Literature
Well before the electronic age of radio and television, dreams, ideas, and knowledge were shared through books. Throughout history and still today, literary texts have played an important role in telling the story of human experience while also preserving the ideals and ambitions of humanity. Although women have historically been restricted in their access to education and have been prohibited from contributing to the literary tradition, as roles changed and women experienced more personal freedom to self-actualization, books became an important part of women’s lives and played a significant role in both reflecting culture and changing worldviews. This manuscript details select literary works by women and about women, with an eye toward inclusivity, acknowledging that literature about race is also about women, and writing about class is also about women because all of us, regardless of gender, embody these identity categories.
THE AWAKENING BY KATE CHOPIN (1899)
Published at a time when debates about the “New Woman” raged throughout American society, Kate Chopin’s (1850–1904) The Awakening attracted a considerable amount of attention from both press and the public upon its 1899 publication. The novel told the story of Edna Pontellier, a young, white, affluent wife and mother who, at the beginning of the tale, begins to chafe against the numerous restrictions placed on her as a respectable matron in late 19th-century Southern society. Beginning to articulate a new sense of self and a desire for artistic and sexual expression outside of marriage and motherhood, Edna struggles throughout The Awakening to find a way to live as an independent, autonomous woman within a repressive culture. Having failed in this endeavor, the end of the novel finds Edna swimming out to sea, seemingly having chosen death over a life lived in conformity to society’s confining expectations for women.
The Awakening was far from a popular success upon its initial publication. To the contrary, it was widely reviled by the American press, which condemned the novel as a vulgar, immoral exploration of a (allegedly silly) woman’s sexual transgressions. So shocked were reviewers and readers by the novel’s open acknowledgement of female sexual desire, and the reality of female sexual expression outside of marriage, that The Awakening largely ended Chopin’s (previously very successful) career as an author.
After Chopin’s premature death at the age of 54 in 1904, The Awakening remained out of print and largely unremembered for many decades thereafter. It was not until the rise of second-wave feminism (and of feminist literary scholarship within the academy) that The Awakening came back to scholarly and popular attention, and new editions of the novel began to appear. Since the 1960s and 1970s, The Awakening has been a key text in American literature and history courses and has been a vitally important one in ongoing debates about definitions of femininity and struggles for female independence and autonomy.
The Awakening tackled numerous issues that remain vital to discussions about gender oppression and women’s efforts to achieve full selfhood within fundamentally sexist social systems. Edna challenges existing definitions of marriage, which define her sole role as self-effacing support to her husband. She insists on her fundamental right to sexual self-ownership, and rejects the efforts of the men around her to define or control her sexual expression. Though she loves her children, she resists a definition of motherhood that requires women’s total self-sacrifice. Above all else, Edna consistently asserts the right to her own self—to have a home of her own, money of her own, time to pursue her artistic interests, and to be her own person, outside of her roles as wife and mother. Vibrantly entering into late 19th-century debates about the “New Woman” and serving as a touchstone for second-wave feminists, the questions that The Awakening raised about how women strive to be full people remain profoundly relevant to contemporary feminism.
Holly M. Kent
FURTHER READING
Chopin, Kate. 1997. The Awakening. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.
Martin, Wendy, ed. 1988. New Essays on The Awakening. New York: Cambridge University Press.
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH BY EDITH WHARTON (1905)
Edith Wharton’s (1862–1937) The House of Mirth (1905) was a novel of manners that followed the beautiful and well-bred but penniless Lily Bart as she negotiated a place for herself in upper-class New York society. The novel examined the particular bind women like Lily experienced: depending on men for their livelihoods, they had no choice but to shape their lives to make themselves suitable for marriage. Any deviation from proper decorum was likely to have disastrous results for the reputation and future of a young lady. Though Lily’s social skills are honed to a fine point, her expensive tastes and the cost of keeping up with her wealthy social circle cause her to overextend her income before she is able to attain the security and acceptance marriage to a wealthy suitor would bring. Bad debt and social missteps eventually land Lily in a milliner’s shop, where she tries to make a living for herself and repay her debts. The strain of her reduced circumstances leads Lily to a dependence on chloral, a medicinal sleep aid, which is the eventual cause of her death at the end of the novel.
The House of Mirth was an instant popular success, climbing the bestsellers’ list a month after its release. Contemporary reviewers seemed to focus either on the novel’s tragic elements (many readers were greatly drawn in and distressed by Lily’s death) or on its gossip value, assuming that it shed light on the real lives of socialites in Wharton’s New York social circle. The novel attracted a fair amount of serious academic attention as well; The House of Mirth launched Wharton’s career as a serious writer and social commentator (Beer et al., 2007: 63).
Despite mixed critical opinion, all reviewers could agree that Wharton had achieved great mastery of language and treated her subject with uncompromising attention to detail. Where critics began to disagree was whether Wharton’s subject—a young socialite grasping at the edges of a frivolous upper-class society—was worthy of literary attention. Those who praised the novel did so for its keen ability to capture an exact cultural moment in New York society when women were trapped in what feminists would later dub the “Madonna–whore complex,” the contradictory cultural mandate to be at once virtuous and above moral reproach, but also physically beautiful and alluring to the opposite sex. Those who found fault with the novel pointed to its alleged immorality, citing the excessive and casual destructiveness and self-absorption of the characters populating the novel.
Novelist and short story writer Edith Wharton was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence. Wharton is also widely known for her novel The House of Mirth. (Library of Congress)
Wharton mocked her reviewers’ squeamishness about Lily’s behavior. In her introduction to the 1936 edition of The House of Mirth, she wrote: “What picture did the writer offer to their horrified eyes? That of a young girl of their work who rouged, smoked, ran into debt, borrowed money, gambled, and—crowning horror!—went home with a bachelor friend to take tea in his flat!” (Wharton, 1936: 375). Wharton’s sarcasm underscores the strict social parameters within which Lily, and the women who were reading her story and perhaps even Wharton herself, were expected to operate.
Erica Robak
FURTHER READING
Beer, Janet, Pamela Knights, and Elizabeth Nolan, eds. 2007. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Routledge Study Guide. New York: Routledge.
The Edith Wharton Society. 2016. https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com.
Wharton, Edith. 1936. “Appendix A: Edith Wharton’s Introduction to the 1936 Edition of The House of Mirth.” In The House of Mirth, 371–76. Edited by Janet Beer, and Elizabeth Nolan. Ontario: Broadview Press.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. 1994. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Perseus.
THE SECRET GARDEN BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT (1911)
With a garden metaphor, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) examined nature’s healing power, described as Magic, throughout The Secret Garden (1911). Mary Lennox, the young protagonist, learns to care for herself and experience solitude in the garden. The secret garden becomes a room of her own, where Mary discovers how to enjoy her body, exercise her imagination, and expand her social circle.
The Secret Garden was published as a novel after being released as a serial in The American Magazine. During Burnett’s life, The Secret Garden was an overlooked part of her work. It was not even mentioned in her obituary. With the rise of children’s literature in the late 20th century, as well as an uptick in adaptations after the work’s U.S. copyright expired in 1987, The Secret Garden is now one of Burnett’s best-known works. Basing Mary on the popular English nursery rhyme “Mary, Mary Quite Contrary,” Burnett created a girl who was brash, hurting, and real. Mary claims, “People never like me and I never like people.” This is a stark difference from the Victorian notion that girls are quiet, polite, and unassuming.
We meet 10-year-old Mary in India during a cholera outbreak. As a spoiled, disagreeable, and sometimes violent child, she is unwanted by her parents and tyrannical to the Indian servants. During the crisis, her parents and nanny die. When she is discovered alone in the house, she is sent to live with her uncle in England. In contrast to other portrayals of girls of the time (Anne Shirley, Jane Eyre, Heidi), Mary Lennox is not a good-hearted orphan; she is willful and self-absorbed.
Upon her arrival in Yorkshire, Mary is lonely and far away from a life she understands. Though she is left alone by her uncle, Archibald Craven, to amuse herself in her rooms, Martha, a talkative maid, tells Mary a story of a locked garden, which piques the child’s imagination. Boredom leads Mary to find the secret garden. In the process, she strengthens her body and softens her disposition. When she finds her way into the locked garden, she discovers life among the dead branches, mirroring the growth Mary experiences as she meets new people.
Along with the garden, another mystery consumes Mary’s attention. She hears unexplained crying inside the manor. Following the sound, she finds her sickly cousin, Colin, living in a hidden room. Mary visits, distracting him with stories of the secret garden. Eventually, Mary admits she has access to the garden and invites Colin to join her for some fresh air. Spending every day in the garden, Colin gets stronger, even standing to prove he is not crippled. The transformation of Mary and Colin from lonely to well-adjusted children is attributed to Magic. Though Magic is not defined, the healing properties of nature and positive thinking reflect Burnett’s interest in Christian Science theories.
Sarah E. Colonna
See also: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.
FURTHER READING
Gerzina, Gretchen H. 2004. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Lundin, Anne. 2006. “The Critical and Commercial Reception of The Secret Garden.” In In the Garden: Essays in Honour of Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911–2004. Edited by Angelica Shirley Carpenter. Toronto: Scarecrow Press.
ORLANDO BY VIRGINIA WOOLF (1928)
Virginia Woolf’s (1882–1941) Orlando (1928) was constructed as a biography spanning three centuries. The novel chronicled Orlando, a wealthy British landowner, from young adulthood to middle age. He is first a confidant to the Queen, later a duke in Constantinople, and afterward a wife to Sheldermine in Britain. Perhaps the most notable aspect is Orlando’s transformation—at the midpoint—from male to female, which occurs after he sleeps for seven days. Though many theories regarding the novel exist, its importance and influence are not to be doubted. This influence consists of two elements: an interrogation of the traditional concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality; and an exploration and challenge to literary conventions and patriarchal language.
Tradition dictates that sex, gender, and sexuality are stable, biological aspects, but Orlando offered readers the exact opposite conceptualization: they are fluid, morphing ideas. This portrayal fosters a disruption of the binary system (male/female), thereby working toward parity. Orlando is male for the first half and female for the second; the alteration is accepted with little fretting. Orlando is aware of the element of gender, though she does not use that term. For example, Orlando ponders the perceived importance of dress, and once she returns to Britain, she embraces both male and female clothing styles: “From the probity of breeches she turned to the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally” (Woolf, 1928: 161). While in these different clothes, her attractions shift, pointing to a sexual fluidity absent from early 20th-century ideas of sexuality. Whether this flexibility is an embrace of androgyny, bisexuality, or sapphism, the novel’s characterization of Orlando broadened the concept of sexuality. Woolf’s uncompromising portrayal of Orlando deconstructed these binaries, provoking a challenge to dominant understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Dominant understandings of traditional literary conventions are also challenged throughout Orlando. By depicting the author characters as deeply flawed and parodying the genre of biography, Woolf denounced patriarchal language and the ideal of male narratives. For example, Nick Greene, a writer Orlando deeply admires, writes a scathing critique of his work. The incident forces Orlando to question the very purpose of writing and the intentionality of authors. A second moment occurs when Orlando (now female) tires of the sneer of Mr. Pope (18th-century poet) and the condescension of Mr. Addison (late 17th-/early 20th-century poet and essayist). In addition to this exposé of the literary tradition, the representation of the Biographer is similarly imperfect, as his reliability and truthfulness remain dubious. These incidences combined create a mockery of patriarchal language. That mockery fosters a space for women and their writing, which is realized in Orlando’s publication of her life’s work (“The Oak Tree”), once she returns to Britain as a woman. Together these aspects expanded readers’ understanding of narrative, voice, and truth.
Orlando garnered varied responses, ranging from praise as a clever and radical romance to criticism as superficial and a departure from Woolf’s previous works. Commenting on this contradictory reception, Maria DiBattista observed, “The combinatory magic of Orlando, in which fact and fancy, dream and history indiscriminately mix and alter each other, dismayed as many of its readers as it enchanted” (Woolf, 1928: xli). She also noted, however, that it immediately “[sold] six thousand copies and [went] into a third edition two months after its publication” (xl). Regardless of the response, the life of the protagonist, Orlando, captivated many.
Sarah E. Fryett
See also: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.
FURTHER READING
De Gay, Jane. 2007. Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Knopp, Sherron E. 1988. “ ‘If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?’: Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” Modern Language Association, 103: 24–34.
Majumdar, Robin, and Allen McLaurin. 2003. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge.
Marcus, Jane. 1987. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Woolf, Virginia. 1928. Orlando. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.
“A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN” BY VIRGINIA WOOLF (1929)
Published in 1929, the essay “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) remains a groundbreaking feminist text that continues to be read by high school and college students today. The fictional essay was a narrative account of Mary Benton’s two days prior to her delivery of a lecture on the topic of women and fiction to young scholars at a women’s college. The narrative account illuminated the negative effects that patriarchy has had on women and their ability to write fiction.
During the first day, Mary visits a men’s college, where she is shooed off the grass by a professor and then denied entry into the library because she is a woman. She has a most lovely and lavish lunch at the college, in which the wine flows freely. She notes the benefit of good food and wine on the ability to think and write well. That evening Mary visits her academic friend at the women’s college. In contrast to the meal at lunch, Mary and her friend have a bland, boring dinner that lacks flavor and wine. Mary and her friend discuss why it is that women’s colleges are so poor and men’s are so wealthy. In their discussion, they note that men have historically controlled the money, and women have had the babies. They observe that men give their money to support their institutions, whereas it was not until recently that women were even legally allowed to keep the money they earned.
The next day, Mary goes to the British Library in London. She finds that although there is much written about women, most of it is written by men. She notes that many famous women had to write in secret or write under a male pseudonym in order to get published. She contends that in reading women’s writing, the reader can feel the woman’s anger about being placed in a lower position in society solely because of her gender. This thinking of one’s gender while writing hinders their ability to write. Woolf theorizes that good writers have unified the masculine with the feminine part of their brain, like William Shakespeare (1564–1616). If Shakespeare had had a sister named Judith, and she too had been an artistic genius, Mary inquires what would have become of her. The answer that Woolf provides is that Judith’s life would end tragically if she were to pursue her craft, because of her limited role and rights in society. She concludes that women need to have a room of their own in which to write and their own financial means to support themselves.
The essay is filled with allusions and comments on political and social issues of the time. Scholars continue to write and comment on Woolf’s text and the concepts and phrases she coined. One such concept is her use of “androgyny” to describe the unification of the masculine and feminine in a good writer’s mind. Some critics argue that this concept disregards Woolf’s own ambitions, whereas others found the idea liberating, and still others contend that androgyny was a trope congruent with Woolf’s time. Scholars play on Woolf’s phraseology in their own work. Alice Walker borrows from Woolf the notion of thinking through our mothers and inquires into thinking about one’s mothers and grandmothers if they were slaves. The phrase “a room of one’s own” remains synonymous with the desire for privacy and freedom to write.
Kristin A. Swenson
See also: Orlando by Virginia Woolf.
FURTHER READING
Lemaster, Tracy. 2012. “Girl with a Pen”: Girls’ Studies and Third-Wave Feminism in A Room of One’s Own and “Professions for Women.” Feminist Formations, 24(2) (Summer): 77–99.
Moi, Toril. 2008. “ ‘I Am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today.” Feminist Theory, 9(3): 259–71.
Showalter, Elaine. 1982. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” In Writing and Sexual Difference. Edited by Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1937)
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was an African American writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. She is remembered as a major figure of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, which took place during the 1920s and 1930s. Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was published in 1937, was her second novel. Scholars commonly describe the novel as the story of an African American woman’s quest for independence and self-knowledge. Throughout most of the novel, the protagonist, Janie Crawford, struggles with gender-based and class-based oppression.
Janie’s narrative, as told to her best friend, Phoeby, is the basis of the novel, which is set in Florida and contains much dialogue written in a black vernacular. When Janie is 16, her aging grandmother forces her to marry Logan Killicks. Janie’s assumption that love will follow marriage proves incorrect. After receiving threats of violence from Logan, she leaves him in order to marry Joe Starks, who offers her lofty dreams. The two move to Eatonville, Florida, where Joe becomes mayor and provides Janie with social standing. However, he is a restrictive husband throughout their 20-year marriage, and Janie discovers that a leisurely middle-class lifestyle is not satisfying. By suppressing her own voice, she survives her marriage, which becomes loveless and involves occasional domestic violence. After Joe’s death, Janie inherits financial independence and meets a younger man named Vergible “Tea Cake” Wood. Contrary to Joe, Tea Cake is working-class and invites Janie into many male-dominated activities. The two marry and live in the Everglades, where Tea Cake insists on being the breadwinner. Janie idealizes the relationship, even though it contains incidents of domestic violence. After Tea Cake contracts rabies from a dog he encounters during a hurricane, Janie shoots him in an act of self-preservation. Following a brief murder trial, she is acquitted. Despite the lack of a happy ending, she attains a sense of empowerment and returns to her house in Eatonville, where she tells her best friend, Phoeby, her story of personal transformation.
Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, author, and prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. She is considered one of the premiere twentieth-century African American writers and is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Library of Congress)
In the first year after its publication, Their Eyes Were Watching God received mixed reviews. Prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance, of which Richard Wright is the most notable, were critical of the novel. Early 20th-century African American intellectuals believed that literature written by African Americans should improve the status of the race, and guidelines were published for African American writers. Hurston’s resistance to the guidelines was subversive. Ultimately, Their Eyes Were Watching God went out of print, and Hurston fell into obscurity in the 1950s.
Feminist literary theory—and, more specifically, black feminist thought—both of which are products of second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, created space for analysis of gender-based power imbalances in literature. Their Eyes Were Watching God was reissued during this time period, and a new generation of readers was receptive to the novel. In 1975, Alice Walker published “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” which played a key role in resurrecting Hurston from obscurity. Today a rich body of diverse scholarship exists on Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is considered a classic. The novel occupies a central position in the canons of American literature, African American literature, and feminist literature. It has influenced many other African American writers, including Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Cade Bambara.
Christine DeCleene
FURTHER READING
Corse, Sarah M., and Monica D. Griffin. 1977. “Cultural Valorization and African American Literary History: Reconstructing the Canon.” Sociological Forum, 12(2): 173–203.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1993. “Their Eyes Were Watching God: Hurston and the Speakerly Text.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 154–203. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Harper.
Hemenway, Robert E. 1980. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Walker, Alice. March 1975. “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” Ms.
A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN BY BETTY SMITH (1943)
Betty Smith (1896–1972) published her first novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, in 1943. Although Smith did not speak explicitly of feminism and women’s rights in the novel, she presented several issues that disrupted perceptions of women and made clear the realities of growing up female in the early 1900s.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the coming-of-age story of Francie Nolan and how her relationships with her family, teachers, and neighbors impact her life. The Nolans live in a tenement building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The intersectionality of gender and class informs Francie’s narrative and portrays the veracity of the time period. Francie is a voracious reader who demonstrates a commitment to challenging the expectations of others.
Class and gender are intricately tied together as Francie’s mother provides the only steady income to the family through cleaning tenement buildings. Francie’s father is an alcoholic, who has shift work from the Waiters’ Union. Francie learns at an early age that women are treated differently. In the beginning of the novel, when Francie and Neeley go to the junker to earn money for the trash they collected for the week, Francie allows the junker to pinch her cheek, knowing it will earn her an extra penny—something not offered to the boys in the neighborhood. Francie also witnesses the way people speak of women who do not follow the expectations of marriage before having children. Francie is told by her mother to let Joanna, a neighbor who had a child out of wedlock, be a lesson to her in life. Through Francie, Smith questions a variety of cultural perceptions surrounding women and provides a critical lens in which to view the world and a belief that determination can change the outcome of one’s life. Similar to the tree outside of Francie’s tenement building that keeps growing back after being cut down, Francie continues to persevere and work toward achieving her goals of becoming a writer despite her environment.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was received positively by the public. The Literary Guild selected Smith’s novel for their selection in September 1943. The first printing of the novel sold out quickly, which led to an almost immediate second printing upon the novel’s release. A bestseller in the United States, Smith’s novel was selected as one to be published as an Armed Services Edition during World War II. The book was so popular among servicemen that a second printing of the book was ordered, which was the first for an Armed Services Edition selection (Newman, 2011). Many soldiers subsequently wrote to Smith to relate the impact of her novel on their lives. She estimated that she received 1500 letters a year, and she responded personally to almost all of them.
Andrea McClanahan
FURTHER READING
Manning, Molly G. 2014. When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Newman, Caitlin. 2011. “Armed Services Editions: A Few Square Inches of Home.” November 27. http://www.historynet.com/armed-services-editions-a-few-square-inches-of-home.htm.
Smith, Betty. 1943. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. New York: HarperCollins.
Weidman, Katharine. n.d. “Smith, Betty: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” 20th Century American Bestsellers. http://bestsellers.lib.virginia.edu/submissions/144.
PEYTON PLACE BY GRACE METALIOUS (1956)
Peyton Place was a 1956 novel by Grace Metalious (1924–1964) set in the 1930s in a fictional, seemingly quiet New England town. The novel focused on the lives of three women: Constance MacKenzie; her daughter, Allison; and Allison’s friend, Selena Cross. Through the characters’ lives, Peyton Place explored issues of class, murder, rape, abortion, and female sexuality.
When Peyton Place was published in 1956, it caused a literary and social firestorm due to its controversial themes. Constance is a single mother who had an affair with a married man, Allison’s father, when she left Peyton Place as a young woman. Such a situation was not openly discussed in the 1930s, nor was it socially accepted. This plot device also mirrored 1950s morals in the United States. The other, more controversial storyline focuses on Selena, a girl “from the wrong side of the tracks.” Selena struggles to help provide for her family, as well as escape the sexual abuse of her stepfather. She becomes pregnant by him and eventually kills him after undergoing an abortion. Meanwhile, Allison explores her own desires as a teenage girl and dreams of becoming a writer while her mother begins a relationship with the new high school principal. Despite the drama, Peyton Place ends happily for the three women. Metalious also wrote a sequel, Return to Peyton Place, with Allison as the main character.
The provocative themes in Peyton Place made the novel extremely popular. It sold 60,000 copies in the first 10 days of its release and stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 59 weeks. Although the book was very successful, it was also criticized as “the decline and fall of the American novel” (Brier, 2005: 51). Metalious made a conscious decision to feature women as the main characters of her novel, exploring their inner struggles rather than simply presenting them as secondary to men in more socially acceptable roles. That the author was a woman who featured women as the main characters, shown to be imperfect, resilient, and largely escaping punishment for their transgressions, contributed to concerns that the book was trashy and without literary merit.
Peyton Place was made into a film in 1957 and later adapted into a television soap opera that aired from 1964 to 1969. The novel and its themes have continued to influence television in particular. Many sitcoms and even reality TV shows of today are built on the premise of exposing the same kinds of secrets popularized in Peyton Place.
Jeanette Sewell
FURTHER READING
Ardis, Cameron. 2015. Unbuttoning of America: A Biography of Peyton Place. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Brier, Evan. 2005. “The Accidental Blockbuster: “Peyton Place” in Literary and Institutional Context.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 33: 48–65.
Toth, Emily. 1981. Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious. New York: Doubleday.
A RAISIN IN THE SUN BY LORRAINE HANSBERRY (1959)
Lorraine Hansberry’s (1930–1965) A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was a protest play focusing on the emotional conflicts within a black working-class family in Southside Chicago. The three-act play was set sometime between World War II and 1959, with most of the action taking place in the Younger family’s living room. When Mama, the head of the family, uses life insurance money received after the death of her husband to make a down payment for a home in Clybourne Park, it appears that the family’s dream of a better future has finally come true. Although Mama’s son, Walter Younger, may be the central figure of the play, the cultural conflicts are expressed through the female characters, making women’s rights an important part of the play. As one of the first black women writers, Hansberry openly questioned whether black women should be loyal to black men and put their personal aspirations behind those of the men, while also addressing reproductive rights issues such as abortion. Hansberry also critiqued black chauvinism by demonstrating that it “transcends cultural, national, educational and economic boundaries” (Lester, 2003: 247). The play initially struggled for financial support and recognition, but upon moving to Broadway, it garnered considerable attention, and in 1959 Hansberry received the prestigious New York Drama Critic’s Circle Award for Best Play of the Year. At the age of 29, Lorraine Hansberry became the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the first black to win the award.
Early critics tended to misinterpret the play by regarding the Youngers as a typical American middle-class family and ignoring the importance of racism as a crucial influence on the family’s life. Hansberry distanced herself from this perspective by claiming that her characters “transcend category” and that “in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific” (Hansberry, 1969: 128). Race, however, was just one category that Hansberry used to describe the life of the Youngers. One of Hansberry’s central concerns was that race intersects with gender and social class, a perspective that also influenced her take on women’s rights. Some critics also argued that Hansberry’s dramatic strategy seems to support the notion that black men were the key victims of white American racism and that strong black women were potentially seen to undermine the struggles of black men for self-respect. The play’s conclusion “reinstates the black man as the center of family authority and as a heroic figure” (Keyssar, 1989: 229), which supports this perspective and highlights some of the tensions that Hansberry as a black female writer had to face.
Daniela Hrzán
FURTHER READING
Hansberry, Lorraine. 1959/1994. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Vintage Books.
Hansberry, Lorraine. 1969. To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Adapted by Robert Nemiroff. New York: New American Library.
Keyssar, Helene. 1989. “Rites and Responsibilities: The Drama of Black American Women.” In Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, 226–40. Edited by Enoch Brater. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lester, Neal A. 2003. “Seasonal with Quiet Strength: Black Womanhood in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959).” In Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens of Gender, 246–49. Edited by Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press.
THE BELL JAR BY SYLVIA PLATH (1963)
The Bell Jar, considered a quasi-autobiographical novel, was initially published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963. It was published in 1971 in the United States under Sylvia Plath’s (1932–1963) name. In the foreword to the 1988 edition of the book, editor Frances McCullough, regarding its reception, noted: “[It] sailed right onto the bestseller list and despite some complaining reviews, it quickly established itself as a female rite-of-passage novel” (Plath, 1988: xii). The novel, known for its confessional, deeply personal style of writing, presents the internal struggles and the external societal pressures that Esther Greenwood—the perceptive, darkly humorous protagonist—confronts in 1950s Boston. The first half of the novel chronicles Esther’s internship with the Ladies’ Day magazine in Manhattan; the second half follows her journey home to the suburbs of Boston before returning to college. While home, Esther’s depression climaxes in her suicide attempt. The remainder of the novel is situated in two mental health facilities, where she is treated and eventually released. This popular and political novel offered a critical examination of Cold War America, focusing on issues of patriarchal dominance, normative femininity, identity, and mental illness.
Two images—the bell jar (a bell-shaped glass often used in a laboratory to contain sensitive objects) and the fig tree—reverberated throughout the novel and illuminated Esther’s confinement within patriarchy (a system where men hold the power). The bell jar metaphor signified her profound loneliness and her feelings of being trapped within a normative feminine identity. This quintessential identity, represented by Mrs. Greenwood, Mrs. Willard, and Dodo Conway, adhered to a strict guideline: women are wives and mothers. Though Esther encounters a number of her own contemporaries (Doreen, her risk-taking internship pal; Betsy, a happy and plain girl from the Midwest; and Jody, her close friend from home), they are unable to provide satisfactory alternatives. Her feelings of being trapped are extended within the fig tree image: “One fig was a husband and happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet […]” (Plath, 1988: 77). Each option comes at the exclusion of the other possibilities; it is clear which option is the cultural norm. Buddy Willard, Esther’s dwindling romantic interest, reminds her repeatedly that marriage and family will bring her happiness. Buddy, along with the other male characters (Dr. Gordon, Constantin, Marco, and Irwin), represent diverse elements of male oppression that range from the unobtrusive but decidedly sexist asides of Buddy to the violent misogyny of Marco. The machinations of patriarchy are transparent throughout the novel, exposing the falsehood of the 1950s housewife ideal and the suffering of those unable to conform to that model.
The critical perspective created through the novel’s treatment of patriarchy extends to its examination of mental illness, which Plath tackles with sensitivity and honesty. Many theories exist regarding Esther’s illness (depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder), but the novel makes it clear that Esther’s increasing inability to reconcile society’s pressures with her own desires prompts her to swallow a handful of pills. Once found, she is whisked off to a mental health facility. Plath critically analyzes the state of mental health services: the conditions of the facilities, the role of the doctors, and the questionable treatment methods. Although Esther appears to benefit from these treatments, the novel ends on an ambivalent note. Leaving the facility and wanting to feel hopeful, she observes, “Instead, all I could see were question marks” (Plath, 1988: 243). This ambivalence, combined with the critique of patriarchy and the illumination of the dismal state of America’s mental health services system, renders The Bell Jar a powerful and provocative coming-of-age novel.
Sarah E. Fryett
FURTHER READING
Perloff, Marjorie G. 1972. “ ‘A Ritual for Being Born Twice’: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.” Contemporary Literature, 13: 507–22.
Plath, Sylvia. 1971. The Bell Jar. New York: First Perennial Classics.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. 1992. The Bell Jar, A Novel of the Fifties. New York: Twayne.
Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. 1988. Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge.
I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS BY MAYA ANGELOU (1969)
Maya Angelou’s (1928–2014) 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, detailed her transition from childhood to adulthood in the 1930s American South. The narrative begins when three-year-old Maya is sent to live with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, and ends when she gives birth to a son at age 16. Caged Bird derives its title from the third stanza of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy”:
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!” (1993: 334).
The poem and title suggested that, even when one feels trapped, through singing—or speaking or writing—one’s trauma, one can prevail over it. Caged Bird was nominated for a National Book Award and appeared on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Best Books Written in English. Despite its successes, however, the autobiography has also been banned in many cities in the United States because of its explicit portrayal of racism, sexism, and sexual assault.
Angelou portrayed Stamps, Arkansas, as a racist and sexist town. Young Maya grows up believing that, as an African American girl, she will never achieve the beauty and status of white women. This internalized oppression is reinforced by a white dentist who refuses to extract her rotten tooth, claiming he would rather place his hand in a dog’s mouth, and by her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, who rapes Maya when she is eight years old. After Maya lies during Freeman’s trial, claiming (falsely) that there were no other sexual abusive incidents before her rape, Freeman is murdered, and Maya—believing her words can kill—resolves not to speak again. The narrator’s silence denotes traumatic construction, what psychiatrist Judith Herman calls the “numbing response of surrender” associated with post-traumatic stress (Herman, 1992: 23). Maya’s refusal to speak, however, also underscores the power of language: words can both slay and resurrect, particularly when one speaks or writes through trauma to surmount it. Indeed, Maya regains both her voice and her well-being when she begins to read literature out loud. Likewise, the adult Angelou writes through her trauma in Caged Bird. In doing so, like the bruised bird that sings while sore, Angelou underscores the capacity of language to help one prevail. Maya’s discovery of freedom in both the spoken and the written word also parallels the theme of literacy as liberty in the African American autobiographical tradition (found in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Malcolm X).
Acclaimed poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou. Angelou penned as many as seven biographies with her first one, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, bringing her international attention and accolades. (National Archives)
Although Caged Bird detailed the pain Maya suffered as a black girl growing up in the racist and sexist South, Angelou’s autobiography ultimately celebrated the beauty and power of black women in general and the centrality of African Americans to the American South. Although Maya initially struggles to locate her own self-worth, she also has noteworthy African American role models to guide her way: her grandmother, “Momma;” her mother, Vivian; and her mentor, Bertha Flowers, who prompts Maya to read out loud in order to heal. These formidable women have different struggles of their own, but each maintains her dignity and agency in a hostile world. Perhaps informed by their example, by the end of Caged Bird, Maya herself has become a paradigm of black and female strength: while still a teenager, she has overcome prejudice, rape, silence, and childbirth to become the first African American streetcar conductor in San Francisco.
Eden Elizabeth Wales Freedman
FURTHER READING
Braxton, Joanne. 1999. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Casebook. New York: Oxford.
Dunbar, Paul. 1993. “Sympathy.” The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Edited by Joanne Braxton. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.
Hagen, Lyman. 1996. Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou. Lanham, MD: UP of America.
Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.
Lupton, Mary Jane. 1998. Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
THE BLUEST EYE BY TONI MORRISON (1970)
Toni Morrison’s (1931–) first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), addressed the imposition of white American beauty ideals on the development of young African American women’s identity. Morrison explored women’s issues through a close examination of the coming of age and psychological destruction of Pecola Breedlove, an African American girl in Lorain, Ohio, in the early 1940s. Through the narration of a now-adult childhood friend of Pecola, the narration of an omniscient narrator, and the use of a children’s primer from that period, Morrison described Pecola’s desire for and obsession with typical American standards of beauty as portrayed in movies, books, advertisements, and merchandise. Pecola believes that if she has the bluest eyes, she will be beautiful and loved by her parents and the rest of her community, which will in turn ultimately result in a better life.
In a nonchronological, fragmented narrative, The Bluest Eye recounts the memories and stories surrounding Pecola Breedlove during one year in the Midwest post-Depression era. The primary narrator, Claudia MacTeer, recounts the events of the year as related to the main character. In the opening pages of the novel, Claudia reveals that Pecola becomes pregnant with her father’s child; that the child and Pecola’s father, Cholly Breedlove, die; and innocence and faith are lost. Claudia also talks of her own transformation from a child who despises the white idealization of beauty embodied in Shirley Temple and white dolls to a girl with “fraudulent love” of the beauty myth (Morrison, 1994: 23). Claudia tells of this change in herself before ever mentioning Pecola’s prayer for blue eyes, thus showing that Pecola’s obsession is not an anomaly but the norm of girls at the time. Hated for her dark skin and eyes, Pecola pines for blue eyes: “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if … those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.… If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too.… Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes” (46). As the events of the novel unfold, the narrator relates that Pecola’s obsession becomes her insanity. In the final chapter, Pecola’s voice illustrates her psychological break as she speaks of the bluest eyes she now possesses, the most beautiful and bluest of any eyes in the world (203). The fragmented voice of Pecola at the end of the novel depicts the broken, fragmented identity of the young American girl who reaps the fruits of a society poisoned by the beauty myth to which all women are held.
This novel shed light on the painful reality of how the white beauty standard affected an African American community, especially its girls and women. Morrison portrayed the internalized racism of this community through characters that devalued themselves in favor of lighter skin and eyes, and women’s growing self-hatred via a continuous cultural consumption of white beauty.
The Bluest Eye received modest reviews when first published, then faded into relative obscurity for a number of years. However, as Toni Morrison gained increasing literary recognition, her first novel also garnered praise from literary scholars and has become a standard in many high school and college classes. In the past decade, The Bluest Eye received backlash as well. It has been placed on the top 10 list of most highly contested/banned books in the United States for its graphic depictions of sex, incest, rape, and pedophilia.
Rachel R. Martin
FURTHER READING
McKay, Nellie Y., ed. 1988. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.
Miner, Madonne M. 1985. “Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, 176–91. Edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1994. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume Printing.
Peach, Linden, ed. 1998. Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays (New Casebooks). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE BY RITA MAE BROWN (1973)
Rita Mae Brown (1944–) is an American novelist and political activist best known for the publication of Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), one of the most significant contemporary American novels to include lesbian characters and themes. Known for her political convictions and her outspokenness, Brown’s contributions to lesbian writing have bolstered the visibility and representation of queer characters in American literature and popular culture.
Since her youth, Brown has been involved with the feminist movement and with LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) activism. Her activist roots trace back to her time spent at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Due to her participation in the Civil Rights Movement and her identification with lesbian social circles, one of the university’s deans threatened to revoke her scholarship if she did not undergo psychological counseling and “straighten up and fly right” (Brown, 1997: 184). After Brown was expelled from the University of Florida in 1964, she moved to New York City, where she attended New York University (NYU) and the New York School of Visual Arts. Brown helped establish a women’s center on the Lower East Side of New York and the Student Homophile League at NYU and Brown University. She also addressed homophobic, racist, and sexist attitudes present in activist groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW). During the 1970s, Brown moved to Washington, D.C., where she lectured at Federal City College and the Institute for Policy Studies, and published essays on political philosophy and feminism.
Brown blossomed as a writer during her time in Washington, D.C., where she published various critical essays and poetry collections. During the same year in which she published a collection of erotic poetry titled Songs to a Handsome Woman (1973), Brown also published her celebrated novel Rubyfruit Jungle—her first work of fiction, which was partially inspired by her childhood and early adulthood. Critics approach this novel as one of the earliest American works to explicitly and unapologetically deal with lesbian and queer themes. Brown’s novel is often categorized as an archetypal lesbian bildungsroman (novel of development). Rubyfruit Jungle depicted Molly Bolt’s struggles to deal with the prejudice present in her family and her surrounding social institutions. The novel focused on the discrimination that Molly faced while attempting to complete an undergraduate degree at the University of Florida and a degree in filmmaking in New York. Although Rubyfruit Jungle has remained widely popular throughout the years, critical and scholarly work on the novel has varied: the novel “has been examined both as a lesbian feminist manifesto and as not being feminist or lesbian enough” (Harde, 2002: 43).
Although Brown has written a number of other novels, none of her later works have been as culturally or historically significant as Rubyfruit Jungle. Readers, scholars, and institutions still celebrate Brown’s legacy and her classic lesbian novel today. In 2015, Brown received two accolades that recognized her novel’s influence and impact: the Lee Lynch Classic Award for groundbreaking LGBTQ literary works, and the Lambda Literary Pioneer Award for authors who have significantly altered the landscape of LGBTQ writing and publishing. Rubyfruit Jungle continues to be in print four decades after its initial publication.
Angel Daniel Matos
AOL. 2015 “Makers Profile: Rita Mae Brown, Author & Activist.” Makers video series. http://www.makers.com/rita-mae-brown.
Brown, Rita Mae. 1997. Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser. New York: Bantam Books.
Harde, Roxanne. 2002. “Rita Mae Brown (1944–).” In Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers, 40–45. Edited by Laurie Champion and Rhonda Austin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Ward, Carol M. 1993. Rita Mae Brown. New York: Twayne Publishers.
THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE: POEMS 1974–1977 BY ADRIENNE RICH (1978)
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (1978) appeared early in Adrienne Rich’s (1929–2012) long career and solidified her position as a leader who articulated the central ideas of the second-wave U.S. feminist movement. These poems, about and for women, envisioned an alternative to a patriarchal system in which men control the avenues of power and the definitions of female existence. They established the primary concerns of Rich’s life’s work to promote (1) solidarity among women and the power that emerges from their collaboration; (2) the legitimacy of lesbian existence within a homophobic world; (3) a reconceptualization of motherhood as institution; (4) the mind’s relation to the body; and (5) the destructive nature of a dominant culture that renders its marginalized members invisible and silent. Rich refused any division between the artistic and political aspects of her poetry as she used both to explore social relations in a world hostile to female identity and creativity.
In the poem “Origins and History of Consciousness,” Rich equated “[t]he drive to connect” with “[t]he dream of a common language.” Rich’s notion of a common language stressed a desire for the direct communication of care and concern within a community of speakers, and the power that ensues from this achievement. At this point in Rich’s evolving process—separatist, radical feminist—she reserved dialogue for the shared experience of women. Although they may remain only dreams, such creative acts can bring forth new realities in the face of a damaging, male-dominated culture where women are not full participants.
The critics’ varied response to The Dream of a Common Language sparked debates that increased Rich’s popularity and notoriety in the public sphere. Many celebrated her attention to women’s history, her rhetorical talent, and her outspoken approach to taboo topics. Others warned against her generalized category of womanhood and condemned what they saw as the continuation of an obsessively antimale focus on patriarchal power. Sensing this backlash, Rich shifted her lens from the world of men to that of women in both Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) and Dream of a Common Language. Nevertheless, several critics rejected her incorporation of poetry and politics: some declared her work overtly propagandistic, didactic, and dogmatic.
At the time of her death, Rich enjoyed an international following. Rich, who was white, won the 1974 National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck. In a characteristic move, she refused the award as an individual but accepted it with fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, who are black, “in the name of all women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world.” Rich leaves her mark on today’s popular culture as an innovative, antiracist feminist who maintained her commitment to dialogue as an instrument for change in the world.
Sarah Wyman
FURTHER READING
Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, and Albert Gelpi, eds. 1993. Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews and Criticism. New York: Norton.
Keyes, Claire. 1986. The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Langdell, Cheri Colby. 2004. Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Rich, Adrienne. 1974. “Statement to Be Read by Adrienne Rich at National Book Award Ceremony.” http://www.nationalbook.org/graphics/2011_nba_poetry/1974/rich_accept_speech_74.pdf.
Rich, Adrienne. 1979. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision 1971.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. New York: Norton.
Werner, Craig. 1988. Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics. Chicago: American Library Association.
FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF BY NTOZAKE SHANGE (1975)
Ntozake Shange’s (1948–) choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf was published in 1975, which she stated, “began in the middle of itself” (Shange, 1997). Writers often speak of that moment when their own lives or those of communities with which they identify are going through significant political and cultural shifts, and for Shange this was a time of awakening of the black feminist voice. In a remarkably short time from its creation, it became only the second play by a black woman to reach Broadway (the first being Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in 1959). The “rainbow” in the play consists of the following: “A Lady in Red,” “A Lady in Blue,” “A Lady in Purple,” “A Lady in Yellow,” “A Lady in Brown,” “A Lady in Green,” and “A Lady in Orange.” Each of the poems represents a woman in a different urban center in the United States, which is learned early on in the play: the lady in brown represents Chicago; the lady in yellow, Detroit; the lady in purple, Houston; the lady in red, Baltimore; the lady in green, San Francisco; the lady in blue, Manhattan; and the lady in orange, St. Louis. The location of each story is secondary to the fact that they are expressing the very real struggles of black women from a collective standpoint that transcends both space and time.
Originally written in 1974 as separate poems, Shange premiered her work in 1976 as a choreopoem production at the Bacchanal in Berkeley, California. It was groundbreaking because as Shange wrote these separate poems toward the development of a collective body, she was also considering the role of movement—specifically how dancers were vital to her artistic expression of the black women’s voice. The timing of her efforts was key, as they occurred at the same time as the Black Power movement and the second-wave feminist movement in the 1970s. In 1974, a black feminist and lesbian group came to the forefront—the Combahee River Collective—and released a statement that drew attention to their doubly oppressed status because of the intersection of racism and heterosexism that had previously gone unspoken. The Combahee River Collective served as a critical opening for the reception of Shange’s “For Colored Girls” work. “The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black Women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face” (Women’s Studies Quarterly, 2014).
Noting the cultural context and time period of her work, Shange stated:
There was a sense of optimism in the feminist community throughout the country. We felt many things were going to change. We were going to have shelters, we were going to stop battery, we were going to inhibit and suppress rapists, we were going to change attitudes about child molestation, we were going to have free and legal abortions, we were going to be able to trust men we invited into our house! Our dreams were going to be respected and not negated every time we turn around. (Blount, 1995)
The fact that “For Colored Girls …” was made into an acclaimed 2010 film by Tyler Perry demonstrates the ongoing relevance of the perspective presented.
When one considers the “why” of using a rainbow with regard to the emotional state of “colored girls” in the title of this play, recall that a rainbow is seen when there is both sun and rain appearing. In addition, the colors of the rainbow, though seen separately, all must blend together and appear in the same formation for completion. Finally, the rainbow image is symbolically associated with the possibility of fortune—for example, the “pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.” Therefore, in the title much is stated about the intent of Shange in that she is writing about a collective state of being through individual sufferings of women of color, where hope lies in communal as well as individual understanding and the determination to overcome oppressive conditions—even ones that intimately involve loved ones.
Terri Jett
Bilowit, Ira J. 1995. “20 Years Later, Shange’s ‘Colored Girls’ Take a New Look at Life.” Back Stage, 36(26): 15.
Colbert, Soyica Diggs. 2014. “Black Feminist Collectivity in Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” The Scholar & Feminist online, 12.3–13.1 (Summer/Fall). http://sfonline.barnard.edu/worlds-of-ntozake-shange/black-feminist-collectivity-in-ntozake-shanges-for-colored-girls-who-have-considered-suicide-when-the-rainbow-is-enuf.
The Combahee River Collective. 2014. “A Black Feminist Statement.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 42(3/4): 271–80.
THE COLOR PURPLE BY ALICE WALKER (1982)
The Color Purple (1982) is considered the seminal novel written by author, poet, and essayist Alice Walker (1944–). Walker’s coming-of-age novel about Southern life at the beginning of the 20th century is significant because the lives of African American women were placed at the center of analysis. The Color Purple provided an unprecedented platform for African American women writers and scholars to discuss the double oppression experienced by African American women who not only face racism in society but also abuse and subjugation at the hands of African American men. The Color Purple is an enduring story because it celebrates black women’s resilience and the healing power of the bonds between women.
The protagonist in The Color Purple is Celie, a young African American girl who is being sexually abused by the man she believes to be her father (but later learns is her stepfather). Alice Walker uses an epistolary form (a novel written as a series of letters) to give the reader a sense of the rich inner life of a silenced and abused girl. Celie addresses her letters to God in hopes that God can be a witness to her suffering. Two children, born of incest, are given away. Celie endures many hardships as she is married off to a violent man who expects her to raise his unruly children and who also drives her sister Nettie out of her life. As time passes, however, Celie finds strong kinship relationships with the women connected to her husband, Albert (most often referenced as Mr._____ in the novel)—including his sisters; his daughter-in-law, Sofia; and his lover, a woman named Shug Avery. The emotional and physical intimacy Celie shares with Shug helps her heal from her past sexual abuse. Further, Shug’s audacious views on God help Celie grow in her own spirituality and gain a sense of self-sufficiency. With Shug’s help, Celie also discovers that her sister, Nettie, has been writing her letters since their separation that have been kept hidden by Albert. Through letters, Celie learns that Nettie has traveled with a couple doing missionary work, and has been living in Africa with Celie’s two children. By the end of the novel, Celie has grown into a self-actualized, whole woman who has forgiven those who have caused her harm, and she runs a successful small business. Finally, she is reunited with Nettie and her two children.
The Color Purple received both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1983, and was later made into both a film (1985) and a musical (2005). Walker’s story of the resilience of black womanhood continues to speak to readers of new generations. By addressing incest, domestic violence, and patriarchy in the African American community, Alice Walker’s novel gave a voice to many women who had been silenced in their suffering. Further, Walker’s novels and essays aided the next generation of artists, scholars, theologians, and critics to articulate an African American woman’s feminism. Both the book and the movie version of The Color Purple experienced significant backlash within the African American community. Critics of the novel felt uncomfortable with the themes of lesbianism and black female sexual agency. Others believed that Walker’s portrayal of African American men was too negative and that the novel supported stereotypes of black men as violent.
Gabrie’l J. Atchison
See also: The Color Purple (film).
FURTHER READING
Fifer, Elizabeth. 1985. “The Dialect and Letters of The Color Purple.” In Contemporary American Women Writer: Narrative Strategies, 155–71. Edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.
hooks, bell. 1990. “Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, 454–70. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian.
LaGrone, Kheven, and Michael Meyer, eds. 2009. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
White, Evelyn. 2004. Alice Walker: A Life. New York: W.W. Norton.
ZAMI: A NEW SPELLING OF MY NAME BY AUDRE LORDE (1982)
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) is renowned poet, critic, and writer Audre Lorde’s (1934–1992) feminist telling of her story not as autobiography, but as a form she called “biomythography.” For Lorde, biomythography functioned as both biography and history of myth; it was a way of expanding what we already see as having constructed each individual’s identity. It did that through acknowledging multiple voices that aid in telling one’s story. In other words, no one person’s identity is formed from one set of experiences; rather, who we are is derived from our ancestors (and, in her case, her Afro-Caribbean roots), our families, and other communities in which we live. Biomythography disrupted a singular “master” narrative and made explicit the intersectionalities of race, sexuality, gender, class, and citizenship that are at the heart of Zami. Adopting this mode of storytelling enabled Lorde to work within the autobiographical tradition even while distancing herself from it. The book picked up on these ideas and pulled them together into a lesbian bildungsroman (a coming-of-age story) that was at once Lorde’s story as well as the story of her ancestors and of her adopted home of New York.
The critically acclaimed and celebrated novel opens with a chronicling of her black, working-class family’s life in New York City, particularly after the stock market crash in 1929. Her parents, West Indian immigrants, struggle to find a way to take care of their growing family. In particular, Lorde focuses on her mother, Linda, whose homesickness and feeling out of place in the United States causes her much stress and is central to the conflicts she has with her daughter. For Lorde, Linda symbolizes that home where she does not belong, both in her family and in Grenada. The result of this is a haunting loneliness that permeates the pages of the book and is palpable in all the different life experiences she chronicles. In the early chapters of the book, it is the ritual of cooking that captures for her a linking to her West Indian ancestors and which she tries to use to link to her mother. In Chapter 11, for example, she describes in painstaking details her pounding of spices for her mother’s souse. The souse serves as a reminder of a home she never knew and a mother for whom she ached. These early chapters reinforce, as Barbara DiBernard has argued, that “[f]or black women in the United States the mother-daughter relationship is complicated by racism and the history of blacks here” (Lorde, 1982: 202).
The search for belonging is a running theme throughout the rest of the book, and is most present in her relationships with various women including Gennie, her “first true friend” (87); Ginger, her first lover; Muriel, the white woman with whom Lorde considered herself married; and to Kitty/Afrekete, who ultimately helps Lorde to come to a new spelling of her name: Zami. Along the way, Lorde also moves to Mexico, explores the place of the black lesbian within the predominantly white lesbian culture in New York City during the 1950s, and eventually goes to Hunter College. Murie’s affair with a friend serves as an impetus for Lorde to find her own way, and her meeting and brief tryst with Kitty/Afrekete paves the way for her to claim all different parts of herself. At the end of the book, she claims the name Zami: “Zami. A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers” (Lorde, 1982: 255). By the end, she makes a complete full circle to her mother, whose blood, she claims, brings about the desire to “lie with other women.” The book ultimately asks us to “recognize and celebrate those before us and around us who survived and who gave us the tools for survival” and also pleads with us to “do our work to ensure the survival of others” (DiBernard, 1991: 211). It is by centralizing our lives in these ways that we can then form our communities and make our home within ourselves.
Priya Jha
FURTHER READING
DiBernard, Barbara. 1991. “Zami: A Portrait of an Artist as a Black Lesbian.” Kenyon Review, S13: 195–213.
Gillan, Jennifer. 1996. “Relocating Home and Identity in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.” In Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, 207–219. Edited by Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes. New York: Garland.
Kader, Cheryl. 1993. “ ‘The Very House of Difference’: Zami, Audre Lorde’s Lesbian-Centered Text.” Journal of homosexuality, 26(2–3): 181–94.
Keating, AnnLouise. 1992. “Making” Our Shattered Faces Whole”: The Black Goddess and Audre Lorde’s Revision of Patriarchal Myth.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 13(1): 20–33.
THE HANDMAID’S TALE BY MARGARET ATWOOD (1985)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), by Canadian author Margaret Atwood (1939–), was set in a dystopic, near-future North America. Frequently compared to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, Atwood’s novel also projected a totalitarian future. The Handmaid’s Tale focused on the role of women in a military theocracy called the Republic of Gilead. Although it received a mixed reception, most positive analyses consider the novel a complex, multifaceted critique of both radical feminism and religious fundamentalism. Scholarly analysis and critique of the novel have focused on themes of patriarchal domination, gender role enforcement, unstable identity, and sexuality.
The Handmaid’s Tale begins after the eventual Republic of Gilead overthrows the United States government. The protagonist, Offred, has just begun her third assignment as a Handmaid. Toxic waste has rendered much of the population infertile, and a caste system with rigid gender roles structures Gilead’s white supremacist, patriarchal society. Black people have been wholly relocated to an area outside Gilead; other “non-persons,” including most infertile women as well as infants born with physical or other abnormalities, are sent to die in the polluted “colonies.” Fertile women who violate gender rules become Handmaids, expected to produce children for the infertile Wives of Commanders, a task justified by Biblical reinterpretation. Handmaids are valued solely for their ability to procreate; infertility or insubordination dooms them to the colonies. The narrative revolves around Offred’s recollections of her previous life as she attempts to cope with her assigned role as a Handmaid, its constrictions, and its complications.
Atwood’s novel was nominated for several awards, including the Nebula Award, Booker Prize, and Prometheus Award. The Handmaid’s Tale received the Governor General’s Award in 1985 and the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. Critical reception of the novel has varied, ranging from declarations that it “has no satiric bite” and is so unrealistic that it is “powerless to scare” (McCarthy, 1986) to assertions that it is “gripping in its horrendous details” while it “predicts what future women in the United States can expect” (Grumbach, 1986). As assigned reading in some high school and college classrooms, The Handmaid’s Tale has sparked significant controversy, placing 37th in the American Library Association’s 1990–1999 list of most frequently challenged books and 88th in the 2000–2009 list; complaints about its contents included sexuality, profanity, and/or anti-Christian themes.
The narrative has been adapted into various other media forms, including film (1990), radio (BBC-4, 2000), opera (2000), audiobook (2012), ballet (2013), and stage play (2002, 2015). “Handmaid’s Tale” is used as shorthand for women’s reproductive and social subjugation. One of its most popular quotations is “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” a mock-Latin saying translated as “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
Jessica E. Birch
FURTHER READING
Atwood, Margaret. 2005. “Aliens Have Taken the Place of Angels.” The Guardian, June 16. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/jun/17/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.margaretatwood.
Grumbach, Doris. 1986. “Handmaid’s Tale Offers a Grim View of Loveless Future.” Chicago Tribune, January 26. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-01-26/entertainment/8601070476_1_offred-handmaid-margaret-atwood.
Hammer, Stephanie Barbé. 1990. “The World as It Will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Modern Language Studies, 20(2): 39–49.
McCarthy, Mary. 1986. “Book Review.” The New York Times, February 9. https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/26/specials/mccarthy-atwood.html.
Tomc, Sandra. 1993. “ ‘The Missionary Position’: Feminism and Nationalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature, 138–9: 73–87.
ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT BY JEANETTE WINTERSON (1985)
Jeanette Winterson’s (1959–) first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, told the coming-of-age story of a young woman (Jeanette), her relationship with her adopted mother, her love of and expulsion from her church, and her self-exploration and sexual realization in Northern England in the 1960s. Winterson’s work addressed women’s rights through an exploration of a woman’s power to define herself, women’s relationships, and gender within the institutions of religious and familial patriarchy abundant in contemporary culture.
Although this novel closely parallels Winterson’s life, Oranges is fiction. The fragmented narrative uses texts such as the Bible, Jane Eyre, fairy tales, and myths to create stories within the main story (metafiction), depicting the narrator’s own identity construction. Raised by her adopted mother to be a missionary, Jeanette “cannot recall a time when [she] did not know that [she] was special” (Winterson, 1985: 2). Her zealot mother and the Elim Pentecostal Church confirm Jeanette’s uniqueness through praise and establishing her as the model of Christianity, and young Jeanette wholeheartedly believes in the word of her mother, the church, and the Bible. However, Jeanette begins to question her commitment to the church and its teachings as she recognizes her sexual attraction to women.
As her lesbianism clashes with her religious community, Jeanette’s identity develops at odds with her mother’s plan for Jeanette. Her mother thinks of the world in binary terms. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator shows her mother’s binary, singular thinking through her mother’s insistence that oranges are “the only fruit” (29). In all aspects of Jeanette’s life, her mother presents Jeanette one option: one path, one truth, and one fruit. In this novel, oranges represent gender and sexuality norms, the limitations of traditional gender roles, and heteronormativity. Jeanette’s mother selects a single fruit, gender, and sexual orientation for her daughter. Distinguishing herself from her mother, Jeanette identifies many fruits, many ways to live, and many ways to love.
Award-winning author Jeanette Winterson garnered much attention with her first book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. A semi-autobiographical book, the novel follows a teenage girl who rebels against traditional norms. (AP Photo/Rick Maiman)
After Jeanette’s mother discovers her daughter’s sexual relationship with a woman in the church’s congregation for the second time, the narrator is forced to leave her church and her home. Jeanette forsakes the path laid out for her, and rather than accept her mother’s black-and-white view of the world, Jeanette explores arenas of contradiction, ambiguity, and multiple truths. After several years on her own, Jeanette returns to her mother’s home, and while they do not discuss Jeanette’s sexual orientation, her mother now recognizes another fruit, pineapple, implying that her binary, judgmental view of the world is expanding.
The mainstream press, along with feminist, left-wing presses, greeted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit with positive reviews. Winterson won the Whitbread Award for a First Novel in 1985, and in 1990 she adapted the book into a series for British television. Although Oranges has often been referred to as a “lesbian novel,” Winterson objects to this categorization, saying she “never understood why straight fiction is supposed to be for everyone, but anything with a gay character or that includes gay experience is only for queers. That said, I’m really glad the book has made a difference to so many women” (Winterson, “Interview”).
Rachel R. Martin
FURTHER READING
Beirne, Rebecca. 2008. Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Winterson, Jeanette. “Interview on Jeanette Winterson’s Official Site.” http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/book/oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit.
Winterson, Jeanette. 1985. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. New York: Grove Press.
HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS BY JULIA ALVAREZ (2010)
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is a classic in Latina literature. It has been widely adopted in high schools and university curricula across the United States as a perfect example of the internal journey of a group of Dominican teenagers trying to fit in in 1960s New York. That term, “fit,” is probably the keyword to frame Julia Alvarez’s (1950–) work. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is, in sum, a reflection on ethnic identity in the development of the Garcia sisters as full-grown women. It is, moreover, a critique of Hispanicity in the context of late 20th-century American feminism and women’s rights.
Unlike so many Latinos, Alvarez came from a very wealthy upbringing. She attended an American school in the Dominican Republic, where she learned English. When she was 10, her entire family pretended that they were traveling to the United States for summer break. But on arriving in New York City, they never returned to the Dominican Republic. It was the 1960s, but before the 1960s were really the 1960s as they have come to be engraved in our cultural imagination. It was before the Civil Rights Movements, before Martin Luther King Jr. and the Beatles and the Vietnam War, before second-wave feminism, and before Dolores Huerta and César Chávez shouted Se, se puede (“Yes, we can”). If the past, as L. P. Hartley would have it, is a foreign country, Julia Alvarez was twice an immigrant. She came from the Dominican Republic to those United States, trying so hard to fit in that she lost her accent and whatever cultural roots a 10-year-old with an American education might have preserved. And then the 1960s really came. And she had to migrate again—from trying to be white to trying to be Latina, from an America where differences were antipatriotic to an America where differences were celebrated, and from the melting pot to the mosaic.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents tells this double journey. Some people have argued that this double ambivalence toward her identity as an American and her identity as a Latina has often been neglected. The novel has too often been read as the story of a group of Latina girls trying to assimilate in the United States, but some experts think it’s much more about a group of girls trying to assimilate in the United States as white, middle-class Americans who then try to assimilate as Latina, middle-class Americans. It’s much more about the mythical utopian dream to assimilate rather than the process of assimilation itself.
As much as Alvarez critiques the social stereotypes Americans impose on Latinos, she also indulges in stereotyping Hispanic culture throughout the book: looking at the Dominican Republic with a colonizer’s gaze, adopting the same proud ignorance Americans hold against ethnic minorities and immigrants. At the end, Alvarez’s work is a fundamental work in Latina literature not so much for its presentation of the struggles of assimilation into Americanness and womanhood, but because of what it reveals: the radical impossibility of assimilation, the artificial construction of an ancestral identity, and the fears (and freedom) that the migrant experience entails.
Eduardo Gregori
FURTHER READING
Chandra, Sarika. 2008. “Re-Producing a Nationalist Literature in the Age of Globalization: Reading (Im)migration in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” American Quarterly, 60.3: 829–50.
Luis, William. 2000. “A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” Callaloo, 23(3): 839–49.
Mitchell, David T. 1999. Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
THE ROUND HOUSE BY LOUISE ERDRICH (2012)
The Round House (2012), the 14th novel by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich (1954–), was awarded the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction. The Round House is narrated by Joe Coutts, whose world is irreparably changed two weeks after his 13th birthday when his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist in North Dakota, is brutally assaulted and raped. Joe’s mother cannot identify the location of her assault (on tribal or nontribal lands) and will not identify her assailant (as an Indian or non-Indian)—information necessary to determine the jurisdiction of the crime. Erdrich called her work a suspense novel “masking a crusade” (Tharp, 2014: 25) against a loophole in conflicting tribal, state, and federal jurisdictions that leaves Native American women vulnerable. In “Rape on the Reservation,” an essay Erdrich wrote for The New York Times, she described the higher rate of rape for Native women, the lower rate of reporting, the failure of federal authorities to prosecute sexual abuse cases, and the statistic that “more than 80 percent of sex crimes on reservations are committed by non-Indian men” (Erdrich, 2013). Tribal authorities were only empowered to prosecute non-Indians for abuses committed on tribal lands in 2013, when a landmark addition was made to the renewed Violence Against Women Act.
In The Round House, Joe’s nascent interest in law is initially expressed as disappointment at his tribal judge father’s seemingly trivial rulings. However, through reading his father’s books—including Felix Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (1941)—Joe realizes that “our treaties with the government were like treaties with foreign nations” (Erdrich, 2012: 2). He surveys the 20th-century laws that preclude justice for his mother: the Major Crimes Act (1885), authorizing the U.S. federal government’s intervention in restitution and punishment on reservations; Public Law 280 and House Concurrent Resolution 108 (1953), replacing federal jurisdiction with state jurisdiction and revoking tribal recognition; and Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe (1978), a ruling that tribal courts did not have the criminal jurisdiction to prosecute non-Indians. In 1988, the setting for Joe’s narrative, both PL 280 and HCR 108, were formally abandoned. By the novel’s conclusion, Joe exchanges his contempt for admiration at his father’s lifelong, case-by-case assertion of tribal sovereignty.
Equally a suspense novel and coming-of-age story, The Round House links Joe’s development to thematic explorations of justice. Joe’s adolescent fantasy life, for instance, draws on the science fiction narratives of Star Trek and Star Wars for their metaphors of frontiers, justice, alien/Others, and revenge. In addition, Joe must reconsider his adolescent attitudes toward women. The attack on his mother at the sacred Round House (symbolic of grandmother buffalo’s corporeal sacrifice and a space of tribal justice and restitution) compels Joe to assess the violation of lineal heritage through mothers by Western colonialism.
Mary Thompson
FURTHER READING
Erdrich, Louise. 2013. “Rape on the Reservation.” The New York Times, February 27.
Goodman, Amy. 2013. “New Violence Against Women Act Includes Historic Protections for Native American and LGBT Survivors.” Democracy Now! https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/8/new_violence_against_women_act_includes.
Owens, Jasmine. 2012. “ ‘Historic’ in a Bad Way: How the Tribal Law and Order Act Continues the American Tradition of Providing Inadequate Protection to American Indian and Alaska Native Rape Victims.” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 102(2): 497–524.
Tharp, Julie. 2014. “Erdrich’s Crusade: Sexual Violence in The Round House.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 26(3): 25–40.
BAD FEMINIST BY ROXANE GAY (2014)
Bad Feminist (2014) is a collection of political and personal essays by writer, professor, and blogger Roxane Gay (1974–). The book positively portrays feminism and accessibly presents basic feminist theory. Gay sets up a “good” feminist straw man in the image of longstanding feminist stereotypes: militant, man-hating women who won’t wear pink and don’t have a sense of humor. This distorted caricature relies heavily on the presumption that good feminists strictly adhere to feminist theory. Gay calls herself a bad feminist because she often falls short when trying to live feminist theory. Despite not always performing feminism “correctly,” Gay is still a feminist. The overarching argument connecting the essays is that there are multiple feminisms: one size does not fit all. A flawed feminist is still a feminist.
Gay illustrates negotiating feminism in essays documenting her complicated relationship with popular culture. For instance, she enjoys rap music that sometimes disparages women and reads Vogue magazine despite the fashion industry’s role in creating unattainable standards for female beauty. Gay, like many feminist women and men, enjoys and consumes media despite problematic content. Yet she does not blindly consume these texts. Gay critiques representations of race and gender in the movies Django Unchained, Fifty Shades of Grey, and The Help. Popular culture segues to bigger conversations about racism, sexism, privilege, violence, rape, and trigger warnings.
Bad Feminist spent a month on The New York Times Bestseller List in 2014. This is notable because a book that so candidly discusses feminism in a positive, proactive way rarely achieves widespread popular success. Praised for its candid, accessible tone, the book is lauded by many feminist scholars, who identify with the way Gay captures the sometimes contradictory negotiation of personal and political identities. Additionally, Gay’s inclusive language creates a nonjudgmental space for readers to explore how a feminist framework might be employed in their own lives. Gay achieves this by plainly stating her standpoint as an upper-middle-class black woman. Her race, class, and gender inform her position as well as her view of the world, but these identities also affect how the world sees her.
Alternatively, some critics feel that Bad Feminist suffers from a lack of history or theoretical grounding. In an effort to avoid jargon and bogging down her cultural critique with a literature review, Gay skates over a rich past of feminist thought without acknowledging her feminist predecessors. Other critics are put off by the way Bad Feminist never offers a definition of what feminism is. Instead, the book focuses on what a bad feminist is not. This result is a loose definition of feminism despite Gay’s attempt to avoid a rigid set of rules. By railing against the feminist stereotype, Gay both challenges and perpetuates the myths about feminism she is trying to dispel.
Katie Sullivan Barak
FURTHER READING
Cooper, Brittney. 2015. “Feminism for Badasses.” Short Takes: Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. June 12. http://signsjournal.org/bad-feminist.
Kaplan, Carla. 2015. “Feminism for Those Who Don’t Like Feminists.” Short Takes: Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. June 12. http://signsjournal.org/bad-feminist.
Wessing, Emily. 2015. “Vulnerable, Human, & Flawed: Confessions of a Bad Feminist.” Feminist Collections, 36: 4–5.
Wolf, Naomi. 2015. “ ‘Bad Feminist,’ Great Rhetorician.” Short Takes: Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. June 12. http://signsjournal.org/bad-feminist.
CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC BY CLAUDIA RANKINE (2014)
Citizen: An American Lyric is a 2014 book of poetry by American writer Claudia Rankine (1963–). Rankine, the Aerol Arnold Chair in the University of Southern California English Department, has published four other volumes of poetry (including the 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, subtitled An American Lyric), as well as two plays and a variety of essays; she has also edited multiple anthologies. Citizen, described by some as a book-length poem and by others as a work that blends or blurs genre boundaries, explores identity, race, and racism in the United States. Images and vignettes spanning the range from personal to political, to public—described by some as “micro-aggressions” (commonplace, casual, and usually unintentional interactions that exclude, demean, and/or insult marginalized persons)—comprise the seven chapters of the book, which has won a wide variety of awards and general acclaim.
Nearly all of the book is written in the second person (you) present tense, a source of conflict and interest among both everyday readers and reviewers. One reviewer describes it as “a tense that implicates as it includes” (Laird, 2015), and Shockley (2016) notes that for African Americans, “the second-person speaker … tends to affirm [our] subjective experience,” but points out that “white readers … will face quite a different psychic situation.” Although many praise its accessibility in language and form, the book has also been critiqued for its binary presentation of race and racial dynamics.
Some of the text reads as intimately autobiographical, delineating the boundaries of a black American life lived in racism. Another section focuses on Serena Williams, using Hennessy Youngman’s philosophy on “commodified anger” (Rankine, 2014: 23) to frame media coverage of Williams’s blackness, tennis matches, and personality. The text also includes scripts for films about notable news events of both the recent and more distant past, including Hurricane Katrina, Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, and the Jena Six. Much of the format consists of short paragraphs, with occasional pages nearly bare of text. One is a three-line poem: “because white men can’t/police their imagination/black men are dying” (135). Opposite the poem is a memorial to black women and men killed.
The book has won multiple awards, including being named the Best Book of the Year by publications including The New Yorker, Slate, National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly. Citizen was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the Forward Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, among others, and winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry and the PEN Open Book Award. A 2015 stage adaptation premiered at The Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles.
Jessica E. Birch
FURTHER READING
Laird, Nick. 2015. “A New Way of Writing about Race.” The New York Review of Books, April 23. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/04/23/claudia-rankine-new-way-writing-about-race.
Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Gray Wolf Press.
Rankine, Claudia. 2015. “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.” The New York Times Magazine, June 22. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html?emc=eta1&_r=1.
Shockley, Evie. 2016. “Reconsidering Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. A Symposium, Part I.” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 6. https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/reconsidering-claudia-rankines-citizen-an-american-lyric-a-symposium-part-i.