Jury of her Peers, Elaine Showalter – Sunday Times
May 24, 2009
From The Sunday Times May 24, 2009
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon: Authors prone to self-pity should spare a thought for Phillis Wheatley. As a teenage slave in colonial Boston, the African-born girl showed such prodigious poetic talent that a special tribunal was called to determine if her writing was authentic. After a gruelling cross-examination by a jury composed of “18 prominent Massachusetts public figures”, it was determined that she was indeed author of her own work. After that sort of scrutiny, a bad review would have seemed like a walk in the park. That bizarre public trial sets the tone for Elaine Showalter’s superb survey of American women writers. According to Showalter, the author of a definitive book about British female writers, American women have al-ways been judg-ed by a harsher set of standards than men. In the years leading up to the civil war, female authors were expected to be ladies first, artists second. As the satirist Caroline Kirkland claimed in 1843, “A lady always feels under a certain degree of restraint when she feels that the world is looking her in the face all the time — many a thought ‘funny, free, and flashy’ is checked through a feeling of diffidence.” Nathaniel Hawthorne himself asserted that “ink-stained women are, without a single exception, detestable”. Transgressors of this code could be punished severely, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who after a bout of depression in 1887 was subjected by a doctor to a “rest cure” in which she was ordered to “live as domestic a life as possible” and “have your child with you all the time”, and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live”. Authorial insecurity was reinforced by comparisons with British cousins such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, who benefited from working in a nation that did not so greatly favour “outdoor” male virtues. In fact, so great was Eliot’s sway over American female writers that several saw her death “as the exorcism of an oppressive ghost”. Related Internet Links * Buy the book here Of course, many were able to break free of these chains, notably Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was arguably the most important American novel of the 19th century. But it wasn’t until the early 20th century that authors such as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton could refuse “to be defined as women at all”. Showalter brilliantly demonstrates how the remainder of the century saw a steady liberation of the American female literary voice, from the suffrage movement through leftist politics and several waves of feminism, culminating in the great unzipping of the 1960s and 1970s that allowed Erica Jong to produce Fear of Flying. We have now entered an era where women no longer, in the words of Ursula Le Guin, “have to write like an honorary man”. As Annie Proulx asserts, female authors “can write about anything they want, any sex they want, any place they want”. Although the central virtue of A Jury of Her Peers is its vast scope, it also provides compelling glimpses into the lives of nearly forgotten artists, such as Anzia Yezierska, the “Sweatshop Cinderella”, and Shirley Jackson, whose macabre novels are now experiencing a renaissance. (The book’s only notable omission is Ayn Rand — one wishes that Showalter, who can be wonderfully acerbic, had held her nose and dealt with this wildly popular right-wing icon.) None of the book’s authors proves more compelling, though, than Gilman, who escaped her crippling “cure” to write a great short story about the experience, The Yellow Wallpaper. You might be able to send a good woman to bed, but you can’t keep her down.
Virago £22.50 pp400
Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre – Washington Post
May 20, 2009
Hot Potatoes in Small-Town Idaho
By Stephen Amidon
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
LAKE OVERTURN
By Vestal McIntyre
Harper. 443 pp. $24.99
The title of Vestal McIntyre’s engrossing first novel may have the comforting overtones of a Garrison Keillor yarn, but in fact it refers to one of nature’s more deadly phenomena. Notoriously witnessed at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986, an overturn occurs when built-up carbon dioxide at the bottom of a lake causes the water to invert, releasing a deadly cloud into the atmosphere. At Nyos, roughly 1,700 villagers were killed by the incident, forcing scientists to wonder just how many other time bombs were ticking beneath placid waters.
McIntyre’s novel is set at the same time as this tragedy, but in a part of the world very far from West Africa: the small town of Eula, Idaho. Located in the high desert on the shores of a large lake, it is a remote outpost of American life, a conservative, deeply religious place that always seems to be about five years behind the rest of the country. It is the sort of community where the cutting edge is defined by giving the prom a “Miami Vice” theme and where social climbing involves buying a bigger trailer home.
“The earth seemed to lose its meat here and become dry,” McIntyre writes, “as if a vast rock — a skull — rose underground, leaving only the thinnest skin of soil.” Most of the town’s inhabitants, particularly its women, are holding on to this blasted terrain for dear life.
Wanda, for instance, is an unemployed babysitter who finds solace in painkillers after being abandoned by a shiftless boyfriend. Her chance for happiness comes when she signs up to serve as a surrogate mother for a yuppie couple from Oregon. Connie, who works in a nursing home, tries to soothe the pain of her husband’s desertion with a passionate devotion to Jesus Christ, a faith that leads her into an unlikely romance with a handsome young missionary. Lina, a housecleaner who has also been dumped by her man, flees her life’s dreariness through an affair with one of her married clients, Chuck Hall.
Their children also thirst for deliverance from harsh lives. Enrique, Lina’s junior high school-aged son, hopes to win the Idaho state science fair with a project about the risks of lake overturn after hearing the grim news from Cameroon, though his partnership with Connie’s mercurial son, Gene, is also a way for him to explore his burgeoning homosexuality. Enrique’s older brother is in love with a classmate, though he must confine his pursuit of her to anonymous notes so as not to risk offending local prejudices against Latino boys dating white girls. And Chuck’s daughter must balance her desperation to flee this small town against an obligation to look after her dying mother.
In “Lake Overturn,” McIntyre has created a vast, intricate lattice of relationships, reminiscent of the novels of Richard Russo. McIntyre’s skill, however, is not always up to managing such a complex plot. On occasion, his narrative is repetitive. Both Connie and Wanda endure the unwelcome return of the men who ditched them in scenes that wind up feeling too similar. The reader is also afforded two visits to junior high school science fairs, when none would have probably sufficed. And McIntyre is not always wise about the amount of face time he affords members of his large cast. For instance, the book opens with a promising confrontation between a despotic high school principal and an amiable bus driver, both of whom then drop from the narrative until its last chapters.
These rookie mistakes are more than made up for, however, by a real talent for characterization and an ability to capture the dramas lurking beneath Eula’s deceptively still waters. Wanda is a particularly fine creation, a woman whose lies and drug abuse cannot dent her fundamental humanity. Her interactions with the yuppie couple whose baby she is to carry are small marvels of social satire. Equally memorable is Chuck’s daughter, who endangers a brilliant future in order to help her dying mother, most notably in a sequence where she must take her mother’s place in the inner sanctum of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.
Enrique, meanwhile, provides a haunting portrait of growing up gay in a town dominated by fundamentalist Christianity and cowboy culture, where erotic fantasies must be indulged with copies of Working Out magazine and visits to the men’s room of the local bus station.
McIntyre is an honest enough artist that he even makes one admire his more unlikable characters, including one whose descent into the town’s culture of macho brutality is driven by a sense of racial and social inadequacy. Here is an author capable of handling even the most noxious elements when he stirs his American backwater.
Amidon’s most recent novel is “Security.”
