Reviewed by: Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering by Cynthia R. Wallace Sara Judy (bio) Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering Cynthia R. Wallace Columbia University Press, 2016. ix + 316 pp. $65.00 hardcover. $27.00 paperback. Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering by Cynthia R. Wallace is as much about justice as it is about suffering, as Wallace, through her analysis of justice-oriented feminist literature, seeks to "do justice" (xiv) to these texts in their specificity and particularity. Wallace's sense of ethical responsibility toward her objects of study, and toward the theory she is in conversation with, operates in the volume as an ever-present awareness that there are lived, material implications to the arguments we make in and about literature. The result is a remarkably personal work of criticism that weaves together critical analysis of Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Ngzoi Adichie with Wallace's own personal experiences of suffering in a body marked "woman" by the world. Located within the framework of "new literary critical ethics" (13), Of Women Borne brings a theologically informed, religiously attentive, and particularly womanist perspective to bear on poststructuralist questions around the ambivalence and ambiguities of language and meaning in literature. Drawing on a range of theological influences, Of Women Borne is most attentive to the Black and Latina feminist contributions to and interventions into the tradition of liberation theology. Unlike John McClure's Partial Faiths (2007) or Amy Hungerford's Postmodern Belief (2010) Wallace's analysis of postmodern postsecular literature does not question religion's place in a postmodern society—the women she writes about express important but ambiguous relationships to religion in their creative and critical writing. Rather, Of Women Borne is interested in representing the ways in which feminist, ethical, justice-oriented literature has shaped philosophical and theological discourse in the postmodern age. For Wallace, "the very idea of suffering implies not just an is but an ought" (22), and her examination of suffering in literature is predicated on the understanding that the world "ought" not to be so racist, so patriarchal, so dominated by pain and selfishness. The authors she engages imagine [End Page 167] that it might, through difficult acts of self-sacrifice, be otherwise—not free of pain, but a world where we choose to endure pain toward more restorative ends. The first chapter, on poet Adrienne Rich, attempts to re-vision Rich as a forerunner of an ethic of care and mutual responsibility which still informs feminist discourse. In chapter two, Wallace reads a number of novels by Toni Morrison, demonstrating how Morrison's perpetual negotiation of particularities and universals implies a need for multiple ethical paradigms. Next, Wallace moves from Black womanist liberation theology to the tradition of Latina feminist theology, through a reading of the liberatory potential of Ana Castillo's So Far From God (1993). Here, Wallace begins to more explicitly interweave her personal investments in this project, and her analysis of Castillo is enriched by a sense of deep responsibility to account for what Wallace, as a white critic, may not know. The final chapter focuses on Nigerian author and popular public feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's historical novels, to question how we might pay "responsible attention" (170) to global and historical suffering, without reinscribing it. Throughout Of Women Borne, Wallace displays a generous attunement to the complexity of the questions she poses, always refusing easy answers in favor of attending to a multiplicity of meanings, and always leaving open the possibility of indeterminacy ("and yet" is a regular refrain in her writing). However, despite Wallace's insistence on specific and contextually determined understandings of suffering, her analysis can sometimes generalize the category of religion to mean specifically Christianity. The result of this tendency is that religious difference is occasionally glossed over, as in the chapter on Rich, which makes little distinction between Rich's critique of Christianity and her ambivalent relationship to Judaism. This generalized sense of religion also misses opportunities for particularity within certain denominations and faith traditions; the chapter on Morrison makes no mention of Morrison's Catholicism, which would seem to offer rich opportunities for attention...