as she identifies "the theoretical
materials from which I have drawn in this study" (192-93)-Robinson
implies that her discussion has had some bearing on real life (or "social
relations," as she prefers to call it): "It is in order to analyze the complicities between the linguistic/discursive and the political that I have
argued here that women become subjects by negotiating between normative representations of Woman... and what those representations
leave out" (190). While Robinson succeeds-at least in her discussion of
slavery in America-in her effort to show "how official narratives conspire to close off the possibility of a female subjectivity, both in discourse
and in social relations" (191), I am not persuaded that she is genuinely
interested in demonstrating how a change in "discursive practices" might
affect social relations.
*
Although the relationship between literature and life that seemed selfevident to earlier critics has been rendered problematic (by psychoanalytic and other poststructural assaults on the unified subject of liberal
humanism and by Althusserian understandings of how ideology interpellates individuals as subjects), this survey of some recent feminist criticism suggests that most academic as well as common readers of contemporary women's fiction remain stubbornly convinced that novels have
something to say about lives. But which novels? And whose lives?
Nine of the dozen books I have discussed include chapters on Lessing,
usually though not always on The Golden Notebook. There is ample
anecdotal evidence - cited in several of the books under review - that The
Golden Notebook was a revolutionary reading experience for many
women in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Is it still? My experience of
Winter
1993
SIGNS
369
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
teaching the novel in a variety of courses over the past five years corroborates Rubenstein's account of teaching it in an introductory women's
studies course in the mid-1980s. She chose The Golden Notebook rather
than other novels she had considered because for her, it was "one of the
most profound explorations of a woman's complex consciousness that
exists in fiction" ("The Golden Notebook in an Introductory Women's
Studies Course," in Kaplan and Rose, eds., 72-77, esp. 72). Yet her
students, like mine, read it as a historical document that may have been
relevant to their mothers (or to Rubenstein or to me, their mothers'
contemporaries), but not to them.
Gayle Greene says that her book "takes the feminist effort of canon
reformation into the area of contemporary women's fiction, and it is
motivated by a pragmatic concern-to draw attention to major women
writers so that they have a better chance of surviving" (25). I would argue
that something like a canon of contemporary women novelists has
emerged over the last ten or fifteen years, that it is represented in most of
the books under review in this essay, and that it may well manage to
survive in such places as college course syllabi, MLA conventions, and
academic books.21 The question is, What meaning does this canon have
for the common reader, whose mother's passionate involvement with The
Golden Notebook twenty years ago propelled that novel into the canon
in the first place?
I am also concerned about the persistence of a "Plessy vs. Ferguson
model" of canon (re)formation whereby certain traditions remain separate and anything but equal. Of the contemporary African-American
21
The research of scholars like those mentioned in this essay has played an important part in the formation of this canon, as have the proliferation of courses and programs in women's studies and the efforts of feminist and alternative presses to publish
not only "lost" or "forgotten" women writers of the past but also the work of contemporary writers spurned by major trade publishers (see Florence Howe, "A Symbiotic Relationship: Women's Studies and Feminist Publishing," Women's Review of Books 6, no.
5 [February 1989]: 15-16, on the connections between the development of feminist
publishing and the growth of women's studies). Writing this essay has made me realize
the equally important, though less frequently acknowledged, role played by reviewers in
constructing not only the acknowledged canon of contemporary women writers but the
no less influential "canon" of critical and theoretical approaches to that literature. The
profile I have drawn of feminist criticism of contemporary women's fiction has been
shaped in part by the books I was asked to review, but my choice of which books and
issues to highlight was, however unconsciously, directed by my own possibly idiosyncratic interests and tastes. I included only one edited collection, Anderson's Plotting
Change, because in my view such collections usually suffer from incoherence. In omitting some of the books in my reviewer's packet from my survey, I may have unintentionally misrepresented the shape of current work on contemporary women writers. Moreover, because this is a review essay in a journal influential in shaping as well as reflecting
contemporary feminist scholarship, an essay scholars in other disciplines will trust to
guide their understanding of feminist criticism of contemporary women writers, I wield
a power I did not-at least consciously-solicit. Truly, no writing is innocent.
370
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
Winter
1993
SIGNS
371
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
372
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
Winter
1993
SIGNS
373
Rose
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
SIGNS
Winter
1993
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
25
1993
SIGNS
375