The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

While some say that this novel defies genre, I’d say rather that it’s much more fully a memoir than most, in that it captures a much more complete picture of Kingston’s girlhood than if she had restricted herself to simply dates, names, and events.  There are names, dates, and events, with scenes set in her childhood home and the laundry her parents ran and the children worked at.  There are scenes at school, of cruelty and play.  But there are also more mythopoetic scenes, of a girlhood taken up into the sky to be trained as a bird and then as a dragon.  There are stories of her ancestors, of women being stoned to death for adultery and men who leave their wives behind in China to create new lives—with new wives—in America.

But primarily, this is a story about women, and about identity, and how a Chinese-American woman discovers her own identity between and within these two cultures.  Her own knowledge of how her ancestors suffered for being female—whether for being found pregnant and unmarried, which led to infanticide and suicide for that un-acknowledged aunt in China, or watching her own aunt suffer as she discovers that the husband who has financially supported her for years in China has taken a new wife in America—weighs on and informs Kingston, who strives to emulate the other stories of Chinese women, those of the dragon women, the women warriors for whom the book is named.  Even the women whose stories she recounts who survive physically often end up—in America, at least—committed to insane asylums, demonstrating the difficulty so many women have balancing the often contradictory requirements of the two cultures.  Kingston’s answer, in this beautiful prose, is to be a warrior, a dragon woman, one who knows how to recognize dragons in the landscape.

Edith Wharton--The House of Mirth (1905)

Considered by most to be Wharton’s first significant work of fiction, House of Mirth was an immediate best-seller, selling out its first printing of 40,000 and its second printing of 20,000 in two weeks.  By the end of 1905, it had sold 140,000 copies.  It was the most successful book that Scribner’s had published to date.  The title comes from Ecclesiastes 7:4: “The house of the wise is in the house of mourning/ The house of the fool is in the house of mirth.”  The novel follows the tragic heroine Lily Bart, dangerously single at 29, as she struggles to survive aristocratic New York society with dwindling funds and dwindling future possibilities.  Over the course of the novel, her prospects decline from house parties at which she is still welcome as long as she helps out her hostess with various duties, to being a sort of hired guide by the nouveau riche who need help navigating the unfamiliar waters of aristocratic society, to finally near-destitution as she works unsuccessfully in a millinery shop.  After using the last of her funds to pay off her debts, she dies of a suspicious overdose of sleeping drops. 

The novel is an accusatory examination of what Wai-Chi Dimock has characterized as the marketplace logic at the heart of the novel.  As Lily explains,

You think we live on the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense—but it’s a privilege we have to pay for!   We eat their dinners, and drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their carriages and their opera-boxes and their private cars—yes, but there’s a tax to pay on every one of those luxuries….the girl pays it by tips and cards…and by going to the best dress-makers, and having just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping herself fresh and exquisite and amusing!” (279-80)

Lily’s problem is that she cannot ever completely give herself over to the kind of mercenary self-commodification required for financial success in this society.  Every time she is on the verge of marital success—for example, when Percy Gryce is in love with her enough to only require her to attend a church service with him and his mother, Lily instead goes for a walk with her friend Selden.

Selden is perhaps the most infuriating character in the book, in his love for Lily never completely translates in his marrying her. Rather, in the frequent visions of Lily presented from his point of view, he fails to see her as either completely human or as innocent of artifice as she at times genuinely can be.  Indeed, from the opening scene forward, Lily is presented as a commodity to be appraised and exchanged.  Selden thinks to himself that “she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her” (5).  Lily, brought up by a mother who instills above all an absolute fear of anything resembling what she characterizes as “dinginess” and a father who dies after losing his fortune, is poorly prepared for adult responsibility.  A exemplar of Naturalism, leaving Lily vulnerable to cruel and heartless society, Wharton places her tragic heroine, Lily Bart, in a society that she describes as a "hot-house of traditions and conventions.”

Harriet Jacobs--Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

First published in 1861 under the pen name “Linda Brent,” Harriet wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to appeal to a northern audience for the abolitionist cause.  It follows her escape from slavery in 1842 to her legal emancipation in 1852.  Jacobs was born to relatively well-off slaves and had a relatively happy childhood with them and then her grandmother, a slave with a somewhat independent income through her baking who wields a strong sense of moral power throughout the text.  Once her parents die, she is sold to the evil Dr. Flint, who pursues and threatens her sexually.  Jacobs calls upon the values of nineteenth century True Womanhood as she appeals to her audience of northern women, calling their attention to her inability to uphold these shared values, instilled in her by her grandmother, as a slave. 

Dr. Flint is a frightening threat: her “master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour” who informs Jacobs that she “was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing” (459).  In addition to her surprising frankness about the sexual dangers which Dr. Flint threatened, Jacobs is equally frank about the sexual relationship she has with Mr. Sands, a white man with whom she has two children.  In a candid aside to the reader, Jacobs admits that she chooses a sexual relationship with him, explaining that, “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, that to submit to compulsion” (501).  She asks for forgiveness, explaining that slaves should be judged differently, as slavery is an inherently corrupting system, which made her “prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world” (500). 

When Dr. Flint becomes too dangerous, Jacobs goes into hiding, staying in a secret compartment in a porch roof which was 9’x3’x7’ (at its highest part).  She stayed seven years in hiding, during which time Mr. Sands is able to take their daughter Ellen to Brooklyn.  Jacobs eventually is able to escape to Philadelphia by boat.  However, even after her escape north, she lives in fear of the Fugitive Slave Act and Dr. Flint’s relentless pursuit of her.  She works for Mrs. Bruce, even spending a year in London, caring for Mrs. Bruce’s daughter, where she experiences a more general freedom from racism than she has ever had.  Eventually, Jacobs’ freedom is bought by her new mistress Mrs. Bruce, despite Jacobs’ complete unwillingness to being purchased.  The text ends with her unfulfilled desires to have her children with her in their own home, and two more truth claims from white authors.

The narrative follows the typical pattern of the nineteenth century slave narrative: (1) loss of innocence (narrator realizes that she’s a slave); (2) realization of alternatives and formulation of resolve to be free; (3) escape (depending on when the narrative was written, will tell more or fewer details about the escape.  Pre-emancipation, fewer details were given); and (4) freedom.  It is prefaced by a truth claim by Lydia Maria Child, a well-respected white author of domestic guides.  Between 1760 and 1947, more than 200 book-length narratives were written; in total, more than 6,000 total exist.  While they were popular tools of propaganda, Jacobs was one of the first to focus on the dangers of slavery which were unique to female slaves, particularly their vulnerability to sexual abuse and rape.  Jacobs uses tropes of the sentimental novel—moralistic asides to her “Dear Reader,” and evocations of her desire to have her children at her own hearth. 

Sylvia Plath--The Bell Jar (1971)

This posthumously published novel is a roman à clef which follows the descent of Esther Greenwood from promising young journalism student through her depression, suicide attempts, shock treatments, and ends with her entering her interview to possibly leave the hospital.  It was first published in England in 1963 under a pseudonym; it wasn’t published in the United States until 1971, though, against the wishes of Plath’s mother. 

It opens with Greenwood in a women’s hotel in New York City, working as an intern for a series of women’s magazines.  In this pre-feminist period, Esther Greenwood struggles to forge an identity in college and in her internship, with her female friends and the men she dates and encounters.  Throughout, she resists the expectations of marriage and motherhood, despite the best intentions of her neighbors and friends.  While the general trend is one of descent, as Esther’s depression and suicidal tendencies increase over much of the novel, there are potentially proto-feminist, potentially hopeful moments in the novel.  Perhaps most hopeful is her psychiatrist’s prescription of a diaphragm for her, which allows Esther to lose her virginity, virginity and sex being one of the ways in which Ester feels powerless in the marriage economy. 

Many reviewers complain about Plath’s immaturity in this novel.  And certainly, reading it for the first time since I was eighteen, there are many places where I see my eighteen-year-old self feeling connection—Plath’s despair that her ability to make straight As will no longer serve her in the real world was one which I quite identified with, along with her desire to rest after being a dutiful daughter.  However, at this point, I see it primarily as a period piece—an important one—telling a tragic story of one woman’s mental illness.  It’s impossible to read this without being influenced by Plath’s own story, even though the novel itself seems to end on a hopeful note, knowing of Plath’s own suicide makes it nearly impossible for me to completely believe in that hopefulness. 

What is hopeful, however, is the proto-feminism apparent in the novel.  While Esther’s first psychiatrist orders terrifyingly dangerous shock treatments and treats her in a quite condescending manner, her subsequent female doctor is much more sensitive to her experiences, and ensures that her subsequent therapy and shock treatments are not painful, but are therapeutic.  Throughout the novel, Esther encounters tentative forms of healing sisterhood, whether in the women’s hotel after food poisoning or in the mental hospital with her fellow inmates and female doctor.  This for me is the takeaway, the protofeminism possibilities which Plath imagines in the novel.

Kathryn R. Kent--Making Girls Into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (2008)

Starting with the line from Little Women, in which Jo proclaims, “Mothers are the best lovers in the whole world, but I’d like to try all kinds,” Kathryn Kent looks at how the changing women’s culture at the turn of the century allowed for a new kind of emergent lesbian subjectivity.  Using authors such as Alcott, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the Girl Scout Handbook, Kent claims that these texts illustrate how a new semi-public, semi-private modality of space provided by scouting, boarding school, and similar entities allowed for a new kind of female-female bonding, an alternatively queer maternal one.

These texts reflect the growth of commodity capitalism in America, which was reflected in the urge for taxonomy and categorization at the time.  For example, Kent points out how the rise of the department store and catalogue “organizes or teaches consumers a specific kind of consumption.”  In addition to the kind of sexological categorization which was occurring at the time, Kent shows how commodity capitalism “demonstrate[s] another kind of codification of gender and sexuality occurred at the turn of the century: there are newly gendered ‘needs’ and ‘desires’ that are supposed to reflect the binary gender oppositions of compulsory heterosexuality.”  Importantly, “the domestic sphere serves within this system as a site for the production and reproduction, through consumption and display, of these norms” (149).  By showing the similarities between the category-driven subject-formation of the Girl Scout handbooks and novels of the 1920s (for example, she looks at the second edition of Scouting for Girls was published in 1920) and Djuna Barnes’s 1928 Ladies Almanack.  Kent identifies that, “In ways analogous to the Girl Scouts, the Almanack explicitly connects theories of mass production with the production of sexual subjectivity and also sees reading as a form of erotic recruitment” (126)—an observation which I have seen confirmed many times in literature, especially from this time period (including work by Virginia Woolf, in Radclyffe Hall, and even, I would argue, Quentin Crisp’s “Crisperanto”).

Much of this book works to critique and reconfigure the traditional oedipal configuration.  According to Kent, the “limits of the oedipal trajectory” include the inability to “view identification and desire and compatible” (101).  In other words, traditional oedipal understandings of desire do not take into account that one can both with to be as well as wish to be with another; identification and desire are not mutually exclusive.  This observation opens up entirely new ways of reading not only these texts of Sapphic modernism, but also more generally readings of romance fiction and even pornography.  In her discussion of the “pleasures of influence” between Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, for example, she identifies what she refers to as a “queer erotics of relation, or what I term ‘invitation,’ an erotics not based in subsuming the difference of the ‘other,’ but in preserving it” (210).  In looking at Moore and Bishop relative to such “queer erotics,” Kent is able to tie this dynamic to both their individual relationship as well as its connection to a larger dynamic of nationhood: “in moving from Moore to Bishop we shift from what I have argued the problems of the erotics of identification—the fact that such identification is often inseparable form other forms of imperial recruitment—to an erotics that tries to resist this impulse to reform the ‘other’ or the self” (210).  Again, subject-formation illuminates the fuzzy interstices of the public and the private.

Eds. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson--Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (1997)

This 1997 (518 page!) collection of essays posits that gender “may be as important an analytic category for making sense of the South as race itself traditionally has been acknowledged to be” (16).  They propose an intersectional analysis which takes into account the connections between “whiteness and blackness, masculinity and femininity, domination and subordination” (16).  From this comes Anne Goodwyn Jones’s question,

If Charles Chesnutt and Faulkner can be seen at least tentatively as writing within a thematic set by Douglass, who rewrites Jacobs’s story?  For reasons about which it would be interesting to wonder, the story seems to have been taken up more by white writers than by African-American southern women like Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor.  I am thinking of Katherine Anne Porter, for example, whose version of Harriet Jacobs in “The Old Order,” Nanny, stays with her mistress after the war by finally transforms herself in a free and independent “aged Bantu woman”; of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, another story of mastery, sexuality, and escape; of Ellen Douglas in her remarkable work about contemporary white mistresses and black maids, Can’t Quit You, Baby. (“Engendered in the South: Blood and Irony in Douglass and Jacobs” 216)

Jones’s observation about this writing is influencing my own ideas of the scope within which I want to write my dissertation.

One highlight early on for me is David Leverenz’s “Poe and Gentry Virginia: Provincial Gentleman, Textual Aristocrat, Man of the Crowd” (79-108).  Leverenz uses Bordieau’s ideas of cultural capital to look at Poe’s exaggerated and parodic portrayal of the southern aristocracy, what he identifies as Poe’s “play[ing] a trixster role at the alienated margin of gentry culture” (100).  Relevant to my work is his brief discussion of Poe’s short fiction versus what is generally accepted as his failed attempt at longer narrative: “What can be riveting or shocking in the short story seems nihilistic and capricious in the novel” (100).  Though he is talking about Poe, I think this idea might be applied to the idea of the southern gothic in general, especially to the work of Flannery O’Connor.  Many people claim that O’Connor’s best work is her short fiction, rather than her novels—however, I think it may instead be a lack of comfort with the kind of nihilism which Leverenz identifies here.  This fits into my reading of Wise Blood, where the kind of shocking imagery which might be a central image in a short story instead appears over and over in the novel, creating a larger sense of nihilism which undergirds Hazel Motes’s own vision of a masculine, nihilistic Christianity. 

The collection also contains Patricia Yaeger’s “Beyond the Hummingbird: Southern Women Writers and the Southern Gargantua” (287-318). Anticipating her brilliant Dirt and Desire, this essay looks specifically at the figure of the gargantuan woman in southern women’s writing.  More generally, though, her essay asks “what it might mean to have one’s body ‘at the core’ of the South’s self-definition” (292).  In her discussion of the ideal miniaturized body of the white southern woman, she identifies the fact that “the small compass of the ideal white woman’s body is oddly at war with its epic stature in minds of white men; this fragile white body, slim as a reed and graceful as a sylph, becomes pivotal in each crucial task of bodily discipline” (293).  Importantly, though, she goes on to claim that,

What is most remarkable about southern women’s fiction is the way in which it refuses such discipline.  When the grotesque body marches onto the page, the ideology that controls southern bodies explodes in the most unexpected of ways.  Southern women’s writing is filled with bizarre somatic images that seem unnecessarily cruel or out of control, and yet this cruelty has a function: it gears at the social fabric and leaves it in shreds. (293)

Further, Yaeger claims that the gargantuan bodies specifically “invoke the messiness and hubris of history itself” (294).  In particular, she sees written on the southern female body what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has named the “southern rape complex”:

This ‘complex,’ with its triumphant protection of white women, its calculated fear of black men, its ignorance of the abuses of black women, is an instrument of sexual and racial suppression scapegoating those players in the southern game who challenge the established order.  Just as ‘lynching served to dramatize hierarchies among men,’ so stories of female victimization encourage white women to depend upon white men. (298)

However, Yaeger notes that characters in this work do not remain within this dimension; rather, their gargantuan bodies allowed for ways out of these limited identities: “the gargantuan body both maps its own limits and refuses to stay within boundaries, to serve asked for ends” (299).  More importantly, these characters “remind[s] us of the relative difficulty—for women, for people of color—of such public refusals” (301).

The rest of the collection contains a variety of perspectives and objects of focus regarding gender and southern literature, from the eighteenth century to the present day.  The authors see so much of present-day understandings of gender in the South still as rooted in the patriarchy and paternalism of the nineteenth century southern plantation, in the ways that it institutionalized structures of race, class, and gender.  Further, it set up a system of who was allowed to speak for whom, silencing most voices which did not fit the image of the ruling class.  Many of the authors in this collection address these silences (or attempts to silence, or reactions to those who do not remain silent) and the significance of southern texts which give voice to those who are expected to remain silent.