Re-visioning Women and Place

Abstract

Re-visioning Women and Place Jennifer Rae Greeson (bio) Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing. By Katherine Henninger. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. xxii + 256 pages. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty. By Barbara Ladd. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State UP, 2007. ix + 175 pages. $40.00 cloth. These two books well attest to the fecundity of Patricia Yaeger’s call in Dirt and Desire (2000) for “reconstructed” readings of twentieth-century southern women writers that explode the conventional proscriptions and prescriptions with which such texts have been approached — most particularly by abolishing the segregation of these writers according to race. Both Katherine Henninger and Barbara Ladd have made this project their own, and in so doing they have pushed Yaeger’s revisionist aims forward, finding new critical restrictions and blind spots to overturn. For Henninger, the categorizations to be troubled have to do with discipline and medium: Ordering the Façade insists that we attend to the twentieth-century South as a primally visual, as well as oral and literary, culture. In reminding us of the central importance of photographic images in the making of the modern and postmodern South, Henninger also asks that we attend to the inextricable intersections of text and image in southern culture, and, further, that we think about the special ways that this cultural visuality has focused on the literal and figurative bodies of women. [End Page 160] Ladd, on the other hand, has the very categories “woman writer” and “South” in her revisionary sights. Resisting History takes as its problematic proving the centrality of the New Woman to the making-it-new of modernism: if, as Ladd argues, Enlightenment ideas from history to polity to the individual were all defined around a primary exclusion of women, a new breaking-down of the meaning and place of “woman” was essential to the modernist engagement with each of these terms. Ladd consequently interests herself in the dissolution rather than the instantiation of the category “woman,” and instead of producing a study of women writers she reads Faulkner contrapuntally with Welty and Hurston. The category “South,” while not an antagonistic term for her thesis, proves tangential to it; as she dispenses with the matter in her introduction, “[O]ne can say that . . . southerners have been constructed as ‘others’ in the national imaginary and that, for those few who were writers at least, it paid off.” So while Henninger breaks disciplinary bonds, she reinforces the category of “southern woman writer”; while Ladd undertakes a traditional literary-critical study, she finds the labels “southern” and “woman” limiting to it. Considering the two books together thus proves a mind-expanding exercise, raising questions about methodology, assumptions, and demystifications that will occur to each reader according to his or her intellectual predilections. Certainly nothing in these books is dull, and much is productive, energetic, and challenging. Ordering the Façade takes as its central site of investigation “textual photographs” (a term Henninger borrows from Judith Sensibar): scenes in contemporary fiction, autobiography, and poetry organized around the description, interpretation, investigation, and/or production of photographic images. Beginning in her introduction with two key textual-photograph scenes in modernist southern writing — the photograph that causes Janie to understand herself as “colored” in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the photograph of Aunt Amy that becomes a touchstone for Miranda’s identity formation in Katherine Anne Porter’s Old Mortality—Henninger goes on to focus on southern women writers of the most recent three decades, arguing that as photography has become increasingly denaturalized as a site of objective recording of reality, it has become a particularly fertile site for writers interested in exposing the constructedness of identities and the ideologies upholding social orders. As a corollary to the “textual photograph,” Henninger stresses the extent to which photographs themselves, rather than providing self-evidence, [End Page 161] “mean” only with the directing context of words; this symbiosis between text and photograph becomes a structuring element of her argument. Henninger opens with a useful “selected history of photography in the South...