Adena Rivera-Dundas, Utah State University
Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

ABSTRACT: “Silences that Bend” argues that Black feminist memoirs figure silence as material. Considering silence as material contributes to conversations in Black feminist studies by interrogating silence not as the antithesis of expression—as early Black feminist writers might have claimed—nor as a wholly resistive tool—as contemporary scholars in Black Studies claim. Rather, silence is both expressive and internal, harmful and healing. I analyze two memoirs, Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman and Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward to theorize the ways in which these writers articulate violent silences as physical sources of harm. Rather than “breaking” silence, the two memoirs instead write around and through that silence to protect and heal those who need it. Hartman uses “critical fabulation” to allow silence to remain unfilled but apparent, to insist that readers address their unspoken expectations for access to intimate and often violent images. Ward, by contrast, uses Patricia Hill Collins’s tool of “rearticulation” to rework the silence to meet her own needs, protecting her loved ones from details that would wound them while demanding readers bear witness to brutal violence. Through the contrast of these two approaches, this article argues that the memoir form creates a space for critiquing silence and for transforming it into a balm.

Teresa Ramoni, Rutgers University
Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

ABSTRACT: Buchi Emecheta’s most studied work, The Joys of Motherhood has garnered a significant amount of critical attention lauding the novel as a feminist project that indicts patriarchal and colonial forces through the story of its protagonist, Nnu Ego. What has not adequately been commented on, however, are the novel’s depictions of sexual violence. This essay asserts that Emecheta’s depictions of sexual violence, while subtle compared to her representations of motherhood or the economic repercussions of colonialism, are crucial parts of the novel’s feminist mission that ought to be restored to the forefront of the critical conversation. As a novel that describes but does not label sexual violence, I contend that The Joys of Motherhood provides readers with the unique opportunity to encounter rape and interrogate the ways in which it is personally, legally, and societally defined. By closely reading three sexual encounters from the novel and placing Emecheta’s work in dialogue with contemporary scholarship on sexual violence in Nigeria, this essay argues that The Joys of Motherhood holds a unique ability to contribute to Nigeria’s anti-rape movement and to anti-rape activist discourse as a whole.

Cassandra Laity, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the impact of H.D.’s materialization of queer desire in Sea Garden as it pertains to H.D.’s queer trope of the non-fertile, grotesque rock flower that she synchronizes with real geological processes to produce what I term a queer geo-ecology. Theoretically, the text draws on Karen Barad’s theory of “intra-action” in which processual histories and human concepts—of which the non-fertile trope of queer womanhood is one—emerge intra-actively in and through one another. Part I examines H.D. and Bishop’s intra-active floral crystals of queer becoming, while part II explores Elizabeth Bishop’s use of Sea Garden as a geo-ecology to launch a specific protest against Cold War McCarthyism and nuclear world destruction. With an eye toward Barad’s material realism, this essay reads H.D.’s becoming with nature’s emergent rock sphere against Bishop’s poetics of belonging, queer intimacy, and political protest.

Patricia Murphy, Missouri Southern State University
Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

ABSTRACT: The workings of time play a vital and fascinating role in two short stories penned by the controversial writer George Egerton. Since the nineteenth century had seen numerous scientific and cultural developments that unsettled longstanding beliefs, Victorians became obsessed with time and widely perceived linear time as privileging men and subordinating women. The Egerton tales address the associations of linear time in complex ways to protest societal assumptions and practices that oppressed women. “Virgin Soil” (1894) reveals the masculinist inflections of linear time and their damaging effects upon women, even as the female protagonist endeavors to diminish their influence in hopes of attaining a measure of freedom. “An Empty Frame” (1893), by contrast, examines the hold of memory, another manifestation of time that intrigued Victorians. Contemporary thought held that memory could not be destroyed, and that the past dismally defined this female protagonist’s existence. The two stories thus provide an important lens for understanding Victorian culture at the fin de siècle.

Adrian Wanner, Pennsylvania State University
Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

ABSTRACT: Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893), Russia’s foremost female poet of the nineteenth century, was trilingual in Russian, German, and French and translated between these languages in all directions. This essay applies a feminist critical lens to Pavlova’s French translation of Friedrich Schiller’s drama Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801), which was published in Paris in 1839 under the title Jeanne d’Arc. By recasting Schiller’s blank-verse play in rhymed alexandrines, Pavlova asserted her own poetic authority over the text of her male “rival.” At the same time, she modified the wording of the source text to express her personal view of the plot, countering Schiller’s androcentric glorification of Joan of Arc by drawing attention to her plight as a victim of patriarchy. Pavlova also composed a hymn of her own to Joan of Arc, which challenged Schiller more overtly, and she turned her translation of Schiller’s programmatic poem “Das Mädchen von Orleans” into an expression of sympathy for the play’s heroine. If Schiller’s stated goal was to rescue Joan of Arc from Voltaire’s enlightenment mockery, Pavlova intended to rescue her from Schiller’s romantic idealization with an empathetic perspective motivated by female solidarity.