American Feminist Criticism of Contemporary Women's Fiction

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
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REVIEW

ESSAYS

American Feminist Criticism of

Contemporary Women's Fiction
Ellen

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

readersfor helpfulcommentson an earlierdraftof this essay,and KateTylerfor meticulous, respectfulediting.

[Signs:Journalof Womenin Cultureand Society 1993, vol. 18, no. 2]
? 1993 by The Universityof Chicago. All rights reserved.0097-9740/93/1802-0003$01.00

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Walker,NancyA. FeministAlternatives:
Ironyand Fantasyin the Contemporary Novel by Women.Jackson: UniversityPress of Mississippi, 1990.

Wyatt, Jean. ReconstructingDesire: The Role of the Unconsciousin

Women's Reading and Writing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Zimmerman,Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women:LesbianFiction, 19691989. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

The relation of experience to discourse, finally, is what is at issue in

the definition of feminism. [Teresa de Lauretis, "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986), 5]

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

women'sfictionrepresents(or mediates)experience;the degree

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
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(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.

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In her preface to Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives

(Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972),
the first published anthology of feminist literary criticism, Susan Koppleman Cornillon addressed readers like herself, "who have looked to literature, and especially fiction, for answers, for models, for clues to the
universal questions of who we are or might become" (ix). Florence Howe
also emphasized the heuristic value of literature in her 1973 presidential
address to the MLA: "Literature, in its most ancient and in its most
modern forms, illuminates lives, teaches us what is possible, how to hope
and aspire" (quoted in Margret Andersen's "Feminism as a Criterion of
the Literary Critic," in Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry, and
Prose, ed. Cheryl L. Brown and Karen Olson [Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow
Press, 1978], 7). Because "ancient" literature, written primarily by men,
too often presented limiting or negative images of women-if it included
them at all-women readers turned with eagerness to contemporary women's fiction, hoping to find there affirmation and inspiration. A number of
academic women read novels like Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962)
(New York: Bantam, 1973) for the same reasons common readers did:
because such novels resonated to their experience. Mindful of how crippled they had felt as students by curricula that made white, male, and
middle- and upper-class experience normative, many feminist academics
who discovered books like Lessing's wanted to introduce them to new
generations of women students. Annis Pratt, in her introduction to Contemporary Literature's special issue on Lessing (vol. 14 [1973]: 413-17),
recalled the special pleasure many women academics felt when, "after
years of our attempts to identify ourselves with Quentin Compson, Augie
March, and the Invisible Man, not to mention Lolita and Franny Glass,"
we discovered in The Golden Notebook "a novel whose persona was an
intellectual, a political activist, an artist, as well as a lover, a mother-a
woman" (413). While feminist literary historians worked to discover and
publish "lost" women writers of the past, those of us who read primarily
contemporary authors struggled to validate "popular" writers for academic study.2
Possibly because most of the few women teaching in the academy in
the early 1970s were white and middle class, the contemporary women
writers who regularly showed up in the earliest critical anthologies,
scholarly journals, course syllabi, and reading lists were those who wrote
about white, middle-class women's experiences. Landmark books of feminist criticism during the 1970s featured essays on Plath, May Sarton, and
2

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.

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Alix Kates Shulman (Cornillon's 1973 Images of Women in Fiction), on

Plath and Lessing (PatriciaMeyer Spacks's The Female Imagination [New
York: Knopf, 1975]), and on Lessing (Sydney Janet Kaplan's Feminist
Consciousness in the Modern British Novel [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975] and Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards's The Authority of Experience [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977]).
Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1977) considered fiction by A. S. Byatt and Margaret
Drabble, as well as by Lessing, while the two contemporary writers in
Barbara Hill Rigney's Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) were Lessing and Margaret Atwood.3 The effect on African-American women students of being
asked to "identify" with Lessing's Anna Wulf, Plath's Esther Greenwood,
or Erica Jong's Isadora Wing (Fear of Flying [New York: Holt, Rinehart,
1973]) must have been at least as disorienting as it had been for white
women students to be asked to identify with Shakespeare's Hamlet or
Twain's Huck Finn. How damaging hegemonic images of white women
could be for black women was powerfully depicted in 1970 by Toni
Morrison in her The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press).
But most academic feminists were not teaching or writing about Morrison in the seventies. In her 1977 essay, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" (Conditions Two 1 [October 1977]: 157-74), Barbara Smith expressed outrage at the few pages focused on black women in the
"thousands and thousands of books, magazines, and articles which have
been devoted, by this time, to the subject of women's writing" (158), even
though work by African-American women writers was being published
simultaneously with that outburst of feminist criticism. Alice Walker's
The Third Life of Grange Copeland (New York: Harcourt) and Toni
Cade's The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: New American
Library) were published in 1970, along with Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
Between 1970 and the appearance of Smith's essay in 1977, a number of
novels and short story collections by black women writers had been
published: Alice Walker's In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women
3 On the status of women in the modern
languages in the early 1970s, see Florence
Howe, Laura Morlock, and Richard Berk, "The Status of Women in Modern Language
Departments: A Report of the Modern Language Association Commission on the Status
of Women in the Profession," PMLA 86 (1971): 459-68; Laura Morlock et al., "Affirmative Action for Women in 1971: A Report of the Modern Language Association
Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession," PMLA 87 (1972): 530-40;
and Joan Hartman et al., "Study III: Women in Modern Language Departments, 197273: A Report by the Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession," PMLA 91
(1976): 124-36. For an updated survey, see Bettina J. Huber, "Women in the Modern
Languages, 1970-90," Profession 90 (1990): 58-73. For additional material on the situation of minority women, see Huber's "Incorporating Minorities into English Programs: The Challenge of the Nineties," ADE Bulletin 21 (1990): 12-19.

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(New York: Harcourt, 1973) and Meridian (New York: Harcourt, 1976);

Mary Helen Washington'sBlack-EyedSusans: Classic Stories by and

about Black Women (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1975); Morrison's
Sula (New York: Knopf, 1973) and Song of Solomon (New York: Knopf,
1977); and Gayl Jones's Corregidora (New York: Random House, 1975)
and Eva's Man (New York: Random House, 1976). Accusing white feminist scholars Elaine Showalter, Patricia Meyer Spacks,4 and Ellen Moers
of ignorance and inattention if not covert racism, Smith called for the
creation of a "black feminist criticism" that-by taking into account
intersections of race, sex, and class-would be capable of understanding
and appreciating the work of black women writers. Within a few years of
Smith's article, Deborah E. McDowell had staked out "New Directions
for Black Feminist Criticism" (Black American Literature Forum 14 [October 1980]: 153-59), and the publication of several critical anthologies
of black women's writing announced the birth and demonstrated the
vigor of black feminist criticism.5
By the end of the 1970s, white, middle-class feminist academics were
forced to concede that the differences among women might be at least as
important to acknowledge and theorize as the differences between
women and men that had preoccupied not only feminist literary criticism
but feminist scholarship in general. Indeed the word "difference" assumed the talismanic significance for the 1980s that "re-vision" had for
the seventies: the tone was set by a 1979 Barnard conference whose
proceedings were published in 1980 as The Future of Difference: The
Scholar and the Feminist (Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds. [Boston: G. K. Hall]). Not only were African-American women calling attention to the particularities of their experience, but also other women of
color-Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Native Americans-and lesbians of
all races and ethnic groups were beginning to make their voices heard, in
4 Spacks's Wellesley colleague and office mate Alice Walker ("One Child of One's
Own: A Meaningful Digression within the Work(s)," in her In Search of Our Mothers'
Gardens [New York: Harcourt, 1983], 371) recalls her ineffectual efforts to introduce
Spacks to fiction by Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, Nella Larsen,
Paule Marshall, and Zora Neale Hurston during the years Spacks was working on The
Female Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1972).
5 See Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy Sheftall, eds., Sturdy Black
Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (New York: Anchor, 1979); Barbara
Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table: Women
of Color Press, 1983); Mary Helen Washington, ed., Midnight Birds: Contemporary
Black Women Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1980); Claudia Tate's collection of interviews with contemporary black women writers, Black Women Writers at Work (New
York: Continuum, 1983); Barbara Christian, ed., Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980); and the articles,
bibliographies, and sample course syllabi on black women writers collected in Gloria T.
Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the
Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (New York: Feminist Press, 1981).

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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.

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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

Jardine, eds., black and lesbian challenges to white, middle-class,

heterocentrist scholarship are offered in essays by Quandra Prettyman, Barbara Omolade, and Tucker Pamela Farley; for the "difference" represented by French intellectuals,
see the essays by Domna Stanton, Josette Feral, Christiane Makward, Jane Gallop, Carolyn G. Burke, and Naomi Schor.

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film form" to provide pleasure for male spectators of classic Hollywood

films (57).8 In 1976, Signs published a translation of Helene Cixous's
feminist literary manifesto, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (trans. Keith
Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 2, no. 1 [Autumn 1976]: 875-93), and in
1980 Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron's New French Feminisms:
An Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press) brought
translations of additional French feminists to American readers. With
language no longer a barrier and the example of British film theorists and
French feminists to suggest how male-authored theoretical paradigms
might be subverted to women's advantage, the psychoanalysis and semiotics of Jacques Lacan were rapidly supplemented with the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, the dialogics of Mikhail Bakhtin, and the genealogy of Michel Foucault as useful-perhaps even necessary-tools in the
feminist theoretical arsenal. By the mid-eighties, many American feminists had turned their backs scornfully on what they labeled "images of
women" criticism. By the end of the 1980s, it was considered inexcusably
naive to look for unproblematized representations of women in fiction if
one were to be Theoretically Correct.
Much has changed, then, since the early 1970s when feminist scholars
as well as common readers asked of a novel, "What does this say about
my life?" The canon has, it could be argued, been opened to contemporary women writers: volumes on several of them (including Atwood,
Drabble, Lessing, and Morrison) are part of well-respected book series,
the Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing societies are allied organizations
of the MLA, and even the staid English Institute-generally regarded as
the most prestigious forum for literary scholars in this country-which
did not include a panel on feminist criticism until 1981, devoted one of
its 1989 sessions to "Toni Morrison in Perspective."9 In its new post8 The feministfilm

theorypioneeredin Britainin the mid-1970sby Mulvey,Pam

Cook, and ClaireJohnstonwas profoundlyinfluencedby Frenchtheory,particularly
JacquesLacan'ssemioticrevisionof Freudianpsychoanalysisand LouisAlthusser'swork
on ideology.Theirinfluentialearlyessaysand othernow-classicexamplesof feminist
film theoryare reprintedin Penley,ed., who providesa helpfulhistoricalintroductionto
the subject.See also JudithMayne'sreviewessay on "FeministFilmTheoryand Criticism,"Signs 11, no. 1 (Autumn1985): 81-100.
9 G. K. Hall's Critical
ApproachesseriesincludesJudithMcComb,ed., CriticalEssays on Margaret Atwood (Boston, 1988), Ellen Cronan Rose, ed., Critical Essays on
Margaret Drabble (Boston, 1985), Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger's Critical Essays on
Doris Lessing (Boston, 1986), and Nellie Y. McKay's Critical Essays on Toni Morrison

(Boston,1988). The MLA'sApproachesto TeachingWorldLiteratureseriesincludes

Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose, eds., Approaches to Teaching Lessing's "The

GoldenNotebook" (New York:MLA, 1989); and ShirleyGeok-linLim, ed., Ap-

proaches to Teaching Kingston's "The Woman Warrior" (New York: MLA, 1991). Two

of the EnglishInstitute'sMorrisonpapersare publishedin HortenseJ. Spillers,ed.,

Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (New

York:Routledge,1991). Forilluminatingstatisticsabout the participationof womenin

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modernistclothes, feministliterarycriticismis so fashionablethat even

men are doing it.10
What effects has the institutionalizationof feministliteraryscholarship and the ascendencyof theory had on feministcritics'approachto
contemporarywomen's novels and more particularlyon their sense of
what relation that fiction has to women, experience,and politics?The
books underreviewhere (the best of them, at least) demonstratethat it
is possibleto theorizethe relationsbetweenliteratureand life, discourse
and experience,and fictionand politics.Takentogether,these books also
raise questionsabout selectivecanon formationand indicatethe persistence,even as we enterthe last decadeof the century,of the view that the
experienceand writingof lesbiansand women of color are "marginal."
Althoughthe books beforeme can be variouslyclassifiedand categorized, they all focus on novels that most commonreaderswould take to
be more or less verisimilarrepresentationsof "real"people, engagedin
familiaractivities,confrontingthe kinds of decisionsreadersrecognize
fromtheirown experience.This is not to say that these scholarsassume,
as perhapssome commonreadersdo, that novels are unmediatedrepresentationsof "reallife."Most would agreewith Rita Felskithat any approach to fictionthat posits a directrelationshipbetweenliteratureand
life is "theoreticallyinadequate"becauseit fails to account"for ideological and intertextualdeterminantsof both subjectivityand textualmeaning" (50). Indeed,virtuallyall feministliteraryscholarswho-for one
reasonor other-retain an interestin realistfictionareconfrontedby and
obligedto deal with what has come to be known as the Franco-American
dividewithinfeministliterarytheory(the "American"view that women's
writing "reflects" women's experience because language is a transparent
medium vs. the "French" view that "experience" is constituted in and by
language); in addition, they must contend with postmodernism's assault
on the very notion of a unified, experiencing "self."11
the English Institute prior to 1981, see Diana Hume George, "Stumbling on Melons:
Sexual Dialectics and Discrimination in English Departments," in English Literature:
Opening Up the Canon, ed. Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A. Baker, Jr. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 107-36.
10 For a recent example of "male feminist criticism" that also surveys the history of
the genre, see Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden, eds., Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism (New York: Routledge, 1990). Feminist skepticism about
this activity has been most recently voiced by Tania Modleski in her Feminism without
Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (New York: Routledge, 1991).
11 The terms of the Anglo-American debate are lucidly set forth in Homans's " 'Her
Very Own Howl' "; Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics (New York: Methuen, 1985);
and Alice Jardine's Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1985); the debate is economically summarized by Betsy Draine

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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).

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lesbian-feministmovement,which she dates from the "watershedyear"

in which lesbiansand gay men riotedat the StonewallInn in New York's
GreenwichVillage (xvi): "The purpose of this writing-self-aware or
not-is to createlesbianidentityand culture,to say,this is what it means
to be a lesbian, this is how lesbians are, this is what lesbians believe.
Whatevertheiraestheticvalue, lesbiantexts are 'sacredobjects'that bind
the communitytogetherand help express-by which I mean both reflect
and create-its ideas about itself" (20-21). The firstchapterof Greene's
Changingthe Storypersuasivelycorrelatesthe efflorescenceof fictionby
women writers in the 1960s and 1970s with the white, middle-class
women's movement.Numerous quotations from feminist scholars, activists, and writersprovideat least anecdotalevidencethat "it was feminist writing-fiction, poetry, and nonfiction-that transformedconfusion to consciousness,enablingwomen to understandthe changesthey
were living through"and to interpretthe personalin termsof the political (50). In FeministAlternatives,Nancy Walkercomparescontemporary women's fiction to consciousness-raisinggroups: both helped
women readers"see the connectionbetweenthe personaland the political" (18). And the reasonFelski,who also likenscertainwomen'snovels
(115), wants to go
publishedin the early 1970s to consciousness-raising
in
feminist
aesthetics"
her
book
of
that
title
is
to examine"the
"beyond
social functionof literaturein relationto a relativelybroad-basedwomen's movement"(7).
Both Zimmerman'sand MelissaWalker'sstudiesof fiction'sintersections with "movement"politics constructnarrativesof their own about
the last twenty years. The Safe Sea of Womenis organizedchronologically.After an introductorychapterthat provideshistoricalbackground
for the emergenceof lesbian consciousnessand lesbian-feministfiction,
Zimmermandevotesa chaptereachto the threecentral"mythsof origin"
in lesbianfiction:the formationof the lesbianself (thecoming-outstory),
the lesbian couple, and the lesbian community.These chaptersare followed by one that takes account of the fissuresthat "difference"and
identitypoliticsuncoveredwithin the hypothetical,and idealized,lesbian
community,primarilythroughbooks by lesbiansof color. An intentionally inconclusivefinal chaptersurveyslesbianfictionpublishedbetween
1986 and 1989 to attemptto discernwhat establishedgenericpatterns
continueand what new directionsmight be signaled.
Melissa Walker'sstudy of black women's novels publishedbetween
1966 and 1989 resemblesZimmerman'sbook both in the connectionsit
draws betweenfiction and events in the history and consciousnessof a
communityand in its chronologicalorganization,which subordinates
individualnovels to a largerhistoricalnarrative:"The eighteen novels
consideredhere are grouped in chapters accordingto their historical
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setting-where we have been. Within the chapters they are arranged

according to date of publication-where we are (or were at the time of
publication), which is often as significant in terms of the movement and
its aftermath as the historical setting itself" (4). Accordingly, the first
chapter considers three novels set during the period of slavery and reconstruction, arranged chronologically by date of publication: Margaret
Walker's Jubilee (New York: Bantam, 1966), Sherley Anne Williams's
Dessa Rose (New York: Morrow, 1986), and Morrison's Beloved (New
York: Knopf, 1987). Chapter 2 concerns the period between the two
world wars, as represented in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt, 1982). Chapter 3 considers
three novels set in Harlem, from the 1930s to the eve of the Montgomery,
Alabama, bus boycott, Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was a Number Runner (New York: Jove Books, 1970), Alice Childress's A Short Walk (New
York: Avon, 1979), and Rosa Guy's A Measure of Time (New York:
Bantam, 1983). Chapter 4 discusses Alice Walker's Grange Copeland and
Morrison's Sula as records of private lives lived in isolated communities
between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the civil
rights movement. The four novels discussed in chapter 5 are set at the
height of the movement-Morrison's Song of Solomon (New York:
Knopf, 1977), Kristin Hunter's The Lakestown Rebellion (New York:
Charles Scribner's, 1978), and Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and
Indigo (New York: St. Martin's, 1982) and Betsey Brown (New York: St.
Martin's, 1985). The three novels discussed in chapter 6 are set in the
postmovement mid-seventies -Alice Walker's Meridian, Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters (New York: Random House, 1980), and Morrison's Tar Baby (New York: New American Library, 1981). An afterword
considers Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar, which is set at
approximately the same time as its publication (New York: Harcourt,
1989).
Greene's book is only in part a narrative of feminist fiction's relationship to the women's movement, but it too has a chronological spine: her
analysis of novels by Lessing, Drabble, Margaret Laurence, and Atwood
is framed by historicizing chapters on the 1950s and the "postfeminist"
1980s. An implicit and often covert tendentiousness is built into chronological or developmental narratives such as Greene's, Melissa Walker's, and Zimmerman's. A "golden age" of politically valuable art is
preceded by unenlightened preconsciousness and followed by a devolutionary loss of vision.
Neither Zimmerman nor Melissa Walker theorizes the relationship she
asserts among author, audience, and historical moment. Zimmerman's
book is part introduction to the general public of a body of fiction
published largely by small, alternative presses; part taxonomy of genres,
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tropes, and conventionsof that fiction;part historyof and commentary

on "lesbianconsciousness,community,and culture"fromthe birthof the
gay and lesbiancivil rightsmovementin the Stonewallriot to the present.
For example, her chapteron "the lesbian self" brieflysummarizesthe
plots of more than a dozen novels (e.g., Sharon Isabell's Yesterday's
Lessons [Oakland,Calif.:Women'sPressCollective,1974], ElanaNachman's RiverfingerWoman[Plainfield,Vt.: DaughtersInc., 1974], Carol
AnneDouglas'sTo the ClevelandStation[Tallahassee,Fla.:Naiad Press,
1982]), describesthe conventionsof the three principalforms of the
coming-outnovel (quest,picaresque,and bildungsroman),and suggests
that the differentialvaluation of "born" and "born-again"lesbians in
lesbianfictionmay reflect"the rancorbetweenthe 'real'lesbiansand the
'political'lesbiansin the early days of lesbian feminism"(53).
MelissaWalker'sinterpretationsand evaluationsof the eighteennovels she discussesrevealherprimaryinterestto be how a novel may reflect
the culturalnormsprevailingat the time it was written(or published).A
good example is her second chapter,which contrastsMorrison'sThe
BluestEye, publishedwhen the euphoriaof the mid-sixtieshad givenway
to "despairand failing energies"(48), with Walker'sThe Color Purple,
publishedat the heightof the Reaganera. The mature,self-criticalvoice
of Claudia,The BluestEye'snarrator,"passesjudgment"on blackswho
madeit into the middleclass at the expenseof those left behind(48), but
MelissaWalkerfindsno "narrativevoice"with "moralauthority"in The
Color Purpleto speak "of the responsibilitythat privilegedpeople have
for the oppressed"(49). MelissaWalkerconcludesthat this differencehas
somethingto do with "the spiritof the time in which the books are being
read" (50). She insists that she does not mean to imply "that at a particulartime there is a monolithiczeitgeistdeterminingthe kinds of narrativeswritersproduceand readersaffirm"(8), but her unwillingnessto
blameAliceWalkerfor what she considersthe morallapsesof The Color
Purple comes dangerouslyclose to reducingthe artist to a mindless,
volitionlessreflectorof her culture:"Perhapsthe storiesnoveliststell are
so conditionedby the receptivenessof the culturethat even a writerlike
Walker-who for more than twenty-fiveyears has been committedto
social action on many fronts, includingthe civil rights movement,the
women's and the antinuclearmovements-inadvertentlyspeaks to the
valuesof the audiencedominantat the time she composesa novel, in this
case an audiencelisteningfor reassurancethat seekingeconomic prosperity and personalgratificationare valid enterprises"(72-73). If Melissa Walkerwere interestedin theorizingthe relationshipbetween authors and the zeitgeist,she might at this point invokeLouisAlthusseror
PierreMacherey,FrenchMarxists whose work on the relationshipbetween ideology and culturalproductionhaveproveduseful to a number
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of Marxist and feminist literary and cultural critics.12 But, as I said,

neither she nor Zimmerman is as much interested in theory as in narration and taxonomy. Felski, on the other hand, seems less interested in the
texts she discusses in Beyond Feminist Fiction than in constructing a
theory that "can address the social meanings and functions of literature
in relation to women writers and readers" and to feminism as an oppositional politics (19).
Drawing on Jiirgen Habermas's model of the bourgeois public sphere,
she proposes the concept of a "feminist public sphere" to account for the
diverse artistic and cultural productions that have emerged in response to
second-wave feminism. Terry Eagleton, who also invokes Habermas in
his The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984), characterizes the
"public sphere" of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bourgeoisie
as "a distinct discursive space" carved out from within a repressive political regime, "a realm of social institutions" such as clubs, coffeehouses,
and periodicals, "in which private individuals assemble for the free, equal
interchange of reasonable discourse, thus welding themselves into a relatively cohesive body whose deliberations may assume the form of a
powerful political force" (9).13 Felski's feminist public sphere is one of
several "counter-public spheres" that affirm identity politics. "Like the
original bourgeois public sphere," she says, "the feminist public sphere
constitutes a discursive space which defines itself in terms of a common
identity; here it is the shared experience of gender-based oppression
which provides the mediating factor intended to unite all participants
beyond their specific differences" (166). Felski recognizes that the femi12 The
essay by Althusser that has, perhaps, most influenced cultural and literary
critics is "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in his Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). See also
Althusser's For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1969); Althusser and
Etienne Balibar's Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1971);
and Pierre Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London:
Routledge, 1978). For many English and American readers, "post-Althusserian" Marxist
theory is epitomized by Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson (Eagleton, Marxism and
Literary Criticism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976]; and Jameson, The
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981]). For a sample of Marxist feminist cultural criticism, see Judith
Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, eds., Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class,
and Race in Literature and Culture [New York: Methuen, 1985]. An earlier, but still
pertinent, volume is Lillian S. Robinson's Sex, Class, and Culture (1978; reprint, New
York: Methuen, 1986).
13 See Jiirgen Habermas, Die Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu
einer Kategorie der burgerlichen Gesellschaft (1962; reprint, Darmstadt: Luchterhand,
1984), and his "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopaedia Article," New German Critique 1,
no. 2 (1974): 49-55. See also Peter U. Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), esp. chap. 7, "Critical Theory, Public Sphere and
Culture: Jiirgen Habermas and His Critics."

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nist public sphere is, at best, an "enablingfiction" that "engendersa

sense of collective identity" by "suspending" or "obscuring" material
differences among women (169). She finds theoretical value in this "contradictory tension," however, because she says it helps locate (and account for) diverse forms of literary and cultural productions, from realist
fictions to avant-garde practices.
How useful Felski's notion of the feminist public sphere might be in
explaining the relationship, if any, between avant-garde or experimental
feminist fiction and social change remains to be demonstrated. Combined
with sociologist Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, which describes
a dynamic relationship between human agency and social structures, it
does enable Felski to illuminate the social functions of certain autobiographical realist narratives that have been popular with women readers.14
She focuses on texts written in the last twenty years to underscore her
contention that feminist confessional narratives like Kate Millett's Sita
(New York: Farrar,1977) and narratives of female self-discovery like Atwood's Surfacing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972) or Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (New York: Dutton, 1984) do not make
up "a self-generating discourse to be judged in abstraction from existing
social conditions," but that they must be understood in relation to needs
and expectations generated by the contemporary women's movement
(121).
Felski's claim that a novel like Surfacing is "an ideological site, an
active process of meaning production" (126), like her contention that
"feminist literature does not reveal an already given female identity, but
is itself involved in the construction of this self" (78), is in keeping with
the prevailing approach to contemporary women's fiction in recent feminist criticism: to explore the interrelations of literary and social conventions, and in so doing, to theorize what some earlier critics took as
self-evident, the relation of fiction to experience and social change.15
14 Felski cites
Anthony Giddens's New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociology (London: Hutchinson, 1976) and his Central Problems
in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1979).
15 There are, of course,
important recent books that do not emphasize the ideological
implications of narrative conventions. For example, in her Free Women: Ethics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1990), Kate Fullbrook seeks to demonstrate that certain twentieth-century women writers, including Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison, used fiction to "restructure the ethical landscape by devising new patterns for assessing moral success or
failure" (1). Patricia Waugh's Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (New York:
Routledge, 1989) develops the argument that, while more innovatory than they are typically perceived to be, contemporary women writers like Margaret Drabble, Anita
Brookner, Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood, and Fay Weldon dif-

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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
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culturallymandatedstory,exposing the limits it inscribesin the process

of affirminga dominantideology" (4).
DuPlessis,Anderson,and Hite emphasizetextual exposes of the hegemonic intentions of "culturallymandatedstories."The most any of
them will claim is that a woman writer'snarrativeinnovationsmay free
her "fromthe coercivefictionsof her culturethat pass as truth"(Anderson, vii). In her Living Stories,TellingLives, publisheda year after DuPlessis'sWritingbeyondthe Ending,JoanneFryemadethe furtherclaim
that "to alter literaryform is to participatein the process of altering
women's [i.e., readers'] lives" (33). Though many novels "educate"
women into their expectedsocial/sexualroles and are thus ideologically
conservative,Fryemaintainsthat the novel is a form sufficientlyflexible
to registernew patternsand possibilitiesfor women and thus to act as an
agent of culturalchange. Other scholarsshareher view that formal innovations can have social and cultural consequences-can empower
readersas well as writers.
Gayle Greene, whose personal testimony to the transformational
power of contemporarywomen'sfictionI havealreadyrecorded,is particularlyinterestedin fiction that is self-consciousabout its own construction and narrativeconventions-"metafiction"-because it most
purely fulfills the terms of her definitionof feminist fiction: "We may
term a novel 'feminist'for its analysisof genderas socially constructed
and its sense that what has been constructedmay be reconstructed-for
its understandingthat change is possible and that narrativecan play a
part in it" (2).
Criticsconvincedthat contemporarywomen'sfictionuses discoursein
the serviceof experience-to recallthe openingepigraphfrom Teresade
Lauretis-must perforcecome to terms with a "French"feministskepticism about languagethat has challengedAmericanfeminist criticism
since 1980, when Marksand de Courtivronimported"new Frenchfeminisms" to these shores. Citing as precedentMargaretHomans's 1983
article" 'HerVeryOwn Howl,' " JoanneFryeand Nancy Walkerseek to
bridgethe apparentchasm separatingthe Americanbelief that women
can use languageto representtheirexperiencefromthe Frenchbeliefthat
women are excluded from representation.Homans had demonstrated
that realist"American"novels might questionthe abilityof languageto
representwomen "by representingtheir skepticismabout representation," in other words, by "displac[ing] unrepresentability from the structure of language to a thematics of language" (205, emphasis mine).
Nancy Walker focuses on what she sees as the two principal ways in
which contemporary women's novels have thematized language; some
novels (like Russ's The Female Man [New York: Bantam, 1975] or Fay
Weldon's Female Friends [New York: St. Martin's, 1974]) challenge male
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discourse through humor, parody, or irony, while others (e.g., Alice

Walker's The Color Purple or Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman
Warrior [New York: Knopf, 1976]) "represent women's exclusion from
language, their silence" (44). A novel like Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), of course, does both.
Because she is more interested in constructing a "feminist poetics of
the novel" than in categorizing women's novels according to a thematics
of language, Frye emphasizes Homans's "reminder that 'representation'
gains force in the formal enactment of the experiential or thematic concern" (15-16). Her discussion of Drabble's The Waterfall (New York:
Knopf, 1969) and Lessing's The Golden Notebook, whose narratorprotagonists are both writers, self-conscious about the power of art to
shape life and eager to escape textual entrapment, demonstrates how the
formal properties of fiction can "enact" its thematic concern with language and representation.
Similarly, Greene can bridge the Franco-American divide because the
metafictions she discusses-including The Waterfall and The Golden
Notebook-"thematize fictionality and make their protagonists artists
and artist figures who critique the ending and contemplate their relation
to the plots of the past" (19). Thus, although the novelists she discusses
"write within a realist, empiricist tradition which generally assumes the
reliability of language," by making their protagonists "question the old
forms and devise new ones, they expose the limits of linguistic and narrative forms from within those forms" (21).
Although these critics deal satisfactorily with language and representation, I am not sure they succeed in answering questions raised by the
assertion that "to alter literary form is to participate in the process of
altering women's lives." I find anecdotal evidence that reading novels can
alter lives persuasive; like Greene's, my professional life was irrevocably
(re)shaped by reading Lessing. And, although specializing in fiction by
"popular" women writers proved to be something of a professional liability (in the mid-1970s, at any rate), I have never regretted the decision
to devote my career to writers like Lessing and Drabble who mattered to
me in a way that James Joyce or Joseph Conrad, the male modernists I
previously "worked on," did not. But, as English professors, Greene and
I are the kind of people who take books-and their formal propertiesseriously anyway. What about nonacademic common readers, who might
not notice or appreciate the metafictional status of The Golden Notebook nor understand that because it "combines Marxist exposure of the
ways ideology is inscribed within literary forms with deconstructive critiques of an epistemology based on hierarchical oppositions, with a feminist analysis of personal as political and of female identity as processive,"
it is "a radically feminist text" (Greene, 115)?
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theoryoffersone explanationof how texts may "do"

Reader-response
unawareof narrativeconventions.Fryedrawson
even
to
readers
things
The
Act
Iser's
of Reading(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UniverWolfgang
to
sity Press,1980) explainthe "interactionbetweennarrativeschemata
and lived experience... by which readersas well as writersand characters identifynew possibilitiesfor women'slives" (202). As she acknowledges,the kindof "epistemologicalinvolvement"that mightlead a reader
to reevaluateher own "perceptualconstructions"is fostered best by
modernisttexts. Yet if a novel is to "lead the woman readerto question
not only how she interpretsher own experiencebut also what that experienceis,"it must be realist,despitemodernistand evenpostmodernist
disruptionsof realistconventions,because"to do both, the texts [must]
not totally relinquishthe expectationsof continuity,of signification,of
social reality,but ratherinvoke expectationsof meaningin the reader's
pragmaticexperience,especiallyin her genderedexperience"(201). It so
happensthat the six novelsFryediscusses-Alice Munro'sLivesof Girls
and Women(Ontario:McGrawHill, 1971), Morrison'sThe BluestEye,
Gail Godwin'sVioletClay (New York:WarnerBooks, 1979), Laurence's
The Stone Angel (1964; reprint,New York:Bantam, 1981), Drabble's
The Waterfall,and Lessing'sThe GoldenNotebook-engage in precisely
that "dialoguebetweenrealismand modernism"(201) Fryehas postulated as the optimum literarystimulus to personal and social change.
Wouldher Iserianmodel apply to less complex texts?
Another way of explaininghow novels might affect the readerand
ultimatelyeffect social change is by using the psychodynamicmodel of
readingelaboratedby JeanWyatt in ReconstructingDesire. "Can reading changethe reader?"she asks (23). Not if, as Norman Holland and
other Anglo-AmericanFreudianswould haveit, readingmerelyactivates
and reinforces"fantasypatternsderivedfrom our earliestexperiencesof
desireor frustrationin the nuclearfamily"(24). FrenchFreudians,on the
other hand, see the unconsciousnot as a reflectionand reinforcerof the
social order but as "the home of repressedsignifiersthat are systematically excludedfrom social formations"(9) and, thus, at least potentially
the source of transformation.17
Wyatt's book, which she says is a study of "the revolutionaryand
transformationalpotential of the preoedipalin novels by women" (2),
begins with an analysisof CharlotteBronte'sJane Eyre (1847), which
17

As Anglo-American
Freudians,Wyattcites NormanHolland,especiallyhis The

Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Norton, 1975); Nancy Chodorow (The Re-

productionof Mothering[Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress,1978]); andJuliet

Mitchell (Psychoanalysis and Feminism [New York: Random House, 1975]). Her chief

examplesof FrenchFreudiansare Lacan,especiallyin his Ecrits:A Selection,trans.Alan

Sheridan(New York:Norton, 1977); and essayspublishedin JulietMitchellandJacqueWinter

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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

American Psychoanalytic Association 14 [1966]: 243-72)

to his better-known books,

Analysisof the Self (New York:InternationalUniversitiesPress,1971) and Restoration

of the Self (New York:InternationalUniversitiesPress,1977), becauseit is less jargonridden.JudithKeganGardineris anotherfeministpsychoanalyticcriticwho findsa Kohutianapproachuseful (see her "SelfPsychologyas FeministTheory,"Signs 12, no. 4
[Summer1987]: 761-80).
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on books enduringlypopularwith girl readers,I am unconvinced.Even

Wyatt concedesthat "children,with theirundiminishedfaith in the possibilitiesof life, theireagernessto try on new experience,and theirproximity to the age of permeableego boundaries,may read novels with a
passionateidentificationclosed off to adult readers,"and therefore,for
adults, "makinga new fantasyone's own probablyrests on the strength
of one's desire to do so" (219). If this is true it is understandablethat
"prefeminist"women-uncomfortable livingthe "femininemystique"should have experiencedThe Golden Notebook as life-transformative.
But if novels changeonly people who want to be changed,what does it
mean to assertthat novels effect personaland social change?
As must by now be apparent,many criticswho write about contemporarywomen's fiction resort to theory of some ilk to elucidatetexts,
explainthe relationshipsbetweentexts and contexts,or describethe dynamics betweenreadersand novels. Yet, as a class, scholarsof contemporarywomen'sliteraturedo not engagein what BarbaraChristianhas
derisivelytermed "the race for theory" in her article of that name (in
Genderand Theory:Dialogueson FeministCriticism,ed. LindaKauffman
[New York:Blackwell,1989], 225-37). Neitherdo theyseemintimidated
by the "new feminist'methodologism'" that SusanBordosays has come
to lay claims"to an authoritativecriticalframework,legislating'correct'
and 'incorrect'approachesto theorizingidentity,history,and culture"
in Nicholson, ed.,
("Feminism,Postmodernism,and Gender-Skepticism,"
133-56, esp. 135). Feministcriticsof contemporarywomen'sfictionwear
theorylightlyfor the most part, combininga psychoanalyticjacketwith
a deconstructionistscarfor a Marxisthat, standingall the while on sturdy
shoes of close-readingbought from the old and now mostly discredited
New Criticismthat dominatedAmericanliterarycriticismin the 1950s
and 1960s. I suspectthereare two reasonsfor feministcritics'theoretical
eclecticism.First,the dominantformof contemporarywomen'sfictionrealism-encouragesreadersto approachit withthe samerangeof reading
strategiesthey applyto real-life"texts."In describinga recentpartyto a
friend,you might begin by enumeratingthe guests'variousoccupations
andincomes(Marxistapproach),thencompareit to a partyyou andyour
friendattendedlast year (intertextuality),and finallytell the story as you
understandit of one sadlycodependentcouple(appealto psychoanalysis).
In much the same fashion,in Boundariesof the Self RobertaRubenstein
employs psychoanalyticobject-relationstheory in discussingPenelope
Mortimer'sdepictionof maritaland maternalrelationships,switchesto
anthropologistVictor Turner'sconcept of liminality(a term he uses to
indicatea transitionalpositionbetweentwo points)to explain"dilemmas
of selfhood"in LeslieMarmonSilko'sCeremony(New York:New American Library,1978), and requiresa blend of psychological,formal, and
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anthropologicalapproachesto appreciatea text like Kingston's The

WomanWarrior,which crossesgenericboundariesseparatingfiction,autobiography,and memoir.
of contemporary
Evenmoreimportantthanthe intrinsiccharacteristics
women'sfictionin determiningscholars'approachto it, however,may be
the significanceof the fictionto the critic.And this, I think, bringsus to
a generationaldifferencebetweencriticsin theirfortiesor earlyfiftiessuch
as Rubenstein,Greene,Zimmerman,Christian,andWyatt,who testifyto
the personal,social,andculturaleffectsof readingfictionon the authority
of theirown experiencein the 1960s and 1970s, and a youngergeneration
of scholarswho not only lack those memoriesbut who also receivedtheir
graduatetrainingafter "theory"gainedits by now arguablyhegemonic
ascendencyin graduatedepartmentsof English.The "oldergeneration"
of feministcritics, among whom I numbermyself, were schooled in a
formalistcriticaltradition,whose inadequaciesand ideologicalbiasesour
feminismequippedus to discernbut whose essentialrespectfor the primarytextwe neverlost. (Aclassiccritiqueof formalismis LillianRobinson
[with Lise Vogel], "Modernismand History,"in Robinson'sSex, Class,
and Culture,22-46.) For a young scholar like Sally Robinson, whose
Engenderingthe Subjectis a versionof her 1990 Universityof Washington
doctoraldissertation,the novelsthat "haunted"GayleGreeneor "saved"
BarbaraChristian'slife areinterestingprincipallybecausethey "respond,
in one way or another,to theoreticalissuesthat currentlypreoccupyfeminist criticsand theorists"(192).2?
Robinsonis chieflyinterestedin what she callsidentitypolitics-not as
that phrase is usually meant (identifyingwith certainracial, ethnic, or
other minority positions) but as the question of how, in the light of
poststructuralism,"to theorize 'women'" (4). She combinesTeresade
Lauretis'sdistinctionbetween "Woman"(a figureconstructedby male
desire)and "women"(actualfemalepersons)with JudithButler'sidea of
genderas performanceto concludethat "neitheridentitynor genderexist
priorto their articulationin historicallyspecific,and situational,discursivecontexts"(9). (Robinsoncites de Lauretis'sAliceDoesn't:Feminism,
Semiotics, Cinema [Bloomington:IndianaUniversityPress, 1984] and
Technologiesof Gender:Essays on Theory,Film, and Fiction [Bloomington: IndianaUniversityPress, 1987] and Butler'sGender Trouble:
Feminismand the Subversionof Identity[New York:Routledge,1990].)
20 In "But What Do We Think We're
Doing Anyway: The State of Black Feminist
Criticism(s) or My Version of a Little Bit of History" (in Wall, ed., 58-74), Barbara
Christian develops the argument of her earlier "The Race for Theory" by drawing on
her experience teaching black women writers to nonacademic women "for whom this
literature was not so much an object of study but was, as it is for me, life-saving" (64).

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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

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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.

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women writers discussed by Melissa Walker and other black feminist

critics, only Morrison and Alice Walker are represented with any regularity in books and articles by white feminists.22 Of the 167 lesbian
writers Zimmerman lists in The Safe Sea of Women, only Russ is discussed in any of the other books reviewed in this essay-in DuPlessis's
Writing beyond the Ending and Walker's Feminist Alternatives. Except
for Kingston, whom Nancy Walker and Roberta Rubenstein discuss,
where are Asian-American women? Hispanic women? Native American
women?
A quantitative, "head count" approach to canon reformation is not,
however, what I have in mind. Far from suggesting that any critic writing
about contemporary women's fiction should feel obliged to include a
"token" representative of every identifiable racial, ethnic, and sexual
"subculture," I share the mistrust of critical and editorial "diversity"
projects voiced by Sondra O'Neale, Valerie Smith, and Judith Roof, cited
earlier in this essay. If feminist critics sincerely want to theorize the
relationship between experience and discourse as it is complexly figured
in contemporary women's fiction, they will need to do much more than
add one X and stir, hoping that X will blend in with all the Lessings and
Atwoods. Genuine, as opposed to token, integration of the perspectives
of "others" into the dominant paradigm(s) requires, as Judith Roof puts
it, "exchanging with and changing in relation to these perspectives" (A
Lure of Knowledge, 225). Molly Hite's meditation on Derrida's margin
or parergon provides some idea of how this might operate in terms of
literary criticism:
To call attention to the margin is to render it no longer marginal
and consequently to collapse the center in a general unsettling of
oppositional hierarchies. The turning of attention to what is not
conventionally in the center-most obviously to conventionally
marginal characters-is of course a characteristic activity of conventionally marginal writers: black women, for example. And of
course to give voice to marginality-to let the margins speak-is to
mix a metaphor intolerably, for a speaking margin cannot be a
22
For discussions of contemporary African-American women writers by black feminist critics, see, e.g., Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin's Wild Women
in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Barbara Christian's Black
Women Novelists (n. 5 above), and Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black
Women Writers (New York: Pergamon, 1985); Mari Evans's Black Women Writers
(1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (New York: Anchor, 1984); Marjorie Pryse and
Hortense Spillers's Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Gloria Wade-Gayles's No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and
Sex in Black Women's Fiction (New York: Pilgrim, 1984); and Wall, ed.

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margin at all and in fact threatens to marginalize what has hitherto

been perceived as the center. Or, rather, such a phenomenon tends
to destabilize precisely the hierarchical oppositions that give margin
and center clearly demarcated meanings. [122]
Hite's The Other Side of the Story is one of the few book-length
critical treatments of contemporary women's fiction I know that makes a
serious attempt to revise received wisdom about the literary canon by
"destabilizing" traditional understandings of margin and center.23 Contending that "changes in emphasis and value can articulate the 'other
side' of a culturally mandated story, exposing the limits it inscribes in the
process of affirming a dominant ideology," Hite says that women writers
"re-center the value structure" of narrative by "emphasizing conventionally marginal characters and themes" (2).
Hite demonstrates most effectively how this is done in chapters on the
fiction of Jean Rhys, who both subverts narrative conventions and attacks
prevailing ideologies of gender and nationality by placing a marginal
character at the center of her fiction, and on Alice Walker.Hite reads The
Color Purple intertextually with Shakespearean pastoral romance in general, The Winter's Tale in particular. She takes issue with critics who fault
The Color Purple for its "implausibilities," as if it were a "flawed" realist
novel. Instead, she argues (convincingly) that it has all the formal characteristics of Shakespeare's romances but that it inverts their patriarchal,
hierarchical values by creating a woman-centered, communal/family utopia: "As a marginal and marginalizing work, The Color Purple not only
reveals the central preoccupations of the tradition within which it locates
itself but succeeds in turning a number of these preoccupations inside
out, at once exposing the ideology that informs them and insinuating the
alternative meanings that, by insisting on its own centrality, the paradigm
has suppressed" (114). At the end of The Color Purple, "society reconstitutes itself, in the manner of Shakespearean romance, around a central
couple," but one that is black, aging, and lesbian, Celie and Shug. Thus,
"the triply marginalized become center and source" (118).
By making The Color Purple the center of her argument about the
relationship between contemporary women's fiction and the discursive
and ideological systems that have historically constrained women, Hite has
done more than just include an essay on an African-American writer in
23 SusanWillis's
of WisconsinPress,1987),whichreSpecifying (Madison:University
of blackwomwritesAmericanhistoryandliteraryhistoryfromthe "marginal"
perspective
an exceptionthatprovesmy rule.Fora historian's
en'sexperience,is a majorachievement,
to
and a recommendation
of the wholeconceptof centralityandmarginality"
"questioning
for the mythof the center,seeJacquelynDowd Hall's
substituteself-conscious
perspectivism
"PartialTruths,"Signs14, no. 4 (Summer1989):902-11, esp. 907.

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her book. Shehas takena step towardmeetingthe firstof two challenges

I see confrontingscholarsof contemporarywomen'sfictionin the 1990s:
to developan approachto women'swriting that is genuinelypluralistic
and multicultural.For white, middle-class,heterosexualfeminists,this
meansno longerfittingthe odd-and I choose the adjectiveadvisedlylesbianor woman of color into a thesis formedon the basis of our own
experienceof personalrelationships,community,and culturalhistory.It
meanslearningfrom PaulaGunnAllen and SandraCisnerosand Sherley
Anne Williamsand Amy Tan,as well as from Lessingand Atwood, what
questionsto ask when we use fiction to interrogateculture.24
Having developedsuch an approach,feministscholarsthen need to
turn their attentionto the phenomenonof so-calledpostfeministfiction.
Of the books I have reviewed in this essay, only Zimmerman'sand
Greene'sconsiderin any detail fiction written since 1985 and only the
latter labels this fictionpostfeminist.Greenefinds most recentwomen's
fictionprofoundlydepressing.She cites the evidenceof best-sellerlists as
testimonythat women'sfictionis still beingproducedand read but says
it has "shrunkin its concerns"(200). Claimingthat feministmetafiction
"devised narrativestrategiesthat renderedthe process of change and
played an actual part in transformingpsychic and social structures,in
raisingthe consciousnessand expectionsof a generation,"she laments
the discoverythat "novelsof the eighties-even by Lessing,Atwood, and
Drabble-no longer envision new possibilities" (193), groundingher
generalizationsin briefanalysesof Lessing'sThe Diaries of Jane Somers
(New York: Vintage, 1984) and Atwood's The Handmaid'sTale and
Cat'sEye (New York:Doubleday,1989). The bleaknessof The Radiant
Way (London: Weidenfeld& Nicolson, 1987) saddens her, but she
praisesDrabblefor her tenacity:"Of all these writers,she holds out the
longest, pushes the farthest,and though she abandonshope of change,
she is still passionatelyengagedwith the questionof change, still using
fictional form as a probe, and still compassionatelyinvolvedwith her
world" (222).
Greene'sbook admirablyrecapturesthe exhilarationmanyof us felt in
the early 1970s, when novelslike The GoldenNotebook, Atwood'sSurfacing,MargePiercy'sSmall Changes(New York:FawcettCrest, 1973),
and Drabble's The Waterfallcorroboratedwhat we were learning in
sessionsand movementactivism-that changewas
consciousness-raising
possible.But to concludethat becausethe women'sfictionthat turnsup
24
See, e.g., Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1983); Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (New York:
Random House, 1991); Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose; and Amy Tan's The Joy
Luck Club (New York: Putnam's, 1989) and The Kitchen God's Wife (New York: Putnam's, 1991).

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on best-seller lists these days does not "envision much possibility of

change" (200), contemporary women's fiction is "losing sight of the
connections between individual and collective" that made The Golden
Notebook personally and politically important to us twenty years ago
(201) is to ignore the possibility that "postfeminist" novels like Atwood's
The Handmaid's Tale or Sue Miller's The Good Mother (New York:
Harper & Row, 1986) may be scouting forays into new political territory.
Contemporary lesbian fiction too "has more to say about loss, compromise, and accommodation than about community and triumph"
(209), according to Zimmerman. The coming-out novel has been replaced by the novel of recovery, particularly from incest (not because
lesbians are more often incest victims than other women but because "in
lesbian feminist culture, incest has become the paradigm of patriarchal
power, the ultimate abuse by the Father" [213]). The lesbian love story
has grown darker and more complicated, eschewing the idealized happyever-after endings that characterized that genre earlier. And community is
no longer guaranteed ("it is striking how many of the romances, mysteries, and recovery novels use metaphors of isolation and claustrophobia" [220]).
Zimmerman attributes what she clearly sees as a devolution in lesbian
fiction to a lesbian feminist community that is "less vital than it was a
decade ago"; her generation has "burned out or grown up" and the
younger generation, like American society in general during the Reagan/
Bush years, seems "primarily interested in personal and economic
growth" (208). Greene also blames "a reinvigorated individualism" for
contributing-along with the resurgence of a right-wing "pro-family"
ideology-to the undoing of "the major intellectual contribution of feminism: the understanding of the individual as connected to social and
historical processes" (194-96). But the sample of fictions-novels by
white, middle-class, heterosexual writers-on which Greene bases her
opinions about a significant moment in cultural history is too narrow, too
univocal, to support meaningful generalizations. What could we learn
about the relationship between fiction and politics in the nineties if we
began with writers of color? Or working class women? And if we regularly included lesbians?
Deborah Rosenfelt's socialist feminist discussion of "Feminism, 'Postfeminism,' and Contemporary Women's Fiction" (in Florence Howe, ed.,
Tradition and the Talents of Women [Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1991], 268-91) refers to African-American, Native American, and lesbian writers as well as to writers who are white, middle-class, and heterosexual and argues that both feminist and postfeminist fiction should
be understood in relation to "a larger tradition of socially concerned
women's fiction that extends back into the nineteenth century" (269).
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She admits that "postfeminist" novels such as Louise Erdrich's Love

Medicine (New York: Bantam, 1984), Jan Clausen's Sinking, Stealing
(Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1985), Atwood's The Handmaid's
Tale, Miller's The Good Mother, and Anne Roiphe's Lovingkindness
(New York: Summit, 1987) are often "ambiguous" and seem clearly to
embody "a retreat from the visionary politics" of such "feminist" predecessors as Morrison's Sula, Piercy's Women on the Edge of Time (New
York: Fawcett, 1976), Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (New York:
Bantam, 1982), and Walker's The Color Purple. But she argues that
postfeminist novels-at least the ones she cites-have not turned their
backs on feminism's insights about male domination and women's oppression; they simply find them "insufficient" to account for "the diversity of women's experiences or naively optimistic about the possibilities
for change" (270).
The "multivalent, contradictory, conflicting voices of postfeminist
texts" not only indicate to Rosenfelt a healthy recognition of diversity
but also suggest a possible critical approach to these novels by way of
postmodernist theory. Given Marge Piercy's revelation in the afterword
to her 1991 novel He, She, and It (New York: Knopf) that she found
"extremely suggestive" Donna Haraway's frequently anthologized essay
in postmodernist theory, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," Rosenfelt may be
on to something (Piercy, 446).25 On the whole, Rosenfelt's essay strikes
me as a constructive prolegomenon to the task confronting feminist
scholars of contemporary women's fiction at this time: to theorize and
historicize today's novels rather than to memorialize a feminist high
renaissance of the 1970s.

Departmentof Humanitiesand Communications

Drexel University

25

One anthologyin which Haraway'sessay may be found is Nicholson,ed. (n. 11

above), 190-233.
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