Judith Fetterley Research Articles

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Re-reading Noir

ABSTRACT This article considers Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader in relation to the author's current research on Cold-War American women's crime fiction. The dominant critical framework about this fiction from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is noir, a masculinist genre about male loners / outsiders that often embraces a cynical or nihilistic worldview. Many of these books objectify women and feature a spider woman or femme fatale, who is punished for her pursuit of self-interest and use of her sexuality to attain power. The lesser-known female crime writers of the period were–in many ways–resisting readers of this tradition. Their re-readings and rewritings often privileged community and connection over isolation and offered more complicated female characters. The author uses the case of Charlotte Armstrong's A Dram of Poison (1956) to make this case.

Reading for Self-Defense

ABSTRACT This essay traces the impact of the wider ideological landscape regarding “identity politics,” interpretive practice, and literature of the 1970s on Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader. Specifically, it tracks the traces of Black and women of color feminist organizing legible in Fetterley's text, as well as those left by social movements operating at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. Though these traces go unattributed, this article argues that their presence offers an opportunity to read, as Fetterley might put it, a closed system from “without.” The author's resistant reading of Fetterley's text suggests how her “radical feminism” calls for a distinct attention to the materialist operations of academic and literary institutions in an investigation of their racialized, patriarchal power.

Reading an Other

ABSTRACT The Resisting Reader by Judith Fetterley is a groundbreaking critique of the American literary canon that put together two major critical movements of the 1970s—feminist criticism and reception theory. Fetterley demonstrated how canonical American texts are “designed” to “immasculate” women readers, to compel them to identify with a male point of view, one of whose tenets is the designation of woman as other. Fetterley inspired the author to examine how women read women's texts and to formulate a theory of careful, responsible reading that does justice to the communicative project embodied in the text.

The Historical Context of Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction

ABSTRACT This essay provides historical context for the second wave of U.S. feminism, focusing on the decade before Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader was published. It demonstrates the ways in which Fetterley's book is shaped by and crystallized the development of feminist politics and scholarship during the decade.

Immasculation in the Language Uses of Science and Philosophy

ABSTRACT Immasculation, Judith Fetterley's neologism, describes how male-coded language usages dominate the teaching of literature. In science and philosophy as well, male-coded uses of language have created innacurate senses of what scientists have studied in nature and in how we understand nature.

The Reception of The Resisting Reader, Early and Late

ABSTRACT An analysis of the reviews of The Resisting Reader and of early academic responses shows that literary and feminist scholars quickly welcomed the work, while reader studies came more slowly to a positive appreciation of it. Judith Fetterley's theory of feminist resistant reading has extended across multiple fields and outside of the academy to become newly relevant today.

Still Resisting after All These Years

ABSTRACT Personal reminiscences about author Judith Fetterley and personal responses to her book, The Resisting Reader.

Still Resisting after All These Years

ABSTRACT The impact of Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader on the development of feminist literary criticism, particularly of the American literary canon, is well known. The parallels between Fetterley's late 1970s call for women to become resistant readers and the work of literary historians invested in the actual reading practices of women reading women's writing (in novels of the early American period) are at the heart of this personal reflection.

The Power of the Resisting Reader

ABSTRACT The argument of Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader focuses on the centrality of “power” to feminist criticism, and how a critique of gendered power relations leads to an unmasking of what she terms “immasculation.” This names a process in which women readers (and critics) are compelled to identify with male perspectives and patriarchal values in fiction written by men. In contrast she posits the power of women-centered reading practices and resistance to homophobic interpretive and scholarly conventions.

The Transitioning Reader

ABSTRACT Susan K. Harris's contribution to the festschrift celebrating Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader traces her own evolving comprehension of the relationship between reader and text.

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

The Yankee in Catholic Ireland: Dorothy Gresham’s Dungar Sketches in the Catholic World, 1896–98

The Yankee in Catholic Ireland: Dorothy Gresham’s Dungar Sketches in the Catholic World, 1896–98 Marguérite Corporaal (bio) The Catholic World, a periodical founded by the Paulist Fathers in New York in 1865 to cater to a growing Catholic intellectual population, did not specifically address an Irish American readership, but was concerned with Catholicism across the globe. Nonetheless, this monthly periodical published many articles related to Catholicism in Ireland, its North American diaspora, as well as the Irish character and land issues, and not just during its first decade when the Famine generation became socially mobile, but also in the 1890s when—as studies by Charles Fanning and Peter O’Neill show—an Irish American middle class became more visible.1 The Catholic World’s engagement with Ireland becomes clear from various pieces concerned with the history of Irish Catholicism, discussions of Ireland’s land politics and Britain’s rule of the sister isle, Ireland’s industries, the Celtic Revival, as well as travelogues about Ireland’s specific regions.2 An example of the latter is a series of semi-autobiographical sketches by writer Dorothy Gresham, published between August 1896 and April 1898. These sketches focus on the main character’s journey from New York to Dungar, Co. Offaly. Fresh out of school in New York, Dolly travels to see relatives in Ireland she has never visited before. We know next to nothing about the author herself, apart from the fact that she was a regular contributor of fiction to Catholic World, writing stories like “The Delinquents” (July 1896), which addresses religious tensions between communities in Ontario. [End Page 161] The “Dungar” stories appear to have been inspired by the then popular genre of local color fiction, a common genre in the magazine, which aimed to record the traditions, language, and ways of life of a rural community in a specific region,3 and often explored the “the clash between modern and pre- or anti-modern without overly romanticizing or mystifying rural life.”4 Furthermore, scholars like Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have viewed the genre as a tool in the consolidation of shared identities among geographically remote communities.5 This article will explore Gresham’s sketches against the background of the genre’s conventions, while focusing on how these short narratives specifically represent issues of religion and identity formation. “Christmas Day in Dungar” (December 1897) and “The Station Mass” (February 1898), in particular, comment on Irish Catholicism from a US perspective. Furthermore, “Good-By” (April 1898) explores the complex nature of Irish American identity in terms of religious loyalties. The following analyses will investigate religious practice and conflict in Gresham’s “Dungar” tales, in light of concepts such as transnational identity formation and nostalgia. A Past of Religious Persecution That Gresham’s stories tap into the genre of local color fiction is evident from the first episode, “Where the Turf Fires Burn,” published in August 1896. The narrative provides a catalog of local customs such as turf cutting. The greater part of the sketches are, however, devoted to the religious life of the villagers, describing the community’s interaction with the Catholic clergy and mass rituals from the perspective of a Catholic American, the first-person narrator, Dolly. One thing that stands out is the narrator’s recurrent emphasis on Irish Catholics and their past suffering under Ireland’s penal laws, which limited the rights of Catholics. Already when she arrives in Queenstown, Co. Cork (present-day Cobh), Dolly finds that the spires of the Cathedral that “loom above the water” as well as a cross that “shines out over the harbour” are “gloriously suggestive of the trials and victories of those brave children of St. Patrick.”6 “The Station’s Mass,” which describes preparations for mass and confession at a local farmhouse, likewise foregrounds the suffering of Catholics worldwide and specifically in Ireland under the penal laws. The scene of worship is not set in an official church or chapel but a kitchen, just as Catholics during the penal days had to resort to other settings to hold Mass.7 Drawing analogies between the persecution of the first Christians in the Roman empire and the Irish...

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach by Derek J. Thiess

Reviewed by: Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach by Derek J. Thiess Carter F. Hanson (bio) Derek J. Thiess. Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Print. Derek Thiess names the methodology of his study explicitly in his subtitle—A Biopsychosocial Approach—and readers should take immediate note because this study is all about its critical approach. Thiess' main intent is to demonstrate the efficacy of the biopsychosocial model, a leading clinical model of treating patients in health and developmental psychology, for literary criticism. As its name implies, a biospsychosocial approach to treatment stresses holistic attention to a person's physical needs, individual psychology, and sociological environment (13). Taking up Sherryl Vint's call in Bodies of Tomorrow (2007) for an ethically "embodied subjectivity" that values "bodies that matter," Thiess takes issue with the "social constructivist" approach of [End Page 412] many feminist and youth studies critics, which ignores important elements of identity, especially biological age (4–11). In his introduction and first chapter, Thiess engagingly critiques how understanding markers of identity, such as gender, class, race and age, as constituted entirely within social structures and discourses leaves theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Nancy Lesko no conceptual space for the "biological and psychological pain and pleasure [of] the individual body" (20). Bodies become abstracted and hence ageless, and this exclusion or abjection of the body does a particular disservice to those whose bodies are especially vulnerable: children and the elderly. Thiess seeks not to discard or reject social constructions of identity, but rather to include biological and psychological dimensions in the critical mix in order to ethically embody the subjects of literary texts. Thiess' first full application of his model looks at the character of Bella in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight as a 17-year-old girl in a "pederastic relationship" with a 108-year-old male vampire (43). Examining the sociological research that points to significant risk factors for teenage girls in relationships with older boys or men, Thiess argues that the Twilight series works to normalize such coercive relationships among female adolescents. Thiess posits that speculative fiction (sf)—or more often in his choice of texts, science fiction—is particularly well suited as a genre for his project because being less "constrained by physical reality, it allows us to consider topics such as gender in new ways" (5). Despite this potential, however, Thiess acknowledges that the history of sf is littered with novels, stories, and subgenres that mainly reinforce stereotypical patterns of white male power. To counteract this tendency, Thiess invokes Judith Fetterley's second-wave feminist concept of resistant reading, whereby the critic deliberately reads against the author's apparent intentions to uncover the text's blind spots, particularly with regard to assumptions about human experience. Thiess employs resistant reading to good effect in chapter 3 in his interesting analysis of age and care work (caregiving) in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). Placing Butler in the context of social constructivist views of youth that tend to treat children as miniature adults—where the "precociousness of children is often assumed"—Thiess shows that Butler's novels extend this idea "to the point of negating biological age" (71). In the dystopian Parable novels, protagonist Lauren Olamina is already a community leader and founder of a new religion, Earthseed, as a teenager, and feels a strong social imperative to teach and care for her younger siblings and other community children. Thiess argues that by reducing age to a purely social construct, Butler's novels overlook the "physical and psychological limitations of age and the stress of care work on the body and mind" (82). As in all of his chapters, Thiess marshals an impressive array [End Page 413] of clinical, psychological, and sociological studies to draw attention to the individual embodied subject. Thiess is to be commended for mastering large bodies of research that few literary critics ever touch. Thiess' book is the latest volume in Routledge's Children's Literature and Culture series, and from a strictly literary perspective, the book is an uneven...

Willa Cather's Nutty Professor

Critics have often argued, or made the assumption, that Professor Godfrey St. Peter and Tom Outland are heroic figures in Willa Cather's The Professor's House. As Judith Fetterley writes, “we enter...

The Kitchen Economics of Sarah Orne Jewett's <em>The Country of the Pointed Firs</em>

The Kitchen Economics of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs Thomas Strychacz One irony about the reception of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is that its most idyllic passages have, of late, inspired the most combative debates. Such has been the fate of the Bowden reunion, the grand feast that provides a measure of symbolic closure to the narrator’s long sojourn at Dunnet Landing; and such has been the fate of the pleasant, peripatetic, four-chapter excursion to Green Island, when the narrator, accompanying Mrs. Todd on a visit to her mother, participates in the serene activities of the “old kitchen” where Mrs. Blackett performs something of a latter-day loaves-and-fishes miracle for three unexpected guests (71). Here, she creates a satisfying chowder from one haddock, one onion, and her own potatoes, aided by the narrator, who labors happily without remuneration to dig them up. “There is all the pleasure that one can have in gold-digging in finding one’s hopes satisfied in the riches of a good hill of potatoes,” announces the narrator, seeming to discover a form of pure use-value in her substitution of potatoes for gold (73). In the making of that miraculous chowder lies the substance of the debate about Jewett’s domestic idylls. Do they represent an emptily utopian turn from the era’s actual economic tribulations, what Richard Brodhead rather disdainfully characterizes as a “counterworld to 1890s modernity” (146)? Or do they oppose the dislocations and “waste” of the modern world and the ideologies of Economic Man underpinning them (Jewett 122)? Counterworld thinking, in fact, runs deep on both sides of this debate. When it comes to Jewett, most scholars take economy and kitchen—the realm of chowders and feasts, women’s work and women’s communities—as contradictory terms. It is this structuring assumption that my rubric of “kitchen economics” challenges by referring us to the compelling moments in Jewett’s work when it becomes possible to rescript mundane domestic tasks in an abstract economic idiom. [End Page 53] Many feminist scholars have celebrated the sense that one finds a critical break from male-dominated capitalist relations in places such as Mrs. Blackett’s old kitchen and in activities such as digging potatoes for free. To early second-wave feminist writers, Jewett’s fictional terrains could represent a “matriarchal community” running “counter to the urban, upper-class, capitalist, industrial, male-dominated civilization” of the late nineteenth century (Donovan 56); they produce under conditions of patriarchy “female relational reality” (Ammons, “Going in Circles” 89).1 Over the last decade this approach has been updated in theoretically sophisticated ways. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse realize the counterhegemonic possibilities of female regionalism through the trope of decenteredness. Places such as Green Island, situated on the very margin of the state of Maine and the mainland United States, exemplify the art of writing “out of place,” as the title of their book puts it, if “place” is understood to be a socioeconomic realm dominated by white men and subject to their ideologies of nation, property, and power. Catriona Sandilands’s queer, ecofeminist reading of Jewett likewise emphasizes the notion that it is only when “apart”—apart, that is, from a “dominant (male) society” (69)—that “women together can develop a critical and reflective distance on processes of social and natural change” (72). To Fetterley, Pryse, and Sandilands, Mrs. Blackett’s kitchen is perhaps more queer than sanctified, less the sustaining metaphor of the matrifocal family than a site of challenge to discourses of nationhood and to rationalized attitudes toward the environment. But all three scholars read spaces such as Green Island as being uncompromisingly oppositional; they manifest a “prop-ertyless condition” in a “location, space, and place that is disconnected from ownership” (Fetterley and Pryse 267). For many New Historicist scholars skeptical about such tidy distributions of power, that aversion to the exchange relations of the marketplace is precisely the problem with such scenes. Requiring for their preparation neither money nor alienated labor, the miraculous feasts on Green Island and at the Bowden reunion seem out of step with the material and...

Jason Arthur, Violet America: Regional Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Fiction since the Great Depression

In the wake of such books as Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (edited by Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, 1997) and Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, 2003), Jason Arthur’s Violet America (2013) starts out as an earnest attempt to debunk the widespread view of regional literature as a minor American tradition, questioning deeply-ingrained prejudices about literary regionalism. It seek...

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Stephanie Hawkins This season of renewal brings with it a new look and other changes to Studies in the Novel. The most significant of these is our new publishing partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Press, a partnership that will allow the journal to continue to thrive amid sweeping changes in academic publishing in the years ahead. It is also an honor to introduce the journal’s new editorial advisory board, a distinguished roster of scholars whose work highlights the breadth and diversity of traditional and contemporary approaches to scholarship on the novel. From its inception in 1969, Studies in the Novel has been dedicated to building a scholarly community around the world-making potentialities of the novel. To commemorate our distinguished history, the Spring issue features an updated cover. Tradition and innovation come together in this design, which retains the original cover’s iconic insignia, the fluttering pages of an open book. The insignia of the open book recalls all the possibilities that the reading of novels has long evoked: imaginative flight, broadened horizons, the opening up of new vistas for critical reflection and of new opportunities for deepened engagement with the world. As scholarship on the novel continues to demonstrate, the genre is one of profound aesthetic, imaginative, and social force, which is uniquely capable of promoting empathy, aesthetic innovation, political resistance, and a richer awareness of history. I would like to take a moment here to reflect on the history of the journal’s mission to publish “critical and scholarly articles on the novel with no restrictions on either chronology or nationality of the novelists studied” in order to recognize Studies in the Novel’s significance as a forum for leading-edge scholarship on the novel. Within the journal’s first decade, it could rightly claim to have fulfilled the ambitions of its founding editor, University of North Texas professor of contemporary literature James W. Lee, who envisioned a journal of international scope and influence. The past and present members of its advisory board, as well as its authors and contributors, have hailed from 48 states and 40 nations, representing more than 240 academic institutions worldwide. Studies in the Novel receives more than 200 article submissions each year, of which approximately 20 to 24 are accepted for publication. [End Page v] Academic and literary luminaries whose work has appeared in Studies in the Novel include Erskine Caldwell, Judith Fetterley, James Olney, Joseph Heller, Anthony Burgess, Donald Pizer, George Hutchinson, Larry Reynolds, Michael Gilmore, Marianna Torgovnick, Wai-Chee Dimock, Robert Hemenway, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Pericles Lewis, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Patricia Meyer Spacks, Michael Hollister, Michelle Burnham, Susan Gallagher, Alan Rauch, Eric Savoy, and Christina Milletti. For more than 40 years, an essay’s publication in Studies in the Novel has represented a mark of distinction for scholars at every stage of their careers. This history reflects the skill, dedication, and hard work of numerous scholars and editors. Studies in the Novel has flourished under the guiding vision and dedicated leadership of four editors: James W. Lee (1969–1975); John Smith (1975–1993); the late Scott Simpkins (1993–2003); and Jacqueline Foertsch (2003–2012). Beyond publishing special issues on significant novelists, these editors have brought forth field-changing issues in each decade of the journal’s history: African American Authors (1971); The Commonwealth Novel (1972); Women and Early Fiction (1987); Queerer Than Fiction (1996); Terrorism and the Postmodern Novel (2004); Postcolonial Trauma Novels (2008). Recently, Studies in the Novel published ground-breaking new scholarship on Young Adult Fiction (2010) and Willa Cather (2013), and in Fall 2015 we will publish a special issue on Science Fictions. For nearly five decades, Studies in the Novel has staked its reputation upon publishing incisive scholarship on the canon-forming novelists that have shaped the genre’s rich history. At the same time, the journal has persistently broken new ground by promoting new theoretical approaches and, most recently, under the editorial leadership of Jacqueline Foertsch, by adopting a broader international scope and pursuing a deeper engagement with the contemporary novel as a form of social critique. As the journal’s new editor, I am fortunate to have this track...