The Politics and Ethics of Literary Revival: A Test Case—Shall We, Ought We, Can We Make of Constance Fenimore Woolson a Kate Chopin?

Abstract

The current proliferation of individual author societies reminds me of the proliferation of little nation-states in that part of the world that was known for a while in this century as the Soviet Union. Both proliferations are attempts to create spaces for the nurturing of particularities-and the building of small power bases. As both financial and moral support for the arts and humanities decreases, those who struggle to survive as artists and humanities scholars are creating more and more little ponds in which their particular cultural enthusiasms can be nurtured. Ethnic/racial/regional pride is honorable, and surely all languages, histories, herstories, and cultures are worth preserving; as the members of the National Women's Studies Association have proclaimed since we established it in 1977, we must recognize, cherish, and celebrate differences. In the same way that each language, herstory, history, and culture is important, each author's work is precious, and the work of each author worthy of preserving. It would therefore seem to be a wonderful idea for these reasons to establish a Society for the Study of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Just as the temporary success of Communism and/or Socialism in various parts of the world was fueled by the dream of a classless, casteless society, so, too, the dream of literary social change activists of the 1960s and 1970s was of a classless, casteless literary society. We struggled for ways to study, talk, write, and teach about literature that weren't founded on or foundering in the traditional prejudice (or affirmative action, if you will) in favor of Protestant-cultured, apparently heterosexual, middle or uppermiddle-class apparently white men. As we witness the dissolution of the Soviet Union into small nationstates, we may also be witnessing the collapse of the literary dream of gender, race, and class justice for all writers and literature. The dream of equal representation and unbiased scholarship in professional journals and meetings, the dream of a way of studying literature that isn't exclusionary and competitive, that doesn't reflect the predispositions of a racist, classist, sexist, xenophobic, ableist, homo- and lesbophobic society, may have been unachievable. The resurgence of anti-Semitism in the re-emerging Eastern European nations has its parallels in the re-emergence of sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism in American literary studies. What has happened to the dreams of those we used to call feminist cultural workers? Are the times no longer amenable to the hopes of the 1960s and 1970s? Have the tactics of oppressors changed so that while the goals of social and literary justice advocates remain the same, past strategies are no longer appropriate? We learned how to storm the bastilles of the Modern Language Association, its regional organizations, the American Studies Association and its regionals, and the National Council of Teachers of English and almost all of the other disciplinary associations; that is, we learned how to get sessions on the conference programs, lobbied successfully for blind reviewing of articles for juried journals, and founded some of organizations. We got some of our own elected to offices of national associations and some were actually hired to run things. We seemed to have achieved at least partial success. Now we are being stalled by the convenient coincidentality of three phenomena: (1) the back to basics movement demands the re-erection of the mighty white men who used to dominate the syllabi; (2) the cultural diversity movement, as I have documented elsewhere, has resulted in the erection of the names of mighty men of other shades and eye shapes to new levels of prominence (except for Jewish and black men), and a decrease in the presence of all women and black and Jewish men; and (3) budgetary crises have resulted in the withdrawal of financial and temporal support for whole programs and departments as well as for scholarship about what are now once again being referred to as minor figures. …