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Preface, Fall 1997, Vol. 16, No. 2

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Holly LairdUniversity of Tulsa
Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall 1997), 255-257

If this issue reaches you later than we would have liked, it will be because this is the first issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature to be generated through desktop typesetting. We hope that the change will be invisible and errors minimal, but please understand—and let us know—if you notice any mistakes we have made. No new staff were hired for the purpose; we retrained ourselves. But like other scholarly journals that run independently of university or trade presses, it is essential for us to become more economically efficient and technologically proficient. Linda Frazier and I are very grateful to all our graduate students who have worked hard in this process. We especially acknowledge the contributions of John Bury, who joined the staff last year with prior experience in desktop publishing and who has given his time and knowledge generously to help make this happen. We wish to express particular thanks also to the University of Tulsa and the Leta Chapman Trust, which granted us the special funding necessary to buy equipment for this transition.

This issue opens with two articles concerned with the reproduction and revision of imperialism in the postcolonial. Mary Lou Emery’s “Refiguring the Postcolonial Imagination” investigates the tropology through which “visuality is figured and refigured,” particularly in texts by Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff. She scrutinizes the reflexive relationship between “a European epistemology of the visual” and the “re-creation in postcolonial literatures of vision, and thus the imagination as something else” not exclusively “of the eye.” In particular, these writers employ and transform the classical rhetorical strategy of ekphrasis, the verbal description of visual art. By “extending it to excess or rendering its absence a significant presence,” Emery argues that “these texts narrativize the links between representation and the social relations of colonialism and neo-colonialism.” Rhys, Kincaid, and Cliff undermine and revise the “narratives of conquest” and “the construction of masculine identities” that have occurred through various kinds of visual art, especially those of European primitivist paintings, of contemporary American photographic portraits, and of commercial film.

Sheila Kineke’s article is the first that readers have enthusiastically recommended for publication to have emerged through research undertaken with one of Tulsa Studies’ travel grants: having won a grant in 1994, Kineke visited the University of Tulsa McFarlin Library Special Collections to study Jean Rhys’s manuscripts. Building upon Emery’s prior work on Rhys, Kineke considers the ways in which the “submission, fatalism, and masochism that mark Rhys’s main female characters” are a side effect of “the female condition” in white Western culture and specifically of the operations of male mentorship by Ford Madox Ford. Kineke sees Ford and Rhys’s relationship, further, as enacting on “a microcosmic scale the dynamics of cultural imperialism that defined modernism’s relationship to the ideas and art of the non-Western world.” The dual processes of “rewriting personal and national his tories” are, Kineke stresses, inextricably connected to each other for writers like Rhys, whose own cultural stories have been suppressed.

In the next essay in this issue, “Plotting the Mother,” Elisabeth Rose Gruner argues, following Marianne Hirsch, that Victorian novels rarely focus on motherhood or on “the multiplicity of ‘women,”‘ which the figure of the mother necessarily encompasses, for a mother is also still a daughter and usually a wife or a lover too. But in three generically exceptional Victorian novels by Anne Brontë, Ellen Wood, and Caroline Norton, Gruner finds “plots engendered by the debates over the 1839 Infant Custody Act,” the first Parliamentary act to be centered on mothers “as a separate class of citizens,” and she shows that, while these novels do not discuss this act explicitly, nonetheless this legislative “refiguration of maternity . . . especially in the language of the debates” made way for consideration of motherhood “detached from courtship or marriage.” All three novels, moreover, “exhibit unusual plotting, false closure, narrative intervention, and even, arguably, artistic failure in their single-minded focus on the multiplicity of female roles.” Finally too, these texts enter into issues of “maternal sexuality and desire” that they then subordinate to a domestic ideology but “cannot entirely contain.”

Claire M. Tylee focuses in her article, “Imagining Women at War,” on Edith Wharton’s wartime writing. While Wharton wrote—as Peter Buitenhuis argues of the older generation of World War I writers—pro-World War I literary propaganda, on the one hand, which draws “a paper curtain across the Western Front,” and fiction, on the other hand, that allows “for question, for irony and debate, for the exploration of personal problems” raised by the war, Wharton produced fiction that also-though this goes unrecognized by Buitenhuis—raises questions about gender and the status of women. Two minor stories in particular, “Writing a War Story” and “The Refugees,” explore women’s roles through the mask of fiction and through irony, “imagining an untrained American VAD and a British spinster in wartime France.” As Tylee argues, these stories thus suggest what is feminist in Wharton’s tactics as a writer. These stories were, moreover, “experiments that prepared for the narrative strategy of her major postwar novel, The Age of Innocence.” Drawing upon feminist theories of the relationship between women’s art and humor, by Elizabeth Robins and Cicely Hamilton, as well as upon contemporary film theory, Tylee shows Wharton evolving feminist narrative strategies.

In the last essay in this issue, Barbara L. Estrin considers the ways in which Adrienne Rich “contest[s] her own representations,” in An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), “widening the Petrarchan revisionism she began in the 1978 ‘Twenty-One Love Poems.”‘ Rich anticipates Judith Butler’s “revisionist linguistics” by showing that poetic form itself is often “seductive and dangerous,”? making the poet “part of the problem she seeks to solve.” Rich tries above all to allow the repressed other back into poetry, “despite the fact that the other who speaks will turn around and indict her as a conspirator in the displacement process.” This complex theoretically grounded discussion of “Adrienne Rich’s Postmodern Inquietude” is combined with incisive new readings of Rich’s poems.

In addition to reporting on this past summer’s travel grant winner, I wish finally to mention two recent developments of potential interest to Tulsa Studies readers. First, we congratulate Loretta Stec, who won Tulsa Studies‘ grant this year. Stec used this support to investigate Rebecca West’s work in McFarlin Library’s archives. Second, we wish to announce that, in addition to employing a regular staff of graduate student editorial interns, we have begun to create opportunities for undergraduate students to work in the office. This summer a student from Hampshire College, Katheryn Desiree Waidner, volunteered her services in exchange for the experience of learning something about the publication process, as also did a University of Tulsa sophomore. In the future, we expect to have undergraduate student interns receiving university course credit for a semester’s work in this office. Finally, it may interest readers to know of my election in the last year to the Women’s Studies Executive Committee of the Modern Languages Association. The Women’s Studies division is the largest (approximately 3,000 members) of the MLA, and, as for most of the other divisions, its primary task is to arrange a series of panels at the MLA’s annual Convention. Within a year, I will become chair of this committee, and before then, I would like very much to hear from Tulsa Studies readers who are MLA members about what topics seem most engaging or urgent to you now. Please let me know by writing to me at the University of Tulsa or by emailing me at: holly-laird[at]utulsa.edu.

Holly Laird
University of Tulsa

This entry was posted on January 29, 2020, in Preface.

Preface, Spring 1998, Vol. 17, No. 1

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Holly LairdUniversity of Tulsa
Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 1998), 7-9

Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature continues a sea change with this issue, as we tangle still with learning QuarkXpress. Our first desktop-printed issue of last fall went forward without a glitch and, to our surprise, was nearly on schedule. The slowdown in our operations will be more marked, however, with this spring 1998 issue. We hope that this issue will reward your patience. Our foremost priority in the immediate future will be to return to our original schedule of publication.

This belated issue also happens to mark a decade in my tenure as editor. Strangely, despite ten years of editorship, the journal still seems like a new venture to me and, of course, barely across the threshold of the enormous changes transpiring in the world of electronic publication. (I am one of those especially astonished, now belated people who wrote her dissertation in longhand and on a typewriter.) In 1988, I would have taken it as a wild surmise that in only ten years, writers and readers like me would be writing, reading, conversing with friends and strangers at least as often through a virtual window in a plastic box on their desks as through the undulating faces of pieces of paper. One day, I would like to see developed a hypertext version of Tulsa Studies that would create electronic space for creative writing by women and chat rooms for conversation between writers and scholars (and interested men-in-feminism) in addition to critical/theoretical articles on women’s writing. But that is sheerly a dream for the present. Even then, I would hope for the journal’s sustained commitment to beautiful, tangible, fierce books (including these printed volumes of Tulsa Studies) and to precise, pushy, heady scholarship devoted to writing and women-as in the present issue.

This issue begins with the archival recovery of a forgotten essay by Edith Wharton. Frederick Wegener has uncovered a short travel essay published by Wharton during the war that turns out to be an unusual appreciation of charities ambitiously managed by a French general’s wife, Madame Lyautey. Its topic is unusual because it uniquely highlights the achievements of a woman whose reputation has otherwise been submerged in her husband’s and because Wharton herself rarely paid admiring attention to activities considered “women’s work.” Indeed, she later edited Madame Lyautey out of reminiscences of the French Moroccan protectorate described in this essay. This essay is of interest, as Wegener shows, not only for its restoration to the known corpus of Wharton’s work, nor only for what reading it contributes to understanding her relations to other achieving women and to women’s work, but also for its small portrait of Wharton’s flattering attitude toward colonialism—not an attractive portrait from today’s perspective, but an illuminating one.

Moving back and forth through time as well as across national borders (from Europe to Morocco, from Canada to the States, from England to France), the articles in this issue are exemplary in expanding the borders not only in what we know about women’s writing, but in how we think about gendered narrative. Following Wharton’s story in this issue is Jean Wyatt’s article on envy between women in Atwood’s The Robber Bride. This essay goes well beyond an acute analysis of Atwood’s novel, moreover, to present a provisional theory of the place of envy in feminist communities. Drawing on Lacanian arguments of the double, Wyatt produces a compelling argument for acknowledging and allowing envy in our (feminist) relations to each other.

Suzanne Juhasz builds upon and corrects previous discussions that she as well as other critics have offered of romantic plots and women readers by turning her attention here to popular romantic novels by and about lesbians, in particular to Sarah Aldridge’s Keep to Me, Stranger (Naiad, 1989). As Juhasz’s title suggests, she provocatively discerns in this fiction alternative “plots of desire,” designed to support lesbian identity as well as to stimulate fantasies of lesbian relations, much as conventional contemporary heterosexual romances arguably support a woman’s need to be nurtured both emotion ally and in a modem career. Juhasz boldly risks essentializing the lesbian in order to describe what lesbian readers often wish for.

Anne Morey’s article on gender and photoplaywrights in the early decades of this century is a first for Tulsa Studies. Though Tulsa Studies is obviously not a journal of film criticism, films should nonetheless be included as subjects for discussion in this journal, for the act of writing plays a crucial role in films, in silent films as well as talkies. Morey explores an important historical decade, from 1913 to 1923, when women rose and fell in their contributions as scenarists and as screenwriters to the burgeoning film industry. It is another monitory example of the ways women have succeeded and then been forced to yield to the other gender their status and the status of what they do.

Patricia Moran has traced a fascinating pattern of oblique references to hymenal intactness and rupture in Virginia Woolf’s writing. She argues that a letter of 1930 to Ethel Smyth marks a shift in Woolf’s thinking of a woman writer’s “centre” from figuring it as lacking to figuring it as a site of creative rupture. The hymen came to seem—as evidenced particularly in a comparison between unpublished passages in A Room of One’s Own, on the one hand, and passages in “Professions for Women” and The Waves, on the other hand—pliable rather than fragile, transformatively shapeshifting rather than tragically frangible. Moran links Woolf’s early thinking about the hymenal center to her early sexual abuse and contrasts this with later thinking that arose from her passionate conversation with other women artists.

Finally, Catherine Liu challenges feminist readings of women’s narratives (citing Nancy K. Miller’s famous “Emphasis Added” as a classic case) and, more specifically, feminist reappraisals of The Princess of Cleves that describe this narrative as contributing to a history of heroic women. Liu redescribes this heroism as profoundly complicated by the princess’s self-renunciation. While the princess can be characterized as seeking a type of Nietzschean will to power through inimitable virtue, she thereby produces a “particularly demanding set of representational and hermeneutic problems.” The writer’s will to power depends, moreover, on Madame de Lafayette’s anonymity as an author, not only on the text’s advocated renunciations. Any inclination to a “faux pas” must yield to the prohibition of “faut pas.”

Readers should be sure also not to miss our next issue. Guest edited by seventeenth-century scholar Teresa Feroli, the fall 1998 issue, “Political Discourse/British Women’s Writing,” focuses on British women’s writing from 1640 to 1869. This exciting special issue includes Diane Purkiss’s “Invasions: Prophecy and Bewitchment in the Case of Margaret Muschamp,” Tamsin Spargo’s “The Fathers’ Seductions: Improper Relations of Desire in Seventeenth-Century Nonconformist Communities,” Katharine Gillespie’s “‘A Hammer in Her Hand’: The Separation of Church from State and the Early Feminist Writings of Katherine Chidley,” Clare Brant’s “Armchair Politicians: Elections and Representations, 1774,” Ewa Badowska’s “The Anorexic Body of Liberal Feminism: Figures of Femininity and Languages of Taste in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Esther Schor’s “The Poetics of Politics: Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows,” and Florence Boos’s “‘We Would Know Again the Fields . . .’: The Rural Poetry of Elizabeth Campbell, Jane Stevenson, and Mary Macpherson.”

Let me remind Tulsa Studies readers that I would love to hear what topics you feel are needed or of special interest as a focus for panels at the 1999 MLA, panels that I hope will generate publishable articles in the future. Each division sponsors a series of three panels every year, and in 1999 I will chair the Executive Committee of the Women’s Studies Division, and so must organize that year’s topics. Topics must be finalized by this coming winter. The 1998 panels, to be conducted in San Francisco, examine the relations between passion and gender in the feminist classroom, in feminist writing, and in feminist scholarship.

On a more personal note, before concluding this preface, I would like to let you—especially those of you I have met or with whom I have worked at any time in the last ten years—know that my husband’s and my two-year wait for a daughter from China is now blissfully over. We travelled in February to meet her and bring her back. Her name is Sage Menglian—a wonderful child, brimmingly responsive, full of laughter, and growing extraordinarily rapidly. Wish her long life and happiness, please, in your thoughts.

Holly Laird
University of Tulsa

This entry was posted on January 29, 2020, in Preface.

Preface, Spring 1999, Vol. 18, No. 1

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Holly LairdUniversity of Tulsa
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 7-9

This issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature opens the last year of the millennium quietly, less in the spirit of a fin de siècle than of yet another turn of the century, in a spirit of sober assessment and retrospection rather than of apocalypse. Like previous tums of the century, this one is marked by the extraordinary productivity and creativity of numerous women writers, who are (to risk a mighty generalization from within the midst of this change) mostly less concerned with imagining millennial upheaval than with figuring the particularities of ongoing social change. Coincidentally perhaps, the articles in this issue, all accepted through our strenuous regular review process, are similarly concerned with representations of domestic and social practices by women writers, which, for each of these writers, struck close to home. Most of the articles position themselves, moreover, not in relation to a century change, but in relation to previous mid-century moments and texts. These articles nonetheless consider the ways various women writers negotiated dilemmas that will, unfortunately, probably survive the Y2K.

Building on the work and insights particularly of Patricia Hill Collins and Sara Ruddick, Joanne S. Frye focuses on questions about childrearing raised by Tillie Olsen’s 1956 short story, “O Yes,” in order to tackle the difficult challenge of “antiracist mothering” in the 1990s. Undaunted by the inherent conflicts involved in resisting white culture’s racial privileges from within, Frye wrestles with the problem of “placing one’s children at the fulcrum of social change: between the urgencies of their own self-confidence, under pinned by the privileges accorded by covert racism, and the opposing urgencies of parental and internal pressure to resist racial privilege.” How, asks Frye, does a mother teach a child “to act on” Ruddick’s “demands of con science,” even as “the child’s own comfort in the world will have to suffer?” Through analysis of Olsen’s story, Frye suggests some important alternative practices for a motherhood resistant to racism.

Lynn M. Alexander returns to mid-century Victorian England, to reconsider the ways in which women, and women seamstresses especially, were routinely selected by women and men writers alike to “represent the working classes and to illustrate the hardships and possible social repercussion of industrialism.” Women and children were preferred as workers in factories and mills for a number of reasons; but, of course, because the seamstress was associated with domesticity, she presented a far more appealing image to middle- and upper-class readers, who were inclined at this time to associate fac tory workers with violent uprising and immoral abandonment of the home. Alexander describes working conditions of the Victorian seamstress that echo reports I have quite recently been reading of sewing sweatshops in Appalachia. Writers like Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Elisabeth Stone, Frances Trollope, and Mary Gaskell could nonetheless deploy the figure of the seamstress to urge their readers to intervene on workers’ behalf. Paradoxically, it was “the seamstress’s seeming lack of power” that made her “powerful as a symbol.”

Sara E. Quay’s article recrosses the Atlantic to focus on Susan Warner’s popular novel of 1850, The Wide, Wide World. Rooted in Warner’s own loss when her family moved from New York City to Constitution Island, this novel reflects a broader sense of cultural dislocation in America at this time. As Quay argues, “homesickness is the affective corollary to the literal and figurative longing for home that shaped so much of mid-nineteenth-century American culture,” as “the newly established American middle class” tried to develop both from a “collection” of nationally and geographically diverse individuals into a “coherent group” and from the “utilitarian” Age of Homespun to a consumer culture. Home “stands as a metaphor for the middle-class search for its identity.” Warner’s novel suggests that when an individual “invest[s] objects with affect, by imagining them as repositories of emotion connected with her home”—that is, by creating keepsakes—”she can overcome the pain—the nostalgia—of modem life.” Quay thus demystifies the ways in which domestic fiction, more generally, copes with nostalgia and change: “Standing at the juncture between these two distinct cultural definitions of material things, keepsakes became the focus of middle-class life because they represented emotional continuity in the face of great personal and social change”—keepsakes including, not least, “attachment to books like Warner’s that evoked and even encouraged their readers to feel nostalgia” for home.

Similarly, Victoria Rosner scrutinizes Doris Lessing’s reconstructions of “home” in her autobiographical writings through the lens of early twentieth century pamphlet guides to Southern Rhodesian settler culture and architecture. Rosner considers more specifically the ways “the architecture of the mother-daughter relationship is constructed in the context of empire and . . . motherhood is materially reproduced in relation to the family home.” Inspired by the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, Lessing’s family set out to produce a colonialist homestead of their own. But quite unlike Warner, Lessing does not strive for “keepsakes” of her colonial home. Rather, Lessing subsequently imagines “her adolescent rebellion as an ’emigration,’ a journey out of the mother country to parts unknown.” Moreover, while women generally have seemed extraneous to the process of colonialism, Lessing shows, on the contrary, “the unexpected reciprocity of maternity and colonialism, a relationship most clearly played out in border skirmishes fought by mother and daughter across the house/bush boundary.”

Laura J. Murray investigates the problematic (post)colonial collaboration between Native Canadian writer Maria Campbell, white actress and play wright Linda Griffiths, and theater director Paul Thompson, as they strove to produce Campbell’s play, Jessica, in the 1980s. This article breaks important new ground in demonstrating Thompson’s central role in this collaboration and in analyzing the play from within the context of Campbell’s relationships to Griffiths and Thompson. Indeed, though Campbell’s autobiographical Halfbreed (1973) is generally perceived as heralding the beginning of Native Canadian literature, Murray’s article offers one of the first interpretations of Jessica. Murray argues that, from the start, Griffiths, Campbell, and Thompson “understood their exchanges of experience in contradictory ways: in terms of the feminine gift economy parallel to the capitalist economy, in terms of a traditional native gift economy, and in terms of a trade economy.” When these contradictions rose to the surface, as Murray writes, and “when the more utopian and ongoing models of exchange, giving and trading, came into crisis with the contract, it was hardly surprising that talk would tum to stealing, for stealing has been the ground metaphor for relations between Native or Metis people and white people since the first treaties were made and broken.”

Finally, I would draw your attention to the panels sponsored by the MLA Women’s Studies Division this December. I look forward to greeting you at our three panels, two of them focused on the newly controversial question of “beauty” and aestheticism in literature and contemporary culture, and the third on the (to a feminist mind) companion question of “aging.” The first panel, “Theorizing Beauty: The Aesthetics of Hair, Bodies, and Brides,” features Shuli Barzilai, Lisbeth Gant-Britton, Lisa Walker, Jodi Schorb, and Tania Hammidi (the last two panelists in collaboration). The second panel, “Theorizing Beauty: The Aesthetic, Race, and Feminism,” features Pamela Caughie, Anne A. Cheng, and Mark Edmundson. The third panel, “Theorizing Age, Aging Theories,” chaired by Sidonie Smith, features Robyn Wiegman, G. Gwen Raaberg, and Elana Marshall. I hope you will attend these sessions and join the discussion following the participants’ papers.

Holly Laird
University of Tulsa

This entry was posted on January 29, 2020, in Preface.

Preface, Fall 1999, Vol. 18, No. 2

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Holly LairdUniversity of Tulsa
Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1999), 167-171

As I was teaching Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces earlier this fall in a graduate seminar on tum-of-the-century writing, I was struck by a passage in which Hopkins plays upon the word “safe.” Published in 1900, this novel places itself deliberately, first, in relation to a previous tum of the century, “in the early part of the year 1800 [when] the agitations of Great Britain over the increasing horrors of the slave trade carried on in the West Indian possessions of the Empire was about reaching a climax.”1 In this moment, embroiled in the debates over slavery, a wealthy Anglo-Bermudan family transplants itself to the more “liberal” soil of the southern United States (p. 28), in order to maintain its accumulated wealth and, only after consolidating this wealth, to free its slaves—neither of which aims succeeds. Later, the novel turns to its own moment, beginning in 1896, when a distant descendant of this West Indian family (and a protagonist of the novel), Dora, finds herself “taking full charge” of her mother’s household; from this point, the novel traces the progress of a Boston African American family and community and their political leaders in the late 1890s. The political excitement, anxiety, and debate over the “race question” cannot be separated from the “domestic” in this novel any more than they can be separated from the burden of the past. So too in our own moment of 1999-2000, it is important to recognize our embeddedness in these previous turn-of-the-century situations.

The irony of such millennial moments—in which, contradictorily, people find themselves simultaneously presaging a brave new future and self-protectively warding off change—is anticipated in the punning passage on the Montfort family’s “safe” (pp. 52-53). After relocation to “Newbern,” North Carolina, Mr. Montfort receives threats ensuant upon rumors spread that his wife is mulatto and that he means to free his slaves. In an effort once again to “save” both his household and his prosperity, Montfort begs his (duplicitous) friend, Pollock, a neighboring white plantation owner, “‘if anything happens to me, I want you to promise to help my wife and babies to get back to Bermuda.’ . . . ‘In that safe,’ continued Montfort, not heeding [Pollock’s] interruption, ‘you will find money and deeds; promise me that you will save them for my family.”‘ Pollock promises, whereupon Pollock convenes the secret “committee on public safety”—a vigilante group dedicated to upholding the “laws” of segregation, whereby no white man may jeopardize southern stability by marrying a woman of color or by freeing his slaves. As Pollock proceeds to tell his conspirators in this meeting, “if niggers are tolerated in any way, it will end in weakening the law, and then good-by to our institutions” (pp. 54-55).

In situations in which it is not possible to separate one’s “safety” from one’s “safe,” where sharp divisions are marked between a family’s safety and its neighbor’s, one people’s salvation and that of another people, the words “safe,” “save,” and “safety” alike become nearly meaningless. Or perhaps rather, these words become all too meaningful, as they collapse together in a complex evocation of yearning for one’s own desserts, envy of others’, terror at the challenge of those others. This is, of course, as much a problematic of 2000 as of 1800. When has wealth ever been more eagerly pursued or the survival of families and peoples ever seemed more dependent upon securing such wealth, investing in such securities? Amusing though Y2K worries may be to many of us in academia—purveyed with stunning speed through innumerable sites on the worldwide web—safety, salvation, and savings are as much keynotes now as in any time past.

In the lead article in this issue, Karen Hollinger and Teresa Winterhalter return us to Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 classic, Little Women, in order to confront the 1994 film adaptation with the long embattled history of women and feminism that the film covers over. As in our Spring 1999 issue, several articles in the current issue—including this article by Hollinger and Winterhalter—are focused on the domestic scene as a site of the political.2 Their article recovers not only Alcott’s ambivalent portrayal of domesticity—where a woman’s self-expression must be subdued to self-abnegation focused on helping others—but also the rich, difficult history of feminist efforts to describe and redescribe this ambivalence. These ambivalences are lost, as Hollinger and Winterhalter demonstrate, in the 1994 feminist triumphalism of Robin Swicord and Gillian Armstrong’s film. Against the desire of contemporary women to see themselves no longer “torn between little womanhood and nonconformity,” to “see ourselves [instead] . . . as women with the ability to transform even the legacy of a restrictive past into a history of female triumph,” these scholars resurrect the novel itself: “thick with patriarchally complicit aspects of [nineteenth-century gender] ideology.” Hollinger and Winterhalter’s article is notably also the first coauthored article recommended through our anonymous review process for publication in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (thus the first article by coauthors since our two-part solicited forum on collaboration five years ago).

Tulsa Studies is fortunate to be able to include also in this Fall 1999 issue an article on Hopkins’s Contending Forces by Gloria T. Randle. In addition to uncovering what is political in the African American domestic, this article considers female-female psychological dynamics as a locus of political repro duction and potential reform. Randle focuses, first, on the way Montfort’s wife’s horrible end (she is whipped at a post by Pollock’s henchmen and then, abandoning her children to him, commits suicide in order to escape becoming his mistress) offers a critique of the creed of “true womanhood.” Randle then tums to the ways the discrepant relations of Dora to her son and daughter replicate gender inequities, both psychologically and socially, though they also foster unconscious resistance in Dora. Finally, Randle uncovers Dora and Sappho’s immanently Sapphic relationship with each other-a relationship that provides a subversive alternative to the marriages with which the novel more predictably concludes.

Continuing the interrogation of motherhood, in “Mother’s Pain, Mother’s Voice,” Margaret Bruzelius broadly addresses the religious specter of the Virgin Mary as “a uniquely powerful idea of motherhood [pervading] Western consciousness.” Taking as her central examples, on the one hand, the early twentieth-century Chilean poet (and Nobel Prize winner) Gabriela Mistral’s fierce poems and, on the other hand, French theorist Julia Kristeva’s discussions of maternity, Bruzelius probes the ways in which the inhibiting “cult” of Mary is recreated even in Mistral and Kristeva’s complex efforts to revise this tradition. Bruzelius launches a provocative critique in particular of the profoundly entrenched association of motherhood and suffering, which she sees as a legacy of Mariolatry.

Since the launching of the Woolf Studies Annual in 1995-a late-century development that we particularly applaud-the number of submissions of articles on Woolf to Tulsa Studies has decreased. So we are especially happy to feature two articles in this issue on this hugely important writer from the opening decades of the century. Karen Kaivola’s article on Woolf’s representations of androgyny undertakes the challenge posed by Kari Weil’s Androgyny and the Denial of Difference to “theorize” (in Kaivola’s words) “androgyny as one intermixed figure among others, [linking] the cultural work androgyny performs through gender to that performed by other intermediate figures, such as racial hybridity, hermaphroditism, and sexual inversion.” Further, she historicizes this analysis by contextualizing it in the political development of liberal constitutionalism (and “the reconceptualization of the individual that was one of its effects”) and in turn-of-the-century anxiety over “intermediate or impure forms of identity, fears that were fed by the convergence of nationalism and scientific rationalism.” This major reassessment of androgyny in Woolf’s texts concludes with a sophisticated reapplication of Wendy Brown’s concept of a “(fictional) egalitarian imaginary” to Woolf’s “intermix.”

Robin Hackett’s article offers itself as a “perverse” reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet VII by Woolf: “as I am imagining an early twentieth-century British feminist and pacifist like Virginia Woolf might read, and as The Waves encourages its readers to reread the sonnet . . . as a story of imperialism.” Hackett proceeds to demonstrate exhaustively why, in fact, such a reading is warranted by the evidence surrounding and within Woolf’s The Waves. Hackett’s ingenious and intricate argument thus returns us to the problem of nationhood partly raised by Kaivola and wittily shows us how Woolf’s novel does the work “of pressing readers to evaluate the imperialist and patriarchal force of Shakespeare’s use of a son-sun metaphor.” Against Shakespeare’s “promise of perpetual eminence for [his] heroically beautiful addressee,” Woolf pursues an antithetical theme of “cyclic individuation and reincorporation.”

One year ago, in spring 1998, Tulsa Studies published Jean Wyatt’s article on Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride. In this issue, we revisit that novel with Donna L. Potts’s analysis of intertextuality and identity. In this profound consideration of the intersections between intertextuality and identity issues, Potts carefully examines the ways in which “Atwood’s intertextuality may therefore be read [both] as a postcolonial attempt to devise a discourse that displaces the effects of the colonizing gaze while still under its influence” and as a narrative that shows the “effect of colonization on Canada [to be] inseparable” from “the effect of patriarchy on Canadian women.” Dovetailing also with Kaivola’s discussion of the ambiguous political functions of hybridity, Potts works toward a different conclusion, arguing for “hybridization” as a “means of acknowledging and accepting multiplicity,” which permits, indeed facilitates, political movement.

Some of you with affiliations to or prior acquaintance with Tulsa may be interested to know that this fall, Atwood visits the city to be honored with the city’s highest honor for writers, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award—a $20,000 award that, in the fifteen years of its existence, has been offered to only two other women writers, to Toni Morrison in 1988 and to Eudora Welty in 1991. At Tulsa Studies, of course, we are jumping up and down with joy at Margaret Atwood’s acceptance of this award.

This issue is capped by a contribution to our Archives section: a comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Caroline Kirkland, a prominent western American woman writer from the middle of the last century. In her introduction to this bibliography, Erika M. Kreger explains and reassesses the history of Kirkland’s career and reception: “In his time, Poe was not alone in praising the first American author to present a realistic vision of frontier life,” Kreger explains, but Kirkland also “went on to become . . . a prolific writer and editor in the New York publishing world,” and yet “few critical discussions of Kirkland have moved beyond her early western sketches.” Kreger’s bibliography thus takes an important step forward in broadening public knowledge of this influential American woman writer.

I would draw our readers’ attention also to the MLA Women’s Studies Division’s proposed sessions for the year 2000, organized by Robyn Wiegman (abstracts or papers should be sent to her by 10 March). The first panel, “Feminism against Time,” addresses issues and problems of temporality in feminist scholarship and theory. The second, “Feminism in Time,” concerns “Feminism’s emergence in historical time.” The third, “Feminism on Time,” focuses on feminist politics of historical, philosophical, and utopian time. For further details, see recent and forthcoming issues of the MLA Newsletter.

I wish to conclude this note with some words of thanks. We wish to thank our Book Review Editor Rosary Fazende, who has undertaken her duties to the journal for the last three years with zest and humor. Not only through the book review section, but in nearly all dimensions of the journal’s business, Rosary has left a lasting mark, contributing to the journal’s success in countless details. She is succeeded by Olivia Martin, who took over this position at the end of the summer and whom many of you have already met through email, snail mail, or the telephone. I want personally to thank both Rosary and Olivia for making this transition so smooth as to be nearly invisible.

We take particular pleasure in thanking our first “Saxifrage” donor—Ellen Adelson—an enduring friend to the University of Tulsa and now also to Tulsa Studies. We are deeply grateful to her for her financial support of the journal and its various activities, including especially its educational internships for students and its travel grants for scholars of women’s literature. She joins us in hoping that her first contribution will encourage others to offer support for all our efforts at Tulsa Studies.

Holly Laird
University of Tulsa

NOTES
1 Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 17. This is the opening sentence of the novel. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text.
2 See my “From the Editor” column in our spring 1999 issue for brief discussion of women writers’ insistence on domestic and social specificity at the tum of the century: Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 18, No. 1 (1999), 7.

This entry was posted on January 29, 2020, in Preface.

Preface, Spring 2000, Vol. 19, No. 1

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Holly LairdUniversity of Tulsa
Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2000), 183-185

This issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature has been caught up in a wave of transitions, as if the new millennium had indeed demanded change. Most important perhaps for the journal is our move to yet another new “old house,” and along with this move, the shifting of our collection of women’s literature and feminist criticism to McFarlin Library. (Visitors to McFarlin thus now have easy access not only to the tremendous manuscript and book collections for women writers in “Special Collections” but also to Tulsa Studies’ inviting archive of books, with the Virago publications at its core.) In addition to these momentous changes, I have become Chair of the Department of English here at the University of Tulsa, while carrying on with editorship of Tulsa Studies, and I do so at a time when—as many of our readers may already know—we will be searching for a new editor of the James Joyce Quarterly to replace Robert Spoo. We miss Bob, his diligence and energy, and his companionship in the “Red House(s)” where the journals have physically dwelled.

The new house where we reside is an elegant structure, set apart slightly from the main campus on a grassy corner. This change was necessitated by the university’s development, as it follows through on its “master plan.” While this move—like the previous one—was onerous for those of us who turned their backs on the memories associated with the spaces in which we worked, and especially for those who packed and unpacked the boxes, the new house tums out to be a more spacious and more pleasant place in which to work. Previously the house was used as a seminary. We welcome visitors who may happen through Tulsa or McFarlin Library. (I wish to thank, in particular, Linda Frazier, Olivia Martin, Kara Ryan-Johnson, Michael Berglund, and Pauline Newton for their help with this move.) We are not yet entirely moved into the house even now, and the move has slowed down our operations, as our current authors, reviewers, and readers already know. We hope that most of you will not notice much in the way of glitches. If you do, however, please let us know, so that we can attend to them as soon as possible.

The shifting of Tulsa Studies‘ small library from our house to McFarlin has caused the greatest of the gaps, of course, in our sense of space in the new house. This was not an easy decision to make. Yet we have long felt that far more students should and would find their ways to this collection if it could be discovered among the rooms of the main library. With library space at a premium, we were surprised and delighted when we learned we would be able to establish this women’s literature collection in McFarlin. We are deeply grateful to the library and to its director, Francine Fisk, for agreeing with us that the collection merited some room of its own.

In the meantime, much continues also to go on without letup within the pages of the journal. This issue fittingly heralds the opening of the new millennium with three articles devoted to reevaluation of both New Women and anti-New Woman novels from the previous tum of the century. Our lead article, an Archives piece, presents readers with a detailed description and evaluation of a heretofore unknown novel by Rebecca West, “The Sentinel.” Kathryn Laing came upon this novel four years ago in the Rebecca West Collection of McFarlin Library, and after painstaking work in transcribing and analyzing it, she offers here the first full-length scholarly examination of it. As Laing narrates, “the striking resemblance of the handwriting [of “Isabel Lancashire”] to that of the young Rebecca West” and “the story of Adela Furnival—schoolgirl, science mistress, and finally suffragette—    . . . suggested the extraordinary possibility that this lengthy but incomplete novel was West’s first, written prior to the posthumously published Adela fragment and started before she began her journalistic work for The Freewoman, when she adopted the pen name Rebecca West.”

In the next essay, “George Egerton and the Project of British Colonialism,” Iveta Jusová extends the work begun by Laura Chrisman of placing the famous New Woman writer George Egerton within the imperialist context of late Victorian England. Rather than focusing exclusively on Egerton’s frankness about female sexuality and gender roles, as have most previous scholars of Egerton, Jusová explores the intersections of gen der and sexuality with race and class. Ultimately diverging from Chrisman’s conclusions about Egerton’s conservatism within a colonialist context, Jusová argues that Egerton went beyond most other New Women novelists in this regard, for her “disrespect for conventional English middle-class values and sensibilities, her lack of direct investment in the maintenance of the British empire, and her engagement with Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy freed Egerton to explore in her work discursive strategies subversive of both middle-class values and, in some instances, of the colonial project.”

In “Disdained and Disempowered: The ‘Inverted’ New Woman in Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina,” Patricia Murphy tums her attention to an anti-New Woman novelist’s demonization of her feminist character, the fictional “Faustina.” As Murphy points out, Broughton has not received much critical attention, though she was widely read in her own day. Yet Dear Faustina, Murphy explains, “provides a fascinating glimpse of the discourses marshaled in the century’s final decades to decry the ‘shrieking sisterhood”‘ by “incorporat[ing] the vituperative sentiments that entered cultural discourse through both fictional and nonfictional writings, [and] resonat[ing] with the nascent scientific study of female homoeroticism conducted by such Victorian sexologists as Havelock Ellis.” Moreover, while this novel overtly reinstitutionalizes a patriarchal order of gender relations, it nonetheless also allows Broughton’s New Woman a central role in the narrative, which puts into performance Ellis’s “sexual invert”; moreover, even after Faustina’s defeat, Broughton retains a commitment to a social mission for women despite the novel’s return to patriarchal norms.

JoAnn Pavletich’s article shifts to the writings of the Jewish immigrant, Anzia Yezierska, in 1920s America. This article, “Anzia Yezierska, Immigrant Authority, and the Uses of Affect,” focuses on a moment in the history of the fascinating discourses of “affect.” As Pavletich shows, “while emotion ostensibly occupies the realm of the subjective, it nevertheless, like sexuality, like class relations, like warfare, has a history.” More specifically, Yezierska’s writings “engag[e] the tensions in early-twentieth-century United States culture between a valorized emotional reserve and a denigrated emotional expressivity [through the] figure of the emotionally intense Jewish female immigrant” and thereby “establish[es] the immigrant woman as an especially important figure in United States culture precisely because of her effusive emotions.” Pavletich does not reach a romantic conclusion about this figure’s role in U.S. culture, however, for she finds that while Yezierska’s texts proffer a critique of class and gender relations in America, these texts remain at least partially constrained not only by cultural stereotypes of affect, but also by the early twentieth-century utopian doctrine of “sympathy” as the answer to “oppressive and marginalizing political and economic forces.”

The next essay by Claudia Ingram on the contemporary coauthors Olga Broumás and T Begley returns to a topic and a question of authorship first broached five years ago in Tulsa Studies‘ publication in Spring 1995 of “What is the Subject? Speaking, Silence, (Self) Censorship,” by the collaborative young scholars Darlene Dralus and Jen Shelton. In “Sappho’s Legacy: The Collaborative Testimony of Olga Broumás and T Begley,” Ingram shows that “in its collaborative production, in the strange and sometimes traumatic content it explores, and in its formal and linguistic qualities, [Broumás and Begley’s verse sequence] ‘Prayerfields’ dramatizes the process of ‘bearing witness.”‘ By “strange,” Ingram means what Shoshana Felman earlier defined as a quality evoked when speech retrospectively and disjunctively marks—or “testifies” to—an undigestible trauma. For Broumás and Begley, as for Dralus and Shelton, the traumas informing this verse sequence include incest. Yet, as Ingram further argues, this poetry does more than memorialize past trauma: Sappho’s “legacy,” as Broumás and Begley themselves remind us, is not one only of “tears,” but of “praise.” In Ingram’s words, these poets “perform the recovery of what they identify as a specifically poetic voice: the voice that is able, without forgetfulness, to praise”—to celebrate not only “the speaking subject, the embodied voice, that survives, but also . . . the intimate ‘you’ who bears witness and, in doing so, enables this survival.”

In the final, culminating essay of this issue, “Who’s Afraid of Mala Mousi? Violence and the ‘Family Romance’ in Anjana Appachana’s ‘Incantations,”‘ Suvir Kaul introduces Tulsa Studies readers to the writing of a contemporary Indian woman author. Working within a feminist con text “made available,” as Kaul says, “by the growth of urban, middle-class feminism in India since the 1970s,” Appachana is one of a group of recent writers who, in contrast to writers like Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, and Arundhati Roy, give voice to “another, quieter strain in contemporary Indian writing in English . . . one whose compressed energy derives not from its sweep or its claim to represent entire worlds-in-the-making, but from its insistence on enacting in a realist idiom the lives and experiences of middle-class families, particularly those of the women who live within and are defined by the expectations of these families.” At the same time, this is a writer for whom a single story like the one on which Kaul focuses, “Incantations,” simultaneously traces “multiple and overlapping stories,” becoming “thick with event and meditation.” “Incantations” is, further, a story whose multilinguality allows an “overlap and jostle of . . . languages [from which] emerge conflicted models of desire and of aberrant or idealized subjectivity.” Whoever is afraid of Mala Mousi—a gynecologist and “feminist avant la lettre” who plays a central role in this story—is still more likely to fear the “power and precision” of Appachana herself.

Holly Laird
University of Tulsa

This entry was posted on January 29, 2020, in Preface.