Country Girl Research Articles

Nowhere to Go, Nothing to Do: Place, Desire, and Country Girlhood

This article explores the figure of the bored country girl that appears widely in popular culture but also in girls studies and rural studies through ethnographic research in Australian country towns. While the presumption that country girls lack resources and opportunities for entertainment and leisure is in many ways empirically valid, this problem's articulation in girls' lives also offers an important perspective from which to ask what boredom and cultural needs mean, relative to each other, for both rural studies and girls studies. This article suggests that girlhood's relation to policy discourse and urbanized modernity can be productively reconsidered through the lived experience of country girls.

Towards a More Critical, Politicized Girlhood Studies

We take the title of our editorial introduction to this themed issue of Girlhood Studies from Sandrina de Finney’s lead article in which she explores “alternative conceptualizations of trauma, place, and girlhood that might enact a more critical, politicized girlhood studies.” Contributions to this issue offer what the guest editors refer to as a re-description of girls in crisis. In so doing not only do they offer challenges to definitions of crisis, they also deepen our understanding of what transformative practices might look like. From a consideration of Indigenous girlhood in Canada to a study of country girls in Australia, from work on YouTube to Holloback! and other social media platforms to girls’ digital representations of their own safety, and from changes in newspaper discourse about murdered girls to a consideration of work done with incarcerated girls, we are invited to re-think this notion of girls-in-crisis, and its significance. These contributions come out of an international invitational symposium, Girlhood and the Politics of Place, convened by the Institute of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, McGill University from 10 to 12 October 2012, held in conjunction with the first International Day of the Girl Child on 11 October. The event drew together researchers from Canada, the US and Australia, along with members of community organizations, policy-makers and, importantly, girls themselves. The symposium focused on the sparking of dialogue about the politics of place in relation to girlhood in different ways, and on how to work effectively across such disciplinary areas as Education, Health, Media Studies, Art History and Literary Studies. We thank Carrie Rentschler, Director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies for her contribution as a guest editor to the success of this issue which we think is a remarkable example of coherence across a number of different disciplinary areas.

A Country Bumpkin in Cosmopolitan Shanghai

A Country Bumpkin in Cosmopolitan Shanghai

(Re)Viewing Maggie and Tess through the Lens of Standpoint Theory

Literary critics admire George Eliot's touching portrayal of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. Many readers prefer to read Maggie's character as a reworking of Eliot's own life. In this article, I compare Maggie with another famous literary heroine, Tess Durbeyfield of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess is a "low-born" country girl whose suffering begins as soon as her family discovers that they have noble connections. Both Maggie and Tess go through hardship and humiliation due to their sense of responsibility and commitment to do the best for their families. Looking at these two characters through the lens of feminist standpoint theory, I argue that Maggie and Tess' social locations, imposed gender-roles, and families' expectations are among the primary causes of their tragedy. As members of the oppressed (gender) group, their epistemologies to understand the reality and to make sense of their social relationships contradict with those of the dominant group-masculine.

Sex differences in mathematics and reading achievement are inversely related: within- and across-nation assessment of 10 years of PISA data.

We analyzed one decade of data collected by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), including the mathematics and reading performance of nearly 1.5 million 15 year olds in 75 countries. Across nations, boys scored higher than girls in mathematics, but lower than girls in reading. The sex difference in reading was three times as large as in mathematics. There was considerable variation in the extent of the sex differences between nations. There are countries without a sex difference in mathematics performance, and in some countries girls scored higher than boys. Boys scored lower in reading in all nations in all four PISA assessments (2000, 2003, 2006, 2009). Contrary to several previous studies, we found no evidence that the sex differences were related to nations’ gender equality indicators. Further, paradoxically, sex differences in mathematics were consistently and strongly inversely correlated with sex differences in reading: Countries with a smaller sex difference in mathematics had a larger sex difference in reading and vice versa. We demonstrate that this was not merely a between-nation, but also a within-nation effect. This effect is related to relative changes in these sex differences across the performance continuum: We did not find a sex difference in mathematics among the lowest performing students, but this is where the sex difference in reading was largest. In contrast, the sex difference in mathematics was largest among the higher performing students, and this is where the sex difference in reading was smallest. The implication is that if policy makers decide that changes in these sex differences are desired, different approaches will be needed to achieve this for reading and mathematics. Interventions that focus on high-achieving girls in mathematics and on low achieving boys in reading are likely to yield the strongest educational benefits.

SUBJECTS OF DISTANCE

The rural is widely associated with traditions that modernity is presumed to disrupt or displace. But rurality is an idea produced by modernity, and endlessly engaged in and by dialogues about modernization. This paper considers the figure of the country girl as an image of distance from modernity. Insofar as she is always coming from the outside of a presumed modern identity and experience that is fixed by its urbanity, the country girl in Australian popular culture clearly has parallels in other places and other cultures. My focus here is on the difference the country girl articulates in a broad Asian-Pacific context discussed as coming ‘late’ to modernity. The country girl is always arriving at an encounter with modernity that identifies what modernity costs and what it offers. Her difference is not only a dramatic foil that throws the subject of modernity into sharp relief but offers up stories about modernity as something that must be learned.

Readerly Involvement in the First Chapter of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls

This paper is a stylistic analysis of the first chapter of The Country Girls. It focuses on the way in which the relationship between narrator and reader is gradually established. Internal focalisation and direct addresses to the reader encourage the latter to operate a projection into the narrator’s Irish rural world. Cognitive stylistics is used to deal with inferences and prototypicality, while the last part of the paper focuses on the question of evaluation, i.e. characters passing judgment on one another and influencing the reader’s perception, but also the way in which O’Brien’s work was received by critics.

Sex work in China’s Pearl River Delta: Accumulating sexual capital as a life-advancement strategy

We develop the concept of sexual capital through examining cases of female sex workers (referred to as xiaojies in Chinese) in the Pearl River Delta, a highly industrialized region of south China. We explore the properties of sexual capital and the conditions that allow them to function. Xiaojies employ sexual and body practices to develop different ‘currencies’: those of bodily beauty; sexual values, knowledge, practices and skills; performance (entertainment and gender performance); and sexual and emotional sophistication – in exchange for economic, social and cultural capital. However, even if sexual capital fails to be converted to the social and economic capital needed for achieving desired goals, these women experience a self-transformation, from rural country girls into sexy, modern and urban women. Such sexual capital is essential for xiaojies who do not have many other resources and are constantly subject to regulations concerning rural migrants and prostitution. This is not only about ‘ guanxi’ (social capital, social connections with others) and social network, which were considered essential in earlier studies, but also about self-esteem, emotional capacity, cognitive understanding of life and so on. Sexual capital involves the capacity for sexual expression and developing a new relationship with oneself, and has emotional significance, in addition to its potential for acquiring social and economic capital.

“Fasten Your Shackles”: Remembering Slavery and Laughing about It in George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum

In the first “exhibit” of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986), a series of loosely connected vignettes that address American legacies of racism and representation, the audience becomes refigured as conscripts on “Celebrity Slaveship.” Wolfe’s choice to begin the play with imagery from the slave trade suggests that the legacy of slavery connects each of the play’s otherwise disparate moments. This essay uses three exhibits from the play to investigate how Wolfe links the history of slavery to contemporary black experiences. For example, the attendant onboard Celebrity Slaveship presents the audience with a “pat” or glib history of slavery, echoing popular beliefs that slavery was a “means to an end” for both blacks and America more generally. By contrast, Wolfe’s inclusion of Snap! Queen Miss Roj illuminates ongoing distinctions between the self and debased “Other” that link the slave trade with the AIDS crisis. Additionally, in Wolfe’s “colored” country girl Normal Jean, this article interprets the playwright conflates the teen’s painful birth with a middle passage journey in order to engage with Reagan-era pathologization of black women’s bodies. Ultimately, Wolfe returns again and again to the originary moment of the African diaspora in order to reimagine it as a generative myth of contemporary black perseverance in the face of ongoing racial abjection.

Mothers and others in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls

This essay responds to critical assertions that the absence of functional maternity in Edna O'Brien's famous 1960 novel The Country Girls reflects O'Brien's frustration with the cloying myth of ‘Ireland-as-motherland’. While I agree that O'Brien centrally considers the imbrication of femininity with nationality in a culturally conservative post-independence Ireland and enumerates the devastating lived effects of this discourse on Irish women, I argue that The Country Girls offers a potentially productive step beyond lamentation or complaint: namely, a nascent transnational poetics. I contend that the novel hinges on a character heretofore neglected by the criticism – Caithleen Brady's Austrian landlady, Joanna – and suggest that O'Brien slyly positions Joanna as Caithleen's potential surrogate mother, framing a ‘foreigner’ as a source of subversive family ties. Joanna's presence, I believe, indicates an effort on O'Brien's part to negotiate a political response to both gendered oppression and literary parochialism (the much-remarked climate of censorship that marked the newly independent Ireland's intellectual culture): the notion that community and security might be transformatively relocated in strategic ‘translocal’ networks rather than within the confines of the nation-state. Joanna signifies O'Brien's look beyond Mother Ireland – a desire to open the country to both global feminisms and transnational textualities.

How Black is La Negra Angustias?

This article discusses the film La Negra Angustias (1949), directed by Matilde Landeta. Angustias was a poor mulata country girl who joined the Mexican Revolution at its beginning and became a colonel in the Zapatista army. The film was directed by a pioneer of the film industry in Mexico. It tells a fascinating story of great aesthetic quality, and is also a critical film in terms of gender, race and class. The treatment of the relationship between genders and the way of understanding the feminine are exceptional in Mexican cinematography of the first half of the twentieth century. Matilde Landeta was one of the few directors of social conscience to empower women and to show the hidden face of poverty, racism and social injustice in general.

Combination of a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) with the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for fashion design scheme evaluation

The purpose of this study is to propose a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to calculate the criteria weight for evaluating fashion design schemes. The criteria weight is used in the synthetic evaluation method to calculate the index value of each scheme for the selection of the best fashion design. There are four schemes and eight criteria to be evaluated. These four schemes are Academy Look (scheme 1), Country Girl (scheme 2), Ballerina (scheme 3), and Gypsy Girl (scheme 4). The eight criteria are Fashion Forecast, Theme Story, Best-seller Modification, New Idea, Product Position, User Value, Opponent Ability, and Brand Image. To test consistency, another method called the TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) is also proposed to calculate the index value of each scheme for the best selection of the fashion design. We find out that the TOPSIS works better than the synthetic evaluation in the selection of fashion design scheme. The TOPSIS uses the concept of the positive-ideal solution and the negative-ideal solution. This method differentiates significantly one scheme from another. This feature makes it much easier for the fashion designer in the selection of the best fashion design.

Das Dienstfraulein auf dem Bahnhof: Frauen im offentlichem Raum im Blick der Berliner Bahnhofsmission 1894-1939

In this study of the Railway Travellers’ Mission (Bahnhofsmission), a charitable service first organized in 1894 and closed down by the National Socialist government in 1936, Astrid Mignon Kirchhof investigates the relationship between conceptions of gender, space and morality. Leaders of the Protestant Domestic Mission (Innere Mission) and Protestant women’s organizations identified railway stations as sites of danger and temptation to the many young women who streamed from the countryside into the city. Protestant activists feared that these young women, whom they pictured as naïve country girls, might end up in the clutches of pimps who would lead them into a life of prostitution. In order to rescue, advise and assist ‘endangered’ women, another kind of woman—the charitable worker, marked by her respectable dress and motherly manner—occupied these threatening spaces. Though travellers’ missions presumably existed throughout Germany and in other countries, Kirchhof focuses on Berlin’s many long-distance railway stations. Her central question concerns the ways in which charitable work changed the lives both of the women who administered the help and of those who received it.

The Apprehensive and Suppressed Soul of the Fallen Woman in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D'Urbervilles

In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hardy brings to picture a helpless innocent country girl who is the victim of Victorian patriarchal society and the injustice of social law. The study makes an attempt to bring to light the injustice of social law, the hypocrisy of social prejudice and the inequality of male-dominance in the Victorian Patriarchal society and shows Hardy’s heartfelt commiseration towards Tess, the protagonist, who is the symbolic of rural women who were ruthlessly crushed in male-dominated world. This study further aims at scrutinizing the biased social norms, the unjust laws the rotten ethics and the malicious morality standards, which contribute to Tess’s innocent crush.

All's Well That Ends Well , and: The Taming of the Shrew (review)

Reviewed by: All's Well That Ends Well, and: The Taming of the Shrew Barbara Ann Lukacs All's Well That Ends Well Presented by the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey at the F.M. Kirby Theatre at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. September 15–October 10, 2010. Directed by Stephen Fried. Set by Bill Clarke. Costumes by Emily Pepper. Lighting by Tony Galaska. Sound by Karin Graybash. Stage management by Denise Cardarelli. With Ellen Adair (Helena), Clifton Duncan (Bertram), Clark Carmichael (Parolles), Tamara Tunie (Countess of Rossillion, Counselor to the King, Widow Capilet), John Ahlin (King of France, Lavatch, Peasant, Florentine Soldier), Robin Chadwick (Lafew, Peasant, Florentine Soldier), Izzie Steele (Rinalda, Nurse to the King, Courtier, Diana), and others The Taming of the Shrew Presented by the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey at the F.M. Kirby Theatre at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. June 2–June 27, 2010. Directed by Bonnie J. Monte. Costumes by Erin Murphy. Lighting by Michael Giannitti. Sound by Karin Graybash. Stage management by Josiane M. Lemieux. With Victoria Mack (Katherina), Steve Wilson (Petruchio), James Michael Reilly (Grumio), Jack Moran (Lucentio), Jon Barker (Tranio), Joe Costa (Baptista Minola), John Seidman (Gremio), Scott Whitehurst (Hortensio), Katie Fabel (Bianca), Joel Rainwater (Biondello, Curtis), Jake Berger (Walter, Pedant, Tailor), Amanda Bailey (Sugarsop, Haberdasher, Widow), Stewart Schneck (Nathaniel, Vincentio), Matt Ogonowski (Nicholas, Servant), Katie Van Rensalier (Ralph, Servant). Director Stephen Fried's production of All's Well That Ends Well was a creative and innovative interpretation of one of Shakespeare's so-called "problem" plays. Fried chose, both for cost effectiveness and, more importantly, artistic interest and vision, to use a cast of only nine actors, thereby necessitating the doubling and tripling of roles. The exceptions were the roles of Helena, Bertram, and Parolles. Through this choice, Fried defined this production as their play. They were the centers, the axes about which the rest of the world of the play rotated, and it was the orthogonal character of their intents that resulted in the dramatic tension and action that filled the stage. Though this play is classified as a comedy, it is far darker than many of Shakespeare's other comedies and this production emphasized these aspects. The stage was lit in muted tones. There was no sunshine, only the dark of night, dim sunrises, and even dimmer sunsets. The stage properties were minimal. An ornate, dark chest and two ladder-back chairs denoted the home of the late Count Rossillion, whose influence was still felt as he looked out from a framed photograph. A feeling of intimacy [End Page 77] was conveyed by the proximity of the furniture and the actors to the audience. On a grander scale, the King's palace was created by the hoisting of an elaborate crystal chandelier that was hidden behind a black cloth and screen at the rear of the stage. Through a series of lighting effects, a rear wall of panes of glass was projected onto a black scrim and suggested the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The Florentine camp was evoked through the placement of a few wooden crates. These Spartan set choices made sense both in terms of budget and quick scene changes. The costuming reflected the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The soldiers' uniforms were of WWI vintage with high woolen oversocks, black boots, riding britches, and short-cropped jackets. The men at court wore white tie and tails. The gowns worn by the Countess and Helena were Victorian, with high starched collars and stiff, heavy fabrics in muted tones. This production was, at heart, a war story and the costuming and staging choices, particularly Helena's outfit, highlighted this directorial decision. Helena, dressed in a gray, ankle-length overcoat, white shirt, brown vest, long skirt, and tall boots resembled Florence Nightingale, come to do battle with and to defeat the King's infirmities. She never lost her simple, homespun outward appearance, even after she cured the King. Despite her noble deeds and bearing, she remained throughout a country girl of lower birth. Helena's costume highlighted her classical beauty, her poise, and her dignity. She was reminiscent of a battlefield nurse and resistance...

"The Sylph of Ullswater," or the "Bluestocking Monster"

In 1825, at age of twenty two, Sara Coleridge completed essay On Disadvantages Resulting from Possession of Beauty. The subject was one with which was painfully acquainted, and while wrote it as private working-out of set of social contradictions to which was subject, essay nonetheless reads like an early intervention in development of normative standards for female Since was sixteen, Sara had been recognized as Despite being safely ensconced in Southey household in Greta Hall, had nonetheless had London debut in 1818--as work of art. The previous summer, painter William Collins had visited Keswick, and Sara had been persuaded to sit for portrait as Wordsworth's Highland Girl. The canvas was shown at Royal Academy to enthusiastic reviews. The picture's subject, matter, unaffected beauty of country girl set amidst rugged Lakeland scenery, proved winning combination and Sara suddenly became famous natural beauty. Some of epithets used to describe included Flower of Lakes, the Sylph of Ullswater, and Beauty of Buttermere. The iconography of Sara was complex; was an aesthetic object, a form of compacted light, not of and blood, as one reviewer had it (quoted in Jones 202), but fascination for Cambridge students who began to include on their list of beautiful and picturesque prospects to visit while touring Lakes was decidedly of flesh and blood variety, if not openly carnal. The painting played directly on picturesque taste with its juxtaposition of wild, obscure mountain scenery (all indistinct brooding clouds and rocky crags), and serene, ethereally beautiful girl on verge of womanhood. This public attention translated into immediate changes in summer social life at Greta Hall, as Southeys accommodated groups of visiting tourists. Dennis Low makes excellent point that assumption that Sara grew up socially isolated in Keswick doesn't bear scrutiny when these summer seasons are taken into account. He quotes late letter to daughter Edith describing frantic round of boating, pic-nic-ing, Lea-drinking, carpet-hop-dancing (Low 106). Her mother feared would grow vain. The other activity, besides this gay round, that occupied Sara as precocious sixteen year old could not have been more different. She began work on translation of Martin Dobrizhoffer's Latin trealise, Historia de Abiponibus, an account of Paraguayan horse culture. This project ted to three-volume An Account of Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, published in 1821 when was just eighteen. Critics often underplay this publication by pointing out elements of chance that led to its creation: task was intended for Derwent as means to defray College costs; she, as better classicist, offered to help; when Derwent begged off because he was too occupied with his post as tutor, asked if might continue. Sarah Fricker Coleridge described process in letter to Tom Poole, including Southey's tentative approval of scheme with proviso that: she not be disappointed if nothing was gained by it, and not work too hard (quoted in Low 107). Mrs Coleridge didn't share Southey's concern, reassuring Poole that he must not imagine that Sara's health has suffered from too intense application to this work, for I am happy to say, is at present in better health than I have ever known her (Low 107). In other words, intellectual labour was source of physical vigour, not danger to it. In his account of story'. Low disturbs critical consensus that Southey's attitude demonstrated an ingrained misogyny. He makes excellent point that Southey's advice reflected state of market for translated works, and poor financial return for translators. He also notes that Southey's concern that project might prove overtaxing was extended equally to Derwent, although this point seems less persuasive, given that concern for Derwent was based on his being consumed by his teaching duties, whereas Southey was clearly worried about Sara's delicate constitution (Low 107-8). …

‘The emotional, the weak, the wayward, the innocent, the unsophisticated and the misplaced girl’: the Travellers' Aid Society of Victoria and the country girl in the 1920s

The Travellers' Aid Society of Victoria (TASV) was established in 1916 for the protection of ‘respectable country girls’ arriving in Melbourne. Along with other middle-class organisations in the 1920s, it promoted a vision of the young rural woman as an exemplar of feminine ‘purity’, in contrast to the wayward urban girl. In the twentieth century urban environment, clear-cut distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ girls had ceased to hold true. The friendless country girl hesitating on the train platform, eyed by men and potential procurers, embodied ‘purity’ in an uncomplicated, archetypal manner. This appealing image helps to explain the TASV's success in the 1920s. It also points to the importance of representations of rurality in the gendered history of modernity.

Front Porch

Front Porch Harry L. Watson, Editor Click for larger view View full resolution "About 1917, it seems, just when H. L. Mencken was delivering 'The Sahara of the Bozart,' his famously blistering dismissal of 'Culture' in the South, somebody down home was buying Victor recordings of famed Italian opera stars Enrico Caruso and Amelita Galli-Curci." Enrico Caruso, examining a bust of himself in 1914, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress. [End Page 1] I never knew my mother's mother, a woman so distant from me that I think of her as "Miss Lucy" rather than "Grandmamma." But I do know a lot about her. She was a college graduate, when that was still a rare thing for a country girl, from one of our very early state schools for women. She agonized that her schoolteacher's job (and then her marriage) had utterly exiled her from childhood and college haunts to the North Carolina boondocks. She fiercely believed in books and late-Victorian "High Culture," and passed her creed intact to my mother. One of her legacies was a tiny phonograph collection that Mom saved when the old house had to go. About 1917, it seems, just when H. L. Mencken was delivering "The Sahara of the Bozart," his famously blistering dismissal of "Culture" in the South, somebody down home was buying Victor recordings of Enrico Caruso and Amelita Galli-Curci, the famed Italian opera stars. It couldn't have been Granddaddy, whose tastes ran to string bands, so it must have been Miss Lucy, who could only have learned about opera in college. I listened to these records when they went off to an archive, and they were still very impressive, though well-worn. But the collection held other disks as well. The one I remember was "Golden Slippers," referring to the footwear of choice in Heaven. The artists were the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, composed of students from one of the South's oldest black colleges—older, in fact, than my grandmother's alma mater—and their earnings went to the college treasury. I don't want to make too much of my grandmother's taste in records. I can't imagine that she ever heard Caruso in person, for just as Mencken said, the nearest bona fide opera house might as well have been on the moon. And at the nadir in southern race relations, a taste for spirituals, and even a modest contribution to black education, could signify a well-intentioned paternalism but no more. After all, the Jubilee Singers performed "refined" black music for well-paying white audiences, not the gut-wrenching wails of laborers and sharecroppers. All the same, the articles in this issue remind me of Miss Lucy's diverse compilation. Just when H. L. Mencken was lambasting the South's dearth of poets, oboe-players, and the like, she and a few other southern audiophiles were attuned to the arias of La Scala and the Met. But unlike Mencken, Miss Lucy and her peers also had some appreciation for the South's other cultures, especially the spiritual tradition that the Jubilee singers repackaged for their benefit. To give the devil his due, Mencken did not completely ignore the arts of black southerners. He even said, "The only visible esthetic activity in the South is in their hands," a comment he intended as a put-down of whites. On the whole, "the Sahara of the Bozart" is unambiguous: the "South" is the white South, "culture" is European "High Culture," and never the twain shall meet. My grandmother's records offer a minor rebuttal, but they carry an even more important lesson. Contrary to Mencken, the South's diversity not only has room for "High Culture," but [End Page 2] even for ladies like her, it also shelters a range of vernacular cultures that Mencken barely recognized. As a result, the meaning of "southern cultures" is far more fluid and unpredictable than he and many others have recognized. The essays in this issue develop this proposition in detail. Hal Crowther begins by tackling Mencken's legacy head-on. He reminds us of Mencken's painful power to rile regional...

Rewriting Genre in The Country Girls Trilogy

On Edna list of her Top Ten books in Women's Review, number eight is Wuthering Heights; she calls the novel an old favourite and one responsible for certain unwise attitudes of mine towards the opposite sex.1 A number of critics have noted the significance of Emily Bronte's novel, arguing for its cen trality to what Amanda Greenwood calls O'Brien's analysis of the compromised nature of female subjectivity.2 Yet, The Country Girls Trilogy owes a largely unexplored debt to the work of another Bront? sister: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.3 A central theme within the Trilogy is the refashioning of the romantic marriage plot found in the Brontes' works. First published as three separate nov els?The Country Girls (i960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Mar ried Bliss (1964)?then republished in 1986 as a trilogy with a new epilogue, the Trilogy's final incarnation critiques the options historically offered to literature's female heroines and authors. For years, critics have debated the novels' literary merit; until recently, most believed that to understand novels, the reader must understand O'Brien, thereby viewing the novels solely as works of autobiography.4 Others, including Grace Eckley, who was the first to write a monograph on O'Brien, fault the author for not being feminist enough; she

Cuba detrás del telón I: Teatro cubano: Vanguardia y resistencia estética (1959-1961) , and: Cuba detrás del telón II: El teatro cubano entre la estética y el compromiso (1962-1969) (review)

SPRING 2010 217 her double identity as saint and whore, as poor little country girl transformed into Cinderella, as champion of the masses and robber of state coffers. Unlike Kahlo, however, Evita’s performance(s) had profound political repercussions forArgentina; as Misemer notes, “what is unique about Evita is the extent of her manipulation of the public through texts in which she describes the creation of her dual roles” (103). Perhaps her most manipulative performance was in death, when her body laid state to be worshipped and mourned by a devoted audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and then afterwards, when it began its surrealistic journey from one place to another. “The Brown Madonna: Crossing the Border’s of Selena’s Martyrdom,” looks at how the Queen of Tex-Mex shares with her fellow icons a dramatic death and subsequent mythologizing of her life. While alive all four were idolized (or in the case of Evita, reviled) figures; in death, they become sacred myths of contemporary popular culture, the secular saints to whom Misemer refers in the title of this beautifully written and well-researched study, which not only looks at these “saints” but also at a body of plays that recreate them as polyvalent signifiers for equally unstable, and therefore, forever fascinating (and exploitable), signifiers; for example, Alberto Castillo’s El espíritu de la pintora, about a young man who is possessed by Frida’s spirit; Carlos Gorostiza’s El acompañamiento and José Ignacio Cabrujas’s El día que me quieras, which recuperate the Gardel icon to make indirect political commentary; the French-Argentine playwright Copis’s demonization of Eva Perón in the play of the same name; and Hugo Salcedo’s celebration of the “brown madonna,” in “Selena: la reina del Tex-Mex,” among others. While certainly nowhere near as fascinating as the people who inspired them, Misemer’s analyses of these texts show them to be worth the reading (or the viewing). Kirsten F. Nigro University of Texas at El Paso Montes Huidobro, Matías. Cuba detrás del telón I: Teatro cubano: Vanguardia y resistencia estética (1959-1961). Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2008: 397 pp. Montes Huidobro, Matías. Cuba detrás del telón II: El teatro cubano entre la estética y el compromiso (1962-1969). Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2008: 365 pp. In the two initial volumes of Cuba detrás del telón, the dramatist and literary critic Matías Montes Huidobro accumulates a tremendous amount of information about the early years of post-revolutionary Cuban drama, spanning the decade 1959-1969. For the author, this period is the richest in Cuba’s dramatic history, but also one where Cuban politics increasingly limit cultural production on the island, and Montes Huidobro was not immune to these restrictions. Volume 1 covers 19591961 , a tumultuous three-year period for the island that began with the revolution’s initial triumph and concluded with enormous changes for Cuban citizens and for the 218 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW island’s international political relationships. This period ends with the Bay of Pigs invasion, as well as with Castro’s famous speech “Las palabras a los intelectuales,” in which he ambiguously outlined what Cuban artists would be permitted to express: “Dentro de la Revolución: todo; contra la Revolución ningún derecho.” Within the year the literary supplement Lunes de revolución was closed by the state, an action which further motivated Montes Huidobro to leave that same year, in 1961. What distinguishes these volumes from other critical works with similar encyclopedic breadth is precisely Montes Huidobro’s ideological and physical break with much of his subject matter. Although the author was still in Cuba in the 1959-1961 period that Volume I covers, he is of course writing from a contemporary perspective, but with the memory of the frustration and anger that was building at that time. Even decades later, the pain from that moment of separation — a moment that stretches out and over the decades — is still palpable, and it informs the entire work. Montes Huidobro may have left Cuba in 1961, but by revisiting his and others ’ works from that...