Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. Two biographies encapsulate the impact of feminism on the critical study of American women's writing: Sharon O'Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Wolff, for instance, argues that Wharton had been emotionally starved as a child, and that her 'feast of words' provided compensation for this trauma. Both Wolff and O'Brien write a feminist psychobiography of their subject. 2. On the various paradigm shifts in American literary studies see Philip Fisher, l\.merican Literary and Cultural Studies since the Civil War', in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (eds), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York: MLA, 1992), pp. 232-50. Nina Baym's essay 'Melodramas of Beset Manhood - How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors' remains the classic feminist attack on the theoreti­ cal structuring of the American canon (see Elaine Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism (London: Virago, 1986), pp. 63-80). 3. Elaine Showalter, Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 146. 4. Annette Kolodny, l\. Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts', New Literary History, 11 (1980), pp. 451-67. Two other important essays on this subject are: Carla Kaplan, 'Reading Feminist Readings: Recuperative Reading and the Silent Heroine of Feminist Criticism', in Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (eds), Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 168-94; Deborah McDowell, '''The Changing Same": Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists', New Literary History, 18 (1987), pp. 281-302. 5. Alice Walker, 'Dedication' to I Love Myself when I am Laughing: A 20ra Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (New York: Feminist Press, 1979), p. 2. 6. Susan Sontag, 'Note on the Play', Alice in Bed (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), p. 116. 7. Ibid., p. 117. 8. My discussion here is indebted to Elaine Neil Orr, Subject to Negotiation: Reading Feminist Criticism and American Women's Fictions (Charlottesville, Va., and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997). 219 220 Twentieth-Century American Women's Fiction Orr calls for' a criticism of negotiations, a form of work that emerges where feminist readers and intellectuals argue for productive rela­ tions at the crossroads of difference and opposition' (p. 2). 9. Gillian Beer, 'The Waves: "The Life of Anybody" , in Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p.77. 10. Willa Cather, On Writing, with a Foreword by Stephen Tennant (1949; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 12. 1 'Sickbed Deathbed Birthbed' 1. Susan Sontag, Alice in Bed (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), p.40. 2. T. J. Jackson Lears, in Richard Wightman Fox and Lears (eds), The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 3-4. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 47-58, 'A Psychic Crisis: Neurasthenia and the Emergence of a Therapeutic World View'. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W W Norton, 1978) - Lasch primarily discusses postwar American life, but it is clear that he regarded the end of the nineteenth century as the point when narcissism and its attendant therapies first emerged. See his discus­ sion of the waning of the Protestant work ethic (see pp. 52--63). 3. Cited in the 'Introduction' to The Diary of Alice James, ed. and with an Introduction by Leon Edel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 15. Future references in the text are to this edition. 4. Ernest Hemingway to Edmund Wilson, 25 November 1923, Selected Letters, 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner's, 1981), p. 105. I discuss Hemingway's response to Cather in my Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 4-5. 5. Toni Morrison, interview with Tom Le Clair, in Le Clair and Larry McCaffery (eds), Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 252--61 at p. 253. 6. Rosa Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 7. Kristin Boudreau, ' ''A Barnum Monstrosity": Alice James and the Spectacle of Sympathy', American Literature, 65 (1993), pp. 53-67 at p. 56. See also Mary Cappello, 'Alice James: "Neither Dead nor Alive"', American Imago, 45 (1988), pp. 127-62. Cappello persuasively argues that James used a kind of comic indifference to her fate to create imaginative freedom. 8. Julie Bates Dock, '''But one Expects That": Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the Shifting Light of Notes 221 Scholarship', PMLA, 111 (1996), pp. 52-63, discusses the fraught textual history of Gilman's story, and argues that many modern editions do not use the most authoritative 1892 New England Magazine text. All my quotations are from the Oxford Classics edition, which does use this text: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories, edited by Robert Shulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). All quotations in my text are to this edition. 9. William Davitt Bell (citing Henry James and William Dean Howells), The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp.175-6. 10. Recently, however, critics have offset Gilman's radicalism by arguing that her politics of colour and race were reactionary. Elizabeth Ammons in Contending Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 34--43, argues that the polemic power of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' is limited by the very specificity of Gilman's focus on a white, middle-class heroine. My discussion of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar deals with a later version of this argument (bell hooks's attack on 1960s middle-class feminists). Susan S. Lanser makes the depressing suggestion that the horror of 'yellow wallpaper' is largely produced by end-of-century racial typecasting: 'Feminist Criticism, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and the Politics of Color in America', Feminist Studies, 15 (1989), pp. 415-41. 11. Willa Cather, 'Preface' to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925), reprinted in The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 11. Another version of this essay, which omits the quoted sentences, was published in Cather's 1936 collection, Not Under Forty. 12. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 124. 13. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, 'The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America', Signs, 1 (1975), pp. 1-29. 14. Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 92. Future references in the text are to this edition. 15. 'Jewett is both more "modern" (in her concern with circuits and exchange) and more "nineteenth-century" (in her religious belief and didacticism) than any turn-of-the-century local colorist is conceived to be' Oune Howard, 'Unraveling Regions, Unsettling Periods: Sarah Orne Jewett and American Literary History', American Literature, 68 (1996), pp. 365-84 at p. 379). 16. Marilyn Sanders Mobley, Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison (Baton Rouge, La., and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1991). She discusses the griot figure on pp. 79-82. 17. Ann Douglas, 'The Literature of Impoverishment: the Women Local Colorists in America, 1865--1914', Women's Studies, 1 (1972),2--40. 222 Twentieth-Century American Women's Fiction 18. Elaine Showalter, 'The Awakening: Tradition and the American Female Talent', in Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 67. 19. Review reprinted in The Awakening (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994), 'Contemporary Reviews', pp. 164-5 at p. 165. Future references to The Awakening are to this edition, and are given in the text. 20. Helen Taylor, 'Walking through New Orleans: Kate Chopin and the Female Flaneur', Symbiosis, 1 (1997), pp. 69-85 at p. 70. Taylor sets Chopin in the context of the cultural typecasting of New Orleans. 21. Rod Edmond, Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative (London: Routledge, 1988). Edmond usefully summarises Victorian British domestic ideology, but also suggests that writers challenged this as often as they conformed to it. It is worth noting that a recent collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, stories dealing with the aberrations of the home and domestic catastrophes, is simply entitled Heat (1991). 22. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969) pp. 25-6 details Chopin's interest in European writers including de Stael and Bronte. 23. Jonathan Little, 'Nella Larsen's Passing: Irony and the Critics', African American Review, 26 (1992), pp. 173-82 at p. 173. Little, like me, reads Larsen as an ironist rather than an affirmative or progressive writer. 24. A range of commentaries on the ending of The Awakening are included in the Norton critical edition. They include George M. Spangler, who sees suicide as a capitulation to sentimental conven­ tions; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, who reads Edna's decline in psychoan­ alytical terms of neurotic collapse; and, above all, Chopin's biographer, Per Seyersted, who interprets self-destruction as an act of obdurate heroism.