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Jana Smith Elford, Medicine Hat College
Michelle Meagher, University of Alberta
Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2023), 361-382. 

Introduction

In their introduction to the first of two 2019 special issues of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature on the topic of Women and Archives, Laura Engel and Emily Ruth Rutter describe the archive “not only as a repository of artifacts and documents but also as a crucial epistemological concept for examining the relationship between power, knowledge, and identity, both past and present.”¹ The articles, reviews, and interrogative essays that make up those special issues are just one sign of the extent to which feminist
literary scholarship has embraced what is often described as the “archival turn” in the humanities and social sciences. Influenced by post-structural theories of history and materiality drawn from scholars like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Michel de Certeau, the archival turn marks a shift in thinking about archives as neutral repositories where documents are simply stored to a richer understanding of archives as complex sites where power and knowledge converge.² Archives are “official structure[s]
of knowledge,” so feminist researchers, including feminist literary scholars, have not hesitated to critique the role that archives play in constructing and maintaining patriarchal structures of knowledge and intelligibility.³

Insofar as archives exist as “official structure[s] of knowledge,” they are political and epistemological projects. As feminist scholar of memory Marianne Hirsch points out, archives institutionalize knowledge in particular—and distinctly political—ways. The task for scholars is not (necessarily) to dismantle archives but rather to liberate them. Hirsch explains the challenge ahead:

We need to question the very structure and conception of archives and the ways in which they institutionalize knowledge. We need to redefine what constitutes an event or a life worthy of being remembered and transmitted to the future, thus creating the opening for countermemories and for previously forgotten or ignored narratives, narratives that are potentially disruptive or
subversive.⁴

Although some feminist activists explore radical and disruptive archival practices,⁵ many researchers continue to create, use, and benefit from traditional archival collections. Even after the archival turn, archival collections remain valuable resources for feminist literary projects that center the recovery of lost voices, contribute to the recuperation of women’s participation in literary movements, and set out to reimagine the past.

Increasingly, archives take digital form. As Jacqueline Wernimont points out in a 2013 article in DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, digital archives are “the cornerstones of digital humanities and literary work.”⁶ Indeed, for many researchers, brick and mortar archives have been complemented—and in some cases entirely replaced—by the convenience of digital archives.⁷ The range of digitized materials and online databases that have become available to contemporary researchers is dizzying to consider.⁸ Unlike their physical counterparts, digital archival environments are unaffected by the limits of material space. It is, within the ever-expanding space of the online environment, imaginable that an online archive might contain every single item ever written by or about a single author.⁹ When those materials are stored digitally and shared in open access archives, feminist researchers may encounter new possibilities for disrupting patriarchal structures of knowledge and intelligibility.

In our thinking about digital archives, we follow the lead of feminist cultural historian Michelle Moravec, who promotes the use of the term “digital archival environments.”¹⁰ Moravec arrived at this term after some reflection on the complex definitional debates about the term “archive” amongst professional archivists, and she uses it to “describe accessing online digitised surrogates of materials taken from archives” (p. 186). We use the term because it makes room for a wide range of materials. A digital archival environment is not an archive; it is archival, which is to say that it is shaped by archival logics and practices. It is also not a closed collection but an environment into which researchers and readers enter to answer existing questions and discover new ones. At their best, digital archival environments pique the curiosity of researchers and readers and help the past come alive in new and unanticipated ways. Writing about physical archives, Jennifer S. Tuttle highlights this dynamic nature: “For what is the archivist’s task if not the ‘gathering, staging, and storing of texts and objects’ to allow for (rather than to foreclose) new historical narratives?”¹¹ For researchers committed to archival practices that interrogate the relationship between power, knowledge, and identity, the digital archival environment may play a key role in opening questions instead of giving answers.

For feminist literary scholars, digital technologies have played a vital role in efforts to expand access to women writers, enable research on marginalized figures, and further the longstanding effort to decenter a literary canon that has been stubbornly focused on white, western male literature. Digital archives and digital archival environments offer an alternative to conventional archival practices and impact how we think about literary worlds of the past. They provide remote and open access to materials related to authors and the literary, political, social, and cultural environments in which they worked. Given the ubiquity of this kind of project, as well as the rich scholarly and activist discourses surrounding feminist archival practices, we reflect on the impact that digital archives and archiving has on feminist literary scholarship.

As a contribution to the larger conversation, we offer here a review of four representative digital archival environments, each one focused on a single English-language woman writer: Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, The Gloria Naylor Archive, George Eliot Archive, and The Winnifred Eaton Archive.¹² Our strategy is to reflect on how these online archival environments exemplify or engage with feminist practices that we identify as foundational, as a way to address broad questions related to feminist literary scholarship in the digital age. We are interested in how feminist researchers, especially literary scholars, can engage with, develop, and build digital archival environments. Simply creating a digital archival environment that centers the work of a woman author is a strong first step, but the expansion of archives dedicated to women authors and feminist histories demands we go beyond recuperation to make further reflections on the work that these archives do and what is possible in the future. Ultimately, archives are more than just repositories of materials, they are also “sites of translation,” which means that they are not accidental, haphazard collections.¹³ All archives—and as we have learned by exploring digital archival environments, especially digital archives—tell stories about their contents. These materials are thoughtfully organized and explicitly curated; they take positions and position users. By building digital archival environments, archivists have the opportunity to engage in feminist practices and to invite and encourage their users to engage the archive with an ethic of care. Before turning to our reviews, we offer some observations on the principles that inform our evaluations. Our assessments are based on our own exploration of each site, which were guided by an interest in how digital archival environments reflect feminist principles through the following practices: situating the author in context, transparency, collaboration, acknowledging positionality, ethical stewardship, and accessibility.

The digital archival environments that we examine here contribute to feminist literary recovery and research by featuring a single woman writer through digital surrogates, or digital facsimiles, of her work that exists elsewhere in material form and by situating the author in a broader context with additional information about her writing, life, and general social, cultural, and political environment. We can examine early drafts of their works, correspondence, comments from editors, handwritten notes, private letters, published and unpublished writings, and scholarly articles about their work that enrich our understanding of the author’s writing and orientation to the world. Certainly, this deeper understanding is the promise of archival research for literary studies. Researchers have often turned to archives in order to learn more about how and why a text was produced. Among the most valuable developments to impact digital literary archives in the last thirty years are the methods and tools for searching, tagging, collating, and visualizing that provide increasingly rich and expansive interactive environments. Users are able to view timelines, chronologies, interactive maps, and personographies, all of which emphasize how literary figures interacted with their social milieux. One major benefit of the “infinitely expandable archival space” of digital environments is that users can consult virtually any text and often its contextualization.¹⁴ We view the practice of contextualization as aligning with longstanding feminist critiques of authorship understood as an individual activity grounded in artistic genius.¹⁵An archive that situates an individual author in context balances preservation and recognition of a literary figure’s impact with an appreciation for the broader social, political, and cultural environments that made their work possible. Moreover, by acknowledging that an author’s literary productions occur in context, this practice aligns with feminist approaches that insist that knowledge is always partial, positioned, and situated.¹⁶

In addition to situating each literary figure in historical and political contexts, a feminist orientation to building a digital archival environment requires transparency about the underlying goals. Archives may often appear to users as neutral accumulations of artifacts, but of course they are actively curated collections. Archivists select items to include and exclude, and they create and provide access to collections for specific reasons. They might set out to increase the reputation of a literary figure, dislodge a hegemonic narrative about the history of literature, or secure a place for an author in a larger aesthetic movement. A digital archival environment might be constructed in order to counter the whiteness or maleness of dominant archives or to provide access to queer or nonbinary authors. In some cases, the creators of digital archival environments are focused less on the literary figure at its center and more on the capacity of digital resources to expand how scholars approach the literary past. In these cases, the goal might be experimentation with digital tools, training students, and/or encouraging users to consider how they might take up these tools to make their own contributions to archival environments. In any case, in reviewing websites, we particularly appreciated those that provided transparency about the goals of the project, which we view as a key feminist practice.

Centering the often immense amount of labor involved in creating a digital archival environment is another way to put transparency into practice. In exploring the sites we review here, we were pleased to find narratives related to the goals of each project, but we were also on the lookout for descriptions of funding and acknowledgements of the labor of collaborators, research assistants, and digital resource centers that support the work of maintaining the project. In all cases, these projects are collaborative efforts involving contributions of researchers with diverse training and commitments, which is vital to accomplishing these enormous, intricate, and technically specialized projects; it is also a way to dislodge scholarly conventions that primarily value single-author scholarship.

The collaborative spirit that we identify in the sites does not stop at the named contributors—it often extends to a project’s encounters with its users. Any contemporary archive is geared at users, but the digital environment grants them the agency to actively interact with, filter, cross-reference, structure, combine, and contribute to materials. Deploying digital search capability, visualization tools, games, and other technologies creates an immersive environment for a user and contributes to an experience that is shaped less by gatekeeping and more by a spirit of collaborative participation in the construction of knowledge about a literary figure. This user experience aligns with a feminist approach to knowledge as situated but also collaborative and shared.

Transparency and collaboration combine when digital archival environments provide users with details about the tools used to build the interactive environments, such as sharing open-access code through resources like GitHub or providing accessible tools, training, and encouragement to users who want to gain digital humanities competencies. Inclusion of instructions and open code sharing reflects a feminist do-it-yourself ethos that contributes to the broader project of dislodging hierarchies between experts and amateurs. An open and collaborative relationship with users can also be reflected in a project’s policies, particularly those that invite peer review, incorporate user contributions, and outline procedures for revision and/or removal of sensitive materials.

As with all scholarship, the work of creating and maintaining digital archival environments is grounded in intellectual, political, and personal positionalities. In other words, each project team makes decisions about how it presents and frames archival materials in particular and positioned ways—none of this work is conducted from a phantasmatic view from nowhere.¹⁷ The most engaging projects are those that incorporate manifestos or codes of conduct that make these positionalities explicit and transparent. We discuss these sorts of documents in the reviews below, but note here that the transparency around goals and positionality is closely aligned with feminist methodological imperatives that demand acknowledgment of a project’s intentions, politics, and expressed voices and perspectives.

Digital archival environments additionally bear the responsibilities of stewardship, which is to say that when making available material about a literary figure, including potentially sensitive materials (personal letters, for instance, or unpublished journal entries), project teams need to balance the benefits of open access with the risks of exposure and possibly exploitation of materials. As Moravec outlines in her article about digital archives, despite the unquestionable impact that digitizing and disseminating the contents of archives has had on increasing the reach of feminist history, there are many situations in which “members of marginalised groups may have concerns about digitising materials that involve their histories” (p. 187).¹⁸ An archive ought to consider the woman writer not simply as an object of study but as a subject whose feelings, experiences, knowledge, and values must inform the project, especially when the author or her intimate circle is still living. These ethical imperatives ought to shape the kind of relationships that archivists have with authors of the past and the communities they built. There are also obligations on the part of archive users; Moravec raises “three questions researchers should consider before consulting materials in a digital archival environment. Have individuals whose work appears in these materials consented to this? Whose labour was used and how is it acknowledged? What absences must be attended to among an abundance of materials?” (p. 186).

The final principle guiding our review of the four representative projects is accessibility, a defining feature of any open digital archive. Any researcher, student, or curious fan with a computer and internet access can immerse themselves in the expansive resources available digitally, without travel, without a formal invitation, and without institutional authority. However, accessibility of design is also important. Sites should be easily navigable and clearly organized; they ought to conform to accessibility standards.¹⁹ An archival environment does this well when the design is straightforward, intuitive, and easy-to-understand with clearly articulated instructions about how to use any tools. The digital interface matters, and it shapes how we encounter the materials included in the site. Design can be authoritative and closed, or it can invite exploration and open users to creative forms of engagement with site contents. Design informed by feminist logics makes room for messiness, contradiction, and multiplicity; it offers material not only to answer research questions but to open up the curiosity of users. Feminist design, we argue, invites users to inhabit the digital archival environment, recognize its goals, and understand their role as collaborators in knowledge production. The most compelling digital archival environments not only enable users to learn about literary figures and their social, political, and cultural environments but also encourage them to ask new questions about writers and ultimately to imagine new futures even as we orient ourselves to the past.

Mina Loy (1882-1966) was a white, British-born modernist writer, artist, and inventor who produced the majority of her body of work in the early twentieth century. The award-winning Mina Loy archive, characterized by the project team as an “open educational resource” rather than an archive, aims to provide “scholarly narratives and visualizations that contextualize and interpret [Loy’s] writing, arts, and designs.”²⁰ Distinct from the other archival environments we explore here, the Mina Loy site is an “experiment in public humanities scholarship.”²¹ In their clear and accessible manifesto, the project team describes the aims of the project as not simply to “create a comprehensive digital archive or wiki” but instead “to provide a curated, multimedia, interactive platform for accessing and understanding Loy’s writing, artwork, and career.”²² The project offers interpretation of Mina Loy in the context of the larger movements and history of which she was a part.²³

The creators of the project argue that Loy’s work was deeply impacted by her experience as a world traveler. The site emphasizes her relationship to her environment through the inclusion of maps that are superimposed with photographic images of Loy. It also offers a travel guide—or Baedeker—modeled on Loy’s own innovative use of the travel guide form as a literary tool for “navigat[ing] real and imagined territory.”²⁴ The creators emphasize Loy’s engagement with the social, political, and artistic movements of her time, including feminism, Italian Futurism, New York Dadaism, and French Surrealism. The project contextualizes Loy’s work within these movements to illuminate her engagement with the avant-garde; in the process, the project reveals the diversity of these movements. In creating the born-digital multimedia resources available on the site, the team self-reflexively models the tools and digital projects on the themes and contents of Loy’s work, such as her “avant-garde migrations.”²⁵ In this way, the project puts into practice its ethical commitment to Loy and the contexts of her work, putting aside the impulse simply to collect and reproduce it and instead providing a platform for understanding her writing, artwork, and career in context.

The site contains an extensive collection of material with multiple avenues for user participation, including primary texts by Loy, map resources describing her travels and their significance to her artistic life, the afterlife of her archival material, and a game built using Twine, which is an interactive tool for exploring non-linear online hypertexts. The site is organized into four main areas. “Read,” written by the project team and its advisory board, situates readers in relation to Loy and her place in modernist culture. This scholarly section includes the project’s manifesto, close readings of Loy’s poems, and Mina Loy Baedeker: Scholarly Book for Digital Travelers, a collection of essays detailing how to understand Loy’s work in the context of her feminism, surrealism, and avant-garde theories. In this section, users can access five of Loy’s poems, which are carefully represented alongside literary analyses. In a subsection of the Mina Loy Baedeker titled “En Dehors Garde,” the creators offer a theory of the avant-garde that encourages recognition of “women, people of color, and queer or disabled artists.”²⁶ En dehors garde is an orientation to writing and art-making that draws attention away from the figures at the center of avant-garde movements and toward those who found themselves at the edges and whose contributions were informed by their marginality. This section also links to the project blog, which contains up-to-date information about recent scholarly work on Loy and exhibitions of her work in the form of conferences, art shows, and awards.

In the “Interact” area of the site, researchers can explore user and student contributions, with over twenty scholarly projects or digital exhibitions about Loy or the avant-garde created by undergraduate and graduate students. This section is distinct from other sections in that it is not peer-reviewed. Projects include an exhibit about the evolution and artistry of Loy’s signature, a collection of user-submitted postcards responding to the team’s invitation to pay attention to those on the forgotten peripheries of the avant-garde movement, and the Twine game, which encourages users to explore and understand Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” (1914). Student projects are collected under the heading “New Frequencies,” and they are explicitly offered as invitations “to interact with the work of Mina Loy and other avant-garde figures in new, experimental, and playful ways.”²⁷ In this way, the creators of this archive encourage students to use digital tools and technologies to reorient scholarship on Loy and the avant-garde. Moreover, the inclusion of a range of projects expands the perspectives represented on the site to include fans and users, not just scholars.

The “Time Travel” section of the site offers rich engagement with Loy’s biography and her avant-garde network, her archives and collections of her work, maps of her travels, and timelines charting eight significant eras in her life and career. The final section of the site, “About,” provides conventional details about the site, the project, and its members and information about the process of peer-review undertaken when the project was developed. Users will also find helpful information about how to cite each page of the project or use its custom WordPress theme. This section reveals the extent to which the developers are eager for users not only to learn more about Loy but also to gain competency in digital tools. A “DH Toolbox,” a collection of digital humanities resources, includes simple and straightforward directions, as well as easily navigable examples, for embarking on one’s own project. Here, and throughout the site, the team emphasizes web accessibility. They also emphasize the rich and unexpected benefits of taking a collaborative and collective approach to scholarship.

Included on the site is a compelling manifesto, “Mina Loy in a Digital Age,” that is critical of the way digital humanities has encouraged distant reading and superficial machine reading of large collections. Against this, the manifesto highlights a commitment to exploring how tools made popular by digital humanities scholarship and enabled by the digitization of primary texts can be deployed for close readings that generate further curiosity about an author, her life, and her times. In addition to articulating this hope for the future of digital humanities, the manifesto also outlines an explicitly feminist approach to the design of the digital archival environment. Diversity and non-hierarchical approaches are highlighted here, as are collaboration and interaction with users. Additionally, transparency is part of their feminist approach to design: “The processes of writing & revision & peer review are made VISIBLE, so that: AUTHORSHIP becomes PUBLIC & COLLABORATIVE (rather than PRIVATE and INDIVIDUALISTIC).”²⁸

Overall, the strength of this award-winning project is its rich and diverse engagement with Loy—it contains many voices, reflecting a multitude of questions about Loy, her writing, her art, and her contributions to the modernist avant-garde. While the site begins with Loy, it invites us to learn more broadly about the avant-garde movements and networks in which she participated, and it provides an example of how digital archival environments grounded in feminist scholarship have the capacity to disrupt or dislodge conventional literary histories. By centering marginalized figures and tracing the impact of their work on transnational avant-garde movements, the Loy archive challenges ideas about literary periodization and expands how we think about literary movements. Equally significant is the project’s transparent approach to positioning itself within a context of digital humanities and feminist design. In particular, the beautiful and easily digestible project manifesto makes clear how the project is shaped by radical feminist reorientations to archives; it is written in an experimental fashion and accompanied by a thoughtful and theoretically engaged explanation for the decision to experiment in this way. The authors of the manifesto point out that they were inspired by Loy’s rejection of rational and linear logics to “challeng[e] you to read outside the norms of scholarly writing.”²⁹

Ultimately, this project is an exemplary digital archival environment that models its practice of digital scholarship on the innovative avant-garde approach that Mina Loy took in her own projects. The project team is dedicated not only to expanding scholarship on Loy but also to transforming how researchers interact with archives.

Gloria Naylor Archive

Gloria Naylor (1950-2016) was a Black American woman writer best known for her acclaimed novels featuring the lives of Black women in the twentieth century. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), which depicts the interconnected lives of Black women living in a New York City apartment building, was awarded the National Book Award for best novel in 1983. Her other novels include Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey’s Cafe (1992), The Men of Brewster Place (1998), and 1996 (2006). She achieved early and ongoing acclaim for her novels and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1988. The Gloria Naylor Archive is an “interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration” that aims to “facilitat[e] engagement with Gloria Naylor’s life and works by making her collected papers widely accessible.”³⁰ Its primary objective is to preserve and promote access to Naylor’s work both through a physical archive that is currently held at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut and the online archival environment. It also aims more broadly to honor the political, intellectual, and aesthetic commitments Naylor had throughout her life and to put into practice the critiques that were central to her work. As such, a primary commitment of the project is to center Black lives. As a review in the Recovery Hub of American Women Writers notes, both the physical and digital components of the archive “[aid] in the continued critical study of Naylor whose work is integral to the emergence of Black women’s writing between 1970 and 1995.”³¹

One of the strengths of this archive is its transparency about its goals and the position that the creators take toward archiving more generally. The digital archival environment’s home page includes a welcome to scholars, educators, students, and fans; a mission statement; and a bullet-point list of guiding commitments. The mission statement is explicit in its articulation of the broad goals that shape the work of the archive. It is a political project that views its contents not simply as a collection of records that teach users about Naylor and the “transnational networks of writers” who were, like her, actively working to “expos[e] the workings of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism”; the project is also oriented toward the future.³² Its key goal is to be a resource for contemporary activists and scholars who find inspiration in Naylor’s work for their own projects on some of the most pressing issues of our day, including

mass incarceration and police violence, migration and gentrification, religion and sexuality, racism and sexism in higher education, the enduring legacies of enslavement and colonization in North America, capitalism and globalization, as well as the power of Black joy, cultural traditions, and resistance.³³

The mission statement ends with an acknowledgement of Naylor’s critiques of archives: “We register Naylor’s trenchant critiques of academic institutions (including archives) that often marginalize, erase, and do violence to Black lives.”³⁴ This recognition is immediately followed by a list of guiding commitments that reads not only as the practices of this archive but also as commitments that could be—and should be—applied to archives more generally if we wish to undo their violence. Most tellingly, this section describes archives using the language of accountability, collaboration, acknowledgement, and equitable community building.

Naylor’s archive is the only one explored here that features a woman writer whose work is still in copyright and whose contemporaries are still living in many cases. As such, the archive takes seriously its ethical responsibility to protect both Naylor’s estate and the relationships she maintained, many with Black women writers and activists who shared her political and intellectual commitments. The Naylor archive is not as immediately discoverable as other archives—much of the material requires a password and will not be found by plugging terms into internet-wide search tools. The creators of this archive have carefully weighed the benefits of open access against the responsibility to protect and care for the contents of the archive. Copyright regulations limit archivists’ ability to make documents public, but more pressing for the Naylor archivists are questions of how to protect information that is sensitive. Those whose voices and words are found in the archive and are still alive may not be willing to have private letters searchable on a public site. The project team notes that they, like Naylor, are deeply aware of the “way that digital surveillance targeted people of colour.”³⁵ The project team thus made the decision to password protect the resources and require visitors to agree to their terms of engagement. The archive is still freely available, as “anyone who asks for the password can have it, for any reason.”³⁶ Password protecting the site both preserves the copyright interests of the Naylor estate and prevents the archival materials from being scraped by search engines or AI, thus preventing material that mentions individuals from turning up in Google searches for their names when they had no say in the circulation of those materials. In this way, the creators of this archive practice a thoughtful form of responsible stewardship over its contents. This approach negotiates a delicate distinction between ease of access and protection of records from disrespectful users.

Though access must be requested to explore the digital archival materials in the Omeka repository, users can freely peruse the resources on the WordPress site. The site contains a “Highlights” section, which includes important scholarly information contextualizing and analyzing the contents of the archive as well as ArcGIS StoryMap digital exhibits, YouTube and audio recordings of collection entries, and links to related archives. In the password protected portion of the site, users can access pdf facsimile reproductions of materials related to The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, and Mama Day, including handwritten drafts of each novel as well as notes and correspondence. In fall 2023, the project team anticipates the addition of digital records related to The Men of Brewster Place (1998), Bailey’s Cafe (1992), Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to Present (1995), and various unpublished materials.

At this point, the password protected archive only searches the titles of the material, not the full-text of each item, but users will, in the near future, be able to browse materials according to type, subject, date, etc. The digital archival environment would benefit from full-text search capacity and TEI (text encoding initiative) transcription and encoding, as well as some reorganization of materials. For instance, the material in the “Highlights” section of the website includes valuable contextual information about Naylor’s work, but this information is not reproduced alongside the facsimile reproductions in the password protected portion of the site. Having the scholarly work—such as Mary C. Foltz’s articles “Insights from Naylor’s Research for Linden Hills” and “Talking about Literary Representations of Black Lesbians”—easily linked to the archival materials would give further context about Black intellectual history.

The Naylor archival environment is an impressive resource for scholarship on this figure, and it is actively being expanded and revised by the project team. Among the most valuable aspects of the project is an ArcGIS digital exhibition entitled “Other Places,” which brings Naylor’s journal entries to life and recordings of lectures and discussions between contemporary scholars of Naylor. Reflecting Naylor’s own commitment to nourishing Black community, the project is dedicated to Black feminist scholarship and to the larger project of archiving Black women writers. The site directs users to visit related archives and to recognize the interconnections between literary figures like Naylor, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, Julia Alvarez, Cheryl Wall, and Maya Angelou.

The George Eliot Archive

Of the writers whose archives we feature in this review, the white British writer George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880), often considered one of the most highly acclaimed novelists in Western literature, is likely the best known. The George Eliot Archive reproduces a substantial amount of Eliot’s body of work—some of which is unavailable anywhere else online—and information about her life and contemporaries in an extensive digital archival environment. The primary objective of the George Eliot Archive is to be a “barrier-free platform for scholars and general readers alike,” and as such, the project team has provided fully searchable and freely downloadable digital facsimiles of Eliot’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and translation through its Omeka-platformed site.³⁷ A notable feature of the project is its commitment to transparency through the open-access availability of its technical process on GitHub for others to use.

The site is divided into six main areas comprised of Eliot’s published and unpublished writings, a gallery of all known images of the author produced during her life, early contemporaneous reviews of her work and biographies written by those who knew her, and interactive data. Included in the “Interactive Data” section are three born-digital projects that mine information from the rich archival sources collected in the project in order to produce data visualizations of Eliot’s chronology, travels, and social networks. A personography, for instance, provides a visualization of Eliot’s relationships with more than 125 of her contemporaries. The people in her social network are represented by circles of various sizes—larger for closer contacts, smaller for more distant contacts. Users can also search the network and read brief biographies of each figure included in the visualization. This network is a great use of available visualization tools, though it will have more appeal to Eliot experts or to Victorianists who might have a familiarity with major (and minor) literary figures of the time. The Eliot archive presumes that the visitors already know a fair amount about Eliot. Also included in the “Interactive Data” section is an exciting, innovative, and extremely useful experiment with AI generated text analysis. This site is an example of what can be accomplished when a digital archival environment is well funded and institutionally supported.

Unlike other sites we have explored, the Eliot archive does not offer a manifesto (Loy) or mission statement (Naylor), and it does not explicitly align itself with a feminist approach. The central stated long-term goals of the site are to “provide open access to all of Eliot’s journals, notebooks, and correspondence” and to provide free access to everything Eliot has published, as well as to most of her unpublished work.³⁸ The emphasis here is on access, not interpretation. The “Contemporaries on Eliot” section, however, does collect interpretative scholarship published during her lifetime, including hundreds, perhaps thousands, of records such as reviews, newspaper articles, and scholarly writings. Though other lists of records provided on the site have been coded and made searchable, this section is simply an alphabetized list unaccompanied by any discussion of, for instance, trends, controversies, or main themes that emerge in Eliot’s contemporaries’ assessment of her work and life. But a final section of the site, titled “Current Criticism,” links to the archive’s sister sites: The George Eliot Review Online, with digital editions of the journal from 1970 onwards, and George Eliot Scholars, a platform for connecting scholars who research and discuss Eliot. On the George Eliot Scholars site, users can search contemporary criticism of Eliot’s work by keywords, such as scholarly perspectives on Eliot’s feminism (or lack thereof) and her engagement with issues of class and race. Users can also browse full text scholarly works according to type: journal articles, book chapters, theses/dissertations, conference papers, and other contributions.

The George Eliot Archive makes a significant and important contribution to public humanities and literary scholarship through the sheer amount of free, publicly accessible information about Eliot’s work and life. Its work collating and making accessible information about Eliot is impressive, and its value to Eliot scholars and to Victorianists cannot be understated. Whereas projects like the Loy and Naylor archives speak to audiences who are curious about communities, movements, political questions, or specific writerly positionalities, the focus of the Eliot archive is squarely on the author herself. Like the other three projects examined here, it treats its subject with care and respect and encourages continued scholarship. However, this project values neutrality and aims to “eliminate speculation and bias,” which raises challenging questions for feminist critiques that insist that all scholarly practices are embedded in specific social, political, and historical position/alities.³⁹ Future iterations of the site might do well to consider the inclusion of a project manifesto or policies and to consider whether accessibility for non-specialists might be a useful goal to embrace.

The Winnifred Eaton Archive

The Winnifred Eaton Archive has to work a bit harder than the Eliot archive to reach out to users, who might have come to the site for a range of reasons. Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve (1875-1954) was a popular and prolific North American author of Asian descent, whose best-known works were signed “Onoto Watanna,” a controversial Japanese persona she developed and assumed for more than two decades. Eaton received acclaim for her best-selling novel Miss Nume of Japan (1899), the first novel in North America published by an author of Asian descent, but she also wrote journal articles, plays, and screenplays. Supporting herself with her writing, Eaton’s works were enormously popular, translated in several languages, reprinted, and produced on stage and screen. The Winnifred Eaton archive is a “research and teaching tool” that aims to collect and make available “all known publications, manuscripts, and films by Eaton in one location” in order to “provide a full survey of Eaton’s work—its generic and stylistic range, its aesthetic experiment, as well as its often problematic politics.”⁴⁰ The archive not only contributes to the recovery of a significant pioneering woman writer of Asian descent, it also takes a deeply nuanced approach to the organization and contextualization of her work. Each of Eaton’s texts is situated within her extensive oeuvre, as well as alongside other contemporaneous writers and her larger social and historical milieu. In this way, the project successfully balances the goal of centering Eaton as an important literary figure with the equally important goal of informing users about the events, policies, and ideologies (such as anti-Asian racism in North America) that were the conditions of Eaton’s literary production.

Users of the digital archival environment encounter Eaton’s work in a way that resists a simple chronological re-telling. Eaton’s oeuvre is instead organized in the form of overlapping exhibits that correspond to different trends in her career: Early Experiments 1895-1902, Playing Japanese 1896-1922, New York Years 1901-1916, Alberta 1917-1954, and In Hollywood 1916-1935. These categories are one way that the creators of the archive have refused to disappear into the background; instead by offering this framing, they make themselves known, offer interpretation, and make arguments about Eaton’s work, her life, and her times. Ultimately, one of the real highlights of this archive is the transparency and explicit positionality of the project team.

While the project is still under development, each exhibit item is reproduced in pdf form, and most documents are also transcribed with TEI markup. Of the items that are transcribed, several longer works also contain tables of contents with complete chapter headings, metadata (with credits given to transcribers, proofreaders, encoders, and authors of headnotes), ways to cite the information on the page, and a way to contact the project team. The items are also fully text searchable, along with thematic and bibliographic search examples. Users can, for instance, search for works according to the pseudonym Eaton used to write them. Users are thus given multiple ways of interacting with the material. The creators are able to make arguments about the author without closing down the curiosity of users, who are encouraged and enabled to explore the material in a range of ways.

Also notable in this site is the dedication to transparency around the work involved in its creation. A section called “Contributors” includes details about more than two dozen researchers involved in various ways with the creation, management, and development of the site. Each assistant’s name and affiliation is included as are links to their specific contributions, which include conventionally invisible tasks like proofreading, transcribing, encoding text, and compiling bibliographic information, as well as the more visible work of authoring headnotes.

The Eaton archive also gives users important contextual information to fill in potential gaps in their knowledge. The project team understands that Eaton, while popular in her own time, has not remained a household name. The preambles to the digital exhibits contain scholarly information about the particular stage of Eaton’s life and writing, and the headnotes include short summaries of stories, novels, or screenplays. In the biography section, a timeline also provides important information about Eaton’s life and work in a clear and engaging format; as users scroll through a timeline, they see brief entries describing major life events as well as evocative images from the wider archive. It lists the births and deaths of Eaton’s thirteen siblings, as well as important historical information, such as the date of Canada’s head tax on Chinese immigrants, and Eaton’s interactions with important literary and historical figures like Helen R. Kellogg, Nellie McClung, and Mark Twain. The linked list of her collaborators is an extremely valuable resource that raises questions about how the research team might deploy digital humanities visualization technologies to explore the literary networks in which Eaton circulated. Though it does not use the familiar visualization or mapping technologies that are present in other similar archives, the Winnifred Eaton Archive notably contributes to the open-access development of digital humanities tools and technologies through open code sharing on GitHub. Its development of staticSearch, a client-side search engine for digital editions, rejecting outside and algorithmically biased search engines, is one such contribution.

Conclusions

What happens when we scratch beneath the surface of the veneer of detached professionalism and start to think of record keepers and archivists [. . .] as caregivers?

–Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor⁴¹

Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor describe “radical empathy in the archives” as an orientation infused by a feminist ethic of care (p. 23). It binds archive builders to “record creators, subjects, users and communities through a web of mutual responsibility” in pursuit of social justice objectives (p. 25). From our perspective, a vital aspect of a feminist archiving practice is the ethical imperative of empathy, which nurtures what we describe as responsible stewardship. As stewards rather than “detached professional[s],” members of archival project teams produce work grounded in a relationship of caregiving. Caregiving might, as it does in the case of the Naylor archive, involve protecting a literary figure and her personal and professional record from exploitation by and within technologies that are characterized by “racist digital surveillance.”⁴² Caregiving might, as it does in the case of the Eaton archive, counterbalance risk of exploitation with a robust and detailed archival environment that brings a virtually unknown figure into relief.⁴³Caregiving in the case of the expansive Eliot archive takes the form of nurturing an entire field of Eliot scholarship through its intimate ties to other sites that maintain a community of Eliot scholars. Finally, the Loy archive expresses an ethic of caregiving both in its efforts to practice the aesthetic interruptions promoted by Loy and in the relationship it establishes with visitors and users of the site who are invited to learn not only about Loy but also about how their own projects might be given digital life.

Though the researchers involved in building each of these digital archival environments have focused their attention on very different literary figures, they are at the same time engaged in a shared project of preserving, contextualizing, and making available a wide range of material related to the history of women’s writing. Contemporary scholars may come to the projects with an acute awareness of the political and epistemological force of archives. These interactive, dynamic, archival environments confirm the continued value of archives and of the archival impulse, especially for literary figures whose work has not fit easily into the frameworks of mainstream aesthetics and literary scholarship. They suggest to us the foundational role of archives:

However imperfectly, archives were established to preserve and make available material for generations to come. This longevity is why, despite issues of privacy, access, ethics, and the like, groups whose voices have been silenced or muted in Western archives have nevertheless sought to create repositories to share knowledge for their communities.⁴⁴

The projects that we have explored are representative of a huge variety of digital archival environments that are committed to knowledge sharing. Some projects prioritize providing access to archival materials; others place emphasis on providing innovative frameworks through which to explore material; others model the ever-expanding possibilities of digital tools for reorienting literary scholarship. We end here with an eye to the future and with optimism for how digital humanities tools and technologies can continue to support feminist literary scholarship. One key opportunity that goes largely unexplored in the digital archival environments we review here is LOD, or linked open data. LOD can add an exciting and expansive networked dimension to digital archival environments. It allows users “to follow connections between texts, periodical reviews, cited works, biographical information, and other forms of context.”⁴⁵ Although additional care and thought needs to be paid to projects that justifiably protect data from open access, like the Naylor archive, innovations in LOD promise to work against the siloing of knowledge and to enable researchers to explore the connections across and between texts, literary figures, and archival materials.

We see a lot of opportunities for researchers to enable connections outside their own distinct digital environments. And we are not alone in expressing an interest in connection. At the end of an essay about feminist archives of the future, Marianne Hirsch imagines a future in which archives are characterized by connection. We might imagine, she writes, the archive as

a list of holdings and as a web of connections circling within and across time and space. In such a network—we might call it a “network of complex ties”—we might stop and consider different knots and nodules, each a site for the production of feminist theory. These sites could link the past to the future in an archival web of open-ended possibility.⁴⁶

Enabling links beyond a singular archival project is exciting, important, and messy work. Reimagined as a living space of encounter that raises questions rather than a closed static resource for answering questions, archives can become complex sites of expansive possibility.

JANA SMITH ELFORD is permanent faculty at Medicine Hat College. Her training is in literary and cultural studies with expertise on the late nineteenth-century British women’s movement. She began her digital humanities career as a Research Assistant with the Orlando Project, a pioneering feminist digital project, and now co-directs the AdArchive project. A digital archival experiment built using the tools of LOD, AdArchive traces the circulation of advertisements in late twentieth-century North American magazines in order to learn more about the publishing networks that sustained feminist periodicals. Recent publications include a co-authored essay titled “From Principles to Praxis: Remediating Feminist Archives in Linked Open Data” in IJHAC: International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, A Journal of Digital Humanities. ORCID: 0000-0003-4557-836X

MICHELLE MEAGHER is Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. Her training is in the field of feminist cultural studies with a research emphasis on late twentieth-century North American feminist cultural production. With Jana Smith Elford, she co-directs the AdArchive research project. In addition to publishing a co-authored essay titled “From Principles to Praxis: Remediating Feminist Archives in Linked Open Data” in IJHAC: International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, A Journal of Digital Humanities, she is co-editor of a special issue of American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism on Feminist Periodical Studies and co-author of essays on the feminist periodical Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics in Australian Feminist Studies and Feminist Media Studies. ORCID: 0000-0002-4898-4315

NOTES

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Heather Treseler, Worcester State University
Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring 2018), 181-193. 

ELIZABETH BISHOP’S BRAZIL, by Bethany Hicok. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. 192 pp. $59.50 cloth; $24.50 paper; $24.50 ebook.

ELIZABETH BISHOP’S PROSAIC, by Vidyan Ravinthiran. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015. 250 pp. $80.00 cloth; $49.99 paper; $42.50 ebook.

“Writing poetry is an unnatural act,” Elizabeth Bishop observed in a set of notes dating from the late 1950s or early 1960s, “it takes great skill to make it seem natural. Most of the poet’s energies are really directed towards this goal: to convince himself (perhaps, with luck, eventually some readers) that what he’s up to and what he’s saying is really an inevitable, only natural way of behaving under the circumstances.”¹ That Bishop, by mid-career, aimed to make her poems seem “natural” and “inevitable” is not surprising to those familiar with her craft. But two recent books, Bethany Hicok’s Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil and Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic, enhance our understanding of the cultural circumstances and technical theater behind Bishop’s air of inevitability—the uncanny sense, which Bishop readers often have, that her finished poem could not have been written any other way without diminishing its power.

Hicok’s and Ravinthiran’s books offer new contexts for reckoning with Bishop’s enduring appeal. As Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis state in their introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop (2014), “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, her poetry seems, if anything, even more contemporary than during her lifetime, a process facilitated . . . mainly by the sheer originality and variety of her writing.”²

Hicok animates the rich complexity of Bishop’s years in Brazil, living among the cultural elite during a period of tumultuous political change and, later, personal urgency, evincing the ways in which Brazilian literature and politics informed Bishop’s poetry. It is a book that enables Bishop scholars and readers alike to see, vividly, Brazil’s place in Bishop’s imaginary. Ravinthiran, for his part, draws on a theoretical framework that includes George Saintsbury as well as Derek Attridge and Stanley Cavell to uncover Bishop’s use of sonic and semantic structures, typically germane to prose, within her poems, prose poems, literary prose, and letters. He offers a fascinating new way to interpret—and to hear—Bishop’s aesthetic, one with ramifications for the study of poetics, more generally.

Both books work against established critical tendencies to read Bishop primarily as a North American poet, one who happened to spend the greater part of two decades in Brazil, and to consider her primarily as a second generation modernist or narrative lyric poet, principally informed by the techniques of a single genre. Hicok’s study steers Bishop scholarship further away from its early North American focus, positioning Bishop’s life in Brazil among its political tensions and upheavals, the social architecture of class and race, the influences of Portuguese language and literature, and the informing richness of its landscape and ecology. In Hicok’s meticulous narrative, Bishop emerges as a poet influenced by—and indebted to—the cultural and literary legacies of both Americas. From a similarly novel perspective, Ravinthiran reads Bishop not as a poet who also happened to write remarkable letters and stories but as a writer intrinsically provoked and guided by the cadences of prose in her work across genres. Prosaic, in his definition, is rinsed of its pejorative force and repurposed to describe ways in which prose structures enhance the sound and cognitive texture of Bishop’s inimitable style.

Together, these two books extend our understanding of Bishop’s oeuvre across generic and national boundaries, moving in the direction of the speaker in Bishop’s “Santarém” (1978) who posits:

Even if one were tempted
to literary interpretations
such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female
—such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off
in that watery, dazzling dialectic.³

Written toward the end of her life, long after Bishop had returned from Brazil, “Santarém” cautions critics who might be “tempted” to apply reductive binaries to the curated ambiguities—and the “contact zones” between cultures, classes, human and non-human actors—in her poems (Hicok, p. 49). Etymologically, a “dialectic” is a dialogue, a conversation, an exchange between counterparts, and in Hegel’s classic formulation, a dialectic is also the process by which an idea is defined and fulfilled by its opposite. Hicok argues that Bishop’s years in Brazil offered that fulfilling challenge; her adopted home heightened her concerns for ecology, social justice, and abuses of power while honing her insights on “dwelling and traveling” (p. 7).

The general lineaments of Bishop’s stay in Brazil are well-known, but Hicok provides nuance, clarification, and depth to scholars’ understanding of Bishop’s relation to Brazil’s politics, class structure, literary tradition, and landscape. Bishop arrived in 1951, traveling on the SS Bowplate, which was scheduled to journey around Cape Horn. As some of her personal letters from the late 1940s indicate, she was fleeing a sense of displacement and dissipation that had increasingly haunted her life since her graduation from Vassar College in 1934. For years, Bishop had been searching for suitable environs—a climate that would not exacerbate her asthma, alcoholism, depression, or bouts of loneliness, conditions that had made her term as Consultant to the Library of Congress, from 1949 to 1950, acutely difficult. Indeed, writing to Robert Lowell, looking back on her years in New York, Bishop noted that she had been “miserably lonely there most of the time” and, while in Washington, DC, endured a most “dismal year . . . when I thought my days were numbered.”⁴

In the occasionally happy folly of fate, during the SS Bowplate’s stop-over in Brazil, Bishop had an allergic reaction to the fruit of the cashew while visiting with friends; the incident detained her in Petrópolis. As she recuperated, she began a love affair with Lota de Macedo Soares, a Brazilian aristocrat who offered to share her privileged life with the American poet, lending Bishop—for a crucial, life-altering interval—a sense of home and domestic ritual in a glass house designed by the prominent architect Sérgio Bernardes, with mountainside views and, soon after Bishop’s arrival, an in-ground swimming pool fed by a waterfall (Hicok, pp. 9, 15-16). After a purgatorial stretch, the forty-year-old poet had arrived at something like an earthly heaven.

Hicok adds meaningful complication and detail to this narrative. Bishop lived in Brazil from 1951 to 1966 and made several additional visits to the country between 1966 and 1974. By 1966, she had published two collections that secured her reputation among North American readers: Poems: North & South – A Cold Spring (1955) and Questions of Travel (1965), the former winning both the Pulitzer Prize and a Partisan Review fellowship. Alongside the writing of poems and stories, many of them drawing on local culture and landscape, Bishop was also positioning herself, Hicok argues, “in a Pan-American context” (p. 65). She hosted several visiting writers—such as Robert Lowell and Keith Botsford—through the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a United States government agency later revealed to have been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency “as part of its anti-Communist, pro-American, Cold War cultural propaganda campaign” (p. 13). More significantly, she embarked on several major translation projects that made manifest, as Hicok argues, the “underlying ideologies of race, gender, class, ethnicity, culture, and politics” in the United States and Brazil, as well as the poet’s evolving place in that gestalt (p. 66).

Translation, in its Latin roots, entails a bearing across, a carrying over. In her work as a translator, Bishop shuttled the approximate meaning of texts written in one language into another, just as she, in her fifteen years in Brazil, carried coordinates of her identity into a new environment with a wholly new set of provocations. Hicok notes that shortly after her arrival, Bishop assisted in the translation of Henrique Mindlin’s Modern Architecture in Brazil (1956), a book that featured the house at Samambaia that she shared with Macedo Soares and that testified to Brazil’s place in the architectural avant-garde (p. 9). Although Bishop, in a letter to Robert Lowell in 1960, would deride the poet Anne Sexton for what she termed “‘our beautiful old silver’ school of female writing”—referring to Sexton’s overt references to social class in her poems—Bishop was not, in 1956, overly concerned with disguising her own class privilege or new mountainside residence in poems or personal letters.⁵

For the most part, Bishop would keep the luck of her liaison with Macedo Soares and the particular nature of their relationship from public view. While Macedo Soares’s money and status afforded Bishop a generous degree of aegis, the poet had good reasons for making the details of her personal life oblique. When she strayed from the heteronormative codes of the 1950s, the poet did not always meet with acceptance from the literary establishment. Indeed, both the New Yorker and Poetry magazines turned down her fine poem “The Shampoo” (1955), in which the speaker is addressing—and tending affectionately to—a woman she loves. Katherine White, poetry editor at the New Yorker, wrote to Bishop that “this sort of small personal poem” was unsuited to the magazine.⁶

Cold War homophobia, which Bishop had witnessed first-hand while working at the Library of Congress, still cast shadows in Manhattan and Chicago as editors policed “the personal.”

The glass house in Samambaia, named for a giant indigenous fern, must have seemed worlds away from surveillance in Washington. Hicok relates that within a year and a half of her arrival, Bishop was busily translating the three-hundred-page Diary of “Helena Morley” (1957), which brought to an Anglo-American audience the autobiographical narrative of a Brazilian girl living in a mining town shortly after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the commencement of the Brazilian republic in 1889 (p. 68). Bishop’s three years of work on this project seems to have informed, in part, her own autobiographical writing about her childhood in Nova Scotia’s Great Village during and after her mother’s mental illness and institutionalization. For a $10,000 commission from Life magazine’s World Library series, Bishop also wrote the prodigious text of Brazil (1962). Although the editorship of that volume greatly frustrated her, her research for it suffused other works of poetry and prose. As Hicok notes, “beyond a doubt . . . Bishop’s artistic life was all of a piece. It was indeed ‘one art’”; even Bishop’s unfinished drafts and the Life book she repudiated supplied her imagination (p. 99).

Like her letter writing, translation complemented Bishop’s poetry and provided a way of relating to her new world and new contacts. After meeting the intriguing, elegant modernist writer Clarice Lispector in Rio de Janeiro in 1962, for instance, Bishop subsequently translated three of Lispector’s stories for The Kenyon Review and advocated, successfully, for her work among New York publishers (pp. 74-75). On a broader scale, drawing on her knowledge of Portuguese as well as on her friendships with American and Brazilian poets, Bishop coedited with Emanuel Brasil An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972), a well-regarded anthology still in print today.

In each of these undertakings, the poet sought to make aspects of Brazil’s social strata, colonial legacy, sociology of childhood, architectural styles, modernist fiction, and poetic verse legible to Anglo-American readers and, as Hicok suggests, more legible to herself. Indeed, Bishop explicitly undertook the translation of The Diary of “Helena Morley” to strengthen her Portuguese, albeit with the corollary conviction that the book would be a commercial success (p. 67). Yet these translations—and Bishop’s epistolary commentary about them—also reveal the poet’s prejudices and cultural projections. As Hicok points out, Bishop excised whole portions of Morley’s diary—without indicating to readers that she had done so—and used, in several places, racial terms such as “pickaninny,” which is indisputably derogatory in American English (p. 69). She also fetishized Lispector, a Brazilian writer born in the Ukraine to Jewish parents, as an exotic foreigner in her letters and insisted that Lispector was “‘a self-taught’ writer, like a primitive painter” despite the author’s high modernist style with its obvious debt to James Joyce, her extensive education, her training in law, and her work as a journalist (qtd. p. 77). Translation, Hicok’s analysis suggests, implicates the translator in the same way that the biographer cannot escape being reflected by the lens he or she trains on another’s life. While Bishop’s years in Brazil heightened her concern for the poor and powerless, the natural environment, and the incursion of commercial interests, Bishop also came of age among the biases of the mid-twentieth century when world wars, racial oppression, and genocide contested how we understand individual responsibility for the collective, the assumed legitimacy of social laws, and the politics of class, gender, and race. Bishop’s generation had much moral complexity with which to contend and, in this regard, the poet was profoundly of her time.

Tracking Bishop’s journey from tourist to traveler, observer to chronicler, Hicok offers contextualized readings of several major poems, stories, and unpublished accounts. She interprets Bishop’s dramatic monologue “The Riverman” (1960) in connection with Charles Wagley’s Amazon Town (1953), an ethnographic account that the poet cites, in epigraph, as an informative source (p. 122). Describing a young man’s desire to become a sacaca (shaman) for his village, Bishop integrates aspects of Wagley’s ethnographic research, which included an interview of Satiro, a young sacaca-in-training (p. 127). Hicok illustrates how Bishop draws on specific aspects of Wagley’s account as well as on the Western myths of Orpheus and Actaeon to create a shape-shifting character who aims to bring the medicinal richness of the Amazon River to his community:

I’ll be there below,
as the turtle rattle hisses
and the coral gives the sign,
travelling fast as a wish,
with my magic cloak of fish
swerving as I swerve,
following the veins,
the river’s long, long veins,
to find the pure elixirs.⁷

Seeking “the remedy / for each of the diseases,” Bishop’s sacaca is a figure, Hicock surmises, both “ethical and ecological,” who undertakes his pursuit with respect for the riverways (Poems, p. 106; Hicok, p. 129). Bishop’s concern for the environment—and its creaturely inhabitants—reappears in Hicok’s readings of other poems such as “Under the Window: Ouro Preto” (1966) and “The Armadillo” (1957). What emerges in Hicok’s meticulous literary history is a clearer sense of the ethical inflection in many of Bishop’s poems and prose narratives during and after her stay in Brazil.

Hicok situates “The Armadillo” in the context of Brazilians’ weeklong celebration of St. John the Baptist’s birthday (p. 23). Instead of benediction, however, in the poem, the religious holiday brings threat. Bishop’s poem centers on “illegal fire balloons” used in the festivities, which “flush and fill with light / . . . like hearts” as they float towards the mountaintops.⁸

At the poem’s volta, in the fifth of ten stanzas, some fire balloons are caught “in the downdraft from a peak, / suddenly turning dangerous” (p. 101). The speaker recalls a balloon splattering perilously, “like an egg of fire / against the cliff behind the house” (p. 101). Under the threat of mock-Pentecostal flames, Bishop satirizes colonial Christianity and ceremonial fires that threaten to harm believers, destroy homes, singe land, and route innocent creatures—owls, a young rabbit, a fugitive armadillo—from their nests and burrows. The armadillo’s “weak mailed fist / clenched ignorant against the sky” might signal nature’s retort to human hubris (p. 102). Hicok interprets the poem as an exploration of “environmental disaster” linked to colonialism, and she frames the figure of the armadillo in connection with Bishop’s reading of Theodore Roosevelt’s Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914) (pp. 24-25). Roosevelt notes in his travelogue that the “armadillo only curls up as a last resort,” and Hicok connects Roosevelt’s observation with Bishop’s image of the armadillo’s “weak mailed fist” as emphasizing the creature’s dire plight, signaling “that what is threatened is our home on a very personal and visceral level” (p. 26).

The cultural, historical, and biographical contexts that Hicok’s work provides prompts revelations—new ways of seeing some of Bishop’s best-loved poems. She links, for example, “The Shampoo” (1955) to the tradition of cafuné, or affectionate head-rubbing, a gesture once common among all social classes in Brazil (p. 17). She connects the political satire in the late poem “Pink Dog” (1979) to the notorious Rio death-squads, which targeted homeless vagrants under the governorship of Carlos Lacerda, once a close friend of Macedo Soares (p. 97). Brazilian sociality and political scandals alike inform Bishop’s poems’ tenderness and terror. So too, in reading Bishop’s travel narratives, Hicok recreates memorable scenes: the pale, well-dressed Aldous Huxley being studied by the Iaualapití Indians or Macedo Soares and Bishop navigating difficult roads in an old Jaguar in “deepening twilight” while men, in passing vehicles, urge them to return, “back to the Kitchen!—Vai levando!” (pp. 104, 40-41).

Bishop’s life with Macedo Soares proved, for a while, sustaining. Circulating among Brazil’s ruling elite, a class largely supported by the labor of the working poor, Bishop was also in active contact with other Brazilian and American writers, artists, and dignitaries. At the same time, daily routines and domestic intimacy balanced her public persona with a personal life that offered its own fulfillments. At Samambaia, the poet enjoyed a living room that flooded with morning clouds and cleared to dazzling vistas, a library of three-thousand books, and a household staff of cooks, gardeners, and servants (pp. 26, 6). But Hicok also turns the reader to Bishop’s anxieties about the fragility of this privileged domesticity. In her analysis of Bishop’s poem-draft “Foreign-Domestic,” dating from the late 1950s, Hicok shows how the poem hints at the precariousness of domestic contentment as it concludes with a parenthetical statement, the mode in which the poet often lodged what could barely be countenanced: “(Said Blake, ‘And mutual fear brings peace / Till the selfish loves increase . . .’).”⁹

Eventually, selfish (or self-preserving) loves and Macedo Soares’s disintegrating mental health brought an end to what had been a sanguine bond, a love once “precipitate and pragmatical.”¹⁰

After Macedo Soares’s tragic death in 1967, Bishop would feel as though the whole continent of South America had been lost to her.

Bishop’s immersion in Brazilian culture may have catalyzed her mature sensibility, sharpening her perceptions and extending her sympathies. Bishop had written to Lowell in 1960 that she feared “becom[ing] a poet who can only write about South America. . . . It is one of my greatest worries now, how to use everything . . . and yet be a New Englander-herring-choker-bluenoser at the same time.”¹¹

By the time Bishop left Brazil in 1966 to teach for a semester in the United States, she had found ways of retaining her allegiances to both the “north” and “south” poles of her experiences as a private writer and a public citizen. She could identify both as a “bluenoser,” a term used to describe someone from Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, and as an expatriate like Gertrude Stein, whose adage “And then there is using everything” from “Composition as Explanation” (1926) Bishop might have been glossing here as she mulled “how to use everything.”¹²

Considering the poet’s varied responses to her adopted home, Hicok convincingly argues—in astute analyses and carefully reconstructed contexts of published and unpublished material—that the poet’s “mature work is inconceivable without Brazil” (p. 1).

In concert with Hicok’s approach, Ravinthiran offers a bold new take on Bishop’s incorporative aesthetic. While Hicok contends that Brazil indelibly shaped Bishop’s “one art,” Ravinthiran claims that Bishop’s mature poetry achieved its distinction, in part, through its integration of prose, which leavens her lyricism with an air of intimate detachment, cognitive texture, and tonal music (p. xiv). He is quick to note, however, in chapter one, that he is not the first to have made this claim; the poet and New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss, reviewing Bishop’s Questions of Travel in 1966, praised Bishop as “revolutionary in being the first poet successfully to use all the resources of prose” with the telling caveat that “if one tries, say, to write out a Bishop poem as if it were prose, one soon realizes it is impossible to do so” (qtd. p. 1). Thus, Ravinthiran sets out to identify how Bishop utilizes “the resources of prose” and why even her more prosaic poetry proves, in the New Critical catch-phrase, irreducible to paraphrase.

His quest results in an archaeology of a neglected critical tradition concerned with prose rhythms and what Robert Pinsky has termed the “prose virtues” of poetry, which include “Clarity, Flexibility, Efficiency, [and] Cohesiveness” (qtd. p. 7). In The Situation of Poetry (1976), Pinsky argues that these traits “can become not merely the poem’s minimum requirement, but the poetic essence” (qtd. p. 7). Ravinthiran, acknowledging Pinsky, is less interested in the so-called “virtues” of prosaic poetry than in identifying its staple rhythms and means of achieving “cognitive authority” (p. xiv). For a vocabulary commensurate to this task, he turns to the work of George Saintsbury, the Victorian-Edwardian critic and biographer whom Bishop and Lowell praised in their correspondence for his History of English Prosody From the Twelfth Century to the Present Day (1906). Writing to Bishop in 1965, Lowell admires Saintsbury’s later book “on prose, prose rhythm” and tellingly advises Bishop to try “read[ing] aloud from Saintsbury” in her poetry class at the University of Washington.¹³

As Ravinthiran argues, it seems likely that Bishop, given her association with Marianne Moore, a champion of Saintsbury, knew of his History of English Prose Rhythm (1912) well before Lowell’s recommendation. In this book, Saintsbury sets forth an aesthetics of prose, advocating for the coordination of sonic patterns—including meaningful variation of stressed and unstressed syllables, unregimented by meter—alongside the pattern of expressed thought.

Quoting from one of Bishop’s collegiate letters to Donald Stanford, Ravinthiran shows that the poet was thinking intently about the relationship between meter, meaning, and mood by the early 1930s. Bishop wrote that she could, in fact

write in iambics if I want to . . . . [But] . . . if I try to write smoothly I find myself perverting the meaning for the sake of the smoothness.
. . . I think that an equally great ‘cumulative effect’ might be built up by a series of irregularities. . . . to get the moods themselves into the rhythm. (qtd. p. 18)

The arc of Bishop’s concern coincides with Saintsbury’s theory of artful prose. What is truly novel in Saintsbury’s methodology is his insistence that prose should be metrically evaluated and scanned, albeit “on a principle totally different, and indeed opposed, when compared with that of poetry. Instead of sameness, equivalence, and recurrence, the central idea turns on difference, inequality, and variety” (qtd. p. 5). Thus, instead of “perverting the meaning for the sake of the smoothness,” Saintsbury posits that a prosaic aesthetic allows for variation and difference or the “series of irregularities” to which Bishop finds herself attracted.

Intriguingly, Saintsbury cites the paragraph as the “rhythmical unit” yet also contends that “its great law is that every syllable shall, as in poetry, have recognisable rhythmical value, and be capable of entering into rhythmical transactions with its neighbours but that these transactions shall always stop short, or steer clear, of admitting the recurrent combinations proper to metre” (qtd. p. 5). Connecting Saintsbury’s aesthetic principles with Bishop’s early affection for Baroque prose writers and distaste for the ways in which Wallace Stevens made “blank verse moo,” Ravinthiran makes the case that Bishop structured her poems to be attuned to variations in syllabic stress, assonance and consonance, typography, and strategic repetition to produce a prosaic music more varied, more cognitively mimetic than the supposed speech-like qualities of iambic pentameter (qtd. p. xvii).

Lest his reader swim in theoretical eddies, Ravinthiran quickly puts his thesis to the test in compelling readings of “Seascape” (1941), “Cape Breton” (1949), and “The End of March” (1976), which show Bishop’s abiding interest in the syntactic enactments of perception. Ravinthiran notes that in Saintsbury’s History of English Prose Rhythm, the critic scans lengthy passages of prose he has lineated to isolate each clause; similarly, in lines of varying, uneven lengths, roughly coinciding with the clausal syntax of thought, Bishop’s “Cape Breton” looks like an example from Saintsbury’s book. The poem, first published in the New Yorker, shows Bishop using lineation to punctuate layers of cognition as she accents the rhythm of “a mind thinking” with assonance and consonance, anaphora, and occasional rhyme (qtd. p. 5):

The road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been
abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock
and miles of burnt forests standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones—
(qtd. p. 12)

Bishop uses lineation to frame perceptions as they follow, one upon the other. The reader, cued by the line-breaks, evaluates them singly—how might a road “[appear] to have been abandoned”?—and cumulatively, as they build upon and qualify what came before. The personification of the road—”unless the road is holding it back”—upends the passivity of the “abandoned” road two lines before it, as the speaker explores whether a landscape might control its own mystery, withholding its “meaning” beyond the reach of human sight or projection. As Ravinthiran observes, the poem engages in an “historical intelligence set to speak on behalf of a landscape which refuses to utter itself” (p. 13). Subtly, the poet draws her readers into the dynamics of visual perception, projective imagination (“where deep lakes are reputed to be”), and the cogs of consciousness in the self-conscious, self-interrogating speaker.

Ravinthiran, himself an accomplished poet, notes that “Bishop’s line-breaks work to accommodate the forestalling of prose sense; written out as prose, the successive ‘where’ phrases and paratactic ‘ands’ would jar” (pp. 13-14). Anaphora, here, provides sonic footholds in the speaker’s shale of lineated thought. The line-breaks, instead of taking on “lyrically suspensive Wordsworthian or Miltonic enjambment,” offer “a less intensive pause for consideration, a kind of sense-making rhythmic pivot” (p. 14). Ravinthiran argues that this is fitting for a poem that portrays a secular landscape, denuded of Romantic gloss or religious transcendence—a region in which, “The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills / like lost quartz arrowheads,” shibboleths—or artifacts—of another era’s system of belief (qtd. p. 12). This short passage evinces Bishop’s prosaic music in that it includes repetitions of whole words (“abandoned,” “and,” “where,” and “stones”), assonance (the play of “oa” and “ou” against “on”), consonance in parallel phrases (“deep lakes” and “disused trails”), alliterative echoes and oblique rhymes (“scratches” and “scriptures”), and the occasional perfect rhyme (“see” and “be”), lending the poem an almost subliminal structure, attuned to the unfolding of thought and consonant with what Donald Davies terms “‘cognitive’ syntax” (qtd. p. 16). As Ravinthiran contends, Bishop generates a “dialectical energy” in her work by mixing conventions of prose and poetry, disenchantment and lyricism (p. 23).

Switching between features of these discourses, the poet maintains the reader’s attention, holding her expectations in suspense. Lines of “Cape Breton,” for example, propose a qualified transcendence, one based on the contest between the seemingly unfettered voice of song and material entrapment. The stanza concludes:

and these regions now have little to say for themselves
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets. (qtd. p. 12)

The regions’ muteness, which is described in the chiding, vaguely parental clause, “have little to say for themselves,” registers nature’s prosaic resistance to the pastoral projections of human speech. Yet, as Ravinthiran points out, Bishop moves unexpectedly “out of a disenchanted landscape towards birdsong, a phenomenon conventionally linked with lyric utterance itself” (p. 15). The tension between a “freely, dispassionately” offered melody and the “brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets” draws into contradistinction creaturely instinct and the human desire to harness nature for our own nurture and edification.

Tending to the syllabic music, Ravinthiran notes “the suggestive assonance linking through themselves-except-meshing-wet-nets” with the recurrent short “e” sound that leads the ear through the end of the concluding line, with its six heavy stresses and internal rhyme of “brown-wet” and “fish-nets” (p. 15). Here, assonance literally dampens the ascendance of song (the latter signified in the long “e” and “ly” sounds of “freely, dispassionately”), weighing it down with the short “e” of “meshing,” “wet,” and “nets,” and the business of harvesting fish. Moreover, the staccato commas of the last two lines reinforce the embattlement between polysyllabic song (“freely, dispassionately”) and the monosyllabic heavy stresses of “brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets” that ground the stanza in a short, weighty final line. In other words, Bishop stages, sonically, a song that struggles to exceed its “meshing” in the torn nets of apprehension applied to what we observe and hear. Ravinthiran’s attention to soundscape and syntactic arrangement unlocks the poem’s subtle effects; his analysis makes apparent Bishop’s skill in wedding the features of more than one genre. Song, “meshing” with “fish-nets,” cannot exceed the prosaic materiality of language. Or can it? Bishop’s “dialectical energy” leaves the answer satisfyingly unclear.

Ravinthiran brings his poetic acuity to bear in close readings of a wide range of Bishop’s poems and prose poems alongside a literary history of prose aesthetics, animating a worthy mode of analysis. He also extends his critique to Bishop’s letters and literary prose, providing a revelatory way of reading Bishop across genres. In a chapter on Bishop’s letters, for example, Ravinthiran parses the acoustics of the poet’s epistolary prose in particularly notable passages, such as in the letter she wrote to Anne Stevenson in 1964 about Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Knowing that her letter would likely be made available to tertiary readers, Bishop’s prose is particularly vivid and recursively sonic. Ravinthiran asserts that it manifests the “larger assonantal network” that often appears in her published work, and he glosses the following passage, noting recurrent sounds:

Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can’t believe we are wholly irrational and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (qtd. p. 86)¹⁴

Ravinthiran emboldens the “a” sounds in this passage, while the italicized words represent Bishop’s own emphases, and the recurrent assonance seems no coincidence, especially alongside the “prose-rhymes on ‘full-face,’ ‘forgetful phrase,’ and ‘beautiful solid case’” as well as “relaxation,” “observations,” “creation,” and “concentration” (p. 86). In this famous letter, Bishop aligns the work of the artist and the scientist as heroes of vision, pioneers in the lonely work of exploring the unknown, “fixed on facts and minute details,” indulging—by necessity—a “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.” What Bishop’s sonic devices register, in her compilation of “a” sounds and prose-rhymes, is the somatic experience of that which she describes. Ravinthiran observes, eloquently, that “her letter is sensuously alive to its subject-matter, manifesting a relationship between form and content which, if not straightforwardly mimetic . . . nevertheless textures the prose with an expressive rhythm to be savored” (p. 86). While many Bishop critics have discussed and parsed this letter, few (if any) have subjected it to close sonic analysis, and what Ravinthiran reveals is useful not only in thinking about Bishop but in extending attention to the play of syllabic sound in the poets and prose writers from the past century who most warrant it.

Building upon several decades of scholarship and accelerating interest in Bishop’s poetry and prose, Hicok and Ravinthiran newly characterize Bishop’s dialectical style—her mixture of genres and geographic imaginaries as she reckoned with “life and the memory of it so compressed / they’ve turned into each other.”¹⁵

In the ways in which she chose to write and to score her lines of sight and sound, Bishop dwelled with contradictions, putting them—as Hicok and Ravinthiran prove—to profitable use, allowing a “watery, dazzling dialectic” to abide in place of overly narrow classification. These books, in ground-breaking analyses of significant aspects of Bishop’s art, invite us to extend, yet again, our understanding and our nomenclature.

NOTES

¹ Elizabeth Bishop, “Writing poetry is an unnatural act . . .”, in Prose, ed. Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 327.
² Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Cleghorn and Ellis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1.
³ Bishop, “Santarém,” in Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 207.
⁴ Bishop to Robert Lowell, 28 July 1953, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 143.
⁵ Bishop to Lowell, 27 July [1960], in Words in Air, 333.
⁶ Katherine White to Bishop, 2 July 1953, in Elizabeth Bishop and “The New Yorker”: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Joelle Biele (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 112-13.
⁷ Bishop, “The Riverman,” in Poems, 106. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
⁸ Bishop, “The Armadillo,” in Poems, 101. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
⁹ Bishop, “Foreign-Domestic,” in Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), 242.
¹⁰ Bishop, “The Shampoo,” in Poems, 82.
¹¹ Bishop to Lowell, 22 April 1960, in Words in Air, 317.
¹² Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage, 1962), 518.
¹³ Lowell to Bishop, [24 November 1965], in Words in Air, 597.
¹⁴ Ravinthiran’s text uses bold type to add emphasis; underlining has been added here to make the emphasis visually clear.
¹⁵ Bishop, “Poem,” in Poems, 197.

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Angela Hubler, Kansas State University
Vol. 36, No. 2 (Fall 2017), 463-476.

THE AFTERLIFE OF “LITTLE WOMEN,” by Beverly Lyon Clark. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 271 pp. $44.95 cloth; $44.95 ebook.

TURNING THE PAGES OF AMERICAN GIRLHOOD: THE EVOLUTION OF GIRLS’ SERIES FICTION, 1865-1930, by Emily Hamilton-Honey. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. 254 pp. $45.00 paper; $45.00 ebook.

READING LIKE A GIRL: NARRATIVE INTIMACY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE, by Sara K. Day. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. 240 pp. $55.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.

PRAISING GIRLS: THE RHETORIC OF YOUNG WOMEN, 1895- 1930, by Henrietta Rix Wood. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 192 pp. $40.00 paper; $40.00 ebook.

Feminist critics have long been concerned with the influence that literature has upon young female readers. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, suggested a remedy for the corruptions of sentimental literature:

The best method, I believe, that can be adopted to correct a fondness for novels is to ridicule them: not indiscriminately, for then it would have little effect; but, if a judicious person, with some turn for humour, would read several to a young girl, and point out both by tones, and apt comparisons with pathetic incidents and heroic characters in history, how foolishly and ridiculously they caricatured human nature, just opinions might be substituted instead of romantic sentiments.¹

It would be some time before Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex, 1952) and Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963) took up Wollstonecraft’s suggestion, critiquing literature for its role in perpetuating female subordination. This review essay examines the ways in which four recent works of feminist criticism of children’s and young adult literature are animated by this concern and by the interest in finding texts that offer alternative constructions of gender. The scholarship discussed here represents valuable, new contributions to existing bodies of research. Beverly Lyon Clark’s fascinating The Afterlife of “Little Women” traces the reception of this ur-text in the field, showing the rise and fall of the novel’s reputation and its revaluation by feminist critics in the 1970s—part of a broader project of reclamation of women writers as represented by the scholarship of Nina Auerbach, Mitzi Myers, and other pioneers in the field.² Emily Hamilton-Honey’s Turning the Pages of American Girlhood: The Evolution of Girls’ Series Fiction, 1865-1930 also usefully adds to a rich vein of scholarship focusing on girls’ series books, the analysis of which has been critically important in understanding how femininity has been represented in texts that, while they may not be highly regarded critically, have been widely read. Similarly, Sara K. Day’s Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature focuses on popular contemporary novels for girls. Her work draws on reader-response theory, which rejects New Critical insistence that static meaning inheres in the text and seeks to account for the role of the reader in interpretation. Day’s innovative scholarship combines two versions of reader-response as she analyzes both the ways that the novels she reads construct ideal readers and the ways in which readers take up and resist those constructions. The final text discussed in this essay, Henrietta Rix Wood’s Praising Girls: The Rhetoric of Young Women 1895-1930, is quite different from the others. Indeed, it might be seen as outside this review’s scope, as it is not about children’s literature at all but instead about the rhetoric of young women’s writing; however, the field of children’s literature has long been interdisciplinary. The book overlaps both with girls’ and children’s studies, and like these fields, it is concerned with the agency of those who are often denied it. Moreover, Wood’s study extends into areas—particularly those of race and class—that the others do not and provides some meticulously researched examples of how the study of the culture of girls can be expanded into areas hitherto virtually unexplored.

A locus classicus for the consideration of female agency has long been Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-1869), which has been read by generations of bookish girls, many of whom, citing the influence of Jo—the unconventional protagonist with ink-stained fingers and uncombed hair—have gone on to write novels of their own for children and for adults. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1959), for example, de Beauvoir wrote that as a girl, “[I] identified myself passionately with Jo” (Clark, p. 49). Responses like de Beauvoir’s, both popular and critical, are the focus of Clark’s The Afterlife of “Little Women.” Having edited Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews (2004) and coedited “Little Women” and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays (1999), Clark has now contributed to the field a historically organized study of the ways in which Little Women has been received from its publication to the present by examining an extraordinary range of textual evidence including reviews, biographies, sales, library circulation figures, letters, diaries, illustrations, translations, fan fiction, and adaptations of every kind from operas to vampire novels, manga, and anime. This delightful work is of interest to both the reader just beginning to wade into the enormous volume of scholarship on Little Women as well as the expert. Clark sketches broad historical trends in reception as they illuminate shifts in popular interest and in scholarly fashion. She also discusses obscure and distant responses to the text, which are nevertheless significant to understanding its cultural importance.

Clark’s masterful analysis of the novel’s reception highlights those aspects of Little Women and the cultural contexts within which it has been read that have made it so astonishingly popular and beloved, even today. At the time of its publication, the novel was read widely not only by girls but also by women, men, and boys. Reviews of the novel reveal that, prior to 1893, the division between children’s and adult literature “was not yet sharply segmented”; the reading public was also less dramatically “gender segregated” than it subsequently became, in part because of changes in the way masculinity was defined and in part because religious values increasingly gave way to capitalist ones (pp. 34, 35). The recent popularity of crossover books like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005-2008) among girls and women and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series (2008-2010) among both male and female readers of all ages compares interestingly to that of Little Women and suggests some areas within which their popularity might be investigated.

Especially prior to 1875, says Clark, Alcott’s novels were both popular and highly regarded by critics. After Alcott died in 1888, however, her critical reputation declined. Clark’s discussion of one of the earliest biographers, family friend Ednah Cheney, identifies some of the contributing factors, such as Cheney’s emphasis on the domestic and traditional qualities of Alcott and her work, attributes that did not earn inclusion in the canon of American literature during its formative stages. These factors led to different receptions depending on the audience in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the popularity of Little Women reached its highest levels while its critical reputation declined. Two events in 1912—the opening of Orchard House (the Alcott family home) and a Broadway production of Little Women—both indicate the popularity of the novel and contributed to it. Clark notes that the play and other contemporary adaptations emphasized romance and elided feminist aspects of the text, such as Marmee’s preference that her girls “be happy old maids [rather] than unhappy wives” (qtd. in Clark, p. 73); the same is true of a 1931 stage version (p. 119). While interpretations and adaptations “allowed some attention to women’s independence by the 1930s”—most notably in the 1933 George Cukor film starring Katharine Hepburn—by the 1949 film remake, the heightened pressure on women to return to domesticity after World War II resulted in a renewed foregrounding of romance and consumerism (p. 102).

The women’s movement of the late 1960s and the publication of Alcott’s “pseudonymous and anonymous thrillers,” beginning with Madeleine Stern’s 1975 edited collection Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, led to a “galvanic shift in Alcott’s critical reputation” (p. 145). These texts complicated the ways in which Alcott was understood, enabling attention to the darker, less conventional aspects of her work. While feminist interest in “women’s traditions and their connections with other women” and a revaluation of sentimentality, spurred by Jane Tompkins’s 1985 Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, has led to an explosion of scholarship on Little Women and adaptations exploring the lesbian erotic possibilities of the text, Clark notes what others, including me, have observed: a significant decline in knowledge of and affection for the novel in our students (p. 146). Clark speculates that recent musical versions of the text—”a more consciously artificial mode than most other dramatizations”—emerge from a sense that the manners of the novel are “dated, and hence artificial” (p. 198). As she argues, however, the emotive power of the novel continues to resonate, indicating the degree to which the central contradiction in the novel—”between an ideal of autonomy and an ideal of connectedness”—continues to be relevant (p. 147).

Alcott is a touchstone in Hamilton-Honey’s Turning the Pages of American Girlhood: The Evolution of Girls’ Series Fiction, 1865-1930. Hamilton-Honey’s examination begins with her own adolescent reading of Beverly Gray, Sophomore, published in 1934, which appealed to her because it focuses on a group of female friends’ collegiate and career experiences. As she read series books published for her own generation of girls, like The Baby-Sitters Club (1986-2000) and Sweet Valley High (1983-2003), however, she questioned why the focus on “college and careers” was replaced by “appearance, romance, and competition” (p. 1). Additional changes—paralleling the shift in girls’ diaries from an emphasis on internal to external self-improvement programs as described by historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997)—became apparent as Hamilton-Honey expanded her reading to older series, including those by Alcott: “social activism and benevolence in the nineteenth century gave way to consumerism and careers in the twentieth” (p. 2). The first chapter examines factors that contributed to the significance of religion in postbellum series. While readers may be aware of Emily Dickinson’s rebellious refusal to convert, Hamilton-Honey usefully contextualizes the pressures upon girls to do so, explaining that conversion was “one of the major goals of female adolescence” (p. 25). Piety, one of the core components of “True Womanhood,” motivated female activism in organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which published “the largest women’s paper in the world,” along with periodicals for children, books, and millions of leaflets (pp. 2, 48). Thus, reading and religion overlapped and much series fiction in the late nineteenth century depicts girls like the March sisters who strive to model Christian behavior, including acts of benevolence. In some fiction, like Isabella Alden’s Chautauqua Girls series (1876-1913), characters’ conversions to religious faith leads to evangelistic and political activism within specific organizations, like the WCTU. Hamilton-Honey says this “open and acknowledged interplay between the real and the fictional . . . helped promote a more active and political True Womanhood in the postbellum period” (p. 50).

Within a short period, Hamilton-Honey argues, the religious values espoused in the Elsie Dinsmore series (1867-1905)—to which Hamilton-Honey devotes sustained attention—and others are abruptly replaced by “secular American ideas of democracy and economic mobility” (p. 118). These values inform the Patty Fairfield series (1901-1919), the Grace Harlowe series (1910-1924), and the Outdoor Girls series (1913-1933) in which protagonists define selfhood and achieve cultural power through consumption. The “girl heroines” in these novels, says Hamilton-Honey, “gained a considerable amount of individual autonomy, while they lost some community influence and some of their status as spiritual leaders” (pp. 5-6). Despite this statement, Hamilton-Honey’s treatment of this fiction is perhaps more descriptive than critical. When Patty wins a luxury car in a contest in the 1911 Patty’s Motor Car, for example, and then declares herself under no obligation to the car company, Hamilton-Honey says that the novel suggests that

female customers hold all the cards. Far from being excluded from the public world of capitalism, Patty ventures into it and uses it to her own advantage, securing an expensive motor car of her very own with a few weeks of mental effort and no money at all. While this is hardly a realistic scenario, it does serve to illustrate the way that women consumers could make the most of sales and promotions, securing more goods for themselves with less money. (p. 126)

This interpretation is problematic, particularly as fantasies of female power enabled by automobiles, motorboats, and airplanes in this and other series fiction are accompanied by the disavowal of overt political empowerment in works such as The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale (1913), in which the girls twice insist that they are not suffragists and in fact “[deny] being political at all” (p. 129). While Nancy Romalov says that series books like this one “set about negating, disrupting, or dismissing the radical possibilities that might have been realized,” Hamilton-Honey disputes this and argues that the girls’ independence and athleticism aligns them with the New Women of their period (qtd. p. 129). Given the overall argument that Hamilton-Honey is making here, however, and the illusory—or at least very partial—nature of the power provided by consumption within a capitalist society, this discussion should be more developed.

Hamilton-Honey argues that the Outdoor Girls, Ruth Fielding, Grace Harlowe, and Khaki Girls series (1918-1920), published and set in World War I, broke with representations of femininity typical of both earlier and later periods: “the heroines in these series do not reflect either the benevolent woman of the nineteenth century or the educated consumers of the turn of the century. They become, instead, fierce patriots devoted to serving the Allied cause” (p. 7). One such patriot is Ruth Fielding, the heroine of an unusually long-running series, beginning in 1913 and spanning twenty years in thirty volumes. Ruth’s exploits are discussed both in Hamilton-Honey’s chapter on World War I series fiction and in a chapter devoted to the Ruth Fielding series, which focuses on Ruth’s unique status as “perhaps” the first book series heroine with a professional career—she works in the budding film industry as an actress, screenwriter, producer, and executive (p. 8). Hamilton-Honey’s research shows that Ruth’s work for the fictional Alectrion Film Corporation paralleled the careers of women in the early film industry, which offered them opportunities as actresses, writers, and directors. Despite the opportunities for women within film, Ruth must confront sexist skeptics who doubt her abilities, and she observes in a 1926 volume that “there are good woman directors in the moving picture business . . . . But they have always had to work twice as hard to prove their ability as a man in the same position” (qtd. p. 210). Though Ruth does not marry till the twenty-fourth volume in the series, balancing work and love presents another challenge to her. With the support of her fiancé, and then husband, however, Ruth continues working after marrying and having a child. Hamilton-Honey concludes that Ruth is the “ideal heroine for the fully modern, twentieth-century girl” (p. 222).

In a brief conclusion, however, Hamilton-Honey persuasively shows that the realistic, historical conflicts experienced by heroines like Ruth disappear in the new era of series books ushered in with Nancy Drew in 1930. Nancy never makes the transition to adulthood, college, marriage, or a career, nor does she engage with the central “religious, political, and social questions” of her time as do so many previous series heroines (p. 229). Hamilton-Honey provides a good deal of useful and relevant historical context for the shifts she analyzes. However, linking these shifts to political-economic change as it impacted gender and gender relations would further illuminate them. Nevertheless, the contrasts that Hamilton-Honey highlights are provocative and significant, and her historical analysis of series books enables a more informed reading of contemporary fiction.

The highly personal, as opposed to social, orientation of contemporary girls’ fiction is the focus of Day’s Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature, which examines intimate relationships between readers and the first-person narrators, which have become de rigueur in books for adolescent female readers. While other critics have discussed the prevalence of the first-person narrator (and the relative advantages and disadvantages it affords), Day makes significant contributions to this scholarship by illuminating the gendered social context that has shaped the use of this formal literary convention. Day situates the trend toward first-person narrators within the increasingly public nature of intimacy in American culture, which has been discussed by Lauren Berlant and others and is exemplified by “social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook” (p. 8). While the trend toward public self-disclosure is pervasive, Day notes that emotional intimacy has historically been associated with femininity. Thus, the dangers posed to female adolescents by intimate relationships, as well as their critical importance, is a significant theme in the raft of academic and popular writing on female adolescence, which seeks to address the concerns raised by Carol Gilligan’s influential assertion that loss of voice is definitive of female adolescence and by the work of Mary Pipher, the American Association of University Women, and others that have focused popular and scholarly attention on adolescence as a crisis point in female development.³ Day focuses on self-help books targeted at girls and their parents in chapters organized around the themes of friendship, love and desire, and sexual assault, and she shows the ways that the fiction she analyzes takes up the concerns of these nonfictional texts; she discusses the ways in which both nonfiction and fiction employ similar formal techniques to create narrative intimacy. In fiction, says Day, these techniques blur the boundary with reality. Drawing on reader-response theorists including Susan Lanser and Wolfgang Iser, Day argues that readers’ identifications with narrators allow them to experience “the realities of young adulthood vicariously through the narrators’ stories” (p. 18).

One of Day’s central arguments is that many of the novels that she analyzes, which thematize intimacy at the same time that they model it through the intimate relationships constructed between narrator and reader, present readers with a contradictory message. On the one hand, says Day, novels like Sarah Dessen’s Keeping the Moon (1999) and Natasha Friends’s Perfect (2004) instruct readers that self-disclosure is a critically important aspect of friendship. Others, however, like Siobhan Vivian’s A Little Friendly Advice (2008) and Lizabeth Zindel’s The Secret Rites of Social Butterflies (2008), reveal the ways that disclosure can lead to manipulation and betrayal, “simultaneously warning against disclosure while crafting a narrator-reader relationship that depends upon the narrator’s willingness to share thoughts, feelings, and—perhaps most importantly, in this case—secrets” (p. 56). Day argues that this contradiction parallels the conflicting cultural expectations of adolescent women and intimacy. One could, however, read The Secret Rites of Social Butterflies not as a warning against disclosure altogether but as a reminder to readers to choose their friends and those they trust carefully. Perhaps I am less perceptive than Day, but I find the dynamics she comments upon less truly contradictory and more a reflection of the complexities of intimacy.

Day sees a related contradiction in her analysis of novels by Laurie Halse Anderson, Deb Caletti, Sarah Dessen, Niki Burnham, Louisa Burnham, and Courtney Summers that focus on rape and sexual abuse. Day advances an interesting thesis that a kind of “reverse bibliotherapy” is reflected in these novels: the narrator who has experienced a violation withdraws from intimacy and regains it only through the implied reader who listens without judgement and without inflicting further injuries upon the traumatized narrator (p. 26). Day argues,

Although the process of reclaiming intimacy seems to empower the narrator and offer the reader a positive model of healing and strength, the narrators’ dependence upon the reader might in fact be seen as reinforcing adolescent women’s vulnerability and general lack of control over intimacy because the only truly safe space for what is figured as a necessary disclosure—one without which the narrator cannot begin to heal—is the impossible relationship with the reader. (p. 106)

The relationship between the narrator and reader is, of course, impossible since it is between a function of a narrative text and a human being. However, a relationship in which self-disclosure is met with support and acceptance is not. Thus, one might read the construction of such relationships as representing not only that self-disclosure is healing but also that particular responses to that self-disclosure are critically important. While her argument perhaps overreaches, asserting more theoretical significance than the texts will bear, Day provides readings of these novels that are original and frequently insightful.

Her final chapter, “Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of Narrative Intimacy,” is particularly instructive. The majority of fan fiction is written by female fans and emerges from fan communities within which authors frequently participate. These fan communities, says Day, “can also potentially mimic the ‘safe space’ of narrative intimacy modeled in the novels that adolescent women read and to which they respond” (p. 186). These safe spaces extend the narrator-reader’s relationship “into the ‘real world’” (p. 187). Fan fiction is a site in which reception can be assessed but also one in which the reader is able to wrest a degree of control from the author, as their creations frequently diverge from the original, “often as a means of privileging the reader’s desires over the intentions of the original texts,” with fascinating results (p. 191). For example, while Twilight is deeply heteronormative, Clark reports that in addition to fan fiction focused on the relationship between Bella and Edward, another popular variant, “femslash” (lesbian) fanfiction, develops a romance between Bella and Alice (p. 199). Day argues that the fan fiction writers’ sense of ownership over these texts and characters derives from the narrative intimacy that they have constructed.

Wood’s Praising Girls: The Rhetoric of Young Women, 1895-1930 employs a methodology that centers on the intersections of gender with race and class to investigate the relationships that authors strive to construct with readers. Wood analyzes the rhetoric of public writing—in newspapers, yearbooks, and magazines—by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century girls from four high schools in the Kansas City area. One of these, Miss Barstow’s School, a private girls’ school founded in 1884, enrolled the white, privileged girls that are too often at the center of scholarly and popular work focusing on girls. In addition, however, Wood includes Haskell Institute, a government boarding school for Native Americans in Lawrence, Kansas; Lincoln High, “the only public secondary school for African Americans in Kansas City, Missouri” (pp. 88-89); and Central High School, the largest public secondary school in Kansas City, at which the white working and middle-class “student body was splintered into factions based on gender, academic class, literary societies, and athletic organizations” (pp. xx-xxi). Wood’s study is a necessary and critically important complement to scholarship like Hamilton-Honey’s on fiction addressed to and depicting white girls. As indicated by Rudine Sims Bishop’s Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature (2007)—a masterful history of African American children’s literature—series book fiction representing black children did not appear until the late twentieth-century. Thus, in order to “see” the discursive construction of gender by Native American, Latina, and black girls, we must look beyond the output of a racist publishing industry that continues to neglect the lives of children of color.

Wood “reconceptualizes epideictic rhetoric as a tool used by young women rather than a prerogative of powerful men giving speeches of praise or blame” (p. xi). Wood explains that the epideictic, as defined by Aristotle, is “persuasive speech in which ‘there is either praise [epainos] or blame [psogos]’” (p. 3). Drawing on George Kennedy and other contemporary rhetorical theorists, she expands the Aristotelean category to argue that “the persuasive discourse of young women can be interpreted as epideictic rhetoric that defined their collective identities, influenced public perceptions of their roles and rights, and altered a social order that excluded or dismissed them” (p. 5). More than a third of all girls took rhetoric in high school, and Wood is able to establish that girls in the high schools she studies took such courses.

Girls at each of the schools that Wood studies “used epideictic rhetoric to define themselves in an era that alternately infantilized, idealized, and demonized young women,” but the way in which they “forge and celebrate their collective identity” at each of the four schools is specific to the racial and class formations of the students there (pp. 2, xiii). The economically and racially privileged white girls at Miss Barstow’s School represented themselves in their yearbook as “active, vocal, and opinionated,” challenging the idea that such students were idle members of the ruling class destined for “marriage and motherhood” (pp. 1, 22). Their writing was influenced by the construction of the “new girl,” and in celebrating athletic achievement—including in the competitive contact sports of basketball and field hockey—they challenged “gender and class codes”; in 1911, Rebecca Gray urged her classmates: “Go at your work with a vim that will make your successors wish to follow in your footsteps; and in your sports win for your class and school such honors as will inspire others to keener competition” (pp. 23, 34, 22). Wood’s fascinating and insightful analysis of the rhetorical and ideological significance of this and other seemingly conventional and uninteresting passages is one of the many strengths of the book.

While Gray and her classmates rejected gender ideologies about wealthy, white femininity, the community they constructed maintained conservative ideologies related to class, nationality, and race: “they wrote short stories that mocked black and Irish figures, characterized Native Americans as noble savages, and chastised a poor boy who would rather return to his dirty hovel than remain in a sanitary charity hospital” (pp. 51-52). It was in relation to dominant ideologies like these that the less privileged girls in the Kansas City area were forced to situate their rhetoric. As Wood puts it, while Barstow girls defined themselves in contrast to “the Other,” girls at Haskell Institute “had to counter the notion that they are the Other” (p. 87). Wood notes that schools like Haskell were one outcome of the imperialist national project of the United States and were established to assimilate Native Americans to hegemonic cultural and economic practices. The literary productions authored by female students in the Indian Leader, a national newspaper that ran between 1897-1924, and Indian Legends (1914), an anthology of folklore, were intended by white school officials to demonstrate the accomplishment of these goals to white readers. Wood argues, however, that the Haskell girls wrote within a complex rhetorical situation in which they addressed not only white but also Native readers. Thus, the girls’ writing was also shaped by Native proponents of the pan-Indian movement, constructing a group identity founded not upon gender, as at Barstow, but upon race. In a vivid example of the rhetorically complex situation negotiated by the Haskell girls, Wood notes that when one of the girls, Nellie Wright, did not name individual tribes in her writing, she encouraged the “group identification” that “reflected the white campaign to destroy tribal identity,” but “her tactic also encourage[d] Indian solidarity” (p. 56).

The construction of racial solidarity was also a major project of girl rhetors at Lincoln High School. Lincoln opened in 1888, nineteen years after the high school for whites; by 1921, 750 students were enrolled in a building meant to accommodate 250, and Lincoln remained the only secondary school for blacks until 1936. In response to conditions like these, girls at Lincoln, influenced by the New Negro movement, promoted race pride, solidarity, and uplift in poetry and prose published in their newspaper and yearbook. Wood finds significant differences between these genres. In poetry, Wood says, girls “gloss over” historical realities. Hazel Hickum’s 1917 yearbook tribute, for example, begins:

In Lincoln High, with pen and ink
Our happiest days were spent,
The teachers trained our minds to think
And we were all content. (qtd. p. 96)

In this and similar works, Wood argues, “by choosing to remain silent on issues that could create despair and disunity . . . . these young Lincoln poets encouraged hope and unity” (p. 102). Prose writers, however, addressed racial inequality head on. Lucile Bluford, who went on to edit the Kansas City Call, published a 1926 editorial in the school newspaper titled “New Schools,” which contrasted the six high schools serving whites with the single facility for black students, which lacked desks for seventeen teachers as well as a “library, librarian, gymnasium, study hall, or art department” and at which six to eight classes were held on the stairs (p. 110). Bluford challenged the neglect of the needs of black students by celebrating the merit of Lincoln graduates: “Has not Lincoln as large a percentage of pupils attending college as any high school of the city? Are not two of Lincoln’s graduates on the University of Kansas Honor Roll?” (qtd. p. 110). Praising the achievements of her race and blaming those who deprive them of just treatment, Bluford contributed to the construction of a collective racial identity.

Girls at Central High School also sought to construct a collective identity, one that overcame the factionalism that split students in the largest public high school in the state. They did so by promoting consubstantiality, or a common identity, by “endorsing the image of a venerable institution, the attitude of inclusivity, and the sensation of school spirit” (p. 120). Gender was a major source of division at the high school. While girls were the majority of students and surpassed boys academically, boys dominated athletics and leadership positions, including class president and editor of the school yearbook. During the 1898-1899 school year, controversy ensued when the “male winners of a debate between two literary societies refused to face representatives of an all-girl literary society that was excluded from competition” (p. 116). Seeking to discourage such strife, Gwendolen Edwards looked back to a time prior to such conflict in “Central High School” (1899):

Launched in the pride of youth and of beauty.
Alike it was free from
Contention and frats, the vice of all schools.
Neither rival had it in the town nor in the country surrounding;
Clear was its title as heaven, to the best of all high schools.
There the youth of the city gleamed, and in gleaming gained knowledge. (qtd. p. 115)

By restoring what appears to be clichéd public writing to the historical context that generated it, Wood offers original and interesting readings of writing by Edwards and other girls from this era, showing the ways in which they claimed their ability and right to intervene in public debates about race, class, and gender. Rather than being passively defined, these girls actively engaged in the discourses that shaped their identities and the collective groups to which they belonged.

Each of these insightful and interesting critical studies focusing on texts by and about girls thematizes—at least to some degree—the interrelationship between texts and female subject formation. Clark’s reader reception study of Little Women begins with her own response to the book: “I felt empowered by [Jo] . . . . Little Women and its sequels made it possible for a girl growing up in the 1950s to dream of having it all—family and career—even though I didn’t know many actual women who did” (pp. 2-3). Clark shows that readers during Alcott’s lifetime related similarly to her work; Alcott wrote that many of her readers found her books “helps for themselves” (qtd. p. 13). This resulted in a deluge of letters, asking Alcott for “advice upon every subject from ‘Who shall I marry’ to ‘Ought I to wear a bustle?’” (p. 13). Such letters, Clark argues, “attempt to achieve intimacy with the author as a person,” whom they imagine as much like her character Jo (p. 13). While the majority of those who recorded their responses to Alcott were white, Clark’s research demonstrates that at least a few women of color identified with Jo; the African American novelist Ann Petry, for example, wrote that she “felt as though I was part of Jo and she was part of me” (p. 48). Unlike Clark and Day, Hamilton-Honey does not address reception, other than her own, but her analysis is motivated by her interest in the way the books she studies

reproduce and challenge our culture’s ideas about what it means to grow up female in the United States and elsewhere. They reflect our fears, hopes, and dreams for young women, as well as the strictures we place upon them and the paths to empowerment that are open to them. If we hope to understand how girls think about the world around them and how they are socialized into expectations for adulthood, there can be no better place to start than by searching their bookshelves for clues. (p. 230)

While Hamilton-Honey does not specify it in her conclusion, these “fears, hopes, and dreams” may be inflected by race. Her introduction, however, notes that like Alcott, the authors and protagonists of the series books produced during the period she examines are all white and targeted at a white audience. Hamilton-Honey reports that the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which published many of the series she analyzes, did not produce series with black protagonists until 1967. She does not address if other publishers did so, information that would have been useful.

Day reports readers’ deep identification with fictional characters—much like readers of Little Women—quoting, for example, a reader of Dessen who claims that “you can find a part of yourself [in] almost every single one of the characters” (qtd. p. 182). However, it is not clear the degree to which readers who are not white might identify with the characters in the novels she examines. Day states that she is “primarily concerned with the concept of the adolescent woman as white, middle class, and heterosexual” because of its prevalence both in fiction and non-fiction (p. 10). These privileged young women “generally concern themselves with the friendships and romances that are understood to be the foundations of social acceptance and markers of maturation into adulthood” (p. 11). Unlike Hamilton-Honey, Day could easily, one would think, have designed her study to include diverse protagonists and authors. While Day says that she believes that “literature about young women outside of the norm” might “help to illuminate the problematic nature of narrative intimacy,” she does not discuss novels that focus on protagonists that are “people of color, lesbian/bisexual/transexual/questioning teens, or working class” (pp. 11, 12). (nota bene: I think the term “transgender” would be preferable here.) She explains her focus by saying that she is interested in the “norm” about which and to whom much popular culture is presented. There is no question that the novels on the interpersonal topics that she addresses—friendship, romance and sexuality, rape and violence—by the nineteen popular, critically acclaimed white authors that she focuses on merit analysis. Surely, however, some attention to first-person narrators in young adult fiction by and about adolescent women of color would illuminate the ways in which, for example, “disclosure and discretion in constructions of friendship,” the focus of chapter two, might differ when the friendship is interracial, in for example, Jacqueline Woodson’s I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (1994) (p. 29). One must acknowledge recent statistics from Lee and Low Books, based on data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which establish the dearth of children’s and young adult literature with “multicultural content”: while 37 percent of the United States population are people of color, only 10 percent of the children’s books published over the past twenty-one years include significant representation of people of color.⁴ Given these findings, it becomes even more important that in our work as feminist scholars we examine gender as it shapes and it is shaped by race, class, sexuality, ability, and global location. Only when such analyses have been conducted can we truly understand the role of the textual in the way that gender is constructed and experienced and that the female subject is formed. Future scholarship, utilizing the inclusive methodology found in Wood’s exemplary work, must further this project.

NOTES

¹ Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Candace Ward (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996), 192.
² For a summary of feminist critics, such as Auerbach and Myers, who pioneered the recovery of women writers, see Lissa Paul, “Feminist Criticism: From Sex-Role Stereotyping to Subjectivity in International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, ed. Peter Hunt (London: Routledge, 1996), 104.
³ See Carol Gilligan, “Joining the Resistance: Psychology, Politics, Girls and Women,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 29 (1990), 501-36; and Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine), 1994.
⁴ Hannah Ehrlich, “The Diversity Gap in Children’s Publishing, 2015,” The Open Book: A Blog on Race, Diversity, Education, and Children’s Books, 5 March 2015, http://blog.leeandlow.com/2015/03/05/the-diversity-gap-in-childrens-publishing-2015; “Publishing Statistics on Children’s Books about People of Color and First/Native Nations and by People of Color and First/Native Nations Authors and Illustrators,” Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin, Madison, accessed 22 August 2017, http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp.

Feminism, Three Ways [full essay]
Samantha Pinto

Negotiating the Traditional and the Modern: Chinese Women’s Literature from the Late Imperial Period through the Twentieth Century [full essay]
Li Guo

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Li Guo, Utah State University
Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring 2013), 195-220.

THE INNER QUARTERS AND BEYOND: WOMEN WRITERS FROM MING THROUGH QING, edited by Grace S. Fong and Ellen Widmer. Women and Gender in China Studies. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 431 pp. $177.00.

CHINESE WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION, 1905-1948, by Yan Haiping. New York: Routledge, 2006. 299 pp. $178.00.

WOMEN’S LITERARY FEMINISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY CHINA, by Amy Dooling. New York: Palgrave, 2005. 273 pp. $100.00.

The three books above complement each other in their coverage of Chinese women’s literary genres from the late fourteenth through the early twentieth century. The authors’ theoretical inquiries invite consideration of the following questions: what meaning, if any, might a feminist imagination or approach have in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644-1911) eras, early and late Republican China (1911-1948), and beyond? What do these works have in common regarding the resituating of women’s literary status, the reclamation of feminine agency, and the empowerment of female subjectivity in China’s literary tradition? These books can be considered in dialogue with Western feminism and studies of women’s literature through their various critical lenses, whether revisionist, historicist, feminist, or postmodernist. This essay reflects on how the authors assess the balance between women writers’ personal trajectories and their collective presence in China’s literary history. It also asks whether the authors presuppose a feminine self as the locus of their scholarship.

Repositioning the Inner Quarters

Grace S. Fong and Ellen Widmer’s edited collection The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing provides a comprehensive view of women’s literary achievements from these eras in writing poetry, composing and editing anthologies, exploring prosimetrical tanci, and carrying out literary exchanges with their close friends in the inner chambers.¹ The book’s eleven chapters are grouped into four parts: “In the Domestic Realm,” “Larger Horizons: Editing and Its Implications,” “Beyond Prescribed Roles,” and “The Personal is Political: Responding to the Outside World.” At issue throughout is the theme of shifting historical and literary paradigms, with their ideological implications and constraints as well as the polemical relationship of such paradigms to individual and collective power. Researchers of the Ming and Qing eras have found abundant examples of women’s works that question or renegotiate prevailing literary and cultural paradigms. The essays in this book reveal an elite female literary culture that shows evidence of a process of becoming and, as Maureen Robertson notes in her conclusion, of transforming, utilizing women’s marginalized literary status as a “site for realizing the potential of historical change” (p. 382).

In part 1, “In the Domestic Realm,” Fong contributes a chapter on writing and illness in the context of women’s poetry. Using the Ming-Qing Women’s Writings database of materials held at the Harvard-Yenching Library, she traces representations of women’s experiences of illness, which function as “a prelude and even a pretext to writing” (p. 19). “Poems written about, during, and after illness” suggest that women of the Ming and Qing periods developed an association between illness and poetic production, using the relatively “public” form of poetry to portray the “private and personal aspects of their experience” (p. 19). Examining illness in seminal anthologies of women’s works, Fong suggests that “writing poetry would seem to enable the sick or convalescent subject to appropriate a different temporality, a different rhythm of feeling, and altered modes of perception from those of normative experience” (p. 26). Poetic representation of illness constructs an alternative feminine aesthetic space and “takes on gendered conventions” (p. 33). In the poetry collection Yongxuelou shigao (Drafts from Yongxue Tower, author’s preface dated 1816), for example, illness allows Gan Lirou (1743–1819) to “experience and write about bodily sensations of a different order” (p. 41). Sickness endows women with emotional intensity, presenting an occasion to transform the domestic realm into an artistic space in which they have access to “a creative or spiritual experience” (p. 43).

Emotional intensity in women’s poetry is also a core concept in chapter 2, “Lamenting the Dead: Women’s Performance of Grief in Late Imperial China.”² Ann E. McLaren offers an insightful study of Ming-Qing women’s appropriation of “elaborate bridal laments (kujia) and funeral laments (kusang)” to “frame their lives in terms of hardship, sickness, and bereavement” (pp. 50, 51). As McLaren suggests, “mourning for the deceased was part of the ‘emotional work’ of women in Chinese society,” serving as “a medium for serious ritual purposes” (p. 50). Through a study of poems by women in Jiangnan, the southern regions near the Yangzi, she distinguishes between elite women’s poetic expressions and the kusang practice by lower-class women as a means “to express their grief, filiality, and verbal eloquence, and [to provide] women with a strong ritual role that was relatively unusual given the androcentric nature of China’s ritual culture” (p. 61). Ming-Qing literati women’s adaptation of mourning rituals in their poetic expressions “laid the foundation for a specifically female mode of mourning within the poetic tradition” (p. 62). Their appropriation and refashioning of conventions “enhanced the perceived value of their poetic compositions and ensured their wider circulation in the cult of sentimentality of the late Ming” (p. 77).

The three chapters of part 2, “Larger Horizons: Editing and Its Implications,” discuss women’s editing and anthologizing poetry. Chapter 3, “Retrieving the Past: Women Editors and Women’s Poetry, 1636-1941” by Widmer, considers “six collections of women’s writings by women editors that came out between the late Ming and the end of the Republican period” (p. 81). The comparison of these works illustrates the interconnectedness of women’s literary traditions in these periods, revealing that even in the Republican period some women editors valued classical poetic traditions. Widmer discusses the following editors, listed chronologically: Shen Yixiu (1590-1635), Wang Duanshu (1621-ca. 1685), Yun Zhu (1771- 1833), Shen Shanbao (1808-1862), and in the Republican period, Shan Shili (1858-1945) and Xian Yuqing (1895-1965). Showing how they contributed to a feminine literary tradition developed from and sustained by dynastic and early modern women’s literary anthologies, this informative chapter makes an important advancement in the study of women’s editing practices.

While Widmer’s research captures a panoramic view of women’s collections across centuries, Robyn Hamilton’s “The Unseen Hand: Contextualizing Luo Qilan and Her Anthologies” studies one prominent female anthologist. Luo Qilan (1755-1813) assembled two anthologies of literary writings by more than one hundred authors from southern China: a women’s anthology, Tingqiuxuan guizhong tongren ji (Poems to the Tingqiu Studio from my companions in women’s quarters) and a men’s anthology, Tingqiuxuan zengyan (Poems of tribute to the Tingqiu Studio), both published in the late eighteenth century (p. 109). Hamilton rightly notes that Luo’s publication of the women’s anthology provided “a vehicle for lesser known poets to gain exposure” (particularly her female friends), while also endorsing “her prestige as an editor of published works” (pp. 109, 110). The chapter traces Luo’s geographical, familial, and social contexts, as well as her spiritual bond with male and female colleagues, mentors, and peer authors. Whereas Luo’s selection of authors largely reflects her personal preferences, the order and arrangement of the selected female poets occasionally might have been influenced by the social prominence of their male relatives (p. 129). Also, Luo’s anthologies illuminated women authors’ claims on familial and social propriety, as well as their insistence on prioritizing their identities as filial daughters and/or loyal wives over their identities as poets. Such prioritizing suggests that these governing-class women viewed their artistry in the context of orthodox modes of gender propriety (pp. 139-40).

Chapter 5, “From Private Life to Public Performances: The Constituted Memory and (Re)Writings of the Early-Qing Woman Wu Zongai” by Wei Hua, examines publications of the legendary poet Wu Zongai (1650-1674), who committed suicide when she was captured to marry a rebel commander in exchange for her home county’s safety. Wu Zongai’s life, which fell into obscurity after her death, was excavated more than a century later by a local official, Wu Tingkang (1799-after 1881). In order to advocate for her virtue and moral power, he published her poetry and invited scholars to compose the deceased heroine’s life story or portray her in a drama. Hua argues that “the reasons for which [Wu Zongai] was recovered, remembered, and rewritten had much more to do with the socio-historical context of the late Qing than her own poetic merit” (p. 143). Literati scholars venerated her “as a virtuous wife who could serve as a moral example . . . during times of imperial crisis—first the Opium War (1839-1842), and then the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864)—by virtue of her ‘choice’ of self-sacrifice for her country” (p. 143). Hua insightfully argues that the reconstruction of Wu Zongai as part of a social memory of the late Qing engaged her in a “public performance” that addressed and fulfilled the role of a virtuous woman (p. 171). Hua’s investigation of this prominent case shows “how male literati participation in the editing, rewriting, and transmission of women’s works in late imperial China was largely implicated in their own networks of male friendship and self-expressive needs” (p. 172). Through studying three editions of Wu Zongai’s poetry, Hua offers a meaningful analysis of the tensions and discrepancies between her published text and its accompanying paratexts, including added biochronologies, historical narratives by scholars and military officials, and didactic or interpretative commentaries, all of which sought to shape the reader’s imagination of her life and feminine virtue through a reinscribing of gendered identity.

Ming-Qing women’s roles, however, could also change, as some women, in real life or in the poetic realm, crossed the boundaries between the inner chamber and the external world. Among the three chapters comprising part 3 of the collection, Wai-yee Li’s “Women Writers and Gender Boundaries during the Ming-Qing Transition” explores “poetry about witnessing, understanding, and remembering” the Ming-Qing transition. Such poetry “transforms or goes beyond the boudoir as subject matter,” suggesting women’s transformation of traditional identities at the juncture of history and politics (p. 179). During this transitional era, male Ming loyalists strategically defined themselves as “remnant subjects” to display their political proclivity in resistance against the Manchurian Qing regime (p. 179). Women loyalist poets, such as Xu Can (1610-1678) and the wife of Chen Zhilin (1605-1666), took on the subjective position of “female remnant subject” (nü yimin), which situated them “beyond gender-specific virtues” (p. 180). Through a close reading of poems by Liu Shu (born around 1620), Liu Rushi (1617-1664), Gu Zhenli (1624-after 1685), and Zhou Qiong (mid-seventeenth century), Li explores women’s newly developed emphasis on political, intellectual, and spiritual common ground. Their “discontent with gender roles sometimes became the precondition for, as well as a consequence of, political engagement” (p. 179). Li holds that these writers could be considered as the “poet-historians” of the Ming-Qing transition period, “whose poetic self-definition is realized in witnessing, remembering, and understanding the momentous changes and challenges that China faced at critical junctures” (p. 213).

Chapter 7, “Chan Friends: Poetic Exchanges between Gentry Women and Buddhist Nuns in Seventeenth-Century China,” by Beata Grant, explores how poetic exchanges between Buddhist nuns and women in the inner chamber produced a “complex intertwining of the political, the aesthetic and the religious” (p. 219). Grant has discovered textual evidence that literati women of the seventeenth century developed friendships with nuns, linked by their “parallel worlds of enclosure” (p. 218). Such friendship allowed women to go “across the boundary . . . between the inner and outer, religious and lay,” to search for advice, sympathetic support, and poetic enlightenment (p. 225). Cloistered women also turned to the Buddhist faith to overcome trauma and personal suffering or to achieve a dimension of spiritual transcendence.

In Chapter 8, “War, Violence, and the Metaphor of Blood in Tanci Narratives by Women Authors,” Siao-chen Hu, a renowned specialist in the genre of tanci, offers an in-depth reading of the images of blood in a voluminous work of this genre. Tanci, in Hu’s words, “can be thought of as the feminine counterpart to xiaoshuo (vernacular fiction) in late imperial China” (p. 250). Although it originated in oral performance, literary tanci was a written narrative form, laid out in prosimetrical, seven-character lines, and often produced at the length of novels. Ming-Qing women authors, largely from the elite class, developed this narrative tradition into a unique medium of feminine expression of loyality, filiality, and heroic aspirations. Hu examines Liuhuameng (Dream of the pomegranate flower), written around 1841 by Li Guiyu (early nineteenth century), which in its rendering of war and the metaphor of blood foregrounds a woman writer’s understanding of “the emotional impact of love . . . in the context of battles” (p. 279). She insightfully argues that in late imperial women’s tanci, war appears mostly as “an allegory for love,” mediated through the imagery of “bloodshed” (p. 280).

These essays share an effort to reclaim the legacy of Ming and Qing women’s literature with its potent impact on fin-de-siècle feminist cultural trends in early twentieth-century China, as well as on the New Woman cultural phenomena of the early Republican Period.³ Several chapters in the anthology, particularly 9 through 11, consider this proleptic vision in late imperial women’s literature. Susan Mann’s contribution clearly and powerfully illustrates how nineteenth-century Chinese women’s poems “anticipate the writings of ‘new women’ with whom they shared a common political awareness” (p. 285). In “The Lady and the State: Women’s Writings in Times of Trouble during the Nineteenth Century,” Mann investigates the representation of the female political subject and women’s “astute cognizance” of socio-political issues “beyond the women’s quarters” (p. 283). Reading their politically fraught poetic tropes, she proposes that women’s writings about political issues and social events answered “the statecraft concerns of prominent officials and comment[ed] on social problems that drew the attention of activist literati” (p. 285). These nineteenth- century authors expressed “a political consciousness” through “the plight of refugees,” while images of war, female militancy, and sacrifice were also important indicators of political engagement (p. 301). Such female political consciousness, however, remained less known before the end of the nineteenth century because “women’s poems on troubled times were not readily available to anthologists or readers” (pp. 310-11). Mann further proposes to distinguish between “women who lived through the Taiping Rebellion” in the lower Yangzi homeland and those who had no experience of this traumatic incident (p. 313). Provisionally, she states that there are historical connections between the former group of women authors and the later New Woman of the early twentieth century (p. 313).

Mann’s focus on women’s representation of the “nation-state” resonates in chapter 10, “Imagining History and the State: Fujian Guixiu (Genteel Ladies) at Home and on the Road.” Guotong Li investigates “women’s poetic production . . . in late imperial China from the perspectives of space and place, conceptions of the body politic, and identities,” proposing that the local identities represented by Fujian female authors demonstrate their reinvention of literary and moral models from didactic books (p. 318). Historical evidence of the traveling gentry class of women shows that these elite authors “had already come into a consciousness of ties to the imperial state—the political community outside the border of Fujian”—through literary reinvention of local sceneries, sojourns and returns, and kin networks (p. 338). This awareness of contributing to “a larger political community” of the state, beyond their native place, suggests the impetus of “women’s ‘political’ consciousness prior to the origin and spread of nationalism” in late imperial and early twentieth-century China (p. 338).

The long-lasting development of dynastic women’s literature in the modern period is highlighted in chapter 11, “Xue Shaohui and Her Poetic Chronicle of Late Qing Reforms,” where Nanxiu Qian offers a valuable study of late Qing elite women’s efforts to “adapt their poetic expressions to contemporary ideas and sentiments” (p. 341). Xue Shaohui, due to her exposure to the polemical political landscape of the late Qing, was able to “[expand] her poetic themes beyond life in the inner chamber” (p. 341). Through her husband and her brother-in-law, both of whom studied in China’s first naval academy and traveled to Europe as diplomats, Xue gained access to knowledge of the world from their depictions of foreign lifestyles and the gifts her husband brought to her (p. 342). Later, Xue herself participated in “the 1897-1898 campaign for women’s education,” which marked her transformation “into a public intellectual” (p. 351). Her emphasis on women’s poetry as a focus and vehicle of women’s education refutes late Qing reformists’ criticism of traditional women’s literature as lacking in engagement with social and national concerns (p. 353). Defending the efficacy of the Ming-Qing talented women’s tradition, Xue insisted that “the Chinese system of educating women . . . should receive the same amount of attention as the Western system” (p. 353).⁴ Qian also suggests that Xue’s portrayal of gentry women’s experiences during the Boxer Rebellion reflects a reconceptualization of traditional feminine virtues, thanks to her writing about women’s lives in other cultures (p. 366).

In a revisionist stance toward paradigms of old and new, modern and premodern, the editors of The Inner Quarters and Beyond argue that Ming- Qing women’s writings problematize the relation of women’s writing practices to Confucian gender ideology. These writings also suggest that women’s poetry and other genres already show the process of becoming in the Ming and Qing eras, while they anticipate the New Woman paradigms that emerged and prevailed in the twentieth century. Robertson’s conclusion, which offers an insightful reading of Ming-Qing women’s writing as a minority literature, provides a meaningful critical intervention. She argues, “The reality of the disparity of men’s and women’s personal political power is evident in the long period of what might be called tutelage that women experienced as authors” (p. 384). Drawing on the French philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Robertson proposes a repositioning of Ming-Qing women’s writing community as “minor,” for “from their minor position . . . writers may access a kind of freedom to ‘become,’ and in that process precipitate innovation, difference, and change within both the minor and the major” (p. 386). Robertson’s argument carries particular importance in this anthology, for it invites a contextualized theoretical inquiry involving current Western philosophical debates on feminist minoritarian literature and on the positioning of Chinese women’s writings in relation to new interpretations of literary feminisms.

Women’s Literature and Feminist Passaging

While Fong and Widmer’s essay collection attends to late imperial women’s reinvention of writing spaces in and beyond the inner chambers, Yan Haiping explores how a feminist imagination was shaped and reconfigured by the national imperatives of “becoming modern” when China was in the midst of urgent social and national crises at the fin-de-siècle (p. 1). The year 1900 marked an era of enormous turmoil and transformation in China; this historical backdrop profoundly affected protofeminist cultural trends in China and women’s narrative practices. Yan situates her book between 1905 and 1948 and lays out seven chapters covering prominent female authors in each decade.

Chapters 1 and 2 analyze the feminist revolutionary Qiu Jin (1875- 1907), who studied in Japan and returned to China to support the cause of women’s education and freedom but who was tragically betrayed and beheaded during an attempt to overthrow the late Qing government. Yan argues that Qiu Jin’s life serves as an exemplar of a “nationalist feminist” in a polemical and turbulent time (p. 46). For Qiu Jin, “feminist passaging” is a journey driven by a longing for and an orientation to one’s “homeplace,” which is the word that Yan’s chooses to “translate the Chinese word ‘jia’” (pp. 46, 48). Qiu Jin’s voyage into the modern world represents the late imperial trend of elite women studying abroad to gain knowledge and freedom. These female pioneers expressed their sense of placelessness and a paradoxical longing for a homeplace, which in Yan’s words implies “the spatial sense and social sphere of belonging” (p. 48). In Qiu Jin’s vision, young male elite intellectuals’ pursuit of modern ideas with an eye to refashioning the old Chinese social order entailed pitfalls for women, yielding “abortive” results for their pursuit of freedom and democracy (p. 55). She instead “envisioned a modern China with a historically ruptured female body as its impetus and leverage” (p. 58). This China would advocate for women’s embodied desires and political endeavors.

Chapter 3, “The Stars of Night: Bing Xin and the Literary Constellation of the 1920s,” considers the May Fourth New Cultural Movement (1919- 1925), whose advocates marked it as an intellectual turning point in modern China’s history.⁵ Yan acknowledges that the “discursive features of those early May Fourth women’s writings registered in a range of concepts such as ‘equality,’ ‘co-education,’ and ‘women’s rights’” (p. 70). However, she focuses on unraveling the “mutually engendering, precipitating, and transforming” relationship between women’s writing and the world in which they lived (p. 70). The subject of the chapter, Bing Xin (original name Xie Bingying, 1906-2000), a poet, fiction writer, and essayist, became well known in 1921 after publishing poems and short stories that eulogized “motherly love” as a source of hope, motivation, and creativity (p. 70). Some male intellectuals criticized the theme of motherly love for its “lack of broader social concerns” (p. 72), but Yan suggests that this theme implies “a mode of mapping the world and enabling its human relations” in order to invoke “symbiotic feelings” for the young, the economically impoverished, and the politically manipulated (p. 80).⁶ Yan proposes that Bing Xin’s literary style particularly endeavored to establish a dialogic relationship with her contemporary readers, achieving a form of “co-authorship” by encompassing readers’ anticipations of alternative realities (p. 85). Yan’s chapter, resonant with Bing Xin’s first poetry collection Stars (1923), illuminates the historical scene in which Chinese women, women’s writing, and their real life situations contributed to “a female-bodied constellation,” prefiguring a broad horizon of feminine identity (p. 98).

The uncertain state of women’s writing took on new complexities after China’s First National Revolution (1924-1927), which led to the extermination of feudal lords in the Great North Expedition launched by the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party in the south. Against the background of revolution and the ensuing White Terror period of the Jiang Jieshi government in Nanjing, women revolutionaries were subjected to “double erasure” and oppression (p. 101). Chapter 4 explores the “Other Life” of activist female authors of this period, particularly Bai Wei (1894- 1987) and Yüan Changying (1894-1973), especially their social dramas of the late 1920s and 1930s (p. 100). Bai Wei’s theatrical portrayals of women’s disempowerment suggest a female “ethical passage” of finding new life in and through death (p. 109). The works of Yüan Changying, on the other hand, depict female characters whose “gendered condition” does not “by definition lead to feminist desires” or perspectives (p. 117). Rather, the playwright’s displaced, hysterical, or abject characters could only submit to the socially inscribed destinies imposed upon them, becoming marginalized in the process of modernization. Citing Yuan’s autobiographical writings, Yan’s chapter concludes with a query on modern culture, which, though freeing women from “brutality,” does not exempt them from other forms of violence and oppression (p. 133).

Chapter 5, “War, Death, and the Art of Existence: Mobile Women in the 1940s,” examines the fiction writers Xiao Hong (1911-1942) and Wang Ying (1913–1974). Xiao Hong’s works “Qier” (Abandoned child, 1933) and Shengsi chang (The field of life and death, 1935) foreground a feminine “imaginative landscape as a site of mobile kinship and homeplace” for the weak and socially disenfranchised, including rural women who battle for their daily existence (p. 139). In Yan’s view, Xiao’s quest for feminine existence and her desire to escape desolation originate from “her lifelong yearning for an alternative land” that sustains mobility and offers a form of “life-giving kinship” (p. 148). Akin to Xiao’s vision of “alternative humanity,” Wang Ying insists that the imaginary impulse in literature and art is required to “activat[e] the latent potential” for social transformations (p. 153). Yan argues that Wang’s stardom, both as a “noted writer and one of the most prominent stage and screen women performers in the 1930s and 1940s,” produced multilayered meanings that unsettled the social categories of “modern,” “Chinese,” “famous,” “professional,” and “woman” (p. 153). Wang’s work and life projected an alternative model of femininity that evoked controversies at home and abroad.

The search for alternative homeplaces in the 1930s and 1940s is exemplified in the life of the eminent fiction writer Ding Ling, to whom Yan dedicates the last two chapters of her book. Ding Ling (original name Jiang Bingzhi, 1904-1986) rose to literary fame during the May Fourth movement and remained a prominent writer in China’s long twentieth century. In comparison with lives in the preceding generation of women activists, her life represents an “emblematic breakage” from the old way of life represented by her “gentry-class household” and an aspiration for change in China’s early Republican period (p. 169). For Ding, feminist passaging implied working through her silence “in darkness” by writing and by confronting the predicament of a traumatic era (p. 170).⁷ Yan has rightly stated that Ding’s literary career manifests a transition corresponding to her feminist passaging (p. 171). Her early period represents a historical era after the failure of the 1927 revolution, when the author’s writings (mostly based in the metropolis of Shanghai) embodied a “gender-specific and female-levered ‘struggle to live against and on the edge of death’ in the brutal [political] climate” (p. 199).⁸ Ding’s late period refers to her reemergence in the literary world after she escaped from imprisonment by the Kuo Ming Tang party and found political support and protection in Yan’An, Shaanxi province, where the Communist Party leaders resided. She was soon appointed head of the All China Association in Arts and Literature (p. 202). In the new political environment of the 1940s, Ding reached a revolutionary turning point in her career and produced many short stories and novels in light of a new politics of art.

In her second acting attempt at the Yan’An Communist base, a place drastically different from Shanghai, Ding took on new political roles, transforming herself from a petit-bourgeois urban writer to an activist writer, organizer, and performer (p. 204). Performing new roles onstage and reinventing her offstage personae at the same time, she devoted herself to “the making and practice of a revolutionary humanity” (p. 209). This change ironically also brought complexity to her representation of onstage female characters, conveying women’s underlying political anxiety when they are endowed with “revolutionary agency” (p. 210). Yan powerfully argues that Ding’s literary depictions of suffering females, including rural women, have deepened women’s fury against injustice into imaginative loci for the empowerment of modern humanity.⁹

Rethinking Feminist Literature in Modern China

In comparison with Yan, who seeks to reconfigure a legacy of feminist imagination through a review of seminal modern women authors, Amy Dooling’s Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China studies feminist writing as a social and cultural trend itself in early twentieth-century China. As she argues, “literary women writing from self-consciously anti-patriarchal perspectives . . . reveal a keener, more inventive and imaginative feminist cultural praxis than has previously been analyzed” (p. 8). Yan endeavors to trace a feminist legacy that suggests an “alternative humanity” against the dominant social-political discourse, whereas Dooling emphasizes reevaluating the achievements of women authors who renegotiate their contemporary patriarchal culture from within. A feminist legacy, for her, is profoundly related to “envisioning women as agents of historical change” (p. 64). Women’s literary feminism, prefigured by late Qing protofeminist thoughts, thus needs to be assessed through “the evolving relationship between feminism and women’s narrative practices,” as well as through the ambivalent political tendencies of those texts (p. 9).¹⁰

Dooling’s book addresses the relationship between feminist ideology and literary women in the early Maoist era, focusing on a series of historical interludes constitutive of the core stages of literary feminism in China. Throughout, she resists essentializing “feminist writing” as “women’s writing” or writing by women (p. 11), arguing (through reference to Rita Felski) that “an understanding of [feminist] literature(s) cannot be sought in a fixed notion of ‘feminist aesthetics’” (p. 13). Rather, one should discuss how dominant cultures may actually open up spaces for dissonance and opposition and how feminist political intervention should be assessed “in terms of its engagement with language and narrative as important battlegrounds in resisting male authority” (p. 15).

With this central question of what Marge Piercy calls “a language of feminism,” the first chapter, “National Imaginaries: Feminist Fantasies at the Turn of the Century,” examines China’s “nascent elite feminist movement,” including the late Qing feminist press and their “new lexicon articulating women’s incipient identity as national subjects” (pp. 35, 36, 39). Dooling rightly suggests that neologisms in fin-de-siècle feminist literature illuminate sexual difference and women’s inferior status, such as “the darkness of the women’s world (nüjie zhi hei’an); the slaves of slaves (nuli zhi nuli); gender discrimination (nanzun nübei); separate spheres (nanwai nünei); . . . [and] gender equality (nannü pingdeng)” (p. 39). Dooling suggests that the “proliferating narratives of national women in the [late Qing] women’s press . . . feature[d] the afflictions of wives and mothers, daughterly rebellions against the patriarchal domestic sphere, and struggles for self-fulfillment beyond conventionally appointed feminine roles” (p. 39). Simultaneously these early feminist texts featured “a self-conscious effort to inscribe a new kind of reading position” to address feminine readership (p. 39). Dooling is particularly interested in the production of feminist fantasies in women authors’ works, such as Wang Miaoru’s Nüyuhua (Flowers in the female prison, 1904) and Qiu Jin’s Jingweishi (Stones of the Jingwei bird, 1905). These works, she argues, show how early modern feminists, rather than merely “serv[ing] the nationalist agenda of radical male intelligentsia, . . . constructed their own narratives of patriotic feminist emancipation, and in the process, significantly altered the plot of the ‘story’ of Chinese national transformation” (p. 43). Her approach resonates with what Susan Lanser calls a “feminist narratology,” centering on uniting women’s writings, feminist viewpoints, and discussions of the gender question in analyses of women’s narratives.¹¹

Two important questions underlie Dooling’s theoretical inquiry in chapter 2, “The New Woman’s Women,” which focuses on “the phenomenon of the xin nüxing . . . , or New Women,” and “their impact on the social, political, and cultural landscapes of 1920s and 1930s China” (p. 65). First, “how successful were the New Women writers themselves in devising, and revising, rhetorical strategies to carry out a realist critique of contemporary patriarchal culture without reproducing the masculinist logic that usurps the image of women for its own interests?” (p. 74). Second, “is it possible, finally, to understand Chinese women not only as discursive constructs or textual configurations but also as active producers of stories and histories of their own making?” (p. 6). Dooling’s reading of the narrative strategies by women authors focuses on how these strategies are applied to resist and modify the May Fourth male authors’ “‘objectifying mode’ of . . . narrative,” which is conditioned by male consciousness and misrepresents the feminine image (p. 71).¹² This misrepresentation includes the portrayal of traditional Chinese women as “visually fetishized object[s]” (p. 72).¹³ As Dooling incisively argues, even in men’s positive representations of New Women, there can be evidence of “the masculinism that may lurk, in the form of ‘residues of traditional representation’ behind even the seemingly most enlightened and sympathetic narratives of the modern woman” (p. 73). Resonant in her argument are profound concerns about the relationship between aesthetics and gender politics, the need to deconstruct the opposition between the two, and the emerging urgency of reconceiving women authors’ narrative art in resistance to male modernist intellectuals’ analytical position.

Dooling’s approach to May Fourth women authors’ literary achievements is reminiscent of feminist interpretations of Western authors, like Teresa Winterhalter’s analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938), whose “aesthetic surface . . . can be understood . . . to purposefully enact a moral position to which she is deeply committed.”¹⁴ Narrative style is “not merely a characteristic of expression or rhetorical flourish but . . . the very motive for writing itself” (p. 237). For Winterhalter, what is at issue in the question of narrative style is how a writer “manipulates authorial voice to explore the relationship between narrative and political authority” (p. 239). Authorial voice is particularly important for the study of early twentieth-century women’s diaries and autobiographical writings, whose representations of feminine consciousness have not received sufficient critical attention from the women’s male contemporaries. Such gender-specific literary practices also point to the fact that modern Chinese women authors endeavored to reach for political ends different from those of their male contemporaries.

Chapter 3, “Love and/or Revolution? Fictions of the Feminine Self in the 1930s Cultural Left,” examines the genre of autobiography as “a conscious reclamation” of female “self and private experience,” making the personal dimension of women’s lives “relevant subject matter for revolutionary writing” (p. 104). While responding to existing criticism of women writers’ autobiographical tendencies, Dooling proposes that such writings utilize “the politics of [autobiographical] form” to respond to “the cultural fascination . . . with the so-called New Women” and rearticulate the feminine experience (p. 109). Through a thorough analysis of female cultural leftist authors such as Bai Wei, Guan Lu (1907-1982), and Xie Bingying (Bing Xin), Dooling proposes that these authors are committed to “(re)politicizing women’s personal, subjective experience” while dismantling the synchronic presence of “revolutionary politics and traditional modes of patriarchy” (p. 115). Questioning the characteristic narrative mode of “female/feminist awakening” in modern literature, she finds through her analysis of Bai Wei’s writings that social demolishment of hegemony could not eliminate women’s “self-alienation and disorientation” (p. 134).

Chapter 4 focuses on feminist strategies of coping with social reality through mockery and laughter, particularly during the Shanghai Occupation period (1937-1945). This focus is aptly captured in the chapter title “Outwitting Patriarchy: Comic Narrative Stategies in the Works of Yang Jiang, Su Qing, and Zhang Ailing.” Whereas laughter was used by playwright Bai Wei in her theatrical works to address “the female subject’s problematic relationship to language itself,” for popular women writers Yang Jiang (born 1911), Su Qing (1914-1982), and Zhang Ailing (English name Eileen Chang, 1920-1995), laughter serves as a tool of social satire, a critique of modern gender relations, or a mockery of modern love and marriage ironized by the historical backdrop of China’s national crisis (p. 137). Yang Jiang, famous playwright and wife to the great novelist Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998), utilizes her feminist comedy of manners to put forward a skeptical view of the modern discourse of female emancipation. For novelist Su Qing, author of the autobiographical novel Jiehun shinian (Ten years of marriage, 1944), comic and playful “subversion of . . . the prevalent genre of female autobiography” foregrounds an “acknowledgement of [female] sexual desire,” while deriding “contemporary gender roles assigned to both men and women as scripts” (pp. 155, 161, 163). The last author covered in the chapter is the famous Shanghai-based fiction writer Zhang Ailing, whose comic reversal of the ancient romance in the fictional setting of semi-colonial China at the threshold of the Sino-Japanese War privileges the satisfaction of her heroine’s desire over social transformation. As shown in her novella Qingcheng zhi lian (Love that fells a city, 1943), feminine sexual desire is even granted at the price of social upheaval. Dooling concludes the chapter by suggesting it is at times of great social disorder that feminist imaginations are liberated and that “new feminine scripts could emerge in life and in literature” (p. 169).

The last chapter, “A World Still to Win,” addresses women’s literature as reconfigured by the demands of the “New China” after 1949 (p. 171). Whereas China’s “feminist literary imagination languished with the advent and consolidation of Communist rule,” Dooling insists on the importance of making connections between the revolutionary past and contemporary understandings of the “feminist strain” of literature and activism in the post-1949 era (pp. 171, 172). She does so by acknowledging how “state feminism” advocated by Fulian (All-China Women’s Federation) and Fulian’s sponsored literary creativities differ from feminist writings of previous decades (p. 172). Whereas Fulian’s promotion of egalitarianism is reminiscent of early feminists such as Qiu Jin, Fulian’s “dominant egalitarian rhetoric about gender” provided women only with the option to transform themselves in order to better serve the needs of the state, making them “paradoxically, disempowered women” (p. 175). Dooling then examines post-liberation popular literature that narrativized the New China’s “Marriage Law” and represented the Communist Party as the “deus ex machina that arrives to rescue the victimized [woman] from her plight” (p. 182). However, several prominent leftist writers of this time, including Chen Xuezhao (1906-1991), Wang Ying (1915-1974), and Yang Gang (1905-1957), resorted to portraying the experience of women in the context of revolutionary change (p. 186). By “emplot[ting] recent history and past personal experience,” these authors “complicate the official account of Women and the Revolution” (p. 186). The chapter closes by reiterating that these postliberation women’s writings, along with works of their feminist predecessors, contribute to an “important alternative narrative” of modern Chinese women and their literary tradition (p. 200).

With her interrogation of women’s agency, particularly its place in the building of a literary tradition, Dooling shares approaches and concerns with Yan, Fong, and Widmer, in that all three books assess women as marginalized figures who can be viewed as sources of empowerment, deconstructing “implied power relationships between the male and female sexes” (Yan, p. 3).¹⁵ For Fong, Widmer, and their anthologized authors, this question leads to a way of establishing the feminist literary tradition as a “minority literature,” an argumentative stance reminiscent of what Pelagia Goulimari has termed “a minoritarian feminism” in feminist philosophical studies.¹⁶ For Yan, likewise, Chinese women’s writings exemplify how “the imaginative empowerment of the prescribed powerless and their counterparts in actual life dialogically inform, engender, and underlie one another throughout the history of the modern Chinese women’s social movement and their literary writings” (pp. 8-9). Yan considers women’s collective agency to be sprung from an empowering imagination rooted in a Chinese revolutionary feminist legacy represented by the late Qing female reformist and martyr Qiu Jin. Fong and Widmer argue that as early as the Ming and Qing dynasties, women’s literary practices had already carried the impetus for the flourishing of protofeminist and nationalistic thought in early twentieth- century China. Dooling focuses on a reassessment of female authorial practices within and outside of the texts, as well as the fraught relationship between female intellectuals and China’s historical change. The authors of the three books project a shared concern with what Judith Butler calls an ability to “deriv[e] agency from the very power regimes which constitute us, and which we oppose.”¹⁷ This challenging process of finding agency involves not only reworking historicity as such. Rather, as Butler puts, “agency is implicated in what it opposes, that ‘emancipation’ will never be the transcendence of power” (p. 137).

In reviewing the books by Yan, Dooling, and Fong and Widmer, one may find several core questions underlying the study of Chinese women’s literature. What kind of historical viewpoints does each author inhabit? How do they negotiate with and respond to each other? How do these studies revitalize our understandings of place? From Ming-Qing women authors’ renegotiation of the inner and outer spatial relations, to Dooling’s examination of women’s appropriation of nationhood for social self-reinvention, to Yan’s mobile understanding of border-crossing and transcultural feminist passaging, the three books share an effort to redraw the discursive boundaries between traditionally gendered spaces, viewpoints, and socio-cultural positions. The focus is not so much on presenting or rediscovering the feminine literary tradition as a counternarrative to dominant patriarchal norms, but rather on representing the dynamic vitality of women’s writings in China to surpass discursive inscriptions and containments, find resources for renewal and survival, transform critical paradigms, and offer new insights into women’s agency and power. The social, cultural, and political valences of these selected texts speak to feminist criticism on a broader historical terrain and give rise to new insights for a self-reflexive, ethically sound, critical perspective in interpreting Chinese women’s literary tradition.

Women’s Writings versus Feminist Legacy

Together these three books call attention to the ambivalent relation between literary feminism and women’s writing in late imperial and modern China.¹⁸ The contested distinction between women-centered writing by women and feminism is a well-saturated theme in Western feminist studies. Asking whether women’s novels are feminist novels, Rosalind Coward suggests the more crucial question is “whether the ‘representativeness’ which these novels claim is simply a reflection of ‘feminist consciousness,’ or a propaganda device towards such a consciousness, or whether we have to be more cautious in analysing their structure and effects.”¹⁹ Ultimately, it is only “by paying attention to [women’s] practices of writing, conventions of genre, and their relation to other forms of writing, that we can differentiate between novels and assess their political effects” (p. 61).

In the context of China, such concerns are even more complicated because the term “feminism” has often been interpreted as a product of theoretical translation that may impose inaccurate paradigms on Chinese women’s literary tradition. According to Kwok-kan Tam, Chinese equivalents for “feminism” include several terms. One is nüquan zhuyi, which literally means “women’s-rights/power-ism” and emphasizes women’s equal rights with men; the other is nüxing zhuyi, which means “an ism of femaleness,” emphasizes women’s gender difference.²⁰ Both terms were applied in the context of modern China’s construct of women as social and national subjects since the early twentieth century. The term nüquan zhuyi carries the risk of reducing feminism to a mere movement for women’s rights and social power and “an antagonism to male power” (p. xvii). This interpretation also renders nüquan zhuyi as a potential “threat” to male authority and leads modern male intellectuals to be “worried about the rise of a new female consciousness” (p. xviii). The term nüxing zhuyi, which has been used since the 1990s, suggests a corrective shift to feminine sexuality and gender-related issues away from Maoist nationalist discourse in the context of the rise of China’s self-acclaimed feminist scholars who are trained in Western theory but choose to search for a locally situated definition of feminism and femininity.²¹

These contentions about Chinese feminism have not been fully covered in the selected books here, but they draw attention to the self-reflective impetus of these authors’ investigations of female-oriented literary traditions. For Fong and Widmer, the resituating of Ming-Qing women’s writing in the history of Chinese literature means not only a “rediscovery” of women’s texts, but also a reconsideration of the histories that “women themselves recorded of their words and actions, of their emotions and life experiences” (p. 2). The editors and authors in the collection have addressed the study of women’s extant writing, especially what Robertson calls “the ‘writerly’ character of this body of texts and its voices” (p. 379). Fong and Widmer’s collection shares common interest with Dooling, who focuses on assessing the important role of women’s voice and narrative authority. One notable difference between the two books, however, is that Dooling claims an approach to women’s literature as evidence of China’s literary feminism, whereas Fong and Widmer, along with their contributing authors, argue that women’s writing in the Ming and Qing eras foreshadowed or provided proleptic narrative evidence for feminist literary explorations of gender and national discourses in the ensuing twentieth century.

Although Dooling and Yan both use the terms “feminism” and “feminist imaginations” to address twentieth-century Chinese women’s writings, there are myriad differences in the books’ structures and theoretical trajectories. Echoing her title, Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905-1948, Yan gives the chapters suggestive titles taken from the writings of the authors being discussed, such as “Unseen Rhythms, Sea Changes,” “Qiu Jin and Her Imaginary,” “The Stars of Night,” “Other Life,” “War, Death, and the Art of Existence,” and “Rhythms of the Unreal.” The fluid structure of her book presents feminist imagination as “an active energy that does not constitute material reality” (p. 8). Yan holds that women’s writings are linked to what Hannah Arendt calls “the unclassifiable ones,” writing that “neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification” (p. 11).²² The figurative chapter titles derived from women authors’ own words suggest the literary soil that nurtures the development of twentieth-century feminist cultural trends.

According to Yan, such structural innovation also is made to “revisit a Chinese revolutionary feminist legacy through an encounter with a group of seminal twentieth-century Chinese women writers at the point of intersection of their print works and life passages” (p. 1). Central to her approach is an endeavor to understand the modernity of women authors through a study of how their lives and writings “disclose, inform and alter each other” (p. 171). Yan’s use of the term “revolutionary” in stating the empowering effect of feminist imagination here is an endeavor not so much to impose a Hegelian interpretation of the evolution of Chinese feminist consciousness, but rather to highlight women’s collective movement toward a homeplace of their own. Yan is similar to Fong and Widmer in concluding that the personal is political, be those persons late imperial women who reconfigured the notion of state prior to modernist constellations of the term, or the modern writer Bing Xin whose portrayal of “motherly love” designates the female body as the very site in which feminine social existence is enacted. In this light, Fong, Widmer, and Yan all address the feminist initiative of mapping the development of the personal in the passages of a life in the making, whether their subjects are late Qing female traveling poets, reformers, or early twentieth-century women authors who write from their experiences of border-crossing sojourns.

Like Yan, Dooling offers a historically contextualized review of Chinese women’s literature in the modern period. Her attention to “sexual-textual politics” complicates and counteracts a reduction of feminist literature to its opposition to the external sociopolitical order (p. 4). She also shifts readers’ concentration to “how a given feminist writer devises strategies of intervention in her own representation of ‘reality’” (p. 17). The theme of gender and textual politics in itself is not a “modern” concept and is also keenly manifested in China’s pre-twentieth-century women’s literature. For example, in her study of the Qing women’s poetry anthology Guochao guixiu: Zhengshi ji (Correct beginnings: Women’s poetry of our dynasty, published in the Daoguang reign from 1821 to 1850) and its sequel, Li Xiaorong proposes that the female scholar-poet Yun Zhu (1771-1833) “strove to celebrate” the authorship of gentry women and that poetry served as “a means for direct self-presentation as well as a reflection on moral principles and their lives as women.”²³ As a result, poetic anthologies by women “[construct] a poetic space” in which women have access to appropriate discursive power “even within the limits imposed by their society” (p. 107).²⁴ Both Dooling and Li Xiaorong show an interest in distinguishing between gendered viewpoints, which, as Elaine Showalter articulates, contributes to a discrepancy between “feminist critiques” focusing on women’s reading of male texts and “gynocriticism” centering on women’s reading of female texts.²⁵ In regard to the textuality of feminine writing, as Widmer argues in her conclusion, whether late imperial women chose literary means as authors or “non-literary” means “as painters, embroiderers, or performers of mourning rituals,” they encountered the same set of issues concerning feminine self-representation (p. 390). Such inquiries illuminate the key tasks entailed in shaping a Chinese feminist poetics: to locate or relocate gender represented in traditional literary concerns, to negotiate the places and possibilities of women authors and their readership, and to develop an altered aesthetic space of women’s “intellectual and political freedom via writing and speeches.”²⁶

It is thus noteworthy to compare the three books’ visions. Fong and Widmer’s book, aptly titled The Inner Quarters and Beyond, reflects a motion of moving from women’s experience of writing within the domestic realm to their spatial awareness of cultural and political geographies (the nation-state), their responses to the outside world at times of war and national crisis, their mediation between domestic and external boundaries, and their prescribed roles through poetic exchange and traveling. In parallel to this outward and forward looking trajectory, the theoretical position of the book envisions a spatial “return” from the marginal to the “center,” which implies the reclamation of women’s poetic achievement within canonical traditions, as well as the reemerging presence of pre-twentieth-century women’s literature on the horizon of women and gender studies in modern China and the broader global context.

Dooling’s book unravels how feminist writing, after departing from the utopian trajectory of the late imperial period, shifts its focus to the stark ongoing processes of creating alternative realities for modern Chinese women. The aesthetic value of women’s writing is prominently demonstrated through the proximity of the literary text and the author’s lived experiences, between embodied authorial space and its exhibition site, and through the larger socio-political terrain that profoundly conditions literary practices. The building of a feminist aesthetic space for Dooling consists of addressing the feminine experiences marginalized by cultural traditions, expanding the content of the male-defined realist literary aesthetics, and defying dominant stereotypes of women. One may conceive of her approach as one of spatializing women’s narrative. Spatiality, rather than temporality, as a focus of critical reading practices, according to Susan Stanford Friedman, is particularly appropriate to women’s texts: “Spatialization emphasizes the psychodynamic, interactive, and situational nature of narrative processes; it also provides a fluid, relational approach that connects text and context, writer and reader.”²⁷ In Dooling’s view, the multidimensional textuality of women’s narrative draws attention to the textual and political incoherencies and ambivalences that defy preconceived parameters, highlighting the relationality of female subjectivity as a theoretical construct.

Yan’s book carries an analogous vein of thought on the spatialization of modern women’s narratives, both in analyzing the stylistic features of autobiographical writings and life narratives and in situating the state of Chinese women in the early twentieth century as “caught up in a historical confluence of violent fluidity” (p. 13). The feminine subject here is often a border-crossing figure, en route and in transit. Modern feminine writing accordingly manifests a degree of placelessness, a forced mobility caused by displacement, as shown by early twentieth-century female intellectuals such as female revolutionary Qiu Jin and Republican playwrights Bai Wei and Yuan Changying, who studied abroad and then returned to China to pursue their literary careers. Yan conceptualizes a feminist aesthetics based on the process through which women, who were denied social spaces for themselves, departed from their “natural places” to become travelers, writers, publishers, and social activists. As exemplified in the life and writing of Ding Ling, the modern woman’s tales and life in China suggest “an immense legacy of a ravished humanity struggling for survival that inherently challenges and finally bursts her bioethnic ‘destiny’” (p. 9). Aligning feminist literary modernity to the “empowerment of a powerless humanity,” Yan envisions women’s feminist imagination as an energy that could surmount women’s immobility and marginality (p. 9).²⁸ She frequently uses rich spatial metaphors including “sea,” “imaginary,” “stars of night,” and “other life” to project an altered or altering feminist spatial aesthetics, which seek to unite the past with the present, to resituate past women authors among today’s readers as participating members of reality.

Epilogue

Several questions covered by the above authors deserve more deliberation. The notion of “difference,” which in The Inner Quarters and Beyond characterized the visibility and productivity of late imperial women writers, carries profound theoretical implications in the field of gender and women’s studies. If “difference,” as understood by Deleuze and Guattari, serves as a sharable theoretical paradigm from postcolonial studies, such a theoretical move also engages a comprehensive discussion of contemporary feminist appropriation and contestation of the concept of “difference” and “minor literature” in the context of pre-modern China. One should also consider the book’s own critical intention in applying such concepts. Could the idea of “minority literature” liberate the study of women’s writings from certain restrictions or constraints imposed by “feminist” inquiries without risking “degendering” women’s literature itself? Does “minority literature” provide a broader vision of women’s literary achievement than feminist literature? Feminism in itself should not be interpreted as only a post-twentieth-century (or post-imperial) concept, just as the concept of postcolonialism is not exclusively Western or Eastern. What other terms could be used to better represent theoretical concepts in the context of late imperial women’s writing? If Ming-Qing women’s writing anticipated and paved the way for later feminist cultural trends, through what examples are the long-term effects of these earlier trends manifested? The term “anticipation” also raises the question of whether/how such “anticipation” carries original authorial intentions or reflects later critics’ retrospective analyses. From the editors’ perspective, can this anticipatory historical gaze lead to a dialogue with later literary feminism, and what is the long-projected impact of finding this anticipated historical connection between the pre-twentieth century and the twentieth century?

The anthology leads to an open-ended vision of women’s literary writing from Ming through Qing, provoking readers to think beyond the inner chambers. The principal genre covered in the chapters is poetry, as well as elite women’s activities related to poetry collecting, editing, anthologizing, and exchange, partially because women’s authorship was largely and successfully represented by governing-class authors. Hu Siao-Chen’s chapter covers prosimetrical tanci, or chantefable narratives written by gentry women authors, which could be considered a subgenre of fiction. Wei Hua’s study discusses both Wu Zongai’s poetry collections and the play that staged her as a heroine. McLaren’s study of kusang poems opens windows to future studies of women’s folk songs in the lamenting tradition by lower class and rural women. These chapters add to the breadth of the covered literary materials in the anthology, suggesting the multiplicity of late imperial women’s stylistic choices. Aside from poetry, other genres such as chronicles, travelogues, folk narratives, fiction, drama, and songs collectively contribute to the notion of “Ming-Qing Women’s Literature.” These dynasties witnessed not only a flourishing of women’s classical poetry, but also women’s endeavors to write with less canonical genres. These efforts, which guaranteed them more freedom, could contribute to the editors’ inquiry about women’s literature as “minor literature.”²⁹

Fong and Widmer focus on gentry women’s poetic expressions in the Ming-Qing periods, whereas Dooling and Yan cover mostly women’s fiction, drama, and autobiographical writings in the modern era. The apparent difference in their attention to genre triggers a deeper question about gender representation and women’s choices of the genre in which they write within various historical contexts.³⁰ To address these less explored genres is not merely to adopt a reflective critical stance of avoiding essentializing feminine literature or literary feminism, whether modern or imperial, or of preventing remarginalization of less acknowledged women’s writings. It also invokes a serious inquiry into why and how certain genres were chosen or preferred for the expression of the feminine, by whom, and for what purposes. In a broader understanding, the question of genre in feminist studies refers to the structures of discourse and social power, featuring the actual processes through which these structures are enacted at the individual level. It is by finding an effective way of speech that a woman author’s voice can be heard and acknowledged as intelligible.

Another key question is the role of translation in the development of Chinese women’s literary history. As stated above, the term “feminism” has been subjected to multiple processes of translation in modern China. Modern China’s feminist writings drew their resources from the translation of foreign texts, and Chinese feminism was deeply engendered by the translated Western texts advocated by the late Qing reformers. In the early twentieth century, Dooling rightly points out,

partially fuelling the contemporary production of discourse on the New Woman’s sexuality was the burst of translation of Western and Japanese texts, both nonfiction and fiction, as New Culturalists increasingly turned away from the domestic textual tradition in their search for a fresh vantage point from which to carry out their social critique. (p. 69)

Scholars Wang Zheng and Dorothy Ko argue that “feminism” remained a contested and pluralistic concept throughout modern and contemporary China, while “translated feminisms” conversely “transformed the terms in which modern Chinese understand their own subjectivities and histories.”³¹ Carol C. Chin argues that for readers and scholars today, China’s feminism or feminist imagination is also subjected to “Chinese women’s conceptions of modernity” as ideological “representation,” their understandings of gender politics and the underlying systems of power relations, and the changing social, historical, and intellectual context from late Qing radical feminist activism to contemporary feminist movements.³² Whereas the feminist inheritance between the late Qing and Republican periods is extensively studied, more scholarship needs to be conducted to address the wide gap between these prefiguring feminist trends and translations of Western feminism into Chinese after the Cultural Revolution.

The books reviewed here breathe energy into global feminist discourse by bringing in local histories and writings of feminism. The translations of feminist terms serve to shore up discontinuity, ruptures, and absences within discursive processes. As Ko and Wang argue, terms such as nüquan (women’s rights/power) have mirrored China’s long political history since the late nineteenth century, a process in which women’s pursuit of equality and political rights was “implicated in a problematic nationalistic scheme from the start” (p. 466). Another prominent example, funü wenti (the woman question), is a term originating in late Qing feminism in which activists advocated for women’s rights in marriage, education, work, and participation in socio-political affairs. Whereas such concerns remain unresolved for many women in today’s China, the “woman question” is expanded to include the impact of globalization, resistance against gendersameness resulting from the Communist Party’s gender politics, and a pressing need to endorse indigenous feminist trends in the global terrain.³³ Chinese feminist scholar Li Xiaojiang, for example, resorts to translating her own works from Chinese into English to counteract the supplementary differences imposed on her writings by the process of translation.³⁴ In addition, Li, though a trained Marxist feminist, turned to the traditional Chinese concept of yin and yang for a localized understanding of gender difference, which she first proposed in her book Xing Gou (Sex gap). Li’s contemporaries, Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, advocate the presence of a Chinese feminist trend that should “emerge from the horizon of history,” as their book title aptly puts it: Fuchu lishi dibiao (Emerging onto the horizon of history). Such “return” of less explored women’s literature to critical attention is profoundly conditioned by translation practices. In contemporary women’s studies, as Laura Stevens states, translation of women’s texts could play a crucial role in global feminist studies, which demonstrates a keen interest in “mak[ing] non-Anglophone languages and literatures slightly more visible and audible by attending to some translations of them.”³⁵ Translation, Stevens argues, is “a crucial form of intellectual labor that should be the subject of analysis, assessment, and feminist critique” (p. 11). These examples illustrate that translation of feminism and women’s writings in general is a discursive process involving the multiple historical backgrounds of texts translated, textual gaps and ambivalences, appropriative interpretations of such ambivalences created through the translation, and the translators’ gendered, political, and social perceptions.

NOTES

¹ Tanci, which literally means “plucking rhymes,” include the following two categories: the orally performed, seven-character liberatto that has been popular in the southern Yangzi River area for centuries, and the prosimetrical narrative genre written in rhymed lines composed chiefly for reading. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, elite women in China transformed this popular narrative form to describe new or imaginary feminine identities. Women’s tanci depict heroines who serve as repositories of women’s self-consciousness about moral propriety and imagine women’s unconventional lives in and beyond the inner chambers as crossdressed scholars, female warriors, Daoist immortals, or even eminent ministers. At the turn of the twentieth century, some progressive male authors also took up the tanci form to write shorter tales of heroic women in China and the West. However, these male-authored tanci tales portray feminine heroism as a reflection of male intellectuals’ own political ideals about China’s nation and society and are very different from traditional tanci fiction by women.
² The late imperial era in Chinese history refers to the dynasties of Ming (1368- 1644) and Qing (1644-1911).
³ The New Woman is a cultural figure in Republican China (1911-1948) who challenges women’s prescribed gender roles and suggests the transformation of Chinese women from backward or bourgeois to a new form of subjectivity. The image represents the necessity for the transformation of China into a new nation. See Sarah E. Stevens, “Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal, 15, No. 3 (2003), 82-103; and Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2004).
⁴ The Ming and Qing dynasties witnessed an expansion of women’s education and the increasing visibility of active woman writers. The development of women’s literary activity was especially marked in the Jiangnan regions around the lower reaches of the Yangzi River. The women authors of this period were recognized as Guixiu writers, or talented writers of the inner chambers. The so-called gui refers to the inner quarters where women resided in the domestic compound. In the late imperial period, educated gentry women transformed the inner chamber into a unique space that valorized women’s voices. In this space, the dominant male literary discourse did not have absolute control. In the context of women’s flourishing literary activities, the acutely interior quarters harbored multiple possibilities of new feminine existence. For a discussion of the trope of the inner chambers and women’s exploration of it as a space of poetic self-expression, see Xiaorong Li, Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China: Transforming the Inner Chambers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).
⁵ The New Culture Movement refers to China’s intellectual changes from the mid-1910s to the 1920s. In China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (New York: Routledge, 2005), Peter Gue Zarrow states, “‘New Culture’ was in fact a rallying cry for efforts to abolish everything associated with subservience, hierarchy, patriarchy, and decadence” (p. 129). The New Culture movement formed “the basis of a new kind of egalitarian and libertarian politics” and paved the way for the May Fourth movement (p. 129). The May Fourth movement (1919), guided by the call to create “New Literature,” prepared for the development of modern Chinese literary realism.
⁶ Yan cites Boqun Fan, ed., Bing Xin yanjiu ziliao [Research materials on Bing Xin] (Beijing: Beijing Chubanshe, 1984), 193-418. Yan alludes to criticisms of Bing Xin’s portrayal of motherly love as “narrow” (p. 257, n. 16).
⁷ Ding Ling, reflecting on the female revolutionary Xiang Jingyü, who was executed by the Nationalist Regime for her activist endeavors, comments that this violence shocked her into realizing that she was “entirely alone in darkness”; Yan cites Ding’s essay “Xiang Jingyü tongzhi liugei wo de yingxiang” [The influence of Xiang Jingyü on me], in Ding Ling quanji [Complete collection of works by Ding Ling], vol. 6 (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 2001), 25-30.
⁸ Yan states that modern women writers recurrently experienced what Ding Ling called a situation of “living at the edge of death” and by doing so derived insights and power for fashioning nascent forms of selfhood (p. 67); see Ding Ling, “Si zhi ge” [Songs of death], in Wo zai aiqing zhong shengzhang [I grow up in love] (Guilin: Lijiang chubanshe, 1988), 87.
⁹ During the Yan’An period of Ding’s career, particularly from 1938 to 1940, she was actively involved in grass-roots organizational works for women in the rural areas. This new direction ignited her passion and provided context for her writings of the period, which convey “revolutionary agency” as a major theme (p. 213).
¹⁰ Grace Fong explores the question of agency and women’s writing in Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008). Fong proposes that late imperial women authors can be considered as “agents exceeding the family- or lineage-centered structure, whether momentarily or figuratively acting in non-kinship defined roles, as friends, travelers, critics, artists, and connoisseurs, in which they make space for a degree of difference, of change, even of authority and autonomy” (p. 5). The “notion of agency” thus accounts both for “subjectivity and enactments of subject positions in the intersection between textual practice and social inscription that suggest instances and modes of self-empowerment within an ideological system of constraint, [such as] Confucian orthodoxy” (p. 6).
¹¹ Susan Lanser, “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” Style, 20 (1986), 341-63.
¹² Dooling cites Stephen Chan, “The Language of Despair: Ideological Representation of the ‘New Woman’ by May Fourth Writers,” Modern Chinese Literature, 4 (1988), 23.
¹³ Dooling cites Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 107.
¹⁴ Teresa Winterhalter, “‘What Else Can I Do But Write?’ Discursive Disruption and the Ethics of Style in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 18, No. 4 (2003), 237. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
¹⁵ Yan argues that the “characterization of the weaker-stronger binary as the natural condition of the modern subject formation reveals a social structure that is also a biopolitical economy of desire and sexuality” (p. 3).
¹⁶ Pelagia Goulimari, “A Minoritarian Feminism? Things to Do with Deleuze and Guattari,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 14, No. 2 (1999), 97-120.
¹⁷ Judith Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), 136. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
¹⁸ For a discussion of the rise of feminism in China, see Shu-Mei Shih, “Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounters, or ‘When’ Does a ‘Chinese’ Woman Become a ‘Feminist’?,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13, No. 2 (2002), 90-126.
¹⁹ Rosalind Coward, ‘“This Novel Changes Lives’: Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels? A Response to Rebecca O’Rourke’s Article ‘Summer Reading,”’ Feminist Review, 5 (1980), 58. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
²⁰ Kwok-kan Tam, “Feminism and Gender Discourse in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong,” introduction to Gender, Discourse, and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, ed. Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2010), xvii. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
²¹ Key works during this period representing the rise of China’s feminist criticism include Xiaojiang Li’s Xing Gou [Sex gap] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1989); and Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua’s book Fuchu lishi dibiao: Xiandai funü wenxue yanjiu [Emerging onto the horizon of history: A study in modern women’s literature] (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1989). Meng and Dai’s book was considered to be a theoretical cornerstone for China’s feminist criticism, which gained in growth and impact after the Cultural Revolution.
²² Yan cites Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940,” introduction to Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 3.
²³ Li Xiaorong, “Gender and Textual Politics during the Qing Dynasty: The Case of the Zhengshi ji,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 69 (2009), 76, 107. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
²⁴ Kang-I Sun Chang, in an earlier study on Ming-Qing women’s poetry anthologies, suggests that “it is through reading and using these separate—that is, separate from male authors—anthologies that we can view the ‘total history’ and fully appreciate the close relations and interdependence between male and female literary activities”; see Chang, “Ming and Qing Anthologies of Women’s Poetry and Their Selection Strategies,” in Writing Women in Late Imperial China, ed. Ellen Widmer and Chang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 149. The variety of selection strategies and criteria in anthologies of Ming-Qing women poets reveals a pluralistic literary scene.
²⁵ Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, Theory, ed. Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 125-43.
²⁶ Vivian M. May, “Writing the Self into Being: Anna Julia Cooper’s Textual Politics,” African American Review, 43 (2009), 17.
²⁷ Susan Stanford Friedman, “Spatialization: A Strategy for Reading Narrative,” Narrative, 1 (1993), 19.
²⁸ For analysis of spatial metaphors in feminist studies, see Kerstin W. Shands, Embracing Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).
²⁹ Among current scholarship on Ming-Qing women’s fiction and drama, the following resources are of particular importance: Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006); and Hua Wei and Wang Ailing, eds., Ming Qing xiqu guoji yantaohui lunwen ji [Collected papers from the international conference on Ming-Qing drama] (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1998).
³⁰ The question about gender and genre in late Qing and early twentieth-century Chinese women’s literature is more centrally explored in Nanxiu Qian, Fong, and Richard Joseph Smith, eds., Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
³¹ Dorothy Ko and Wang Zheng, eds., “Translating Feminisms in China,” special issue, Gender and History, 18 (2006), 464. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
³² Carol C. Chin, “Translating the New Woman: Chinese Feminists View the West, 1905-15,” Gender and History, 18 (2006), 491.
³³ Recent feminist scholarship in China also offers rich reciprocal reflections on the function of capitalist globalization and its impact on feminist movements. See Su Hong-jun, “A Dangerous Liaison: Theorizing the Relationship between American Second-wave Feminism and the Neo-liberal Capitalist Globalization,” Collection of Women’s Studies, 3 (2013), 5-14.
³⁴ For Li Xiaojiang’s reflection on the problems in translating feminist theories, see “Women and Feminism in China and India: A Conversation with Li Xiaojiang,” by Mary E. John, Economic and Political Weekly, 16 April 2005, 1594-97.
³⁵ Laura M. Stevens, “On Translation,” Tulsa Studies of Women’s Literature, 30 (2011), 11. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.