Reading the Body in Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl

Abstract

Meridel Le Sueur describes her novel The Girl (1939/1978) as a memorial to great and heroic women of depression and a record of varied stories of women in bus stations, food lines, and warehouses (133). (1) Le Sueur's novel chronicles these lives to prevent their appearance as defeated, trashed, defenseless (133). According to Le Sueur's afterword to novel, writer should urge and nourish ... social vision and provide a historical narrative of those women keep us all alive (133). Indeed, novel closes with a birth scene celebrating work of memory: Memory is all we got, I cried, we got to remember. We got to remember everything.... We got to remember to be able to fight. Got to write down names. Make a list. Nobody can be forgotten (126). Le Sueur's text works to re-member female experience and her own position in literary history. As most people familiar with Le Sueur's biography know, although she was widely published in 1920s and 1930s, her popularity dwindled until Feminist Press and John Crawford of West End Press rediscovered her work in late 1970s and early 1980s. (2) Early on, she frequently published work in journals such as Kenyon Review and Prairie Schooner and in magazines like Mademoiselle and was able to support herself financially (Pratt 255). With onset of McCarthy years--in Le Sueur's words the dark of time--her mainstream popularity declined until she was published almost exclusively in Communist Party journals and read only within Party circles (qtd. in Pratt 255). (3) But even during her peak period, her work was not always met with approval. One editor at Scribner's suggested Le Sueur write more like Hemingway (Coiner 108), and Communist Party itself instructed Le Sueur to move away from lyricism as a mode of expression and write literature that would organize (Pratt 257). The literary left established genres, such as Malcolm Cowley's classic plot, that codified masculine metaphors for working-class struggle (Rabinowitz, Labor 61); these genres kept women writers' modes of representation from being recognized as worthy forms of expression. (4) The terms proletarian and manly often were used interchangeably, and so a female writer like Le Sueur was criticized by dominant bourgeois culture and Communist leadership. Le Sueur had rural roots (she was born in Iowa and lived most of her life in Minnesota) and little formal education; she found herself marginalized on all fronts. Set in St. Paul during Great Depression, The Girl is a bildungsroman about a working-class girl. The main plot of novel centers on her sexual awakening, subsequent loss of her lover, and birth of her child. The Girl explores larger landscape of union work and scabbing, unemployment, and social welfare for both men and women. The novel focuses on working-class struggles against larger economic forces and women's struggles against control of men; therefore, novel contributes substantially to discussions of gender in both modernist and fiction. Le Sueur's novel charts female experience through body in knowledge of sexuality, abortion, physical abuse, and birth. As a writer, Le Sueur projects a cogent social vision, and through this novel, she makes particular demands on her readers, who must serve as capable interpreters of historical record. In interpreting this work, both writer and readers participate in constituting cultural currency of female experience and in assigning value to varied subjectivities women assume in narrative. The Girl situates body as a register for physical, social, and political struggles. The novel asks its characters and readers to read body as a text and chart its various discourses. In wake of work of Michel Foucault, assumption that one can attain a proper reading is problematic; indeed, as Foucault argues, every reading is a misreading in some ways. …