Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists Lorraine York (bio) Deborah Heller, Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists McGill-Queen’s University Press. xii, 182. $65.00 Literary Sisterhoods takes as its subject one specific sort of sisterhood: the links between women writers and the representations of women artists contained in their work. With reference to one work apiece by Madame de Staël, George Eliot, Anna Banti, and Alice Munro and several works by Grace Paley, Deborah Heller maintains that, whereas earlier writers somehow had to manage the strangeness, even monstrosity, of their artist figures, recent writers like Munro and Paley are able to let their women artists 'naturalize' themselves more seamlessly in their fictions and in the social tapestry created in those fictions. In some ways, as a thesis, this is unsurprising; references to the woman artist as monstrous are strewn through earlier literature still – in early modern women's poetry, for instance. But the progressivism described by Heller's thesis may end up flattening out women's literary history and underestimating the other, subtler ways in which women who create art are still ostracized. In Munro's texts, for example, it is true that there is a strong thread of celebration of the ways in which storytelling is taken up by a wide range of characters, not all of whom explicitly identify as writers. And Heller seizes on an intriguing insight into the story 'Friend of My Youth' when she notes that the story is 'a site of competition between mother and daughter for narrative (and hence, moral) authority.' But this does not adequately account for the scores of Munrovian female artists who are made to feel awkward, ostracized, or unnatural because of their capacity to create art or, more generally, to regard life artistically. Part of the reason for this somewhat limiting thematic frame for this study is, I suspect, a need to connect five chapters that are quite disparate. No rationale is offered for the selection of texts and these five authors, besides the fact that they, like myriad others, explore the female artist figure. Theory does not provide an organizational rationale either: the study is straightforwardly textual and thematic, with little theoretical inquiry into women's creativity and its textual representations. There is also little sense of other, more theoretically engaged studies that have been [End Page 443] written on women artist figures, so the book seems, overall, more a collection of discrete essays than an ongoing, cumulative critical project. This impression is reinforced by the lack of a summative conclusion at the end of the book that would have offered an opportunity to tie together the various narrative threads and representations that have been explored in the preceding chapters. There are, to be sure, moments of insight in the study; in addition to the observation about competitive narration in Munro that I have already mentioned, there is Heller's discussion of how, in her depiction of the Alcharisi (Princess Halm-Eberstein) in Daniel Deronda, 'by using the Jew as other, Eliot allows herself to express an anger about woman's subordinate position in society that she expresses nowhere else.' I'm not as convinced that this anger is as softened in Maggie Tulliver as Heller believes, but the larger point about ethnicity and gender frustration is intriguing, and it could have been more thoroughly connected to the discussion of Paley's work, which conjoins a vivid social activism that Paley herself links to the legacy of American Judaism and her patent anger at continuing discrimination against female citizens in contemporary America. In summary, then, Literary Sisterhoods will be of interest to scholars working on these discrete authors and their texts, but it does not fully or consistently engage with larger issues and debates involving women, creativity, and representation. It might better have been conceived as a book of collected literary essays, though current publishing and academic exigencies tend to discourage such a format. Lorraine York Lorraine York, Department of English, McMaster University Copyright © 2007 University of Toronto Press Incorporated