BiblioVault - Books about Women in literature

Beyond the Gibson Girl

Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915

Martha H. Patterson

University of Illinois Press, 2005

Challenging monolithic images of the New Woman as white, well-educated, and politically progressive, this study focuses on important regional, ethnic, and sociopolitical differences in the use of the New Woman trope at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girls" as a point of departure, Martha H. Patterson explores how writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Margaret Murray Washington, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather challenged and redeployed the New Woman image in light of other “new” conceptions: the "New Negro Woman," the "New Ethics," the "New South," and the "New China."

As she appears in these writers' works, the New Woman both promises and threatens to effect sociopolitical change as a consumer, an instigator of evolutionary and economic development, and (for writers of color) an icon of successful assimilation into dominant Anglo-American culture. Examining a diverse array of cultural products, Patterson shows how the seemingly celebratory term of the New Woman becomes a trope not only of progressive reform, consumer power, transgressive femininity, modern energy, and modern cure, but also of racial and ethnic taxonomies, social Darwinist struggle, imperialist ambition, assimilationist pressures, and modern decay.

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The Bitch is Back

Wicked Women in Literature

Sarah Appleton Aguiar

Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

Although the “bitch” has always commanded a prominent spot in popular culture—television, movies, art—she virtually disappeared from the work of the second wave of feminist writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now, announces Sarah Appleton Aguiar, the bitch is back, returned once more to cultural center stage in the world of serious literature.

Feminist writers such as Mary Gordon and Alice Walker, to name only two, felt obligated to subvert literary misrepresentations of females as dimensionless, to refute preconceptions of objectified characters, and, of paramount importance, to create memorable women full of complexity and character. They wanted to create a subjective reality for their protagonists. And they succeeded admirably.

But along the road to subjectivity, that vital woman, empowered with anger, with ruthless survival instincts—the bitch—was banished from the pages of feminist fiction. The village gossips, calculating gold-diggers, merciless backstabbers, sinful sirens, evil stepmothers, deadly daughters, twisted sisters, hags, bags, and crones—all had vanished from the fiction written by women. Ubiquitous in other forms of media, the bitch was noticeably absent from the feminist literary canon.

Aguiar, however, points to indications in contemporary culture that the season of the bitch is fast approaching. Contemporary feminist writers and theorists are making substantial reevaluations of the archetypal bitch. Focusing on the traits and the types of guises usually associated with this vital character, Aguiar discusses such characters as Zenia in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, Ruth Patchett in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Sula in Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Ginny in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres.

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Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin

Trudier Harris

University of Tennessee Press, 1985

In James Baldwin's fiction, according to Trudier Harris, black women are conceptually limited figures until their author ceases to measure them by standards of the community fundamentalist church. Harris analyzes works written over a thirty-year period to show how Baldwin's development of female character progresses through time.

Black women in the early fiction, responding to their elders as well as to religious influences, see their lives in terms of duty as wives, mothers, sisters, and lovers. Failure in any of these roles leads to guilt feelings and the expectation of damnation. In later works, Baldwin adopts a new point of view, acknowledging complex extenuating circumstances in lieu of pronouncing moral judgement. Female characters in works written at this stage eventually come to believe that the church affords no comfort.

Baldwin subsequently makes villains of some female churchgoers, and caring women who do not attend church become his most attractive characters. Still later in Baldwin's career, a woman who frees herself of guilt by moving completely beyond the church attains greater contentment than almost all of her counterparts in the earlier works.

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