Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature

, and: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer

as Heroine in American Literature , and: Insatiable
Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers ,
and: Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of
Women's Romance Fiction , and: Reading the Romance: Women,
Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (review)

Sharon O'Brien

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 32, Number 2, Summer 1986, pp. 353-358
(Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: [Link]

Access provided at 5 Aug 2019 12:56 GMT from UFG-Univ Federal de Goias
juan's Mulamadhyamakakarikas. Christ, also, was a deconstructor. "Christ's revela-
tions about the nature of the Trinity, as communicated in scripture and clarified
by the magisterium, persistently serve to deconstruct trinitarian theories which pro-
pose a self-enclosed, entitative triadic model" (Magliola's italics). And it was "the
Council for Nicaea (325 a.d.) which issued a series of magisterial declarations
that effectively deconstruct the subordinationist model." No doubt, no doubt. To
make his tenuous arguments, Maguóla resorts to cutesy writing and bad puns,
pretentious pseudophilology (" 'semiology' suggests, etymologically, a privileged
'unity'—the root sem indicates 'oneness' or 'togetherness' in Greek and Sanscrit
[rt'c]"), the occasional poem or prose arranged as poetry, and the putting forth
of every assertion as "radical" (for example, he argues that a theory's validity
is tested by institutions and ¡ntersubjective constraints, hardly a new position).
Although it is unpleasant and uncharitable to criticize a book written in the
author's blood, only critics with the most morbid interest in deconstruction will
find Derrida on the Mend useful.

LEONARD ORR
University of Notre Dame

ntf

Beth Ann Bassein. Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature.
Westport: Greenwood, 1984. 207 pp. $27.95.
Linda Huf. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American
Literature. NY: Unger, 1983. 159 pp. $13.50.
Madonne M. Miner. Insatiable Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers.
Westport: Greenwood, 1984. 142 pp. $27.95.
Kay Mussell. Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women's Romance
Fiction. Westport: Greenwood, 1984. 192 pp. $27.95.
Janice A. Radway. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.
Chapel HiII: U of North Carolina P, 1984. 222 pp. No price given.

Beth Ann Bassein takes on a major project in Women and Death: Linkages in Western
Thought and Literature: to examine the "image, aura, and actuality of death as
they relate to women's lives both in literature and, insofar as art represents life,
in reality as people know or define it." In exploring what she sees as the "almost
universal" associations among women, death, and sexuality in patriarchal Western
culture, Bassein ranges widely throughout history and literature, devoting chapters
to gender and language, Christianity, Renaissance poetry, adultery in fiction, the
"death aura" in modern poetry, and twentieth-century British and American fic-
tion. She ends with a chapter on Adrienne Rich, whose subversion and revision
of the traditional identification of women and death allows Bassein to end the
book on an optimistic note. An engaged feminist critic, Bassein is disturbed by
RECENT BOOKS—MISCELLANEOUS 353
the links she senses between the negative attitudes expressed toward women in
literature and male violence toward women in life; she concludes with an Appen-
dix that provides a brutal list of social crimes against women (including female
infanticide, foot-binding, rape, suttee, and murder), arguing that literary and sym-
bolic associations of women with death help to legitimate such acts.
The book's ambitious scope—Bassein's attempt to synthesize attitudes toward
women and death across cultures and historical periods—is also its major weakness.
Because Bassein assumes an unchanging continuity from the Middle Ages to the
present in cultural attitudes toward "the inseparable triad: woman, sex, death,"
she gives us an ahistorical argument, failing to account for changing ideologies
as well as for varying social and historical contexts. Hence she also oversimplifies
the complex interplay between symbolic and social systems, image and attitude,
prescription and behavior. Although she hopes to examine both the "image" and
the "actuality" of women's lives, she tends to confuse the two, as in her assump-
tion that a repressive Victorian sexual ideology "cut [women] off from real life"
and "stifled their development." Recent studies by Carl Degler and Peter Gay,
however, demonstrate that this was not the case: there was considerably more
sexual freedom and enjoyment in the nineteenth century for both women and
men than the prescriptive literature would suggest. Bassein's attempt to integrate
systems of cultural representation—literature, myth, religion—with social/historical
actualities is admirable, but her insufficient awareness of social history unfortunately
places both her questions and her conclusions on shaky methodological ground.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Linda Huf avoids the problems
raised by interdisciplinary scholarship by restricting herself to a literary subject:
her concern is the feminist exploration of the interconnections between gender
and genre. Proceeding from the assumption that the male kunstlerroman does not
tell the woman artist's story, Huf sets out to define and to analyze the female
novel of artistic emergence. She devotes an introductory chapter to isolating the
common elements in the female kunstlerroman and then applies her paradigm to
six American novels, ranging from the midnineteenth to the twentieth century:
AuM Hall (1855), The Story of Avis (1877), The Awakening (1899), The Song of the
Lark (1915), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), and The Bell Jar (1963). She con-
cludes with a chapter on the contemporary artist-heroine, looking briefly at novels
and autobiographies by Erica Jong, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Mille«, among
others.

Huf proceeds from a familiar, and important, feminist premise: that we need
to challenge the supposedly "universal" patterns literary critics have found in
literature by recognizing that certain plots and possibilities are male. Agreeing
with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's point in The Madwoman in the Attic (1978)
that most genres tell male stories about the world, Huf likewise seeks to map
the female literary imagination by showing the differences between the male and
the female kunstlerroman. She does this by relying on Maurice Beebe's "composite
picture" of the male artist-hero in Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts (1964); whereas
Beebe assumes that the woman artist fits the male model, Huf argues that women's
novels featuring artist-heroines differ from—often invert—Beebe's categories, which
Huf assumes accurately represent the male kunstlerroman. So, for example, whereas
Beebe's shy, passive male artist possesses conventionally "feminine" traits, Hufs
spirited, daring female artist possesses conventionally "masculine" traits; whereas
354 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
male artist-heroes suffer conflicts between their sensual and their aesthetic long-
ings, the female artist-heroine suffers a more serious conflict between gender and
vocation; whereas male artist-heroes have female muses, female artist-heroines
do not have male muses, and so, Huf assumes, do not have muses at all, a con-
clusion that ignores the possibility that women might also imagine creative in-
spiration as female.
Hufs use of Beebe's argument capsulizes two major problems with her argu-
ment. By relying on Beebe—who wrote his book several years before feminist
literary criticism began to have an impact on the profession—Huf chains herself
to a monolithic version of the male kunstlerroman and of the male literary imagina-
tion. She does not then question whether the model of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man (which she takes as exemplary) in fact accurately captures most
male writers' representations of dieir artist-heroes, a question diat seems particularly
necessary because Joyce himself views Stephen Dedalus with some irony.
Hufs use of Beebe's categories to structure her analysis raises a more serious
problem. Hoping to escape from male constructions of female experience, she
in fact accepts them—and thus cannot show us fully how women artists might
be rejecting the very definitions of artistry that male writers and critics employ.
For example, she does not question the traditional association of artistic power
with the Romantic, individualistic self—which is one of the male-defined categories
many women writers have challenged. As a result, Huf can find no place for
black women writers in her study, but her conclusion that "the black woman
artist is a missing character in fiction" (one which Alice Walker and Toni Mor-
rison might dispute) arises from her questionable association of artistic achieve-
ment with individualism and her acceptance of elite definitions of art. What of
our mothers' gardens? Of communal or domestic artistry, such as we find in Sarah
Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs as well as in contemporary novels
by black women writers? Not asking these questions, Huf does not fully explore
the ways in which women writers have tried to imagine creativity outside of male-
defined structures and so gives us a limited and disappointing study.
In Insatiable Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers and Fantasy
and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women's Romance Fictwn, Madonne M.
Miner and Kay Mussell go beyond the literary analytic methods employed by
the first two authors in exploring the cultural significance of popular literature
directed toward female readers. The fiction the two authors analyze differs, however;
Miner focusses on five twentieth-century best sellers (Gone with the Wind, Forever
Amber, Peyton Place, Valley of the DolL·, and Scruples), whereas Mussell examines the
contemporary formulaic romances—both series fiction like Harlequin Romances
and novels by best-selling writers such as Janet Daily and Danielle Steel—that
have become phenomenally popular in the last ten years. Drawing on feminist
psychoanalytic theory and reception theory as well as literary analysis, both authors
seek not only to explain the reasons why certain texts and genres are widely read
but also to illuminate women's psychological and social experience by showing
the interconnections between literary patterns and female fantasies. Both writers
thus want to use literary texts as cultural documents.
Miner's thesis is interesting and persuasive. Below the romantic, heterosex-
ual plot (which is frequently thwarted in the five best sellers she analyzes), she
finds a female-female plot, a maternal subtext: the search for a lost mother, con-
RECENT BOOKS—MISCELLANEOUS 355
veyed through the imagery of feeding and starving, nurturance and deprivation.
Deprived of the mother, unsatisfied by male substitutes who cannot provide the
care and tenderness they crave, the daughter-heroines, in Miner's view, suffer
the "insatiable appetites" of the tide. Miner connects this unsatisfiable female
desire to "twentieth-century, American middle-class families" in which she finds
an "early withdrawal of maternal affection from female children" as well as "mater-
nal ambivalence" about daughters. Drawing on Nancy Chodorow's feminist revi-
sion of object relations theory, Miner argues that women suffer deprivation in
the asymmetrical patriarchal family in which mothers are socially and psychological-
ly encouraged to give nurturance to men rather than to derive it for themselves.
Hence women readers—themselves insufficiently mothered—find a satisfying
"meal" in reading narratives that embody, however covertly, their own dissatisfac-
tions and desires.
Miner convinces me, through her astute literary and psychoanalytic analyses
of the novels, that the maternal subtext she sees is, in some sense, "there." But
her attempt to use literature as a cultural document—to tell us something about
the plight of women in the American middle-class family—is much less convinc-
ing because almost nothing is known about the people who read these books.
Sales figures do not reveal the gender of readers, and Miner is forced to conclude
that the overwhelming percentage of readers must have been women on the basis
of dubious evidence—the fact that the authors, publishers, and reviewers envision
a female reader.
In order to explain why these books appeal to women, Miner makes an even
more problematic assertion. She assumes that her own reading of the texts is iden-
tical with that of the average reader, even if hers is more critically aware; in
other words, she argues that a feminist psychoanalytic critic in the 1980s is reading
the same text as nonacademic readers in the 1930s who were reading Gone with the
Wind for pleasure, not for professional analysis. As she puts it, "in response to
the sceptic who doubts that a critical reader is capable of representing the reading
experience of thousands of women who have devoured Scruples, I maintain that
although I may eat more slowly and more self-consciously than members of the
female mass audience, we all eat the same meal." Although I do think that academic
critics can cogently and persuasively represent the reading experience of a mass
audience, I do not agree that we can do this on the basis of textual analysis alone;
after all, we might be eating the same meal, but tasting it differently. Although
Miner's book offers us skillful feminist and psychoanalytic readings of the novels
in question, she does not convince me that her analysis can represent or account
for the meaning (or meanings) these texts had for their readers.
In Fantasy and Reconciliation, a valuable study of romantic formula fiction, Kay
Mussell's answer to the problem of assessing the meaning texts have for readers
is to concentrate on formula analysis. She argues, as does John Cawelti in Adven-
ture, Mystery, and Romance, that an analysis of the cultural significance of popular
texts must be based on recognition of the genre's narrative conventions as well
as the cultural context in which formula stories are produced and read. Mussell
first presents her typology of romance formulas, in which she both offers a useful
guide to the variety of subgenres currently popular and establishes the centrality
of the love plot to all the formulas. Romances, she then argues, serve to "reaf-
firm and heighten the value of those areas of human life that have been most

356 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

frequently the province of women." In her analysis of the function that romances
play in patriarchal culture, Mussell ultimately concludes that romance reading
is conservative. Although women are drawn to romances because, she thinks, they
want to see the qualities they value—"love, commitment, nurturing, attach-
ment"—given the significance they lack in the dominant culture, the "romance
fantasy reconciles readers to the cultural prescriptions of patriarchy." Although
Mussell is not too clear on how the romance accomplishes this goal, she implies
that the reader's return to patriarchy is connected with the romance's conven-
tional ending, in which the heroine accepts the hero's definition of her; she becomes
part of his story instead of remaining the active subject of her own.
Unlike Miner, Mussell is aware that a feminist critic's reading of a romance
may not be identical with the average woman's. "Analysis of formulas should
be grounded in examination of their readers," she observes, "but reliable and
thorough information is difficult to obtain and interpret." Mussell does the best
she can by drawing on readership surveys, sales figures, and marketing analyses
while acknowledging that such data are inconclusive and incomplete. But because
it is not based on the "examination of readers" she would have liked, Mussell's
argument that the fantasies of romance reconcile women to patriarchal definitions
of gender and marriage remains speculative and the means by which romances
accomplish this goal unspecified.
In her brilliant study of women and reading, Reading the Romance: Women,
Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Janice A. Radway both solves the methodological
problems evident in Insatiable Desires and Fantasy and Reconciliation and presents
the most convincing and complex account of the ways in which romance reading
both springs from an unacknowledged feminist protest and recontains that protest
within conventional patriarchial social and narrative structures. Drawing on the
anthropologist's ethnography as well as on feminist, psychoanalytic, and literary
analysis and displaying the social historian's sensitivity to changing historical cir-
cumstances, Radway does not speculate about readers on the basis of her own
reading of romances but studies the meaning of romance reading for a specific
group of women in the midwest.
In the course of her research Radway encountered "Dot Evans," a bookstore
employee for a large chain who developed a newsletter in order to inform her
readers about new romance publications and to guide their selection of tides through
a rating system. After interviewing Dot and her customers and administering a
questionnaire, Radway first of all gained the essential empirical data other studies
of romance reading (indeed, of all popular fiction reading) have been missing:
the responses of real readers. From her forty-two informants Radway learned some
surprising details that might disconcert those academic critics who base their in-
terpretations on the romance plot alone: that many women readers believed that
their hobby contributed to their self-worth and assertiveness, even aiding them
in claiming more equality in their marriages; that not all romances are the same
because readers distinguish between an "ideal" romance in which female values
are celebrated and a "failed" romance in which female characters are degraded.
In analyzing the function romances play for their female readers, Radway
then develops a more complex and satisfying hypothesis than does Mussell. On
the one hand, she argues, romances function conservatively because they com-
pensate for women's emotional and psychological deprivation within the patriar-
RECENT BOOKS—MISCELLANEOUS 357
chai family, providing the nurturance and emotional satisfaction women do not
demand (and perhaps could not get) from men socially conditioned to value in-
dividualism more man relationality. This compensatory function, although betraying
women's dissatisfaction with male-female relationships as presently constituted,
nevertheless returns women readers to the "real world" with all its oppressive
structures unchanged, in fact with women emotionally reconstituted by the reading
experience and thus better able to withstand the demands of wifehood and
motherhood. On the other hand, women's desire to read—and to read repeatedly—
reveals an incipient challenge to patriarchy, and the fact that they read at times
in defiance of their family's wishes demonstrates their desire to assert and to
replenish the self. The second interpretation—stressing the romance reading as
an "activity of mild protest"—arises from Radway's innovative field work, her
anthropological commitment to read these texts from the inside as well as the
outside.
Radway's inability—given her study's limitations—to correlate readers'
responses to the romance with their real-life marriages may leave some readers
of her book unconvinced that romance reading arises from the dissatisfactions
she portrays. But her theoretically sophisticated intertwining of various
methodologies and interpretive frameworks—as well as her obvious sympathy and
respect for the readers—makes Reading the Romance a stunning contribution to
feminist and cultural criticism, the best model for analyzing popular literature
that we now have.

SHARON O'BRIEN
Dickinson College

fTfr

Nina Auerbach. Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts. New York:
Columbia UP, 1985. 339 pp. $25.00.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed. Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.
Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983-84, NS 10. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1986. 195 pp. No price given.
Joyce W. Warren. 7"Af American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-
Century American Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984. 345 pp. $23.00.

Unlike Phyllis Rose in Writing of Women (also reviewed in this issue), Nina Auer-
bach offers no apology for her "collection of previously published essays." Such
an apology would not have been inappropriate. Romantic Imprisonment provides
a brief history of Auerbach 's development as a literary critic, revealing in the
process a movement from tentative feminist insights to assertive feminist jargon.
This movement is emphasized by Auerbach's decision "to leave the earlier essays
358 MODERN FICTION STUDIES