9780198123835
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Sister's Choice: Traditions and Change in American Women's Writing share button
Elaine Showalter
Genre Fiction Books & Literature
Format Hardcover
Dimensions 5.63 (w) x 8.81 (h) x 0.67 (d)
Pages 208
Publisher Oxford University Press, USA
Publication Date November 1991
ISBN 9780198123835
Book ISBN 10 0198123833
About Book

When Elaine Showalter's study of English women writers, A Literature of Their Own, appeared in 1977, Patricia M. Spacks hailed it in The New York Times Book Review as "provocative....thoughtfully argued," and certain to "generate fresh social and literary understanding." Now Showalter—who also edited the influential New Feminist Criticism (for which the New York Times Book Review found "cause to celebrate")—turns her critical insight to a wide range of American women authors in order to explore the diversity of our culture and question the concept of a single national literature or identity.
After a lucid discussion of recent African-American, feminist, and post-colonial scholarship, Showalter provides provocative readings of classic and lesser-known women's writings. The focal points of this study are the delightful chapters on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Not only are Showalter's interpretations full of wit and subtlety—as when she compares Chopin's novel to a piece of music by the composer Chopin—but her imaginative invocation of these popular works makes us curious to rediscover them. The range of Sister's Choice is spectacular—from Alice Walker's The Color Purple (Celie's quilt provides Showalter's title—an allusion to the multiple destinies of American women) to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (which is compared to the popular Log Cabin pattern quilt of the 19th century). Along the way we find chapters on rewritings of Shakespeare's Tempest by American women, on the Female Gothic (from Anne Radcliffe to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Joyce Carol Oates), on Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neal Hurston (who died in a welfare home, only to have her work rediscovered decades later), even on the history of the patchwork quilt in literature and in women's lives, which ends with a moving description of the Names Project, the quilt which memorializes people who have died of AIDS.
The broad scope of Sister's Choice (which is based on the prestigious Clarendon lectures from 1989) testifies to the multiplicity of cultures which make up the United States. In her approach to literary works, Elaine Showalter helps to envision a new map of America—one which charts the struggles, suffering, and enduring creativity of women's writing.

Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

The title of this collection of essays (some delivered as lectures at Oxford in 1989) refers to a quilting pattern—the image, as Showalter (English/Princeton; Sexual Anarchy, 1990, etc.) explains, that best describes women's literature in America: its communal and ritual nature, its continuity, its diversity, its history as a domestic art that lapsed into disrepute before being resurrected into a high art in the 60's. Showalter's dual preoccupation with the role of women writers and the special identity of American literature appears in the first essay, "Miranda's Story," describing the way various American subcultures have appropriated The Tempest—the role of Miranda, the Dark Lady, Shakespeare's sister—as played by American women, the prototype being Margaret Fuller. In successive chapters on Alcott's Little Women, Chopin's The Awakening, and Wharton's The House of Mirth, Showalter identifies the distinctive voices, values, preoccupations, "hybridity" of American women's writing that makes any question of being Shakespeare's sister irrelevant. And in an astute chapter on what she calls "women's gothic," she further explores the contributions of women writers to the dominant male culture. Even in her chapter on the lost generation of women writers of the 20's—poets such as Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, and Elinor Wylie, and Afro-Americans such as Zora Neale Hurston—she finds, in spite of the exclusion, victimization, and repression, a "literary history of female mastery and growth." Persuasive, ranging, perceptive, unpolemical, Showalter here offers a splendid example of humanistic writing, of her own "female mastery and growth," a genuine contribution tocontemporary thinking about women's literature. Her flaw: excessive quoting of scholars who don't write as well as she does, illustrating merely that she has done her homework. (Photographs of quilts.)
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