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Women in Culture and Society
Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism
The 1890s have long been thought one of the most male-oriented eras in American history. But in reading such writers as Frank Norris with Mary Wilkins Freeman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman with Stephen Crane, Jennifer L. Fleissner boldly argues that feminist claims in fact shaped the period's cultural mainstream. Women, Compulsion, Modernity reopens a moment when the young American woman embodied both the promise and threat of a modernizing world.
Fleissner shows that this era's expanding opportunities for women were inseparable from the same modern developments—industrialization, consumerism—typically believed to constrain human freedom. With Women, Compulsion, and Modernity , Fleissner creates a new language for the strange way the writings of the time both broaden and question individual agency.
Fleissner shows that this era's expanding opportunities for women were inseparable from the same modern developments—industrialization, consumerism—typically believed to constrain human freedom. With Women, Compulsion, and Modernity , Fleissner creates a new language for the strange way the writings of the time both broaden and question individual agency.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 6, 2011
A scholarly book on U.S. Literary Naturalism that places the representation of modern women at the center of the naturalist project. Fleissner complicates the critical commonplace that naturalism describes social determinism, a historical allegory that imagines modernity as the fall, and condemns the threat of femininity, elevating instead the virile man. Instead, Fleissner proposes that novels and short stories within the typically separated traditions of local color writing (usually women-authored) and naturalist novels (usually male-authored) actually mutually articulate a fascination with and an uncertainty and striving about the figure of the modern woman, her increased mobility and agency and also the continued circumscription and containment of her social lot.
Fleissner uses the concept of compulsion (repetition, obsession, oscillation) to describe some of the unruly effects of literary naturalism--its emotional extremity, excessive description, and general atmosphere of "stuck-ness." My favorite chapters in the book were her readings of Sister Carrie, taking seriously Carrie's professionalism where earlier readings focused on her consumerism alone, and of McTeague, interpreting Trina not as a dismissible and shallow villain but rather as a frustrated creator and collector. Fleissner both disputes and synthesizes the extant criticism with grace. Her overall thesis is utterly compelling and eloquently, passionately argued. She does a great job also using her own individual analyses to probe the limitations of received models of feminist and New Historicist criticism.
This book was a pleasure to read (which cannot always be said of scholarly books!) and really helped illuminate major works of this period for me. One minor quibble is Fleissner's tendency to overuse the construction in which one concept, trope, or action appears to be one thing but in fact is produced by or working towards its opposite. This formulation became a commonplace in literary criticism with the deconstructionists, and it has a lot of value and conceptual power, but it can also begin to sound forced. (perhaps that's appropriate in an argument about repetition, recursion, etc.!)
What I loved most about Fleissner's study is that she allows the novels and stories to speak for themselves (in their contradictions, strange textures, and character traits rather than totalities) and gives accounts of those complexities rather than forcing them towards a prescriptivist reading. She makes a strong argument throughout the book (particularly touchingly at the end) that historical and political prescriptivism does violence to the complexity in this literature and in our own tangled ideological experiences. Also, Fleissner writes with wit and precision. A nice line: "For someone said to be 'awakening,' Edna does quite a bit of sleeping throughout the book."
Fleissner uses the concept of compulsion (repetition, obsession, oscillation) to describe some of the unruly effects of literary naturalism--its emotional extremity, excessive description, and general atmosphere of "stuck-ness." My favorite chapters in the book were her readings of Sister Carrie, taking seriously Carrie's professionalism where earlier readings focused on her consumerism alone, and of McTeague, interpreting Trina not as a dismissible and shallow villain but rather as a frustrated creator and collector. Fleissner both disputes and synthesizes the extant criticism with grace. Her overall thesis is utterly compelling and eloquently, passionately argued. She does a great job also using her own individual analyses to probe the limitations of received models of feminist and New Historicist criticism.
This book was a pleasure to read (which cannot always be said of scholarly books!) and really helped illuminate major works of this period for me. One minor quibble is Fleissner's tendency to overuse the construction in which one concept, trope, or action appears to be one thing but in fact is produced by or working towards its opposite. This formulation became a commonplace in literary criticism with the deconstructionists, and it has a lot of value and conceptual power, but it can also begin to sound forced. (perhaps that's appropriate in an argument about repetition, recursion, etc.!)
What I loved most about Fleissner's study is that she allows the novels and stories to speak for themselves (in their contradictions, strange textures, and character traits rather than totalities) and gives accounts of those complexities rather than forcing them towards a prescriptivist reading. She makes a strong argument throughout the book (particularly touchingly at the end) that historical and political prescriptivism does violence to the complexity in this literature and in our own tangled ideological experiences. Also, Fleissner writes with wit and precision. A nice line: "For someone said to be 'awakening,' Edna does quite a bit of sleeping throughout the book."
September 19, 2017
It's hard to ask for much more from a scholarly text than this. Fleissner produces readings of primary texts as well as the history of scholarship; readings that expand the bounds of historicism and feminist criticism and yet are compelling in their own right (the one I would quibble with most is the chapter that touches on regionalism and Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman]). Arguments make complex (and satisfying) turns but are nonetheless accessibly written; some places might be a bit digressive, but the arc of an argument or chapter is always evident.
July 24, 2008
The introdcution is wonderfully helpful in reorienting critical thoughts regarding the "moment of American Naturalism" - a period of American literary history typically concerned with the image of the male. My primary complaint with this text is Fleissner's overly ambitious project. Though appreciative of her interdisciplinary approach, there are moments where the import of her argument is obscured by the book's tangential style.
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January 3, 2009More of perused...interesting argument.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews