Reviewed by: Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism Melanie Dawson Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism. By Jennifer L. Fleissner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 320 pp. $65.00/$25.00 paper. What would it mean to place women at the center of a reading of American naturalism, particularly the women in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "A New England Nun"? Or to highlight compulsion instead of violence and brutality? What happens to the parameters of naturalism if we envision constrained, domestic women at its center? Jennifer L. Fleissner's Women, Compulsion, Modernity explores these possibilities as it offers a refreshing interpretation of naturalism by reading texts commonly recognized as naturalistic alongside those that have been characterized as regionalist or realist. Challenging naturalism's hypermasculinity on many fronts, Fleissner's emphatically discursive study insists on naturalism's rootedness in wide-ranging cultural conversations about the New Woman, eugenics, birth control, and domesticity—topics that appear, in some form, throughout virtually all the study's chapters. Fleissner's interest in a psychological modernity animates her discussion of compulsive behaviors, particularly those compulsions involving domestic women, from the "heroine" of "The Yellow Wallpaper" to that alarming domestic, Trina McTeague, to a few domestic men, among them Frank Norris's Vandover. While the extent to which the scholarship will take up this expanded understanding of naturalism's work remains to be seen, the most important accomplishment in this impressively researched, theorized, and textually engaged study is its interjection of new life into a deeply contextualized vision of naturalism. By contrast, many previous explorations of the movement appear as the splitting of so many hairs, considering [End Page 200] closely related issues such as free will and heredity, determinism and agency, brutality and civilization. These familiar oppositions, moreover, have been limited to a handful of notably masculinist texts; naturalism's reach has not been extended to fictions by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Weld Grimké, or Gertrude Stein, nor, incidentally, to important nonfiction authors such as Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt. By invoking such figures, this study retrieves naturalism from discussions of dog-eating wolves or men who think they are wolves and turns instead to a range of political and social contestations encircling motherhood and race suicide and to the paths available to fin-de-siècle women and the fiction that depicts them. As a result, naturalism appears as a movement rooted in modernity's everyday concerns as well as the call of the wild. Moreover, as Fleissner argues, naturalistic texts are themselves models of stasis and incompletion; narratives about women who become stuck in their circumstances reflect writers' attempts "to conceive of new plots for women," even if the writers "did not quite know what it would look like to bring them into being" (31). Explorations of these topics take delightfully unexpected turns, as in Fleissner's reading of naturalistic men as sentimental figures, of women's compulsive domesticity as evidence of a troubling, yet socially encoded primitivism, and of the possibility of a naturalist motherhood infused with women's profound ambivalence about taking up a notion of self-definition rooted in maternity. Thus, confronting the expectations facing modern women results in a "characteristic plot . . . marked . . . by neither the steep arc of decline nor that of triumph, but rather by an ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion—back and forth, around and around, on and on—that has the distinctive effect of seeming also like a stuckness in place" (9). The book's deliberately provocative synthesis of seldomly grouped texts is compelling, as in chapter two's discussion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Norris, and Sarah Orne Jewett, where compulsive thinking is exposed as deeply gendered in both the "rest cure" and the "west cure." Hence, the "monomania" of domesticity compares with the force that drives McTeague to the desert. Chapter four's uniting of Charlotte Temple, Sister Carrie, and The House of Mirth is equally unique, where Fleissner explores the position of the sentimental worldview within a naturalist novel, along with the "sentimentalizing consequences of . . . victimization" in characters such as Edith Wharton's Lily Bart and Theodore Dreiser's Hurstwood (195). Such...