Fictional Feminism: How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Womens Equality (Literary Criti
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Jong's sexual and romantic poetics, however unoriginal, at least enable her to fashion a character who delights in the power relations of the institutions she inhabits.
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Isadora feels trapped in her marriage, and yet she longs for this entrapment. But Isadora's sexual liberation does not coincide with emancipation and self-actualization within marriage, therapy, or the university. Institutional dead-ends in fact nourish her sexual desire. In Fear of Flying , the university and therapy lead nowhere, but at least one of them, therapy, provides its fair share of entertainment. Isadora enrolls in graduate school in what she describes as a moment of weakness.
Despite having published poems in small literary magazines and received letters from literary agents asking her whether she has been working on a novel, Isadora "[doesn't] really believe the seriousness of [her] commitment" to her craft A "compulsive good girl" lacking "the guts" to turn down the fellowships that her professors dangle before her, Isadora enters, and subsequently drops out of, the Graduate English Department at Columbia Isadora presents psychoanalysis as similarly aimless, but instead of quitting therapy, she delights in the failure of the operation.
On a flight to Vienna, she thinks, "God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks' ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier" 5. Isadora denigrates psychoanalysis' literal-mindedness: The horse you are dreaming about is your mother.
The piles of bullshit you are dreaming about are, in reality, your analyst. This is called the transference. Yet, Isadora finds pleasure in the debacle not only of therapy, but of psychoanalytic reasoning more broadly. A cynical approach to psychoanalysis' overdetermined interpretive schemes highlights the absurd humor in stasis. The fact that Isadora mocks the university and psychiatry does not mean that she is above their absurdity. It means instead that her game plan is to turn experiences of and transitions between absurd spaces into sources of comedic and sexual relief.
Isadora's description of a hotel room in the last leg of the novel allegorizes her experience of the institutions of marriage, therapy, and the university. As in Mira's dream at the end of The Women's Room , Jong's account of the hotel room offers a meta-commentary on Isadora's relation to the confining spaces across which she hops throughout the picaresque-like plot. In Paris, on her own after escaping an increasingly toxic triangle involving her husband Bennett and her lover Adrian, Isadora looks for a place to stay and finds a "firetrap. In contrast to Mira, Isadora expresses the "masochistic pleasure" of feeling trapped:.
The place was a firetrap, I remarked to myself with masochistic pleasure, and the top floor was where I was most likely to be trapped. All sorts of images rushed into my mind: Zelda Fitzgerald dying in that asylum fire I had just read a biography of her ; the seedy hotel room in the movie Breathless ; my father warning me gravely before my first unescorted trip to Europe at nineteen that he had seen Breathless and knew what happened to American girls in Europe.
Isadora and her father — or rather Isadora and her own recollection of her father's words — produce different interpretations of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless On the one hand, "what happens to American girls in Europe," the version associated with Isadora's father, probably points to a plot in which Patricia Jean Seberg , an American, is seduced by the dangerous Michel Jean-Paul Belmondo , a French man who is on the run after having killed a police officer. While it is commonplace to say that in huis clos the room itself is a character, it might be more accurate to suggest that isolation, voluntary or not, constitutes the narrative thrust of huis clos.
In the hotel room from Breathless , Patricia and Michel engage in ambivalent power plays: The lesson that Fear of Flying gathers from Breathless is that power imbalances are the terrain not only of oppression, but also of sexuality. Breathless and Fear of Flying are narratives about masochism: The figure of the firetrap encapsulates this libidinal structure.
When Isadora finds herself enclosed, her sexual fantasies abound. The institutional critique that emerges from the firetrap episode is a style or aesthetics rather than an agenda; and it concerns Isadora's affective disposition toward institutions rather than institutions themselves. Isadora's style of institutional critique, premised on the falsehood of institutional promises of emancipation and self-actualization, consists of trying out and performing new relations to the spaces she inhabits. Isadora blames her own status as a "compulsive good girl" for joining Columbia's English Ph.
She ends up in a Paris firetrap due to being a compulsive bad girl. As these examples, as well as Mira's identification with Breathless 's Patricia and possibly Michel , suggest, stasis and isolation in Fear of Flying are both effects of and occasions for role-playing. While The Women's Room and Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen imagine protagonists stuck in the tension between refuge and captivity, Isadora avoids the weight of a debilitating political consciousness by designing a style of relation and behavior that reforms her experience of the sites she occupies, not the sites themselves.
Isadora can afford, financially and energetically, to imagine liberation by other means — that is, through a practice of role-playing in potentially dangerous firetraps. In the novel's I-choose-myself conclusion, after Isadora "[looks] down at [her] body" and "[decides] to keep it," our narrator reflects, "But whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I'd go on working.
Surviving meant being born over and over. It wasn't easy, and it was always painful. But there wasn't any other choice except death. But in Fear of Flying , Isadora's strategy for avoiding death — being born over and over again — brings to mind a virtuosic creative worker who powers through taxing adventures by adjusting and performing accordingly. Jong's novel leads nowhere beyond a firetrap. It nonetheless offers a crash course in livening up the tone of liberal disillusionment. For French, Shulman, and Jong, the room, as a scale model of institutional politics and an expression of the limits of the liberal feminist political imagination, is flawed.
These authors use figuration to deploy a realism whose potency can be partly measured in reader-response terms: Roland Barthes writes that "a figure is established if at least someone can say: I recognize that scene of language! If the rooms of s novels constitute particularly forceful means of representation and critique, it is because they bring readers into spaces that lack a political horizon.
For instance, by being catapulted into rooms that model university injustices, readers get a sense of the obstacles that separate protagonists from the professional positions that would turn particular life stories into bona fide campus novel plots. But once readers recognize themselves in novels that, in Mira's words, "[fail] to ascertain an objective difference between one way of living or another," what is there to do? Only Jong proposes a solution to this problem, and not the most farsighted one: Immersion is a gamble: His research tracks breathing as a concept for relationality and encounter in contemporary, Anglo-American literature.
I thank the editors of Post45 and three anonymous readers for their astute observations and recommendations. Fiction, Art, Social Form Princeton: Duke University Press, , Robyn Wiegman tracks the categorization of "identity knowledges" the identity-based rubrics that anchor such analytics or fields as women's studies and whiteness studies as either good or bad objects White feminism, the bad object that The Women's Room , Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen , and Fear of Flying are often thought to emblematize, is an accusation, not an identity that authors, theorists, or critics claim for themselves.
The most influential defense of the literary criticism more than the novels or other aesthetic objects labeled as white feminist is probably Susan Gubar's "What Ails Feminist Criticism? Gubar fears that by rejecting s and s feminism en bloc on the basis of its presumed universalism and essentialism, feminists abandon the aspiration to produce a coherent political subject , But Gubar's essay is not only a defense; it is also an attack.
If her piece has been so contentious in feminist scholarship, it is because it blames the dismissal of white feminism on feminists of color and poststructuralists A Second Opinion," Critical Inquiry Wiegman says that Gubar's argument reiterates the marked identity formation of injured whiteness that is dominant in contemporary U. I argue that in order to understand the value and significance of The Women's Room , Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen , and Fear of Flying , we should not retroactively ascribe an antiracism or a class politics to these works.
A feminism of singularities and particularities means that we can recognize the shortcomings of a cluster of texts, and yet attend to the social, political, and aesthetic idioms it supplies. Routledge, , 2, ; Maria Lauret, Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America New York: Harvard University Press, , Grove Press, , Acker's criticism targets Jong's aspiration to authenticity, a kind of thinking out loud that claims a proximity to the reality of lived experience despite being uttered from an almost comically privileged position. D ," Chronicle of Higher Education , May 3, University of Chicago Press, , Implemented in , the City University of New York's Open Admissions initiative intended to compensate for structural inequalities that had mainly penalized African American and Hispanic populations.
Open Admissions encompassed two policies: As documented by Jen Fain, the narrator and protagonist of Renata Adler's novel Speedboat ; repr.
Feminist literary criticism
NYRB Classics, , the expansion and restructuring of CUNY's colleges in the first half of the s yielded complaints, some sincere and others affected, about a conjectured loss of "standards" in higher education: If anything goes wrong, the featherbedding illiterates in our department will join the reactionary pedants in theirs to blame it on Open Admissions, the program by which the university now lets all interested high school graduates in.
It is another faculty excuse for doing less and earning more. The simile additionally points to Open Admissions' open secret: Such a reform would have ensured that students who undertook undergraduate studies did so with adequate skills and knowledge. In the s, debates on inclusion at elite private universities like Harvard and Columbia the main universities portrayed in French, Shulman, and Jong's novels pertained to the admission of women to undergraduate colleges.
Columbia College began admitting female undergraduate students in , following a decade of unsuccessful merger negotiations with the women-only Barnard College, with which Columbia had been affiliated since the beginning of the twentieth century. Harvard College and its associated women's college, Radcliffe, took a different route: Others began to connect their works to the politics of lesbianism.
Some decided to analyze the Black experience through their relationship to the Western world. Regardless, these scholars continue to employ a variety of methods to explore the identity of Black feminism in literature. Currently, several university scholars all employ the usage of literary feminism when critiquing texts. The mainstreaming of this school has given academia an extremely useful tool in raising questions over the gender relationships within texts.
As with other aspects of feminist theory, over the course of the second half of twentieth century feminist literary criticism has expanded to include a significantly broader spectrum of identities under the umbrella term of 'feminism. Third wave feminism and feminist literary criticism is concerned more with the intersection of race and other feminist concerns. At the same time, new feminist literary critics examine the universal images used by women writers to uncover the unconscious symbolism women have used to describe themselves, their world, female society across time and nationalities to uncover the specifically feminine language in literature.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Women's suffrage Muslim countries US. First Second Third Fourth. Lists Articles Feminists by nationality Literature American feminist literature Feminist comic books. Retrieved 29 January A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. A User Friendly Guide 2nd Edition. The University Press of Kentucky. Archived from the original on 1 September A Room of One's Own. The Madwoman In the Attic 2nd Edition. Ettinger, Matrix and Metramorphosis.
Ettinger The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press, ScholarWorks Georgia State University. Retrieved 10 October A Romance with H. Archetypal criticism Biographical criticism Chicago school Cultural materialism Darwinian criticism Deconstruction Descriptive poetics Ecocriticism Feminist criticism Formalism Geocriticism Marxist criticism New Criticism New Historicism Postcolonial criticism Psychoanalytic criticism Reader-response criticism Russian formalism Semiotic criticism Sociological criticism Source criticism Thing theory.
Women's cinema Chick flick Woman's film Female buddy film.
If each of these institutions is dissatisfying in its own way, their symbiosis ultimately reduces the protagonist's range of possible actions. It is therefore worth examining how suffrage writings could question issues of power through new forms of expression, mainly through fragmentation and rewriting. For instance, in the total book production was 9, and in , the number was 12, Hill and Wang, , 4 italics in the original. Shulman writes like she has spent many an hour in consciousness-raising groups. Before the s—in the first and second waves of feminism— feminist literary criticism was concerned with women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within literature; in particular the depiction of fictional female characters.
Ecofeminism Feminist method Hegemonic masculinity Women's history Women's studies. New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy: Bardes, Barbara and Suzanne Gossett. The Career of Hazel MacKaye, Cane, Aleta Feinsod, and Susan Alves, eds. American Women Writers and the Periodicals U of Iowa P, Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.
Chapman, Mary, and Angela Mills, eds. A Study of Cartoonist Blanche Ames. University of Kansas, Past, Present, and Future. The Concept of Modernism. Breaking the Ties that Bind: Popular Stories of the New Woman, U Oklahoma P, Feminist Literature and Social Change. Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage Movement. Suffrage Songs and Verses. U of Massachusetts P, Feminism and its Fictions: U of Pennsylvania P, Samantha on the Woman Question.
Staging a Life, Henry Holt and Company, Suffragists and the Right of Assembly. The U of Tennessee P, Back of the Ballot: A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times. Feminist Activism in American Fiction, The U of Georgia P, Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: A Checklist, , vol. The Art of Citizenship: Suffrage Literature as Social Pedagogy. University of Pittsburgh, What Did Miss Darrington See?: An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction. U of New Mexico P, A Voice of Their Own: Woman Suffrage Press U of Alabama P, A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era.
She wrote Votes for Women! She was elected corresponding secretary for the National Woman Suffrage Association upon its founding in She wrote articles for The Revolution and became its editor in She was a member of the literary society Sorosis. Her two novels Now-a-days!
On suffrage periodical culture, see Cane and Alves; Finnegan; and Solomon. On cartoons, see Anne B. Clark; and also Sheppard. On pageantry, see Blair; see also Lumsden Anna Howard Shaw was a very important figure of the suffrage movement, which she joined in the late s.
This book argues that these texts create a kind of "fictional feminism" that recuperates How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women's Equality. Front Cover. Kim A. Loudermilk. Routledge, Aug 21, - Literary Criticism - pages critics critique cultural feminism Daryl Denfeld described discussion. How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women's Equality Kim A. A number of feminist literary critics have noted that reviews of feminist novels.
She became president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in for 11 years, before resigning in For instance, in the total book production was 9, and in , the number was 12, Caroline Abbot Stanley was a schoolteacher and principal in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her works include Order No. His theatrical successes include Polly with a Past Adam and Eva A Story of a Woman in Revolt Harry Leon Wilson was a dramatist and a novelist. Dorothy Canfield Fischer was engaged in many reform movements, including prison reform and education she introduced the Montessori method to the United States.
She owned and edited The Club Woman , a monthly magazine.
She published her first narrative The Randolphs of Redwood in The MacMillan Company, Scholars of the suffrage movement have done important work trying to identify and list these texts. In her dissertation, The Art of Citizenship , Maggie Amelia Rehm has included in her appendices many helpful lists of sources:
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