Templates for Authorship: American Women's Literary Autobiography of the 1930s by Windy Counsell Petrie

Abstract

Reviewed by: Templates for Authorship: American Women's Literary Autobiography of the 1930s by Windy Counsell Petrie Ian Afflerbach Templates for Authorship: American Women's Literary Autobiography of the 1930s. By Windy Counsell Petrie. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. x + 240 pp. $90 cloth/$28.95 paper/$22.99 e-book. "Exhibitionism," writes Margaret Anderson in My Thirty Years' War, "merely means choosing one phase of your personality for conscious and intelligent exploitation" (qtd. in. Petrie 88). Given Anderson's cultivated notoriety, such talk of exhibitionism in her memoir might sound dramatic or even licentious. Yet, in Templates for Authorship, Windy Counsell Petrie shows how an entire generation of women writers likewise worked to develop narrative strategies for framing their literary lives, foregrounding some "phases" of their personality and strategically excising others. Her introduction provides an incisive view of the market changes that made this shared project possible. "Before the 1930s," explains Petrie, "life-writing by female writers in America . . . mostly took the form of diaries, travel journals, and autobiographical fiction" (10). During the Depression, however, American publishers experienced a newfound demand for "nonfiction, nostalgia, and self-help books and success stories" (3), market conditions that enabled the 1930s to become "the most prolific decade women's autobiography had yet seen" (1). Still, women writers who aimed to capitalize on this demand had "barely any models for women's literary autobiography," and so, Petrie argues, they had to employ templates already operative in public discourse for labeling women writers (12). She identifies four key templates that women writers of the decade variously adopted, blended, or challenged: "(1) the artist or 'serious' writer, (2) the activist, (3) the professional, and (4) the celebrity" (28). "Borrowing from" these templates, Petrie argues, "allowed these writers simultaneously to satisfy and to subvert the expectations of their multiple critical and commercial audiences" (39). In the process, they became the "first generation of American women writers to publicly claim the powerful terms of 'artist,' 'genius,' and 'professional' for themselves" (248). Each chapter in Petrie's study "reconstructs the composition and reception" of two autobiographies through a rich archive, including "reviews, drafts, letters, and biographical research" (39). Rather than clinging to an arbitrary chronology, her "chapters progress from analyzing texts that conform most closely to a preexisting template" to those that play with or violate expected conventions (41). Petrie's book succeeds admirably in maintaining its thematic focus with rich internal motifs while surveying a diverse cohort of writers: Margaret Anderson, Mary Austin, Gertrude Atherton, Grace King, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Deland, Harriet Monroe, Edna Ferber, Gertrude Stein, and Carolyn Wells. These authors were established figures [End Page 130] when they wrote their autobiographies and, Petrie notes, although Ferber and Stein sometimes faced anti-Semitism, "could all 'pass' for white" (8). Yet they variously wrote high-modernist literature, middlebrow fiction, or pulp fare; they led differing domestic lives and held varying social opinions; and they came from every class and corner of the United States (7). Petrie shows how all these authors carefully sculpted their lived experience into legible character arcs, assuming various positions within the "intensifying gendered binaries of modernism," which imagined a "masculine" artistic life of principle counterpoised to a "feminized" mass culture (19). As an activist who challenged Victorian conceptions of marriage, motherhood, and mental health, for instance, Gilman "seems determined to refute any desire for fame, success, or wealth" in her autobiography (141), and so she "tiptoes around . . . questions of money and professionalism" (145). Ferber, by contrast, proudly describes her working-class origins, uses "baking analogies" as she "demystifies her own 'writing process,'" and describes how she and her husband spent "their earnings on domestic comforts" (212, 197, 209). The contrasts between these women and their autobiographies are instructive for readers looking to understand the gendering of the American literary field of the 1930s and its increasingly divergent aesthetic and commercial values. Yet the richest, most complex moments in Templates for Authorship appear in scenes of equivocation and compromise by individual authors, whose "innovative narrative rhetoric" and self-fashioning also served to "hide or elide certain intimate details about their lives" (31). Stein and Wells, for instance, employ "humor and...