Holly Laird, University of Tulsa
Vol. 15, No. 2 (Fall 1996), 215-219
It is often difficult for a journal editor to decide the order of contents for an issue. The most vigorous exchange that occurred this summer on “Editor-L”—the electronic listserv for the CELJ (Council of Editors of Learned Journals)—has involved precisely this question, posed by a new editor to the other members of the Council. The responses varied even more widely than I expected, and, still more unexpectedly, a number of journal editors reported their reliance on a standard format—for example, on a hierarchical order (with the best known or most controversial subjects prior to the lesser known) or on a chronological one (with the earliest subject matter first, the most recent subject matter last). In most cases, moreover, the format they described was not that of thematic or argumentative organization (whereby articles, though composed and produced quite separately, could be read as building upon each other’s thoughts) nor that of several kinds of arrangements, but instead that of a single general format. Not enough editors participated for me to describe this as a significant bit of statistical data, but the interesting fact remains that, while kinds of formats vary, they do not necessarily vary much in the context of a single journal.
The format of articles in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature often conforms to a chronological plan for the important reason that its mission is, in part, archivalist—to recover the writings and reconsider the reception of women writers, especially those from earlier periods. Previous editors of Tulsa Studies and I have adopted a chronological sequence more often than any other for otherwise miscellaneous articles. But the issues have also frequently deviated from this format or have been internally variable: either in part or in their entirety, they often include forums focused on specific topics, and these special issues and forums are arranged in a wide variety of ways (sometimes, in fact, with several considerations involved simultaneously in a single arrangement). We pay attention closely also to the book review section, which usually follows its own order rather than echoing or building upon the preceding sections. My own practice is, for example, to place more theoretical and/or generalizing essays either at the beginning or the end, and then to arrange essays in such a manner as to emphasize their variety and their juxtapositions, as well as their thematic or argumentative continuities.
None of the editors who contributed to the CELJ conversation about contents mentioned yet another reason, moreover, for a given arrangement: that choices of arrangement may be partly aesthetic. In Tulsa Studies, we occasionally consider the ways in which a given arrangement enlists not only the reader’s mind, but her eye. In this issue of Tulsa Studies, I hesitated awhile, for example, about whether to place part two of the “After Empire” forum before or after the articles. A conventional journal format, after all, typically places forums, “clusters,” or “positions” between articles and reviews rather than at the head of an issue. But we have defied convention in this not particularly obtrusive way several times before, in part, because the “work-in-progress” or “position papers” often included in these forums deserve—we feel—as much emphasis as finished articles, and, in part, because of the immediate visual/ideational focus it gives to journal issues.
I see every issue as a “special issue,” whether or not a chronological order has been selected for it, or a forum included within it. Each issue is a collection of arguments and topics, whose unforeseen contiguities are, so it seems to me, as potentially interesting and useful to a reader as their individualities. So too, as most readers of Tulsa Studies are by now aware, I use this prefatory note to suggest some lines both of conflict and affiliation discernible among essays.
Thus this issue of Tulsa Studies starts with the end of the “After Empire” forum begun in this year’s spring issue. Its lead paper, Peggy Ochoa’s “The Historical Moments of Postcolonial Writing,” might be read as a reintroduction to the forum as a whole, for in it Ochoa produces a broadly based analysis and critique of the binaries haunting postcolonial studies and does so by means of a wide-ranging discussion of Morrison, Spivak, Anzaldua, Fanon, Gramsci, Said, and others. Lindsay Aegerter’s paper brings attention to the lesser-known Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. Revisiting and revising “womanist” theory of the seventies, Aegerter focuses on Collins, Davies, and Henderson for her own points of departure and then explores the contradictions in and between the “African” and the “woman” and the interlocutory contexts of African women writers in the colonialist Rhodesian setting of this novel. Joseph Slaughter’s essay on “narrating solidarity” in the Argentine writer Elvira Orphee’s story, “Las viejas fantasiosas,” returns to the problematics of “writing torture,” addressed in Part I of this forum by Jennifer Wenzel in relation to South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. Slaughter further argues the importance of Orphee’s role both in exile and “in a national reassertion of identity and a memorial for the dead and disappeared”: “Orphee’s writing must be seen as doing two things: on the one hand, she takes the issues of torture, disappearance, and solidarity to a court of world opinion by continuing to publish ‘in exile,’ and, on the other, her books, subsequently released in Argentina, have to be seen as acts of commemoration.” In the last essay in this forum, “Sexual Orientation in the (Post)Imperial Nation,” Margot Gayle Backus extends theorization and analysis of postcoloniality and gender in nationalist writing to encompass the question also of sexuality. Turning to the ways in which “the Irish” were inscribed as “requisite colonial other” in British imperialist writing, Backus shows that Radclyffe Hall’s construction in The Well of Loneliness of her protagonist Stephen Gordon’s mother as “Irish other”—against which her protagonist’s English subjectivity could be advanced—served to “promote” Havelock Ellis’s inversion theory by incorporating a second set of binary terms, that of the Celticism of Matthew Arnold.
Concluding this forum, Isabella Matsikidze—codirector (with Hermione de Almeida and Lars Engle) of the 1994 University of Tulsa Comparative Literature Symposium, from which most of these papers emerged—looks ahead in her Afterword to what she sees as the conflictual, yet fruitful, future for (post)colonial studies. Nearly one hundred participants spoke at the 1994 symposium, and so it is represented here by a highly selective slice of its proceedings, developed, revised (and, in most cases, revised again), and edited for this volume of Tulsa Studies. What Matsikidze sees now, as she recalls the moment when the conference codirectors first deliberated on their subject, is that expansions of “definitions of the postcolonial condition” (to “include all transitional periods that involve any group’s search for a new discursive identity following a break with a previous dominant other”) entail a dual problematic and challenge. It remains important, in expanding contexts, not to forget or cover over the specific history of nineteenth century European imperialism from which postcolonial studies arose, yet at the same time to forge ahead in extending the insights gained and methodologies developed in analyzing that history in order to resist any “isolationist” tendency. Moreover, as various participants in this forum have also indicated, in Matsikidze’s words, postcolonialism itself “seems incapable of fashioning itself outside of negotiations with the prior text” and may need to “devote greater energies to textualizing heterogeneities” not only in colonial texts but in “its own postcolonial worlds.”
I wish to thank once again the two specialist readers for this forum, Mary Lynn Broe and Chiwengo Ngwarsungu. Though they could not have predicted the final outcome either of individual submissions or of the forum organization as a whole, their thoughts and suggestions about its possible arrangements as well as about possibilities for revision and selection of papers proved invaluable.
The articles in this issue, arranged chronologically, begin with Josephine Donovan’s tracing of the genealogy of a popular Renaissance tale of the “seduced and abandoned lower-middle-class woman who avenges herself by killing her treacherous aristocratic lover.” Beginning with Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (1554) and proceeding through Eliza Haywood’s “Female Revenge; or the Happy Exchange” (1727), Donovan re-narrates the intriguing variations and transformations of this tale from its sixteenth century “feminist” origins through its sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century variants in Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor and Delarivier Manley, Pierre Boaistuau, and William Painter, to its (unfortunate) eighteenth-century end in Haywood. Haywood’s “domestication of the novella,” writes Donovan, “marks a pivotal transformation in women’s literary history,” eliminating its “feminist import,” condemning the woman protagonist outright, and turning it into something closely akin to the “sentimentalist genre” of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple.
Elizabeth LeBlanc’s article on the now-canonical The Awakening argues that “the delicate, understated intimation of [the] possibility” of a lesbian relation between the protagonist Edna Pontellier and the pianist Mademoiselle Reisz, which the critic Kathryn Lee Seidel previously has remarked on (seeing in Reisz characteristics associated with lesbians in the 1890s), “lends itself to a discussion of Bonnie Zimmerman’s ‘metaphorical lesbian.'” As LeBlanc demonstrates in a deftly multilayered analysis of this novel, Edna “engages in a variety of woman-identified practices that suggest,” without ever explicitly becoming, sexual encounters. Interweaving concepts also from Adrienne Rich, Monique Wittig, Teresa de Lauretis, and Audre Lorde, LeBlanc’s analysis moves beyond conventional readings of this novel’s ending. Edna’s long final swim out into the sea at the end is an even more radical adventure with female “freedom” in this reading of it than previous feminist readers have thought.
In “House Mothers and Haunted Daughters,” Roberta Rubenstein investigates the Gothic career of American author Shirley Jackson in the 1950s and ’60s. More specifically, Rubenstein analyzes ambivalent mother daughter relations and ambiguous “houses” by focusing on tensions she identifies as those of “inside/outside,” “mother/self,” “home/lost,” and “eat or be eaten.” Situating her discussion in the contexts not only of Jackson’s biography, but of object-relations psychology and theories of Gothic narrative (especially the female Gothic), Rubenstein argues that “the fusion of the ideas of mother and home,” which occur especially in the later fiction, “may be understood as the materialized specter/structure of anxiety that haunts and even paralyzes the daughter” and that the daughter in Jackson’s fiction can never know “whether she is lost or saved when she finds herself either stranded far from home or ‘inside the house, with the door shut behind.'”
The concluding article in this issue is also a memorial to its writer. With great sadness, we record the death of its author, Charlotte Hogsett, who died in March of this year. An obituary may be found at the end of her article. In “Giving Birth to Marguerite Yourcenar,” Hogsett sought feminist reconsideration of the legacy of the contemporary French writer Yourcenar—the first woman ever to be admitted to the French Academy—and argued that, “if [Yourcenar] began her career by a writing that suppressed the feminine, she ended it by questioning the primacy of the paternal and beginning to supplement it, though not to supplant it, with an appreciation of the maternal.” Yourcenar’s autobiographical writings at the end of her career strive to fathom the story of Yourcenar’s own birth and, in doing so, to give herself “second birth.”
We wish our readers, finally, to know of another great change the journal is undergoing this semester: for the first time since I became its editor, the entire student staff will be a new one. For various reasons, the terms not only of the three editorial interns from last semester, but also of the book review editor all ended this summer. Many of our readers know that Tulsa Studies regularly offers opportunities to graduate students for involvement in its operations, but the benefits are by no means one-sided: this journal relies heavily on the students’ energy and competence, and the editorial interns we have just lost are as skilled and dedicated as any we have had. I wish particularly to thank Sarah Theobald-Hall, who has served as Book Review Editor for the last four years of her doctorate program at the University of Tulsa. Her calm management and unusual intelligence, not only in this office but in all the other small and big services she undertook for the journal, would be difficult to overpraise. Replacing her, Rosary Fazende, an advanced doctoral student here, has already proven herself a talented and efficient editor in previous work as an intern. And she has already plunged herself into the seemingly endless work of this office. We feel very fortunate to have her with us.
Holly Laird
University of Tulsa
