Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860-1940 by Peter Stoneley (review)

Abstract

234 Reviews of class distinction in Teeftallow (1926), Susan Glaspell's 1921 play The Verge,which examines biological transmutation through an analogy between horticultural grafting and eugenics, Mary Austin's ambivalence towards mixed marriages, and the case of Dorothy Canfield. Paradoxically, although the latter attacked racial discrimination, her hostility to Vermont tourism had racial undertones in that she feared the sapping of the Vermonters' blood line by an influx of the 'wrong people'. Virtually the only writer to emerge from these discussions untouched by racism is the African American writer Pauline Hopkins, who rejected calls forwhite families to have as many children as possible and who foresaw the evolution of a new mixed race in the USA. A particularly useful overview of turn-of-the-century American eugenics narra? tives by Elizabeth Yukins charts the convergence ofa number of concerns in this area. Moral condemnation was conflated with a 'scientific' belief in biological inferiority and social difference was stigmatized as a sign of degeneration. These fears impacted on gender in a number of ways. In Faulkner's Absalom, Absaloml, for instance, Darwinian language underpins the emergence of Thomas Sutpen's dynasty and mothers are excluded, an element which reflects fears of mixed-race births. Sarah Holmes gives an important reinterpretation of Erskine Caldwell's fiction,which has been too long taken to demonstrate the socialist concerns of the 1930s. She refutes this view by demonstrating that Caldwell drew directly on his father's writings on eugenics in order to dramatize genetic degeneracy in novels such as Tobacco Road. We should note two women writers who are rarelythought ofin relation to eugenics. H.D.'s novel Her is shown to mock Anglo-Saxonism but actually collude with it. Thus, taking a lead from Ezra Pound's belief in racial degeneration, H.D. describes a protagonist who 'embraces the language of eugenics as a means of modernist self-fashioning' (p. 227). Finally, Tillie Olsen's relation to the pioneer of birth control Margaret Sanger is examined. Sanger's periodical The Birth Control Review both opened up avenues for women's sexual independence and also advocated sterilization of the unfit. This contradiction was reflected to some extent in Olsen's Yonnondio. Indeed, ambivalence and contradiction could be taken as the main them of this collection. Eugenic theory is shown to be more widely influential than was thought and also to produce tensions within the value systems of writers in this period. In this respect the volume makes an important contribution to the cultural history of American writing. University of Liverpool David Seed Consumerism and American Girls*Literatur e,i 86o-ig 40. By Peter Stoneley. (Cam? bridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. x+167pp. ?40; $55. ISBNo521 -82187-8. Establishing the literary and cultural significance of the mass fiction read by adolescent girls, Peter Stoneley persuades us not to change the canon of American literature but to counter-read it with the more widely consumed but critically neglected pro? ducts of mass culture. In this way his book makes an important contribution to the broader cultural history of American literary production, offeringa distorted mirror of gender, class, and race anxieties through which we may see the 'underside' of the Jamesian heroine Daisy Miller. Using Raymond Williams's terms as a thematic are, Stoneley locates the 'residual', 'dominant', and 'emergent' formations of the era as they are expressed in the girls' fic? tion he analyses. But he does more than this: he unfolds the apparently simple morality of the texts to illustrate conflict, tensions, and paradoxes that reside in the writer,the reader, and the culture itself. The conflicts of modernity, such as the changing role of MLR, ioi.i, 2006 235 women, racial tensions, rural versus industrial processes, are neatly replicated in the fiction written for adolescent girls, he argues. Using a multitude of evidence, such as fan letters, reviews, diaries, and magazine commentary, Stoneley makes a convincing case for a biographical and historical understanding of such literary genres. Louisa May Alcott, for example, provides the 'perfect means for us to explore this complex intersection of genre, pleasure, and capitalism' (p. 21) as...