American Women Writing Fiction by Mickey Pearlman

Abstract

284 Western American Literature Myth expresses “verities,” history only “manifest fictions” (88). It victimizes the past by “measuring an illusion of reality rather than feeling the pulse of a significant human event” (87). Thus the inability of historians to enter the Puritan mind or any unfamiliar territory. Not that feeling the pulse of the past is easy. It requires considerable groping, judging from Poulsen’s prose: “And yet some explanations seem insufficient to cope with, appreciate, the immense pervasiveness of certain folk, certain mythological images. It is one problem to be able to explain, prove, that animals. . .” etc. (60). This stylistic hesitancy, throat-clearing, is distracting, puzzling, given the author’s equal penchant for flat pronouncements. Those he disagrees with are wrong, even disgustingly so. And when he isnot lecturing historians for misrepresenting the past, he is lecturing the sources they use (the Donner Party survivors, for instance) for misunderstanding their own experiences. Yet all he offers are fortune cookie profundities: “facts are illusions of measurement which portray the mind of the researcher, not the condition of the thing observed” (86) ; “History is a divinity” (107) ; “Truth is the unending reflection of an image” (119); “Science is a system of measured prejudices” (120) ;“Chaos, like truth, is unbearable” (125) ; “Human life is a tissue of spaces” (135) ; “Satisfaction and greatness are antithetical” (147). One thinks of Herbert Spencer’s strain­ ing after a universal law. “Evolution,” he wrote, “is a change from an indefin­ ite, incoherent homogenity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations.” A contemporary translated: “Evolution is a change from a nohowish, untalkaboutable, all-alikeness, to a somehowish and ingeneral-talk-aboutable not all-alikeness, by continuous something-elsefications and sticktogetherations.” Poulsen’s nihilation, in turn, translates as a subjectivity devoid of other than personal significance. Of course, this is the opinion of an historian. BRIAN W. DIPPIE University of Victoria, B.C. American Women Writing Fiction. Edited by Mickey Pearlman. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989. 236 pages, $20.00/$10.00.) In her seminal essay, “The Masculine Wilderness of the American Novel,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun writes of the standard, now even classical “texts” of American literature as exclusively male—that is to say, concerning man alone, the solitaryhero, an individual pitting strength and durability against society in an adventurous and mythic journey to knowledge. Whether or not the knowl­ edge readers have come to through reading this fiction is the same as the hero’s—existential, escapist, vindicating—the fact remains that for generations of readers this literature has defined “American character” and the corollary issues (social, political, religious, psychological) that apparently concern us. Reviews 285 Mickey Pearlman points out in his introduction to American Women Writing Fiction not only the now evident alternate view of women writers to this masculine perspective, but how identity is tied for women not in “lighting out for the territory,” but in memory and family. He notes, however, that the purpose of this collection is not to argue that women write about memory, identity, family, and space and that men do not. Rather, he notes that women writers as represented by the voices in this book are aware of the change in the lives of contemporary American women, the tension that provokes, and the resulting refocusing on the themes identified above. While feminist criticism records and explicates the growing awareness of American women writers the last forty years of their role as female artists, this volume avoids both social and biological explanations for this phenome­ non. The collection includes the work of ten critics, the essays written particu­ larly for this volume and published here for the first time. Bibliographies of the works of these authors, also original, as well as substantial bibliographies of criticism about them, are included. The choice of the writers Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Alison Lurie, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Toni Cade Bambara, Gail Godwin, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Mary Lee Settle offers widely divergent considerations of regional, ethnic, generational perspectives. In this case, diversity also points to a complicated and commingling assembling of writers who more broadly reflect who we are. This volume isrecommended for critics, professors...