A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women's Lives (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women's Lives Claudia Mills (bio) A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women's Lives. Edited by Betsy Hearne and Roberta Seelinger Trites. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2009. If you are reading this book review in the pages of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, you are someone who is a lover of books and who has shaped your personal and professional life around them. And probably there is at least one crucially important book that has helped to shape you. That is to say, you have a "narrative compass" of your own: some story that has "shaped [your] research, motivated [you], and helped [you] learn wisdom, guided [you] when you have known sorrow and when [you] have known joy" (ix). In this endlessly enthralling collection, Betsy Hearne and Roberta Seelinger Trites have gathered nineteen essays by women scholars from a range of disciplines: children's literature, of course, but also health policy and management, history of religion, anthropology, Chinese language and literature, American studies, agricultural history and rural studies, linguistics. The authors are at different stages in their careers: graduate student, assistant professor, occupant of a named chair at Harvard, professor emerita. They are African American, Asian American, Latina American, Native American, white; they are straight and gay. What they have in common is what all of us have in common: stories have changed their lives. Indeed, some particular story has changed each individual woman's life. Every single essay here is a gem of remarkably candid self-disclosure and a moving tribute to the enduring power of stories, both published and unpublished, to provide the very grounding of our being. It's hard to pick favorites. This is a uniformly stellar volume. Here are a few small glimpses of some of the most amazingly wonderful of these treasures. Little Women has been the narrative compass for Roberta Seelinger Trites, given to her by her grandfather when she was recovering from pneumonia at age seven, her sisters "as frightened as Meg and Jo when Beth lies dying" (9). But Trites didn't grow up to self-identify as Beth, but as both Jo and Amy: Amy the brat, her reality; Jo the writer, her aspiration. As a graduate student, Trites transferred from one university to another when her professor did not appreciate the paper she wrote on how the Transcendentalists influenced Louisa May Alcott; she went on build her scholarly career around her love of Alcott, and "Jo's honesty and Amy's tact" served her well in her challenging years as a university administrator. Trites writes [End Page 99] that the lesson that has best served her in her academic career is "the lesson Jo learns early in Little Women," when Jo's rage against Amy after she destroys Jo's cherished manuscript leads to Amy's nearly drowning: "a time comes when forgiveness helps more than righteousness" (17). In the end, both Trites's Amy side (respect for convention) and Jo side (nonconformity) have come into balance, leading her to the crucial realization that "paradoxically, self-denial can sometimes be self-fulfilling, especially if it leads to self-respect" (18). Karen Coats's essay, "Wet Work and Dry Work: Notes from a Lacanian Mother," is by turns heart-piercing and hilarious, as she shares the way in which Lacanian theory proved the improbable resource for mothering her older daughter, Emily, born with Down syndrome. As Emily reverts in toilet training during Coats's pregnancy with her second daughter, Coats's "dry" work as a Lacanian scholar helped her understand her "wet" (and messy and smelly!) work as a mother: Lacan helped her to see Emily's night poops as "a Lacanian drama of resistance and negotiation … Like the little Lacanian neurotic that she is, [Emily] was asking if I would love her beyond the pleasure principle" (76). Coats tells her students, "You don't date Lacan, you marry him" (79). And she tells us, "it feels like I not only married him but together we've also given birth to multiple lives—two children, a book, and me in both scholarly and maternal guises" (79). Maria...