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

As a visual object, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature is something of a “beauty.” At journal displays (like those sponsored by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals at its annual MLA journal exhibit), Tulsa Studies—with its embossed saxifrage, its brazen red covers, and the elegant lines of its type—stands off and out from many other journals. As we complete the nineteenth year of this journal’s life and career, we are now considering a modernization of the journal’s “look”—one that would retain its central elements of design, elegance, and color but that would deploy an unembossed flower—in order to increase our flexibility in working with printers as well as to herald twenty successful years of publication. We would like to forewarn our readers of this still-only meditated change and to solicit your reactions to such a change.

But beauty is (I’ve always thought) as beauty does, and—for better and for worse—the latter is less easily ascertained or fixed according to an illusion of changeless standards than are commercialized visual paradigms of beauty. The first half of this issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature takes up some of the “Problems of Beauty in Feminist Studies” in a fascinating set of explorations not only of the problems of beauty in and for feminist studies, but also of beauty’s deeds: its consequences, its resolutions, and its alternatives for feminists. Overlapping with several sub-plots of this forum—particularly with its occasionally psychoanalytic explorations of desire and with its allusions to the romance paradigm—the dyad of essays that follows delves into problems of mother-daughter relationships in women’s narratives. Both of these essays seek to reshape the “mirror” in which mothers and daughters see each other.

Since I discuss the fall 2000 forum in detail in its preface, I will add no more about it here, but rather will say a few more words about this issue’s concluding paired essays. Despite their distance from each other in the languages and times they treat—the first essay centering on two eighteenth century French-language writers, the second essay on two late twentieth-century English-language writers—these two essays have much in common in how they view western Caucasian heritages of mother-daughter relationships. Katharine Ann Jensen explains how Isabelle de Charrière and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun take up where seventeenth-century writers Madame de Lafayette and Madame de Sévigné left off in “portray[ing] an intense narcissistic relationship between mother and daughter in which the daughter’s heterosexual desire threatens the primary dyad by defining the daughter as separate from her mother.” Moreover, pressing beyond these specific French women writers of an earlier age, Jensen argues that the “mother’s nostalgia for reflective unity with her daughter” is “not different in kind from the daughter’s nostalgia in the twentieth century. Feminists’ longing for the preoedipal mother is based on the same fantasy of past reflective unity as the early modem mothers’ longing for their heterosexually undetermined daughters.” Jensen concludes by urging the importance not only of producing alternative “models and metaphors for coexistent maternal and filial subjectivities,” but of demanding “cultural recognition” for alternative models to rival and, if possible, supersede early modem, Freudian, and post-Freudian “elegiac and nostalgic models” alike.

Sarah R. Morrison ponders similarly the strange tenacity of the “traditional courtship or marriage plot” in novels by women, even when these women writers may satirize elements of the plots that they employ. Such plots may, of course, vicariously satisfy many women’s “psychological need for mothering,” but then again, they tend ambivalently, in Marianne Hirsch’s formulation, also to attempt to disassociate the daughter’s “emerging subjectivity” from the long shadow of her mother. As Morrison argues, however, Margaret Atwood’s widely known The Handmaid’s Tale and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s lesser known The Madness of a Seduced Woman exemplify sophisticated contemporary novels that “move beyond the traditional romance not by minimizing or attacking the romance plot but by exploiting it directly.” How do they manage this paradoxical move? In Morrison’s intricate exposition, perhaps most striking are the ways these two novels “abruptly distance readers from the heroine’s narrative and tum the familiar love story into a story about, among other matters, women’s attachment to the fantasy itself.” Morrison’s article interestingly intersects with Shuli Barzilai’s forum essay on Atwood’s Lady Oracle, whose woman-writer heroine “admits . . . in explaining the fascination of Tennyson’s fable, ‘I was a romantic despite myself.”‘ Where Barzilai stresses the way “One can travel to London and Rome, change addresses, lovers, hairstyles, or whatever, and yet move very little (‘say . . . three-quarters of an inch’) or remain in the same place,” so that women writers must contradictorily “comply with” even as they “undermine” the romance plot, Morrison speculates that some women writers like Atwood not only “discover that such escape [from romance] is impossible,” but also “pause to wonder whether such escape” is entirely “desirable.”

As mentioned in my spring 2000 editor’s note, I have indeed become chair of English here, and it is no easier than I thought it would be to keep up with the compounded duties. But I am nonetheless as busy as ever with Tulsa Studies and would like to conclude this note by mentioning a couple of our future plans. Next year’s volume will include an issue almost entirely dedicated to consideration of women writers internationally, particularly beyond the shores of the United States and England. These planned essays have emerged entirely through the regular blind-review submission process. I was so pleased to see an increase in such submissions that I set aside an issue for these essays to highlight non-Anglo-American women writers. Beyond this special issue, I hope (though I remain in the early stages of planning) to devote a forum or complete issue to examination of national and international adoption and its relationship to feminist studies; I am in the process now of seeking essays by adoptive mothers and am asking them to speculate on the ways adoption has affected their thinking as writers, scholars, and theorists, and vice versa. Tulsa Studies has given much space over the years to questions of mother-daughter relationships (as in the current issue), but rarely have authors factored in the question of adoption, “open” adoption, and cross-racial or transnational adoption. I cannot hope to contact everyone who has adopted internationally or even to know of everyone in academia who is creating a blended family, and so I wish in closing to invite your suggestions and recommendations. Please let me know if and how you might like to participate in such a forum yourself: holly-laird[at]utulsa.edu.

Holly Laird
University of Tulsa

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Holly Laird, University of Tulsa
Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring 2001), 5-10.

As readers of the print version of these editorial notes may immediately notice, our cover has not changed: the alternative designs that we considered last year for a possible new book jacket for Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (which I mentioned in “From the Editor” in our fall 2000 issue)—while visually articulate in an impressively punk style—also rather looked like the jacket for any other contemporary scholarly journal. Moreover, we felt no prods in the direction of change, but instead received some urgings not to revise the journal’s look. So, for now, we retain our style as of old.

This particular issue brings together a number of essays that focus on cross-currents of the old and new from the past 140 years. Since these essays are so unusually mixed in their sense of overlapping times (for example, of the Victorian with the modernist, of modern feminism with Victorian “true womanhood,” of the Victorian diary form with the con temporary novel), I have arranged them in thematic clusters rather than in a strictly chronological progression—or, in accordance, with what Wendy Parkins describes in this issue as “the nonsynchronicities of modernity.” The issue’s article section thus begins, not with the earliest of its writers (Anne Thackeray Ritchie), but with a study of “the roots of ecological feminism” in the first decade of the twentieth century; and the article section ends, not with the most recent of its authors (A. S. Byatt), but with the resurgently contemporary interest in vampirism. In between this frame are a cluster of essays (on Elizabeth Robins, Ritchie, and Elizabeth Bowen and Stella Gibbons) that rethink feminist writing in the process of transition from the Victorian to the modern and a culminating essay (on Byatt) that uses a 1990s novel to interrogate the private-public distinction in Victorian diary writing. Finally, in this issue, our archives section includes an essay that tracks Willa Cather’s backward look at Walt Whitman for her sense of a future.

A quiet interest in Appalachian women’s literature awakened in me thirteen years ago in the spring when I first began reading submissions and readers’ reports for Tulsa Studies. So it is with a sense of overdue urgency that we publish at last the first article to have met with readers’ approval in this area. Leading this issue is Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt’s exploration of early ecological feminism in the writings of Emma Bell Miles and Grace MacGowan Cooke. Distinguishing these women’s views from “environmental” feminism—which, as Carolyn Merchant has argued, was a type of conservationism premised on the separation and even superiority of human from and over the nonhuman—Engelhardt writes that “because their feminism is neither northeastern nor only for a fairly small group of upper-class white women, because it is rural, working class, and because it rejects the automatic superiority of certain human beings over nature and other human beings, it is, instead, an early form of ecological feminism.”

Taking up the case for Elizabeth Robins, against a number of feminist modernists from Virginia Woolf to the present, Sue Thomas shows us some other sides of Robins. Well known as a realist as well as a suffragist in her writings from 1907-13, Robins had “both aesthetic and feminist reservations about aspects of modernist literature,” particularly as represented by T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations and Dorothy Richardson’s Honeycomb. Robins nonetheless admired and was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Chance and Richardson’s The Tunnel and Deadlock, and her observations about such texts in the late 1910s and 1920s are richly recorded in the Elizabeth Robins Papers—in diaries, notebooks, letters, and notes for her fiction—as well as being reflected in her novels Time Is Whispering and Ancilla’s Share. Moreover, Robins continued in the 1920s to pursue the problem she had earlier formulated as “sex antagonism” and the “sex disgust of male modernist writers as well as the limiting ideals of women’s place projected by social visionaries like H. G. Wells.” Although her feminist project partly conformed to a racist shift among Anglophiles “towards a more parochial sense of Englishness,” her writings about “feminist social reclamation based on production and women’s participation in the public sphere” suggest the ways that male modernists’ sex antagonism was “implicated in other antagonisms—generational conflict, militarism, and imperialist alienations.”

As Manuela Mourão points out, Anne Thackeray Ritchie is better known for her introductions to her father’s, William Makepeace Thackeray’s, books and for her short lives of canonical nineteenth-century male writers than for her nonfictional and fictional representations of women. In the essay published in this issue, Mourão helps to correct this neglect by analyzing Ritchie’s cautious critiques of Victorian ideologies of marriage and domesticity in her short fiction. Quite unlike Robins, Ritchie, as Mourão explains, “never openly embraced a feminist identity,” but rather, in her short fiction of the 1860s and ’80s, tried to erode Victorian assumptions about marriage despite the “social pressure” she experienced “to conform.” Yet interestingly, Mourão uncovers in Ritchie some anticipatory modernist methods that enable precisely the “indirection essential for [Ritchie] to negotiate her dual position within Victorian culture.” In other words, Ritchie “explor[es] alternatives to traditional Victorian realism so as to diffuse her indictment of Victorian ideologies of marriage and thus avoid the appearance of strong opposition.” If Ritchie becomes a “transitional figure between literary movements,” this is “partly necessitated by the attempt to negotiate between feminist principles and Victorian ideologies.” Focusing both on how Ritchie uses her short fiction of the 1880s to revisit situations and themes in her stories of the 1860s and on what Mourão further uncovers in the manuscripts behind some of this short fiction, Mourão demonstrates that Ritchie “systematically chose subtler critiques that allowed her to negotiate between a strong feminist stance and Victorian gender ideologies.”

Whereas Mourão focuses on the ways in which a Victorian writer may serve as a transitional figure to modernist methods, deployed, paradoxically, to disguise precociously feminist views, Parkins demonstrates how modernity in the work of some early twentieth-century women writers is itself a transitional phenomenon, ambivalently belonging to both the past and the future, both the country and the city, both a feminism of agency (capable of “surviv[ing] the shock of the present”) and a feminism of mobility (inescapable in the modern world in which feminism was born). In Parkins’s words, although Bowen’s To the North is “a serious (if non-canonical) novel” and Gibbons’s is “a satirical one . . . having in common only their year of publication (1932), . . . both these novels feature heroines who are emblematic of a modernity associated with cars, trains, and planes”—highly mobile vehicles that “‘Move dangerously.”‘ Moreover, both these novels allow Parkins to “widen the frame to consider the mobility of the female subject beyond the city,” “to show that the female subject represents the disruptions and transitions between the city and the country—and between the different kinds of social relations and experience associated with each location—in ways that represent the nonsynchronicities of modernity and the instabilities of modern subjectivity.” Reapplying Ernst Bloch’s notion of “nonsynchronism,” Parkins shows how Bowen and Gibbons undercut the myths of “modernization’s limitless development” and the concomitant notion of “limitless self-development.” In addition, giving yet another twist to the complex possibilities of realism for women writers in this issue, Parkins suggests that while “the nonrealist mode of Cold Comfort Farm may be able to evade the consequences of nonsynchronicity through escapist fantasies of country life,” the realism of To the North better represents the unevenness of modernity” and the “vacuity of modernization’s promise” to reconcile divergent temporalities in an “‘endless present.”‘

Opening her article with a review of some key moments in recent feminist considerations of the diary, of autobiography, and of life writing, Adrienne Shiffman adopts the view that “a reexamination and reappropriation of the diary as a literary form locates it on the borderline or threshold of autobiography; while the diary is an autobiographical act of writing the self, it simultaneously subverts the conventions of the traditional male centered genre.” Further adopting Lynn Z. Bloom’s delineation of the “public private diary,” Shiffman argues that “the importance of the audience in what has been traditionally regarded as a private genre . . . cannot be overstated.” Applying these ideas to A. S. Byatt’s Possession and citing Byatt’s own claim that “‘of course all autobiography is fiction,”‘ Shiffman goes on to show the ways Byatt’s “fictional construction of a nineteenth century female diary” by the wife of a canonical male poet “exposes the genre” of the diary “as a textual construct.” Spanning the times between Byatt’s own moment in the 1990s and the Victorian past, Byatt also imagines some fictional male scholars of the late twentieth century who specialize in the canonical poet of this novel. For these scholars, Ellen Ash’s journal is as “dull” and domestic as a female diary is expected by them to be. But dissertation student Beatrice Nest suspects that beyond the diary’s appearance of “dailiness” is a self-conscious design, to “construct her journal with a deliberate intention: to baffle”—that is, to baffle an audience Ash fully expects to possess in centuries to come. Ash deliberately “writes herself as the ideal embodiment of Victorian femininity, overtly aware of the necessary element of female inferiority that lies at the center of this ideal.” But when in her diary Ash becomes an appreciative audience in turn for the noncanonical female poet Christabel LaMotte, Ash “recognizes LaMotte’s deviance from the cultural expectations of womanhood” and “locates herself, as reader, outside the collective majority of the ‘general public’ who perpetuate such ideological constructions.” She becomes herself at last “a learned literary critic” in her own right.

Wondering aloud why “at the beginning of the twenty-first century, vampires are as popular as ever,” Sarah Sceats looks at Angela Carter’s prescient revival of vampirism in her novels from the late 1960s through the early ’80s as a paradigmatic example of the vampire’s fascination for us. Rehearsing all that gives the vampire an essentially contradictory nature, “represent[ing] what we both fear and desire,” simultaneously “voracious” and “insatiable,” “highly sexual, yet [its] penetration … nongenital,” “confus[ing] the roles of victim and predator,” “combining dependence and rapaciousness,” “‘wedged,”‘ as Carter herself indicates, “‘in the gap between art and life,”‘ Sceats distinguishes Carter’s representation of vampires from previous Victorian and modern figuration in that Carter also “us[es] vampiric tropes to examine gendered behavior and heterosexual power relations.” Sceats sees Carter as ahead of her time in the 1960s-’80s in both her irony and “her insistence upon appetite, transgression, and instability.” Sceats notes that in some ways “it is surprising that this figure has not been taken up more by feminist writers,” given that “women (vampires), prowling to satisfy their transgressive appetites, offer a revolutionary possibility-an active, penetrative, and indeed vengeful role model.” Then again, as Sceats explains, “the element of dependence” and the “parasitic” in the vampire may have been “off-putting” for other women writers. Ultimately, however, as Sceats argues, it may well be “vampirism’s deconstruction of the oppositions it spans, as much as the interest in sexual or ontological risk, that makes the vampire such a compelling and undying figure,” not only for twenty-first-century general readers and film-goers, but for contemporary feminists.

In our archives section, Maire Mullins probes the influence of Whitman on Cather, an influence acknowledged by previous critics but one whose far-reaching impact calls for more extensive consideration. Quoting Eudora Welty on Cather, Mullins begins, “‘Willa Cather brought past and present into juxtaposition to the most powerful effect. And the landscape itself must have shown her this juxtaposition.”‘ As Mullins argues, however, it was the writing of O Pioneers! under Whitman’s influence—in particular, his poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”—that enabled Cather “to discern and to understand the latent beauty in the landscape and in its people.” The structure itself and epic mode of this novel echo those of “Song of Myself,” but so also does its choice of a revolutionary theme, in Cather’s case, “the story of a female pioneer and her enduring relationship not to a man, not to her children or family, but to the land”—a relationship, as for Whitman, at once “spiritual and erotic.”

Time is on my mind in this issue, not only because of the serendipity of these articles, but because of a special issue in the works treating the larger theoretical concerns involved for feminists in thinking about time, history, feminist history, and our times. Derived from last December’s MLA sessions, organized by Robyn Wiegman and sponsored by the executive committee of the Women’s Studies Division, “Feminism and Time” will be published in the forthcoming volume. In addition, as I mentioned in my previous editor’s note (fall 2000), our forthcoming fall 2001 issue includes a cluster of essays on international women writers, “Women Writing across the World,” and we plan a special issue in the near future on feminism and adoption.

I have two further announcements to make in this note, the first one celebratory, the second mournful. We are pleased to announce another recipient of our travel-to-collections grants. Lynette Felber, editor of Clio and professor of English at Indiana-Purdue University, traveled in May of this year to the University of Tulsa to study the Rebecca West papers in McFarlin Library’s Special Collections. The annual deadline for applications for this grant is March 15, and we welcome applications from dissertation students and postgraduates as well as from established scholars.

Finally, we wish to mourn the death of Nancy Walker, an Editorial Board member of Tulsa Studies. Nancy Walker served as one of our most reliable, active, and wide-ranging readers, filling several pages in the notebook in which we track our circulating manuscripts. Her energy, her staunch feminism, and her warmth will long be remembered by this journal’s staff. As Susan Ford Wiltshire writes in the women’s studies newsletter at Vanderbilt University, “Her acute intelligence was buffered by humor. Her generosity of spirit moved her to action for the common good. Her political skills were wrapped in a kindness in a way that draws people together. She won over skeptics. She seized opportunities. Nancy was smart, and she could move fast.”¹ We will miss her.

Holly Laird
University of Tulsa

NOTES
¹ Susan Ford Wiltshire, “Nancy Walker,” Women’s Studies at Vanderbilt University, 12, No. 2 (2001), 6.

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Holly Laird, University of Tulsa
Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 2001), 183-187.

Women Writing across the World

Despite plenty of preparation for this moment, I still find it hard to believe that, with this issue, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature completes twenty continuous years of publication. And such a year this is, with the endless images of war circulating through America’s insistent electronic media—battalions of men everywhere one looks. What is a women’s lit journal doing in a place like this, one might ask?

Well, kicking up her heels against phallocratic social norms, as usual. Our subscription numbers too are down this fall, as if asking the same question in more material terms. Survive we nonetheless do, and never has it seemed more important to me to remind ourselves of the histories of and in diverse women’s writing, to herald the achievements and struggles of women writing today, to imagine a different sort of future. We will continue to produce a journal that manages, moreover, both to feature ground-breaking work by eminent scholars and to sustain our openness to the work of emerging scholars—and to do this at an indubitably affordable rate for our less than wealthy subscribers.

So with this issue, we do all these things yet again. With articles both on writers from earlier in this century and on writings as recent as last year, 2000, we continue the hard, everyday work of feminist scholars, keeping the past in view, keeping the present in touch with our pasts. With this international issue, I am made particularly aware of how much more work there is still to do, how much more ground to bridge, how many more “firsts” to undertake: for this issue is itself our first compilation of unsolicited articles to be entirely devoted to women writing beyond the shores of England and North America. Until this year, despite our pronounced and reiterated purpose to publish scholarship on women of all times and places, we had not received in any given year enough articles on non-Anglo-American writers among our innumerable submissions to fill a single issue with essays recommended for publication by our readers. Thus Tulsa Studies has forged its reputation through publication of articles almost entirely on Anglo-American women writers. But with this year, a seachange has occurred, and the greater stretch of this journal becomes suddenly visible.

Emerging, then, through articles we have received in the regular anonymous submission and review process, and accepted well before the crisis of September 11, the essays included here remind us of the many worlds of women’s writing that cry out for our attention. At the same time, with the scrupulousness of concern for detail and for the local that has become a hallmark of this journal, most of these essays probe the complex negotiations of just one or two texts by just one or two writers at a time: opening with Jennifer Yee’s article on Hélène Cixous’s recent novel, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage (2000); proceeding through articles on writers from war torn lands, first, on the 1994 and 1995 translations of Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh’s novels The Story of Zahra and Beirut Blues, and, second, on the poetry of Irish feminist Eavan Boland, especially from 1982 through 1994; then, extending back, first, to the modernism of neglected Scandinavian Stina Aronson’s “The Fever Book” in 1931 and Edith Øberg’s “Man in Darkness” in 1939, second, to the more famous modernist experiments from 1910 to 1939 of French writer Colette. This issue concludes with an archival piece surveying the work of Spanish women writers of the 1990s, including those who both do and do not belong to the “new narrative” and to the “boom” of Spanish women’s fiction. Each article, in its turn, shows us ways modern women writers of many nationalities have sought paths around and through the sharply delineated territories—variously male, imperialist, Western, warmongering, and/or white—in which they found themselves.

In “The Colonial Outsider: ‘Malgérie’ in Hélène Cixous’s Les rêveries de la femme sauvage,” Jennifer Yee discusses a novel in which “for the first time” the famous French feminist writer Cixous “deals directly with her childhood experiences in Algeria.” In this novel, Cixous focuses on the “outsider” who must paradoxically reside within the colonial system: neither colonizer nor colonized, neither master nor slave, the protagonist of Cixous’s novel is a girl whom “the colonial system . . . condemns . . . to a necessarily false position.” Yet at the same time, Cixous eludes the “narrowed space” of the colonialist story through a linguistic play that, Yee points out, accounts for the comparative neglect of Cixous’s fiction by Anglo-American scholars. It is this language play nonetheless that “main tain[s]” a “freedom” equatable with “marginality of vision” precisely through “constant slippage from one gender role to another, thanks here, in part, to her ‘hermaphroditic’ semiunity with her brother, and from one place to another in the overdefined series of exclusions, of walls, doors, and gateways that is her childhood Algeria.” This fascinating essay discloses the intricacy with which semantic playfulness, in Cixous’s hands, simultaneously provides a scathing critique of colonialist and patriarchal normative assumptions.

Focusing still more directly on the problem and problematic of the “nation,” Ann Marie Adams argues in “Writing Self, Writing Nation: Imagined Geographies in the Fiction of Hanan al-Shaykh” that it is too soon to replace the concept of “nation” entirely with that of the “world” when it comes to examining the ways in which literature-here, that of an Arab woman writer-continues to think through and against the construct of the national: “Without denying the importance of these critiques [of the ‘nation’], or the very real phenomenon of ‘new’ literatures in global languages that do seem to move both beyond and below national affiliations, it must be noted that a study of the nation is not without merit in some contemporary ‘minority’ literatures.” The embattled, acne-scarred, and finally murdered body of protagonist Zahra in The Story of Zahra works, in part, in a conventionally iconic manner to tell the story of her nation and the bleak impasse with which that story must end, but it also works to critique “the logic of gendered stereotypes used to ‘map’ [the] ‘imagined community”‘ of “nation” and “homeland.” In Beirut Blues, al-Shaykh returns to this nationalist scene to insist on an “imagined community” that is neither coherent nor stable, but embedded specifically within its own self-dispersed fragments: “Whether or not [protagonist] Asmahan fully agrees with the politics of the people she writes to and for, they are accorded spaces in her shifting and fluid map—a contradictory map that even man ages to incorporate the countryside of the South into the cityscape. . . ‘you stayed where you were, but kept close to us even in Beirut.”‘

Shifting from the ways the “nation” is implicated in and depends upon war, Christy Burns sees in Eavan Boland a similar refusal to iconicize the Irish female in the lyric, yet also an ability to negotiate the conflict between attraction to Irish lyricism and antilyrical feminist convictions. Returning to some of the themes of our recent special forum on “Problems of Beauty in Feminist Studies” (19.2), Burns’s article “Beautiful Labors” pivots on the contradiction between women’s “labor” that adamantly is not beautiful and yet defiantly may be so. “Critical of the romanticized images of women in the Irish, lyric imagination,” as Burns explains, “Boland is keenly aware of [the] risks” of cliché and “tethers her imaginative creations to the concrete details with which she herself is intimately familiar.” In other words, while seeking to avoid the romanticization produced by the lyric, Boland wishes even so to combine the beauties and seductions of lyric language with the knitty gritty “sensate” burdens of “domestic lives.” In “Writing in a Time of Violence,” for example, Boland “issues a warning of what lies behind the mere aesthetic or the graceful, silken language. Rhetoric is seductive, and one should watch for the serpent or tool of violence twined within the words.” Yet, as Burns argues, “beauty” itself becomes an agent that for Boland can “speak across differences” between “aesthetics and politics”: the beauty of “sensate pleasure.” Moreover “in this aesthetics, beauty and pain alternately define each other and dissipate the rigidification of the emblematic,” enabling the recovery of “lost histories” not only for Ireland, but for “the transnational feminist context.”

Ellen Rees begins her essay, the next in this issue, with two simple glaring facts of omission: “Until quite recently, anyone surveying histories of literary modernism in Scandinavia from the years between the two world wars would notice the glaring absence of experimental prose and women writers.” Moreover, despite changes within Scandinavia itself in the 1990s, due to the language barrier “none of the most radical Scandinavian experimental prose by women has been translated into English   . . . This ghettoization is unfortunate, given the innovation of their texts, which when placed in the context of European literary modernism as a whole both enhance and complicate our understanding of what it meant for women to write in the modernist mode.” Taking up the cases of Swedish Stina Aronson and Norwegian Edith Øberg in her article “Problems of Prose Modernism and Frigidity in Stina Aronson’s ‘The Fever Book’ and Edith Øberg’s ‘Man in Darkness,”‘ Rees’s interest resembles Burns’s in exploring the ways these writers undercut mainstream Scandinavian “literary objectification” of women and binarization of them as “either intellectual or sensual, but never both.” Rees shows further how these writers “explicitly problematize the notion of female sexual frigidity” in works that are “highly self-reflective regarding their status as texts.” This lucid article traces the confluence of desire and writing in texts that Rees shows surely belong in the reformation of the European modernist canon: these Scandinavian women in fact “played a central and highly creative role in the cultural dialogue we know as modernism” and, in particular, “in conceptualizing and producing Scandinavian prose modernism.”

In a variety of ways, Helen Southworth’s “Rooms of Their Own: How Colette Uses Physical and Textual Space to Question a Gendered Literary Tradition,” brings this issue full circle back to a constellation of issues raised by Yee’s essay on Cixous: experimentalism as a means to renegotiate textual and physical spaces traditionally dominated by Western Caucasian men. Thus this essay returns us to the “notion,” in Southworth’s terms, of “linguistic mobility.” Extensively analyzing Colette’s famous novels La Vagabonde (1910) and La maison de Claudine (1922), then her lesser known novels Duo (1933) and Le Toutounier (1939), Southworth uncovers “a spatial poetics of sorts,” one in which the conventional marriage plot is rejected in favor of a thickened plot of interwoven and fractured narratives and, with these narratives, a thickened language, made dense with metaphor and simile, color and texture. Space here has less to do with national categories than with gendered ones. Still, generating space that, in Nancy Miller’s now-famous phrase, is “subject to change,” Colette’s spaces are ones where her protagonists “remain on the move” across borders of various sorts, and her spaces remain thus “necessarily incomplete.” Recalling also Virginia Woolf’s appeal for a “woman’s sentence” as well as Woolf’s admiration for Colette’s new form, Southworth argues that Colette “answers” Woolf not so much with a sentence as with a question, “retaining rather than resolving the problem of space.”

In our Archives section, Carmen de Urioste draws our attention to “Narrative of Spanish Women Writers of the Nineties.” Frankly confronting the thornier questions of literary value and commercialism involved in the “boom” of Spanish women’s narrative, de Urioste nonetheless directs us to the ways this narrative “opens up the Spanish narrative at the edge of the millennium to new techniques and to new themes with transnational traits.” One of the more interesting points made by de Urioste—in her tabulation of these new women writers, their literary prizes, and their textual strategies—arises from “the fleeting character of the texts” in the literary marketplace: although “a fundamental disservice is rendered to these texts by women writers when they are thrown onto the market in massive quantities  . . . [despite] the quick commercial evolution of substitutable texts . . . women writers retaliate with a transtextual resistance, which rides through and across all the texts and undoubtedly dismantles the program of textual agility of literature understood sheerly as serving the ephemeral goals of leisure, entertainment, and industry.” These textual strategies include choice of first-person, psychological narratives, polyphonic perspectivism, groups of women protagonists, and narrative fragmentation. De Urioste’s informative essay and appended tables constitute a valuable resource for the study of “Spanish women writers at the end of the millennium” and their “consolidation . . . in the Spanish cultural circles of the twenty-first century.”

Finally, on a sadder note, I wish with this preface to acknowledge and mourn the deaths of two women writers closer to home. The first is Mitzi Myers, scholar of women writers, friend to and longtime reader for Tulsa Studies. Mitzi never recovered from a fire in her home in the summer of 2000. The second is Eudora Welty, who in my college and graduate school years honored me with the name of friend. Once described as a “regional” writer by critics who had trouble grasping the global value of the local, Welty became internationally acclaimed and globally valued long ago. To her this twenty-year-old issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature is dedicated.

Holly Laird
University of Tulsa

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Holly Laird, University of Tulsa
Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 2002), 227-230.

Scholarly journals depend so heavily on an exceedingly transient academic readership that we are perhaps inclined to celebrate our innings more than other institutions; a bookstore, for example, is less prone to hail the world vociferously with five-year, ten-year, and fifteen-year anniversaries. And our anniversaries begin, naturally, sometime in the fourth year of every half decade, remaining still fresh early in the sixth. Still, it seems no small accomplishment to the learned journal’s pitifully unrewarded editors when a journal is here one year later, and another year yet again. Thus, the attainment of the twenty-year mark and the achievement of that mark at the turn of the twenty-first century in 2002—as Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature has just done (1982-2002)—seems an attainment little short of millennial triumph. We do not expect everyone to exult with us, but we certainly do wish to spread the news and frame the moment. For me personally, the current issue is, moreover, a small miracle. Rising to the occasion of “the adoption issue,” the essays in these pages, by turns buoyant, brainy, fierce, warm, and explosive in their arguments, herald the times with major, sorely needed changes in thinking about parenting. Simultaneously, publication here of Frank Felsenstein’s work on the Thorp Arch Archive marks a milestone in eighteenth-century studies, particularly in relation to the famous working-class poet Ann Yearsley.

But, as it happens, a very different set of wishes from that of timing was predominant in bringing the current issue into being. Indeed, while the previous issue, “Feminism and Time,” was conceived, wrought, and completed with the turn of the century fully in mind, none of those of us who worked toward the current issue ever thought of it in terms of a particular moment either in this century or in this journal’s history—even though several contributors to this issue do register the crisis, and meditate the aftermath, of September 11, 2001. For parents, particularly the parents here, who have been rendered deeply thoughtful about parenting by the adoption process, war is the worst of possible reminders of the dangers amid which we foster “our” children. Undaunted even so, challenging yet another unthinking opposition—this time the opposition so often assumed between “own” and “adopted” (as Janet Beizer expressly urges)—this special issue insists upon a broader, surely more efficacious understanding of affiliation in this world, beginning (where so many things can begin) with the family. What brought this issue into existence were the deceptively simple questions of what adoption is and does and of why it matters, as viewed from the transformed perspectives of “academic” women and men who have engaged directly in adopting children. In the preface to “The Adoption Issue,” I introduce those perspectives in greater detail.

As further chance would have it, the recent discovery of new letters and poems by the “milkmaid” poet, Ann Yearsley, made rapid publication of this Archives section desirable. Thus in this special issue, we also present Part I of “Ann Yearsley and the Politics of Patronage: The Thorp Arch Archive” by Frank Felsenstein. Supported by grants from the Leonard Hastings Schoff Publication Fund of Columbia University Seminars and from the West Yorkshire Archive Council, Professor Felsenstein articulates the complex patronage system enwinding, yet also enabling, the publications of Yearsley—the now-canonical working-class woman poet of the late eighteenth century. Nearly a decade ago in 1993, Tulsa Studies published an exciting stash of poems by Yearsley, edited by Professor Moira Ferguson. Complicating Ferguson’s argument, Felsenstein analyzes Yearsley’s partial complicity with the patronage system. Part II of “Ann Yearsley and the Politics of Patronage,” scheduled for the Spring 2003 issue of Tulsa Studies, will present Felsenstein’s edition of the new letters and poems by Yearsley that he uncovered.

Several groundbreaking news items that I announced in the previous issue should be reiterated here. First, in April Tulsa Studies joined JSTOR’s new Language and Literature Collection and its stellar archive of scholarly publications; this means that all except the most recent five volumes of Tulsa Studies are now available electronically to our readers and scholars.¹ Following the lead of PMLA in its initiative to enroll major scholarly journals in this archive, we saw this as an opportune moment to broaden our presence in library archives and make Tulsa Studies that much more accessible to a widening readership. So many issues and articles in so many of the past twenty years of publication remain as fascinating and pointed today as they were when first printed: from Germaine Greer’s inaugural essay on L.E.L. (1.1); through Shari Benstock’s theoretically informed issues and debates, Nina Auerbach’s prescient “Nation and Time,” and (since 1988) our numerous internationally recognized issues, “Toward a Gendered Modernity,” “South African Women’s Writing,” “After Empire I and II,” “On Collaborations I and II,” “Political Discourse/British Women’s Writing, 1640-1867,” “Women Writing Across the World,” and the prize-winning “Redefining Marginality”; to our groundbreaking archival features, including previously unpublished manuscripts by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Ann Yearsley, or bibliographies of authors like Grace Paley and Carolyn Kirkland, and many articles much-sought-after for reprinting in anthologies elsewhere.

Also in the electronic medium, accompanying publication of this volume, we have posted an internet version of Tulsa Studies’ twenty-year index (printed in the previous issue, Vol. 21, No. 1) on Tulsa Studies’ homepage, thus creating immediate easy access to information about past issues (see www.utulsa.edu/tswl/). We are grateful to our editorial intern, Christine Cavitt, for producing this important index of our most recent back issues. For copies of any of the most recent issues that you are missing (that is, volumes 16-20, since issues will not be available through JSTOR until they are more than five years old), simply write to us, as usual, at Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, University of Tulsa, 600 S. College Ave., Tulsa, OK 74104-3189. The prices for back issues of the journal remain an extremely affordable $7.00 (domestic) and $8.00 (non-U.S.).

I would like too to call the attention of Tulsa Studies readers as well as feminist modernists and feminist Joyceans to the fact that in the week of 16 June 2003, the University of Tulsa NEH-endowed Comparative Literature Symposium and Sean Latham, new editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, will host the 2003 North American James Joyce Conference in the halls of T.U. We look forward to the exciting return to this campus of Shari Benstock, feminist scholar and theorist and former editor of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature; Karen Lawrence, feminist and modernist scholar and Dean of the School of Humanities, University of California, Irvine; Thomas Staley, Director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin and founding Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly; Robert Scholes, rising President of the MLA; and Robert Spoo, immediate past Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly and a former editor of the Yale Law Review. Notable events during the conference are likely to include a trip to OK Mozart; the opening night Bloomsday banquet; a display of the famous Joyce materials at McFarlin Library; a reception hosted by the James Joyce Quarterly; and a roundtable of past James Joyce Quarterly editors.

Both the previous special issue on “Feminism and Time” and the earlier special forum on “Problems of Beauty in Feminist Studies” have proved so rewarding that we hope to repeat their successes with another future issue again derived from papers sponsored by the Women’s Studies Division Executive Committee of the MLA. For this December 2002, Shirley Geoklin Lim has organized a tripartite series of sessions on transnational and international feminist studies: “Transnational and/or Transgender Cultural Productions” with speakers Gillian Whitlock (Queensland), Kenneth Chan (Singapore), Susan Rudy (Calgary), and Tina Chen (Vanderbilt); “Feminism in the Shadow of Global Capitalism,” chaired by Sidonie Smith (Michigan), with speakers Nina Y. Morgan (Kennesaw), Susan Alice Fischer (Medgar Evers, CUNY), and Yi Zheng (Tel Aviv); and “U.S. Women’s Studies, International Women’s Studies, and the Practice of Literary Criticism” with Marguerite R. Waller (U.C., Riverside), Jane Lilienfeld (Lincoln), Harriet Davidson (Rutgers), and Lori Rowlett (U. Wisconsin, Eau Claire). In addition, the executive committee is cosponsoring a cash bar this year with the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. If you can find your way to New York City this December, be sure both to visit these MLA sessions and meet us at the cash bar.

Although I have saved it for last, our most important news of all is a major change of the guard in this journal. So closely identified as Linda Frazier is by readers, authors, students, and the Tulsa community with Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature that it is next to impossible to imagine the journal without her. Nonetheless, after sixteen years of extraordinary dedication, intelligence, and cheerfulness devoted to this journal, Linda Frazier will step down as Managing Editor and, as of September 2003, will be replaced by former Book Review Editor Sarah Theobald-Hall. Hard as I tried to talk Linda into remaining with the journal (“just a little while longer”), she richly deserves the retirement she seeks. She leaves behind her innumerable gifts to the journal and its people—from the acuity of her copy-editing (in several languages) that brought so many articles to a bright finish; through her management of staff, budget, and production in frequent storms; to her seemingly infinite good will and the deep mark she thus made in every life that has passed by her desk. With tears, I watch her leave. Yet she is replaced by someone with remarkable talents, intelligence, steadiness, and commitment to Tulsa Studies. If it has to shift hands, Tulsa Studies could not be shifting to better hands than Sarah’s. Please join me in welcoming Sarah Theobald-Hall to the managing editorship.

Holly Laird
University of Tulsa

NOTES

¹The full list of journals in this collection includes African American Review, African Languages and Cultures Supplement, Alif, American Literary History, American Literature, American Speech, Boundary 2, Callaloo, Chinese Literature, College Composition and Communication, College English, Comparative Literature, Diacritics, ELH, French Review, The French Review Special Issue, German Quarterly, Hispania, Hispanic Review, Italica, Japanese Language and Literature, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Language, MELUS, MLN, Modern Language Journal, Modern Philology, Nineteenth-Century Literature, New England Quarterly, New German Critique, New Literary History, PMLA, Poetics Today, Renaissance Quarterly, Representations, Review of English Studies, Rhetoric Review, Shakespeare Quarterly, Social Text, Speculum, Studies in English Literature, Studies in the Renaissance, Transition, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, Yale French Studies, and Zhurnal Ministevsta Vyshego Obrazovaniya.