Sally McWilliams, Montclair State University
Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring 2009), 141-163

This essay examines the literary representation of the overlap between event and insidious traumas in Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue, while gesturing towards the larger implications that such linkages create for the politics of reading diasporic Chinese women’s literature. It argues that Breaking the Tongue refines and resituates the array of affective and objective responses to traumatic situations by using three specific narrative techniques: nonlinear narrative structure; shifting points of view; and cross-linguistic testifying as technologies of memory. These techniques disrupt any superficial rendering of physical suffering and deconstruct our positions of safety when reading about traumatic experiences. This analysis demonstrates how Loh’s novel produces a powerful feminist intervention into the politics of trauma, its representations, and the production of cultural memory and identity. We are positioned within the language and bodies of trauma to better understand the potential for survival where there is lack, the possibility of healing where there is violence, and the creative energy for change where there is destruction.

Trinna S. Frever, University of Michigan, Flint
Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring 2009), 121-139

The doll as depicted in fiction and popular culture, in song and in story, is a multifaceted symbol for societal disputes over what it is to be female. In particular works, the doll image also becomes a playing field for contests of cultural and national identity. This essay discusses three pivotal depictions of dollhood within this context: Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents , Sandra Cisneros’s “Barbie-Q,” and the now-famous doll dismemberment scene from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. These three authors use of the doll stretches beyond literary symbol to cultural site because of the doll’s iconic status in contemporary society, its close ties to the value system of the U.S.-dominant culture, and its ever-present uneasy representation of womanhood. In each work, the doll image functions to fuse literary, gendered, cultural, and pop-cultural concerns, played out in the text, and played with by literary girls and their authors.

Catherine Bacon, University of Texas at Austin
Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring 2009), 97-119

This essay reads Molly Keane’s The Rising Tide (1937) in the context of three discourses: Keane’s own earlier lesbian novel, Devoted Ladies (1934); 1930s sexology; and the tradition of the Irish Big House fiction. It argues that Keane revises the negative discourse of lesbian sexuality in order to situate lesbianism as a by-product of English modernity, rather than a dangerous result of female friendship and autonomy. It also shows that while The Rising Tide follows convention by chronicling the political and familial failures of the Irish Ascendancy, it stops short of depicting the impotence of this class as either inevitable or complete. Rather, by drawing on both theories of inversion and on psychoanalytic understandings of lesbianism, Keane is able to renovate the trope of Irish romantic friendship to create an alternative household characterized by a fertile garden where creativity, beauty, and love can flourish. Thus, Keane’s novel makes a unique contribution to the Big House genre, and to modernist lesbian fiction, in its assertion of a connection between lesbianism and the land in the Irish context.

Audrey Russek, University of Texas at Austin
Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring 2009), 75-96

Marjorie Allen Seiffert, an early twentieth-century poet and participant in the Spectra Hoax, a literary farce designed to debunk Imagism, used literary pseudonyms to express feminist sensibilities while remaining an upstanding member of conservative midwestern high society. Seiffert’s pseudonymous poetry brought into existence virtual personas that integrated her sense of self yet refused to privilege one voice over another. Her multiple personas provided a way of having individuality without breaking from her traditional lifestyle. Moreover, her strategies for becoming a modern woman and poet in her own right reveal much about the complexities of life in an era whose cultural values were dramatically changing. By creating more identities for herself, poetic personas that could express thoughts and feelings she deemed inappropriate for a woman of her stature, Seiffert added her own imaginative twist, reconciling contradictions inherent in a modern woman’s identity.

Cheryl A. Wilson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring 2009), 57-74

The literary review and critical essay were complicated genres informed by the demands of the publishers and the expectations of readers. This essay examines critical writings by Victorian women, including George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie, within the contexts of canon studies and reception theory to demonstrate how Victorian women writers were actively involved in acts of canon formation that both attest to the cultural implications of their work and have significant implications for contemporary pedagogical practices. Topics such as recovery work, anthology formation, and the role of the periodical press in the nineteenth century are also considered within this framework.