Sister's Choice Traditions and Change in American Women's Writing [Hardcover]

When Elaine Showalter's study of English women writers,A Literature of Their Own, appeared in 1977, Patricia M. Spacks hailed it inThe New York Times Book Reviewas provocative....thoughtfully argued, and certain to generate fresh social and literary understanding. Now Showalter--who also edited the influentialNew Feminist Criticism(for which theNew York Times Book Reviewfound 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'sLittle Women, Edith Wharton'sHouse of Mirth, and Kate Chopin'sThe 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 ofSister's Choiceis spectacular--from Alice Walker'sThe Color Purple(Celie's quilt provides Showalter's title--an allusion to the multiple destinies of American women) to Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle 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'sTempestby 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 l³@