Women's Fiction Research Articles

The Bad Wife Who Was Good: A Woman as a Way of Life in Genesis Rabbah 17:3

This article begins with the observation that one of the most famous bad wife tales in rabbinic literature (Genesis Rabbah 17:3) is not really a tale about women at all. While Genesis Rabbah 17:3 is formally structured as a tale of two wives, the bad wife of Rabbi Yose and the good wife of Rabbi Ḥananiah ben Ḥakhinai, the narrative is not primarily directed at shaping a feminine ideal but works to negotiate competing visions of male honor. Specifically, the narrative works to overturn a model of male Jewish honor based on a paterfamilias model of individual leadership in favor of a system in which male Jewish honor derives from visible adherence to the norms of the rabbinic academy. This article thus explores a common dissonance in early rabbinic narratives about women, asking why women's literary bodies are so effective as a material through which male social ideals can be negotiated. The article concludes that the fictional women in such stories function in a mode very similar to what Mikhail Bahktin described as a "fairytale chronotope," in which landscapes, objects, and animals are animated to make the defining structures of a particular social moment visible by distilling them into a perceptible representative but without the blurring complications of a full human subjectivity.

Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women's Fiction by Maryam Mirza

Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women's Fiction by Maryam Mirza

Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan by Amanda C. Seaman

Reviewed by: Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan by Amanda C. Seaman Ayako Kano (bio) Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan. By Amanda C. Seaman. University of Hawai'i Press, 2017. x, 230 pages. $62.00. Amanda Seaman's Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan is an informative and thought-provoking book that offers many fascinating insights into pregnancy—in both its mundane and its outlandish modes—in the last few decades in Japan. As a study of pregnancy in Japan, it joins the ethnography Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel (Rutgers University Press, 2010) by Tsipy Ivry. As a study of female authors foregrounding their bodily experiences, it joins books like Seaman's own Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2004) and Julia Bullock's The Other Women's Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women's Fiction (University of Hawai'i Press, 2010). The book that most persistently calls for comparison with Seaman's, however, is Saitō Minako's Ninshin shōsetsu (Pregnancy fiction [Chikuma Shobō, 1994]), which is (in my opinion lamentably) not yet translated. Saitō's book does a masterful chopping and roasting job on canonical fiction written mostly, but not exclusively, by men, from the 1890s to the 1980s. In contrast, Seaman's deals primarily with the 1970s onward and exclusively focuses on works by women, also including works by manga artists and those blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction. Thus, in terms of the oeuvre discussed, there is hardly any overlap. The two contrasting books have much to tell us about pregnancy and about writing (or drawing) pregnancy in modern and contemporary Japan. What Saitō Minako ends up doing in her satirical study, I would argue, is not to describe a subgenre of Japanese fiction but to send up the institution of canonical "modern Japanese fiction" itself, in all its masculinist glory. [End Page 385] Pregnancy turns out to be crucial to the institution of modern Japanese fiction, a secret ingredient that exposes all manner of tired tropes and stereotypes about women and men and the meaning of life. What Amanda Seaman accomplishes is something quite different. As she points out, the decades since the 1980s are ones of low fertility, in which marriage and childbirth circumscribe less and less of women's lives. The dominant figure in cultural representation of women is not that of the mother, or the pregnant woman, but that of the girl (shMjo). For example, Nobuko Anan's Contemporary Japanese Women's Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls' Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) captures the cultural visibility of the girlish figure on stage and screen. Low fertility as social reality and the prevalence of the shōjo ideal means that the pregnant woman is rarely seen, on the page or in the streets. The topic of Seaman's study then is something of a paradox. On the one hand, pregnancy continues to be a defining feature of what is understood to be a woman's life-course in social common sense and in government policy. (As I describe in my own work, Japanese Feminist Debates [University of Hawai'i Press, 2016], the basic assumption of Japanese welfare policy is that all women marry and become mothers.) Yet, on the other hand, pregnancy is increasingly absent from women's lives. There is another paradox: In Seaman's words, "pregnancy makes for great literature: there is an alien creature growing inside a woman's body, sucking the life from her, parasitical and potentially horrific. When it painfully erupts, it is demanding and all-encompassing. On the other hand, stories about pregnancy are really boring" (p. 16) because modern medical development makes gestation non-eventful and parturition usually nonhorrific. Thus, pregnancy stories tend to be dominated by "intense personal reflection on the part of the woman" (p. 16) that may be variously insightful and enlightening, but might not make for entertaining reading. This is why in the works discussed by Seaman, something usually intrudes to make the pregnancy exciting and worthy of publication. Saitō Minako points to the same problem when she notes that in fiction, all pregnancy is unwanted, or...

The Interracial Marriage Plot: Suicide and the Politics of Blood in Romantic-era Women's Fiction

The Interracial Marriage Plot: Suicide and the Politics of Blood in Romantic-era Women's Fiction

Masquerade in Fingersmith

Masquerade in Fingersmith Hatice Yurttas (bio) In the last decades, intertextuality has been used to question issues of gender identity and desire, and, in a lively dialogue with theoretical debates within feminist thought, has come to define women's writing. An early example of such intertextuality is the rewriting of the female subject in Angela Carter's spectacular novel Nights at the Circus (1984). Fevvers, the self-proclaimed bird woman found at the door of a brothel, hatched from an egg, raised by prostitutes, and trained by the witch-like anarchist Lizzie, wanders around the world, traversing alternative communities, ideologies, and the world of fiction, while exploring the feminine experience in relation to her indeterminate female body symbolized by her alleged wings and searching for a place and language for the new woman. The figure of the woman writer in confrontation with the literary heritage is ubiquitous in contemporary women's writing; a recent example is Kate Atkinson's Emotionally Weird (2000), a postmodern novel that produces its new woman by rewriting and questioning the realist novel. Unlike most of their fictive predecessors in the realist novel, who begin as single women and end up in socially appropriate, acceptable heterosexual marriages, the female protagonists of postmodern fiction strive to break free of both their biological roots and the marriage institution and stage female experience in the discursive field. While exposing the inadequacy of traditional literary forms and their implicit gender norms, this figure of the woman writer in search of a language offers a viable, desirable form of female existence instead.1 Sarah Waters's 2002 Fingersmith is another example of a novel whose playful discursive production of the woman writer illustrates the [End Page 109] stakes involved in rewriting the female subject in the postmodern novel. Maud Lilly, the fictional woman author in question, cuts the umbilical cord to her biological origins and weaves literary cords with fellow female writers and readers in a new sexual topology, expressing lesbian desire through linguistic masquerade. Offering herself as a signifier, as the object of a discursive investigation open to new configurations, this female subject constructs herself by rewriting inherited male narratives that have proved oppressive and limiting for feminine desire and language. Fingersmith is a Künstlerroman, in which the fictive writer, Maud, as well as the author, Waters, create their novelistic discourse by subverting the plots of male writers. The novel articulates its woman writer through multiple masquerades, beginning with the imitation of two key works of the Victorian era: Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and Wilkie Collins's sensation novel, The Woman in White.2 By subjecting the inherited narrative forms to a dizzying number of reversals, doublings, and masquerades, the novel ends up displacing all identity categories, and, in a nod to Judith Butler, exposes them as indeterminate and the effect of performative acts. According to Butler, gender and identity are learned performances; neither stable nor natural, they are socially and discursively constructed through reiterative acts and regulatory practices. Butler challenges the notion of an original, authentic gender identity or sexuality that gay identity or sexuality either copies or from which it deviates. Waters draws on Butler's understanding of gender and the construction of identity as the imitation of an imitation, in other words, as discursive constructions that do not rely on an originary, natural, or in any sense imperative form of identity and sexuality. Thus in Fingersmith the lesbian woman writer materializes through reiterative acts whose apparent original is revealed to be the copy of another copy, leaving imitation and masquerade as the only possible forms of identity. The novel's masquerading effect hinges on the fact that a known lesbian author, namely Waters, is imitating the heterosexual writers Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Waters's impersonation of Charles Dickens, which earned her the title "lesbian Charles Dickens" in Kirkus Reviews, ensures that the trope of mirroring accrues significance in the novel. Waters's postmodern novelistic language—a type of stylizing language, in Bakhtin's terms—mirrors the Victorian heterosexual male novelists' language while testing its validity for exploring female experience and transforming [End Page 110] the language whenever it proves inadequate. The fact that we...

Fictional Women Travelers in Plays by Women: Victims or Good Role Models?

Fictional Women Travelers in Plays by Women: Victims or Good Role Models?

Book review: Ruchira Gupta (Ed.), River of Flesh and Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction

Ruchira Gupta (Ed.), River of Flesh and Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction. New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2016, 256 pp., ₹350.

Ruchira Gupta (ed.), River of Flesh and Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction

Ruchira Gupta (ed.), <i>River of Flesh and Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction</i>

La reapropiación del cuerpo de las mujeres en la ficción televisiva. Análisis de "Orange is the New Black"

Tradicionalmente, la ficción televisiva estereotipa e invisibiliza a las mujeres, con una representación muy ligada a una exhibición como objeto pasivo dedicado al placer masculino. No obstante, la Tercera Edad Dorada también posibilita el nacimiento de producciones de que quiebran este modelo androcéntrico normativo, donde se encuentra Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013‑). Así, mediante la aplicación del Análisis Crítico del Discurso desde una Perspectiva Feminista se examinarán las alocuciones en torno a la sexualidad y los cuerpos de las mujeres a partir de dos episodios paradigmáticos en este sentido: A Whole Other Hole (204) y Fear, and Other Smells (308). A partir de este análisis se concluye que la serie dirigida por Jenji Kohan permite una reapropiación de las sexualidades y de los cuerpos de las mujeres a través de una representación diversa de las mujeres y de la quiebra de los silencios que el patriarcado ha impuesto sobre sus realidades.

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

Plotting New Womanhood on Either Side of the Channel: A comparison of Tinayre's La Rebelle and Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman

Abstract This is a comparison of Ella Hepworth Dixon's 1894 novel, The Story of a Modern Woman, and Marcelle Tinayre's La Rebelle, published in 1905. Arguing that these two examples of British and French New Woman fiction contain striking parallels in their incorporation of young female magazine journalists negotiating romance and reportage and attempting to balance public and private lives, this article suggests that Tinayre's novel reflects and modifies details found in the French translation of Dixon's text. The result is an analysis of the strategies employed by both writers, who provide their readers with young female protagonists who resist social and narrative norms, yet who offer relatively modest and acceptable forms of rebellion; focus thus falls on the connections and contrasts between French and Anglophone representations of the New Woman or the “femme moderne” in the fiction of the fin de siècle period, and the comparative female bildungsroman plots at work in the different cultures.

The Pursuit of Happiness: The Veil as an Inducer of Subjective Well- being in Hadia Said’s Hijab Kashif

This paper aims at offering a fresh way to see veiling as a practice which induces power by means of knowledge, spiritual development and well-being. To reach this end, the veil, as the object of analysis, is approached as a phenomenon interpreted from within the experience of fictional women; Muslim and non-Muslim, veiled and unveiled, to evaluate the possibility of its being a means of empowerment on many conceptual levels. The analysis takes as its basis a variety of conceptual tools which constitute the framework of argumentation: Michel Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self, Ibn Al Arabi's belief that the veil is epistemic by nature, Edward R. Canda and Leola Dyrud Furman's definition of spirituality, Ed Diener's explanation of the term subjective well-being and W.R Walker et al 's concept of the Fading Affect Bias (FAB).

Dystopia, Gerontology and the Writing of Margaret Atwood

Old age and visions of the future are inherently bound with one another, and the realms of dystopian fiction provide scope for a gerontological focus within contemporary literature. A theme that is now being revisited in speculative fiction, this paper aims to assess the role of the elderly within Margaret Atwood's dystopian tales, specifically looking at the role of gerontology in her collection of short stories Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales (2014). I argue that Atwood utilises the dystopian narrative in order to address broader social issues that stem from immobility and declining virility. Focussing on Atwood's feminist politics and representations of the elderly woman in the dystopian narrative, this paper proposes that older women in Atwood's fiction seek to move beyond the asexual, immobile and matronly gerontological stereotype that is often portrayed in literature. Instead, the elderly, and in particular elder women, adapt to their environment, often becoming figures of their community. They are aware of sexual desires and look to move within and beyond societal constraints, utilising the realms of cyberspace in order to forge their own identity. The role of the elderly in a distinctly dystopian narrative allows for a new Utopian strategy to be constructed.

Painting the Soul: A Complex Legacy of Romanticism in Edith Johnstone’s New Woman Novel, A Sunless Heart (1894)

ABSTRACTIn the last decade of the twentieth century, the scholarly consensus was that genius was incompatible with what Lyn Pykett terms the “proper feminine.” This incompatibility makes the “New Woman” artist-protagonist the exemplar of a genre known for self-conflicted, introspective protagonists. Edith Johnstone’s A Sunless Heart (1894) has been peripheral to this scholarship because Johnstone relegates her artist to the sidelines of a second protagonist’s life. Most New Woman authors recall the narrow brand of Romanticism that reverberates through nineteenth-century poetics—the poet’s lyrical turn inwards to (in John Stuart Mill’s words) “paint the human soul truly.” When Johnstone presents lyricism as an interchange between two people, she seizes what would be an otherwise missed opportunity in New Woman fiction: a portrait of the artist’s struggle not to transpose her subjectivity onto another individual. Johnstone’s portrait of an artist will be compared to that of other fin de siècle writers, including Wilde, to show that even these writers, keen to portray human subjectivity in new ways, cannot see that the “artist-as-genius” construct obscures the politics of representation. Johnstone invokes a more complex legacy of Romanticism so as to question the degree to which the artist can paint another human soul.

Reclaiming the Status of Human: Gender and Protest in Zoë Wicomb’s Short Stories

ABSTRACTIn this study of Wicomb's fiction, I investigate the depiction of women's oppression and resistance in three short stories from You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town and The One That Got Away. Judith Butler's model of gender performativity and Susan Bordo's work on the socio-historical construction of female bodies provide a useful framework within which to examine how “coloured” women in Wicomb's fiction are socialised to perform a version of “ideal” femininity under the heteronormative male gaze, which is often also informed by sexism and racism. I argue that, as a result of their subjection to an objectifying male gaze and the perpetual threat or incident of gender failure, the central characters in “When the Train Comes”, “Friends and Goffels”, and “Mrs Pringle's Bed” encounter repeated dehumanisation and humiliation. The protagonists’ failure or conscious refusal to perform normative white femininity, however, opens up a space for resistance in which they are able to defy patriarchal control and assert their agency. Appropriating Butler's terminology, I refer to these instances of opposition as moments of “psychic excess”, by which I mean the subversion of the heteronormative. Ultimately, I show how the women in all three short stories harness the subversive power of psychic excess by employing it as a means of protest against the restrictions of normative femininity and, in so doing, recover a sense of their humanity.

Writing domestic violence in Marian Keyes’ This Charming Man (2008)

Popular fiction for women has been variously criticised and derided for a focus on romance plots and superficial themes. Marian Keyes, a prolific author of contemporary women’s popular fiction, however, utilises romance to explore serious contemporary issues. This paper examines the representation of one of these serious issues, domestic violence, in Keyes’ novel This Charming Man (2008). The novel’s multi-story plot gradually weaves together the histories and experiences of four female protagonists from their individual points of view. Each protagonist has had a romantic involvement with one ‘charming man’, the rich and powerful Irish politician Paddy de Courcy. Chapters devoted to each woman are interspersed with short vignettes that recount moments of Paddy’s violent behaviour. The narrative organisation of This Charming Man represents domestic violence in a way that prioritises healing, physically, mentally and emotionally, for the protagonists through telling their stories and sharing those stories with other characters and readers. This form of creative writing prompts reader engagement and reflection. Such readerly engagement may increase awareness of this issue and potentially lead readers to actively seek change in their own lives.

Stitches: The Relationship Between Women and Fabrication in Short Legal Fiction

Alec Masella’s “Stitches: The Relationship Between Women and Fabrication in Short Legal Fiction” is a fascinating look into the role women play in legal fiction. Feminism, female community, and the role of women in the justice system are all explored within his research. Masella delves into the definition of fabrication, and how both the literal and figurative definitions of fabrication are used as a plot trope when female characters are present in legal fiction. Masella argues and demonstrates that fabrication is used for both the empowerment and trivialization of women, offering an interesting insight into the role of women in legal fiction. Fabrication is utilized in Masella’s research to mean both the making and wearing of articles of clothing, as well as fabrication in the sense of creating stories to fool the justice system. While fabrication connects and empowers women in legal fiction, Masella explores the complexities it creates in short legal fiction as well. The dichotomy of the power that women hold in the justice system and fabrication’s role in demonizing women as schemers and liars creates new perspective on how women are treated by and contribute to the legal system. A range of short legal fiction is analyzed in Masella’s research, including short stories by Agatha Christie, Somerset Maugham, and Achy Obejas. A special focus is placed on Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” in order to fully explore the role of fabrication and its connection to women in legal fiction. Glaspell’s powerful story is about three women in rural Iowa connecting to one another and solving a crime through fabrication. Following the murder of John Wright, his wife, Minnie Wright, becomes the prime suspect due to her peculiar behavior when the Wright’s neighbor, Lewis Hale, comes by and finds John’s body. The country sheriff, Mr. Peters; the county prosecutor, George Henderson; Lewis Hale; Hale’s wife, Margaret; and the sheriff’s wife, Mrs. Peters go to the Wrights’ house to try to find evidence against Minnie Wright. As the story progresses, Margaret Hale and Mrs. Peters, discover that Minnie Wright was abused by her husband and killed him out of self-defense. By noticing strewn objects around the house, the strange state of a canary cage, a dead bird, and the unclean state of the kitchen, Margaret Hale and Mrs. Peters begin to solve the crime together. After finding a quilt Mrs. Wright was making, the women notice the quilt has uneven stitching and is unfinished, suggesting Mrs. Wright’s nervousness the night her husband was murdered. Throughout the story, the three women become connected through the evidence and their similar state of being seen as trivial and unimportant by their husbands. After discovering other clues, Margaret Hale and Mrs. Peters hide a piece of evidence that would convict Minnie in order to help her case. Margaret Hale and Mrs. Peters do their own fabricating by lying to their husbands and refusing to show them the incriminating evidence. The story is wonderfully analyzed as it relates to fabrication, both in Minnie Wright’s quilt and the construction of a story by Margaret Hale and Mrs. Peters in order to spare Minnie Wright. “Stitches: The Relationship Between Women and Fabrication in Short Legal Fiction” explores the theme of fabrication in “A Jury of Her Peers” within the context of other stories featuring women playing roles in the justice system. The wide selection of stories, all from different time periods and about women from diverse backgrounds, demonstrates how linked women and fabrication have become, and have been throughout literary history, specifically in legal fiction. Masella decided to write his research about women and fabrication in short legal fiction in a course titled Literature and the Law. As he read short stories for the course, he noticed that most female characters in the stories knitted and sewed throughout the plot, specifically after important plot-twists. Once “A Jury of Her Peers” was assigned, he noticed what a large role fabrication plays in the story, thus conforming his idea that fabrication is a recurring theme in short legal fiction with female characters. Masella’s exploration of the way legal fiction depicts women, specifically with both literal and gurative fabrication, insinuates that fiction can influence people’s perspectives on how women actually are involved in crime in reality. Masella says that Mrs. Wright’s unfinished quilt “holds a certain literary power to it. It also speaks to the generally unnoticed influence women have in dire legal decisions.” In drawing attention to the way women are overlooked by the legal system in short legal fiction, and how fabrication binds them together in these stories, Masella highlights the importance of women in the justice system both in fiction and reality.

“Devoted to the Cause of Woman’s Rights”: The New Zealand New Woman Novel

ABSTRACTThis article examines New Woman novels written by New Zealand authors from 1882–1925. The fiction is embedded in a colonial settler culture. All of the authors discussed are European New Zealanders and only one of them addresses the rights of Māori. This silence regarding the indigenous population points to the ambivalent position of white settler women in an invader settler nation; preoccupied with their own predicament as an oppressed gender, most of these authors fail to acknowledge their complicity as imperial subjects in the subjugation of Māori people. Settler New Zealand is depicted by these New Woman authors as both a white space and a dichotomous space. It is lauded as the first country to give women the vote and reviled as a provincial backwater. New Women regularly leave New Zealand in search of expanded mental and artistic horizons in international metropolitan centres. Yet New Zealand New Woman fiction also frames the colony as a place promoting independence, agency, physical health, sexual desire and a re-evaluating of class hierarchies. The tradition of New Woman writing in New Zealand follows international models: protesting against patriarchy; demanding female autonomy, education and congenial work; and calling for the renovation of marriage and frank discussions about sexuality. New Zealand New Woman fiction is polemical and frequently autobiographical, typically focusing on heroines who are white and middle class. It tends to be more optimistic than some British and American fiction, in frequently ending with the heroine's happiness being fulfilled.

Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy

Reviewed by: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy Alexandra Kingston-Reese Maria Rice Bellamy. Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015. xii + 190 pp. Throughout Maria Rice Bellamy's Bridges to Memory, the figure of trauma's ghost resonates. Its presence echoes; its residue clarifies as often as it clouds. It even manifests literally in the fictional narratives at the center of the book's focus. But this is not a book that lets trauma's ghost remain in the shadows. Through the theory of postmemory, what Bellamy offers is a concerted realignment of the way contemporary ethnic women writers engage generationally with traumatic pasts that is both conceptually distinctive and socially forceful. With deft treatment, the ghostly presence of trauma is engaged to recover the violent experiences of ethnic American women often "repressed from mainstream social consciousness" and reimagine the effect of its legacy on future generations as they work toward repair (3). Reading works such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy casts each as revelatory: braiding narratives of past, present, and future generations to draw attention to and expose "inherited forms of traumatic memory" (2). It is with this emphasis that Bridges to Memory gains ethical force. By drawing together narratives whose focus is to illuminate the "suffering of others" through practices of "mediation" (5), the book identifies the experience of violent trauma not solely as the domain of the individual but as "intersubjective communion" (4). Theorizing this experience in terms of postmemory, Bellamy negotiates trauma as a space "inhabited by narrators and auditors, survivors and descendants, in which temporal and subjective boundaries are blurred, allowing the memories of one to haunt and infect the other." She navigates facets of postmemory not simply to identify a new contemporary genre of the postmemorial journey—"comprised of a three-step process of identification, translation, and differentiation" (6)—but to shed light on how narratives of postmemory are as literarily innovative as they are socially representative, employing an array of techniques "to overcome the traumatic ruptures and temporal distance that separate the child of postmemory from her ancestral inheritance" (7). With such a dextrous model, Bellamy is able to illuminate the effect of postmemorial journeys on the formation of contemporary identities while simultaneously provoking a generative literary conversation elicited by traumas of the female body and the expressive techniques used to convey them. [End Page 769] Each chapter seeks to explore elements of the contemporary genre of postmemory. Bellamy considers a range of texts by ethnic women that include not just African Americans but what she calls "hyphenated Americans" (14). While the first two chapters of the book analyze narratives of African American postmemory (particularly those of slavery) in novels by Jones, Butler, and Perry, the remaining three chapters provide examples by other ethnic American women that offer their own "particular challenges of geographical, cultural, and linguistic displacement": García's portrait of the Cuban Revolution, Keller's account of the Korean tradition of comfort women, and Danticat's story-cycle of Haitian traumatic history. Beginning with Jones, the book establishes a classic example of postmemory fiction in which "late-twentieth-century descendants of American slaves" must engage with "their traumatic inheritance" as a "process of excavating memories and experiences that have been consciously forgotten, distorted, or destroyed" (19). This is a process, Bellamy claims, that Jones recuperates through the use of "oral transmission to access the experiential history of slavery and explores how the physical body testifies to the enduring trauma of enslavement." But, she asks, "[w]hat if postmemory were experienced physically, affecting the inheritors of traumatic memory in their bodies as well as their minds and emotions?" (45). This is the question Bellamy asks with regard to Butler and Perry, and which she complicates in the third chapter in a discussion of embodiment in García's Dreaming in Cuban. In this novel, García "uses alternative forms of connection...

History Repeating Itself: Men, Masculinities, and "His Story" in the Fiction of Micheál Ó Conghaile

History Repeating Itself:Men, Masculinities, and "His Story" in the Fiction of Micheál Ó Conghaile Sorcha de Brún (bio) The status of Irish as a minority language and recognition of its broken and often traumatized past give it a distinctly alive, almost virtual sense of reality in contemporary Irish-language letters. This recognition prompts the feeling that, in language as in life, in the words of the poem by Seamus Heaney, "Anything can happen, the tallest things … / Be overturned, those in high places daunted, / Those overlooked regarded" (10). Yet despite its minority status the Irish language is far from overlooked: Irish, or an Ghaeilge, is a feminine noun, and thus it should come as no surprise that in contemporary Irish criticism the female experience and the feminine—in terms of both writers and characters—have been the subject of exploration. To be sure, a number of Irish-language women prose writers and dramatists who began publishing in the 1950s and 1960s have not yet received the critical attention that their works deserve, and this absence of critical attention is all the more striking in an era of Irish-language feminist criticism.1 Nevertheless, writing in 2005, Brian Ó Conchubhair ("Novel in Irish" 227) noted that in the period since 1984 "a little improvement has occurred" with regard to a greater [End Page 17] proliferation of women fiction writers in Irish. Since the publication of his essay the "improvement" mentioned has continued, and there are increasing numbers of women fiction writers in Irish. For all of this slow-growing visibility of female writers in Irish, however, the fact remains that the majority of contemporary Irish-language fiction writers active since the 1980s—in particular, novelists from Irish-speaking regions—have been male. More importantly in the context of this essay and masculinities studies, the writing of these individuals has focused to a large extent on the male subject, on men's life experiences, on their interactions with women, and on various expressions and themes related to masculinity. Among contemporary Gaeltacht fiction writers who explore different versions of masculinity and the male subject, one finds works by Micheál Ó Conghaile, Pádraig Ó Cíobháin, Joe Steve Ó Neachtain, Pádraig Standún, and Pádraig Breathnach. Yet apart from Sarah McKibben's comprehensive study of masculinities in bardic poetry, Endangered Masculinities in Irish Poetry, 1540–1780 (2010), there have been no critical studies of masculinities in contemporary Irish-language prose writing. This absence of criticism contrasts with interdisciplinary critical studies by scholars on Irish masculinities in English-language literature and culture in Ireland (Magennis and Mullan 2011). For instance, Debbie Ging (2013) has carried out critical research on masculinities in Irish cinema, and Brian Singleton (2011) has done work on masculinities in the contemporary Irish theatre. The dearth of critical work on masculinities in Irish-language literature also stands in contrast to critical studies carried out internationally on both the male-authored novel, such as Alice Ferrebe's 2005 study, Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000, and on masculinities and men in other genres. The writer and scholar Alan Titley ("Saol is A Thuistí" 329) has described much of the feminist critique of Irish-language literature that took place in the 1990s and its focus on the dearth of female prose writers in Irish as concerning itself with "cad-nach-bhfuil-ann" (that which does not exist). It is highly contestable whether the dearth of female prose writers in Irish precludes examination and debate about the subject or discussion as to the possible reasons for the lack of female authors. Nevertheless, differences in the representations of men and women in Irish literature have prompted comment in other [End Page 18] studies. For example, Máirín Nic Eoin and Aisling Ní Dhonnchadha (12) noted in 2008 in a study of emigration in Irish-language literature that there was a marked difference between the portrayals of women's and men's experiences of emigration in modern Irish literature: "Tá sé suimiúil freisin go dtagann léiriú na litríochta le fianaise na staire a dhearbhaíonn nárbh ionann meon na mban agus meon na bhfear i dtaobh na...