Holly Laird, University of Tulsa
Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2003), 7-11
With this issue, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature is proud to present poems and letters by Ann Yearsley (the famous “milkmaid” working-class poet of the late eighteenth century) discovered among the Thorp Arch Estate papers at the West Yorkshire Archive in Leeds and edited by Frank Felsenstein. Publication of this trove is supported by grants from the Leonard Hastings Schoff Publication Fund of Columbia University Seminars and from the West Yorkshire Archive Council. For an important correction of previous critical accounts and editing of Yearsley, readers should also consult Part I of “Ann Yearsley and the Politics of Patronage” in the fall 2002 issue of Tulsa Studies: there Felsenstein explains the intricate patronage system upon which Yearsley depended. Ten years ago in 1993, Tulsa Studies published an earlier edition of poems by Yearsley, edited by Moira Ferguson. Revising Ferguson’s editorial work and reconsidering her analysis, Felsenstein argues that Yearsley enjoyed almost complete complicity with the patronage system. For the benefit of future scholars and interested readers of Yearsley, we have reproduced Felsenstein’s edition of Yearsley’s manuscripts in its entirety.
Following this Archives, the Articles section of this issue covers women writers from Sarah Scott in the eighteenth century to Shirley Jackson nearing the end of the twentieth and from little known to the now canonical women writers. These essays analyze areas of feminist concern that are as radical as queer dissidence in heterosexually normative contexts and as conservative as negotiated domesticity in the midst of an emerging modernity; and they range broadly in their dissection of intersecting, if rivalrous discourses, from the intertextual discourses of madness and modernism, through the interrelationship of literary influence and homoerotic desire, to the enmeshment of psychoanalytically defined desire with economic impulse.
In the lead article of this issue, Sally O’Driscoll surveys, first, the debates between lesbian and queer theorization, on the one hand, and feminist theory, on the other. Then, reviewing the ways that “queer theory’s claims to supersede feminism have been energetically disputed,” especially by Judith Butler and Biddy Martin who “reposition queer theory and feminist theory in relation to each other,” and, third, the recent history of criticism of Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall (1762), O’Driscoll enumerates in the scholarship on Scott’s novel “precisely the need for intersection rather than separation”: “a critical practice focusing exclusively on one or the other produces an impoverished, limited reading.” Answering the question, “Why use an eighteenth-century” novel as her central example, O’Driscoll reminds us that this “is the period in which . .. our current gender arrangements were imposed.” As O’Driscoll’s essay, “Lesbian Criticism and Feminist Criticism: Readings of Millenium Hall,” further shows, reanalysis of this novel exposes “the modern model that links biological sex, socially constructed gender, and binary sexuality in a particular relation to each other [that] was gradually put into place over the course of the eighteenth century.”
Lisa Wood directs her attention to writings four decades after Scott by “antirevolutionary women writers of the post-French Revolutionary period” who “were dedicated to combating what the novelist and moralist Jane West called ‘the alarming relaxation of principle that too surely dis criminates a declining age.'” Wood tracks in this essay—”Bachelors and ‘Old Maids’: Antirevolutionary British Women Writers and Narrative Authority after the French Revolution”—women intellectuals who may well remind the reader of the conservative politics of our own day, writers who were “more likely to applaud Edmund Burke than to endorse Mary Wollstonecraft” and who took part in “a broad, heterogeneous, and active conservative print culture.” Focusing on the Evangelical Hannah More’s only novel, the “best-selling” Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), and on the female narrator, Mrs. Prudentia Homespun, in the five novels that West produced between 1793 and 1810 (but particularly A Gossip’s Story, West’s second novel published in 1796), Wood shows how these writers manage, in a conservative climate and with conservative aims, nonetheless to achieve limited forms of authority in narration: More, by maneuvering of “class and gender in her use of a gentleman as narrator,” and West, by employing a female narrator who displays “the conflict between conservative ideology and the possibility for an authoritative female voice.”
The first of three articles in this issue that revisit the modernist moment, Stella Deen’s ‘”So Minute and Yet So Alive’: Domestic Modernity in E. H. Young’s William” recovers a little-known novel from 1925. As Deen records, Virginia Woolf puzzled over why Young was “not far more famous than dear old voluble Hugh, and Wells, and so on.” But Young “did not announce a radical break with the past and its literary traditions through a self-consciously innovative literary practice” as did the contemporary writers—like Woolf—who are household names of modernism today. As Deen points out, “modernist movements have dominated literary canons of the period.” In contrast, returning to writers like Young enables us to recover “a broader modernity,” “not restricted to elite aesthetic practices,” and opening out into “the diverse experiences of modern life in industrialized, urbanized, and secularized societies.” In particular, Deen uncovers the novel William’s depiction of a new domesticity, for this novel “enabled readers to confront unsettled elements in modern life and to place them within a moderating framework” in a “distinctively ‘middle brow’ expression of modernity.” As Deen ultimately argues, “middlebrow culture,” as exemplified in Young’s work, shows by contrast the ways a self-conscious modernist “rupture with Victorian ideas and aesthetic practices” in fact “conceals” the “painful process by which traditional ideas are transformed under the influence of new ones.”
In “Mad and Modern: A Reading of Emily Holmes Coleman and Antonia White,” Kylie Valentine uses Virginia Woolf as a preliminary example to argue that “the fact… the most sophisticated textual criticism of Woolf neglects her madness and that the most sophisticated treatments of Woolf ‘s mental distress tend to read her texts schematically raises questions about the tools available to feminist critics interested in both the politics of mental distress and the particularity of texts.” Reading two little discussed modernist novels by Emily Holmes Coleman (The Shutter of Snow, 1930) and Antonia White (Beyond the Glass, 1955), Valentine establishes a model for analysis that is “attentive to the particularities of both mental distress and fiction.” The “intertextuality between modernism and psychoanalysis that has been recognized elsewhere,” Valentine argues, “emerges again in the texts of White and Coleman, suggesting that these intertextual links occur more frequently and with more diverse effects than has yet been documented.” Although, as Valentine demurs, her discussion of these novels is not “especially invested in their recuperation as feminist writing or in lamenting their neglect,” nonetheless, within the “clinical cultural” context of modernism—”arguably … the last significant moment in which the arenas of psychiatry and literature were proximate”—these novels do suggest that “the range of modernist interventions in madness and psychiatry is broader than has been acknowledged” and prove themselves “worthy of the kind of discussion mobilized around other, canonical modernist texts.”
Shameem Black reminds us that “in many stories of lesbian self-knowledge, the image of a young woman reading emerges as a foundational parable, an icon of individual quest,” but Black may be the first critic to realize the difference this story of “desire” can make when reapplied to the question of literary influence. Far from the staid bequest of a father’s set of ideas to his son’s corpus, far also from the turbulent angst of Bloomian sons at war with their heavy-weight fathers, Black’s model represents “influence” as a daughter’s dual erotic desire for and questioning of a mother’s story of desire. In “Homoerotics of Influence: Eudora Welty Romances Virginia Woolf,” Black conducts a detailed inquiry into the erotic relationship between Woolf ‘s stories “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points'” (1928) and Welty’s stories “June Recital” and “Music from Spain” (both written, revised, and published from 1946 to 1949). Yet at the same time, Black argues for each of these stories as “a questioning text” rather than as a “lesbian text”; for in addition to exploring “myriad forms of heterosexual connection” as well as sounding homoerotic notes, Welty’s stories imagine “the power of homoerotic desire … as intimately tied to, and in some respects created by, the relationship between female eroticism and traditionally masculine classical art.”
Deriving her title from Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, ‘”The Hero is Married and Ascends the Throne’: The Economics of Narrative End in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle” Honor McKitrick Wallace counters Propp’s narratological premise with a theory—inspired by Slavoj Zizek—of “economic desire” in narrative and with an example of how a model of psycho-economic desire operates in the marriage plot of Jackson’s 1962 novel. Any theory of narrative ending must be revised, so Wallace argues, by consideration of how “economic and narrative paradigms [work] in order for the female protagonist to receive a material reward—a throne, if not a princess—at the end of her narrative.” Along with Judith Roof, Wallace comes close to “despair of ever subverting structures of capitalist production and heterosexual reproduction” in the face of ‘”the logics of narrative and Western ideologies of gender,'” in particular the logic of narrative closure. But, Wallace notes, “one way out of this narrative bind is to question what might be too much emphasis on closure.” Wallace urges readers to resist “elevating [the formal movement of closure] above other movements within the text as a whole,” to “focus instead” on the “subversive middle actions” of a female protagonist, regardless of the ways she is or is not rewarded in the end.
Beyond this ending, the next issue of volume 22 of Tulsa Studies further pursues questions of textual editing—raised in “Ann Yearsley and the Politics of Patronage” by Frank Felsenstein—with two provocative articles: the first by Heather Dubrow entitled ‘”And Thus Leave Off’: Reevaluating Mary Wroth’s Folger Manuscript, Va. 104,” the second by Alexander Pettit, “Terrible Texts, ‘Marginal’ Works, and the Mandate of the Moment: The Case of Eliza Haywood.” Then in volume 23, Tulsa Studies features another special issue, guest edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. This issue derives from a tripartite series of panels on transnational and international feminist studies held during the December 2002 Modern Language Association Convention, sessions organized by Lim under the auspices of the Women’s Studies Division Executive Committee of the MLA. Included in this issue are Gillian Whitlock’s “Consuming Passions: Reconciliation in Women’s Intellectual Memoir”—an essay on South African and Australian Aboriginal women’s memoirs; Kenneth Chan’s “Cross-Dress for Success: Performing Ivan Heng and Chowee Leow’s An Occasional Orchid and Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill on the Singapore Stage”—an essay on Singapore drama, performance, and queerness; and Yi Zheng’s ‘”Personalized Writing’ and its Enthusiastic Critic”—an essay on contemporary Chinese women’s writing and post-Socialist feminism; and Marjorie Pryse’s “Literary Regionalism and Global Capital: Nineteenth Century U.S. Women Writers—an essay on U.S. feminist criticism; and others. Stay tuned.
