A compelling critical investigation into Gilman’s conception of setting and place

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman’s Place in America is a pioneering collection that probes how depictions of space, confinement, and liberation establish both the difficulty and necessity of female empowerment. Turning Victorian notions of propriety and a woman’s place on its ear, this finely crafted essay collection studies Gilman’s writings and the manner in which they push back against societal norms and reject male-dominated confines of space.

The contributors present fascinating and innovative readings of some of Gilman’s most significant works. By examining the settings in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland, for example, the volume analyzes Gilman’s construction of place, her representations of male dominance and female subjugation, and her analysis of the rules and obligations that women feel in conforming to their assigned place: the home.
 
Additionally, this volume delineates female resistance to this conformity. Contributors highlight how Gilman’s narrators often choose resistance over obedient captivity, breaking free of the spaces imposed upon them in order to seek or create their own habitats. Through biographical interpretations of Gilman’s work that focus on the author’s own renouncement of her “natural” role of wife and mother, contributors trace her relocation to the American West in an attempt to appropriate the masculinized spaces of work and social organization.
 
Engaging, well-researched, and deftly written, the essays in this collection will appeal to scholars of Gilman, literature, and gender issues alike.

Christina Rossetti was considered the ideal female poet of her time. Her poetry was devo­tional, moral, and spoke of frustrated affection.

Dolores Rosenblum presents a fresh reading of Rossetti’s works and places them in the con­text of her life. Rosenblum shows that what was ostensibly devotional, moral, and loveless, was actually what Luce Irigaray calls “mimetism,” a subtle parody and subversion of the male tra­dition of literature.

Only with the coming of feminist criticism can Rossetti be meaningfully re-evaluated. Rosenblum calls Rossetti’s works the “poetry of endurance,” stating that it is similar, and at times identical, to the female “sentimental” tradition in literature. Rossetti endured the con­straints of the Victorian female artistic spirit by becoming a “watcher.” Within this self-accepted role, Rossetti was able to carefully and deliber­ately choose artistic self-protection. In her reli­gious poetry, Rossetti transcended, by aesthetic renunciation, the alienation and immobilization forced upon her.

Rossetti’s poetry is full of paradox; it sings about silence, exposes the poet’s oblivion. From the repining Victorian poet, there emerged a “stone woman.” Rosenblum discusses this pas­sively enduring female figure’s alienation from knowledge and power, and how the myth of self strengthened the lyric voice within her. Because she was a woman, she was denied the male use of the lyric “I.”

Rossetti’s work is unified, Rosenblum argues, because she was a deliberate poet, and by accepting the “burden of womanhood,” she played out what men only symbolized as female in their art. By her mimicry and revision of the male tradition of literature, Christina Rossetti engaged the patriarchal tradition in ways that make it usable for the female experience, and that provide a critique of male objectification of women in art.

From the creation of a neuter pronoun in her earliest work, L’Opoponax, to the confusion of genres in her most recent fiction, Virgile, non, Monique Wittig uses literary subversion and invention to accomplish what Erika Ostrovsky appropriately defines as renversement, the annihilation of existing literary canons and the creation of highly innovative constructs.

Erika Ostrovsky explores those aspects of Wittig’s work that best illustrate her literary approach. Among the countless revolutionary devices that Wittig uses to achieve renversement are the feminization of masculine gender names, the reorganization of myth patterns, and the replacement of traditional punctuation with her own system of grammatical emphasis and separation. It is the unexpected quantity and quality of such literary devices that make reading Monique Wittig’s fiction a fresh and rewarding experience. Such literary devices have earned Wittig the acclaim of her critics and peers—Marguerite Duras, Mary McCarthy, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon, to name a few.

While analyzing the intrinsic value of each of Wittig’s fictions separately, Erika Ostrovsky traces the progressive development of Wittig’s major literary devices as they appear and reappear in her fictions. Ostrovsky maintains that the seeds of those innovations that appear in Wittig’s most recent texts can be found as far back as L’Opoponax. This evidence of progression supports Ostrovsky’s theory that clues to Wittig’s future endeavors can be found in her past.