A Re-Awakening: Anne Tyler's Postfeminist Edna Pontellier in Ladder of Years

Abstract

Following the 1995 publication of Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, familiar comments about the author's much-debated stance on feminist issues once again appeared in book reviews. For example, in the Yale Review, Lome Moore described the Baltimore of Tyler's novel as “a land and time unto itself, untouched by such things as feminism […] or politics of any kind” (141). Brooke Allen, in the New Criterion, lamented that Tyler's characters “seem eerily untouched by any of the revolutions, be they sexual or feminist, of the last forty years.” Additionally, Allen complained, “Not only do none of Tyler's wives see themselves as feminists, they apparently do not even acknowledge that such a creature exists” (33). Similar observations have greeted the debuts of many of Tyler's novels since the 1970s, when her negative reviews of a number of feminist works and her published remarks about novels by “liberated” women—“I hate 'em all”—unsurprisingly earned her the reputation of being unsupportive of feminist concerns (Ridley 23).1