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Scribbling Women Scribbling Women A Jury Of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter Review by: Carole DeSanti The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 26, No. 4 (July / August 2009), pp. 5-7 Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20698204 . Accessed: 09/10/2014 11:57 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Old City Publishing, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Women's Review of Books. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 149.130.186.228 on Thu, 9 Oct 2014 11:57:32 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions women writers conference September 10-12, 2009 Featuring: inauguration poet I ElizabethAlexander with I lonoree Fanonne Jeffers on in mentorship Women Scribbling women writers5 lives A JuryOf Her Peers: American Women Writers fromAnne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx and By Elaine Showalter Readings, panels, with: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, 608 pp., $30.00, hardcover workshops Salile Bingham Reviewed DeSanti by Carole Nikky Finney Holly Goddard Jones he that comes to mind over the Men can do and Women know itwell. image best, Gina McCauley I course of reading Elaine Showalter's A Jury Preeminence in all and each is yours a Yet some small of ours. Christine Schutt I ofHer Peers is that of stage-set concealed grant acknowledgement a and JL behind theatrical scrim, opaque Susan Vreeland mysterious. As the spotlights come on one by one, But the human appetite for the taboo and the scene behind the scrim is slowly revealed as a forbidden, along with puzzling evidence that work could be huge, complicated tableau vivant of lives, deaths, women's "intellectually inferior" births, loves, and struggles, portrayed by costumed highly marketable, set the stage formuch of what actors and set the of successive was to come. now: against backdrop Register untold of women's narrative an eras?the great story literary Revealingly, the firstknown work by effort on these shores. The effect of thewhole is American woman writer was A True History of the in its and sometimes in its and Restoration Mrs. Rowlandson, stunning scope shocking Captivity of Mary www.uky.edu/wwk particulars. Altogether, A Jury ofHer Peers is a published in 1682, an account of the 1676 Indian in or 257-2874 generous, significant guide to heretofore uncharted raids inWestern Massachusetts that resulted the call (859) a author's abduction and three-month terrain. Showalter has cut path through the imprisonment wilderness. among the Narragansett. Rowlandson's captivity Indeed, it is in the wilderness that her epic narrative sets the tone formany of the lives that begins. A Jury ofHer Peers opens with the New follow: the paths ofwomen writers, as described by England Puritans, reminding us thatUS women's Showalter, have been characterized by difficult 1979-2009 or female literary ancestors, the first two of whom dislocations, epics of peregrination, flights of were followed confinement?and born in England and traveled to the New imagination, by poor World by sea, insisted on putting pen to paper nourishment. Rowlandson recounts her diet among despite God's apparent decree that they were the Indians: intellectually inferiorbeings, had nothing of worth not merit attention. Horses' and and all sorts of wild to express, and did public guts ears, in and at the Notoriety, they had been told, wrongly invaded birds...Also Bear, Venison, Beavers, Tortois, Lexington If Rattle-snakes: their appropriate terrain, the private sphere. their Frogs, Squirils, Dogs, Skunks, University of Kentucky was of Trees. writings did happen to achieve publication, it yea, the very Barks only as anomalies and with a great fuss of preamble Anne America's first is an theme. Women writers and apology. Bradstreet, Entrapment ongoing woman are as poet, wrote: held captive in oppressive marriages, in the Women's Review of Books 5 This content downloaded from 149.130.186.228 on Thu, 9 Oct 2014 11:57:32 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions first to have any public voice at all?have had with the dispossessed races of their new nation. Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867), a New HarrietBeecher Stowe, despite Englander famous in the 1820s, possessed "a keen j^B?^^^^ I^^B and for the all the controversysurrounding [Uncle Tom's daring sympathy outsider," including ^^^Bjjjj^SB^jB slaves and Native Americans. However, she Cabin]and thecriticism of it,both in its adopted anti-abolitionist views later in her life, ^^^^H^Hj^HH abandoned a novel about and ? own era and ours, is "themost slavery, eventually ^ ^ |||2^ | described her own successful literary career as importantfigure in the history of "accidental," a pastime to console her for being unmarried and childless. The prolific Lydia Maria - ^Bj^^^^^^^^&j Child (1802 1880), born to a working-class Medford, Massachusetts, family and raised with little formal education, took issue with what she felt case - or was "deficient ... moral with of JuliaWard Howe (1819 1910) Genevi?ve civilization and into the forecastle of thewhale ship Sedgwick's courage" Taggard (1894 -1948); in sanitariums, like Charlotte on the lonely ocean." And with that,we are off and regard to the issue of race. Child herself adopted an Perkins Gilman (1869 -1935); by domestic running. According to a writer in 1798?a novelist outspoken stance against slavery, proposing encirclement like Lydia Maria Child (1802 -1880); herself?novels became "the favourite, and the interracial marriage as a solution to the racial - and inmany cases by imprisoning structures of most dangerous, kind of reading now adopted by divide. Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791 1865) was thought. Following a highly productive and public the generality of young ladies...They often pervert also impassioned about the injustices perpetrated career, Shirley Jackson (1916 -1965), according to the judgment,mislead the affections, and blind the on Native peoples, and continued towrite on the In came Jonathan Le them's introduction to Jackson's book understanding." topic despite its unpopularity. 1852 the We Have Always Lived in theCastle, which Showalter The mass market for women's fiction truly juggernaut Uncle Tom's Cabin, a worldwide quotes, "succumbed almost entirely to a crippling established itself in the 1850s, and itwas in this era sensation that united the category of bestselling ... a on eve doubt and fear, squalid, unreasonable that the battle lines between literary and novel with the issue of slavery the of the male canonization vs. female its an agoraphobia?a sort of horrible parody of the full marketplace acclaim, Civil War, earning author unparalleled time homemaker's role she assumed." Even when popular appeal, began to be drawn. Showalter position in this canon: Showalter argues that the uprooting is done by thewomen themselves, writes, "As women's fiction became more and more Harriet Beecher Stowe, despite all the controversy their expressive, imaginative selves have often commercially popular, male editors and writers surrounding the novel and the criticism of it,both more a in its own era and is most remained restricted and bound?as if the world protested vigorously against female ours, "the important didn't know what to do with them, or indeed, they invasion of the literary marketplace." In an figure in the history ofAmerican women writers." did not know what to do with themselves. anecdote thatpresages the still-unresolved tensions In themid-1850s, black women writers began to One thing, though, is clear: women writers of our own day, she recounts Nathaniel emerge to speak in theirown voices, although these eras Maria Cummins's through the have demonstrated talent, ingenu Hawthorne's rage against works raised "problems of authorial identification," ity, creativity, and ambition in abundance. They bestselling novel The Lamplighter (1854). Hawthorne and were "difficult to categorize in terms of genre." contributed energetically the creation of an railed angrily to his publisher,William Ticknor, From this erawe have FrancesWatkins Harper (1825 - American an initial a woman literary culture, effort defined, 1922), free black from Baltimore who ly, as replacing British content with American America is now wholly given over to a d?d published poetry in response to Stowe in the scenes and characters in both children's and adult mob of scribbling women, and I should have abolitionist press, thanking thenovelist. literature.From the early English settlers,Showalter no chance of success while the public taste is In 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl us to woman so a reconnects the first American play occupied with their trash... [w]hat is the appeared under pseudonym, presented and - wright, Mercy Otis Warren; Phyllis Wheatly, the mystery of these innumerable editions of The "edited" by Lydia Maria Child who was widely, firstAfrican American woman poet; Judith Sargent Lamplighter?" at the time, considered to have authored it. The Murray, the first major feminist author; and mystery was resolved only in 1971, when Jean as Susanna
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