Kimberley Snow

SOURCE: "Women in the American Novel," in Women: A Feminist Perspective, edited by Jo Freeman, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1975, pp. 279-92.

[In the following essay, Snow examines the evolution of female characterization in American literature from the embodiment of goodness and purity to that of conniving temptress.]

In 1852 Melville described Lucy Tartan in Pierre:

.. . her cheeks were tinted with the most delicate white and red, the white predominating. Her eyes some god brought down from heaven; her hair was Danae's, spangled with Jove's shower; her teeth were dived for in the Persian Sea.

In 1930 Faulkner described Temple Drake in Sanctuary:

Her face was quite pale, the two spots of rouge like paper discs pasted on her cheek bones, her mouth painted into a savage and perfect bow, also like something both symbolical and cryptic cut carefully from purple paper and pasted there. . . . her eyes blank right and left looking, cool, predatory and discreet.

This change from flower to Venus's flytrap took place neither suddenly nor completely. The earlier image of woman as the hand-wrought creation of the gods permeated our culture to such an extent that remnants and distortions of it may still be found. Despite its persistence on the periphery, however, it was gradually obscured and replaced by a more dominant image. In turn, that image was eclipsed by a newer one, until an evolving pattern emerged in which a series of images grew out of, or in opposition to, one another. The contemporary image of woman as a mechanical yet threatening creature is but the current one in this succession. It is not difficult to trace the broad outlines of the evolutionary process that turned the darling of the gods into the witch of the Industrial Revolution.

There are, of course, individual characterizations of women that transcend the usual pattern and works that do not correspond to the dominant trend. [Such individual portraits as Isabel Archer and Hester Prynne immediately spring to mind.] In spite of these exceptions, if one reviews a cross section of American literature for a certain time span, one finds that in general a common attitude toward women prevails and a particular image dominates. In works of literary merit, this portrait is presented in depth, while in popular literature, it tends to be more one-dimensional or stereotyped. But whether the characterization is deep or shallow, within a given time period the underlying attitude toward woman is often depressingly consistent.

In early American literature a number of different types of female characters are found. Several are transplants from European soil, although one, at least, reflects a more specifically American treatment. By the nineteenth century, these types of women and the attitudes behind them had jelled into an idealized portrait of woman. A change occurred around the end of the nineteenth century, and by the middle of the twentieth, the earlier image of woman was almost reversed. In order to trace the change in our literature from the idealized heroine of the nineteenth century to the current demonic one, it is necessary first to review a few of the conventional female types that were carried over into our literature from the European tradition.

The earliest American novels feature the sentimental heroine inherited from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa Harlow, published in 1748. The formula for these novels is simple: a heroine is (reluctantly or through chicanery) seduced, impregnated, and abandoned. In the end the parent/guardian/friend who initially drove her into the arms of the seducer arrives (miraculously) in time for a deathbed scene. Amid copious tears, recriminations, and forgiveness all around, the heroine presents them with her spotless baby (usually a girl) to bring up before she "raised her eyes to Heaven—and then closed them forever."¹ William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794), and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) are all popular examples of this type.

Another popular heroine in the early literature is the onedimensional female who flits through the historical romances of James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms and their imitators. This woman exists essentially as a prop to be brought on stage to swoon, scream, or sigh at the appropriate moment. Her chief function, apparently, is to be rescued by the hero.

Of all the early American novelists, Charles Brockden Brown was the most innovative in his treatment of women. Many of his contemporaries dealt with the idea of the "American Adam"—a second Adam who is given another chance in the second Eden of the New World. Brown, however, was the only one to deal with the New Woman [The New Woman is a term applied to the independent, self-motivated heroine of the Restoration drama. Her immediate origins lie in the Renaissance, although the liberated heroine appears throughout epic literature and mythology.] in the New World. In 1798 Brown, who had been influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft and the French feminists, wrote a dialogue called Alcuin that deals with the education and emancipation of women. In his novels he explored these ideas further by creating rational, self-directed heroines who embody many feminist ideals. Although Brown was not always successful in developing his heroines, his treatment of women, especially in Wieland (1798) and Ormond (1799), is extremely interesting.² His efforts in this area were truly pioneering, for it was not until nearly the end of the nineteenth century that the New Woman emerged as a dominant type in American letters.

In American literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sentimental and historical heroines are dominant. These two did not remain pure types, but became inextricably mixed. Leslie Fiedler, however, has pointed out that there is a curious lack of women of any type in many of the American classics throughout the nineteenth century. He points to Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Red Badge of Courage as examples. It is his thesis that excessive sentimentality has prevented American authors from portraying either woman or sex in a natural manner. The American novel, he writes, "is different from its European prototypes, and one of its essential differences arises from its chary treatment of woman and of sex."³

But Fiedler has oversimplified and exaggerated his case. The English novelists of the same period were no more realistic about sex than the Americans. Dickens, who had a tremendous influence on American novelists, was excessively sentimental about women and never failed to idealize them. Still, Fiedler is right in observing that sex and women do not play a dominant part in our nineteenth-century literature. The reason for this is simple:

American novelists—in their novels—were simply concerned with other things. Since early American writers were strongly influenced by the Puritan meditative tradition, in which the soul is constantly being examined, American literature tends to deal more with the state of the soul than with the individual in society. Theoretically, souls have no sex, but in a sexist society, they are perceived as male and represented as such. [One is reminded of the husband's comment: "My wife and I are one and I am he."] Since women are thus seen in social, not metaphysical terms, it is not surprising that they play a large part in English novels, which deal with society and social relationships, but have a paler role in American literature, which deals with the isolated soul of man, his relationship with himself, or his relationship to God. Up to the novels of Henry James, social relationships, especially between men and women, are not as important in American literature as they are in English or Continental literature.

The Romantic movement in the United States, for example, has a peculiarly desexed quality about it when compared to the Romantic movement in Britain. None of the major American writers of this period show the combined interest in women and sex displayed by Blake and Shelley. Whitman was interested in sex, but except for "Children of Adam," not necessarily in connection with women. The high-minded Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau were concerned neither with women nor with sex, but with philosophy. Poe has many women characters, but they all seem to be dead—or dying.

In spite of Fiedler's claims, the great American fiction writers of this period—Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne—created many women characters. Frequently, however, as would be expected in the type of novel involved, women are treated not as individuals but as symbols of some aspect of man's soul. Of course, to see women in symbolic terms was nothing new. In the Western tradition, with its persistent ideas of a Manichean universe, the dual aspects of man's nature have frequently found symbolic form. In Plato's parable of a chariot pulled by a black horse and a white horse, the dual aspects of man's nature are symbolized by the black horse, which pulls the chariot downward, and the white horse, which pulls it upward, while the charioteer struggles to keep a steady course. [Freud, using the same paradigm, calls them the id, ego, and superego.] Women are substituted for the horses in much of Western literature, but the basic struggle and the underlying symbolism remain the same. In this traditional, even archetypal pattern, the Dark Woman as Fiedler calls her, who symbolizes the evil side of man's nature, is placed in opposition to what he calls the Fair Maiden, who represents the good side. The hero is symbolically caught between the two. This symbolic representation, of course, prevents a realistic portrayal of the woman herself, as an individual in her own right. [Also, the fact that women are always connected with sex and are seen only in their relationships to men gives them a lopsided appearance in literature and prevents realistic characterization. The nonsexual aspects of a woman's life are almost never explored by male authors, and women characters do not think about anything except men. No doubt the fact that women exist in fiction as symbols of man's inner conflicts or as necessary props to his fantasy life indicates their true position in society.]

In the earlier versions of this symbolism, such as the one set forth in the sixteenth century by Spenser in The Faerie Queene, The Fair Maiden is closely identified with God and with the powers of the Establishment. Conversely, the Dark Woman is a temptress who is the agent of the underworld and the darker powers. By the Romantic era, however, the Dark Woman is no longer truly evil but has become increasingly idealized. At the same time she has also become more autonomous and self-motivated, for she is no longer the agent of the devil. In Scott's Ivanhoe, for example, Rebecca's Jewish ancestry connects her with the archetypal Dark Woman, although she is not evil herself. In the novels of Scott and his American followers, the Dark Woman becomes depressingly vapid and virtuous, only a pale carbon of the dangerous creature she once was. Even in Oliver Wendell Holmes's Elsie Venner, where the heroine has deep affinities with the dark powers, her viciousness is sympathetically attributed to a snake bite received by her mother. In the end Elsie repents in a tearful deathbed scene and dies like a good sentimental heroine.

This symbolic representation of the Dark Woman and the Fair Maiden is seen in Poe's "Ligeia," Melville's Pierre, and Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, as well as in numerous other American works. Usually the Dark Woman is pictured as being in love with the hero, and it is only some unfortunate circumstance (she is his sister, she is married, etc.) that prevents her from marrying him. Unlike her progenitors, she exists only for the hero; certainly she has no outside interests such as witchcraft or pacts with the devil. Frequently she has a past, but it remains shrouded in mystery and she gives up all connections with it for the hero. In fact, the Dark Woman's darkness lies mainly in the color of her hair and the obscurity of her origins. Likely as not, she loves the hero as purely and virtuously as the Fair Maiden. Usually, the hero is fascinated or even obsessed with the Dark Woman, but because she is outside the accepted structures of society, he marries the Fair Maiden. [In Melville's Pierre the hero chooses the Dark Woman and all three members of the triangle are destroyed.]

By the end of the century, when the image of woman was generally undergoing a change, novelists shifted their emphasis from the hero's struggle between the Dark Woman and the Fair Maiden to the point of view of one of the women. As the psychology of the Dark Woman was explored, she was portrayed in increasingly sympathetic terms. Ellen Olenska in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, for example, is much more appealing than the fair, cold May Weiland. In William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham, a major portion of the plot hinges on the fact that the hero is in love with the Dark Woman, while everyone (including the women themselves) assumes that he is in love with the Fair Maiden.

To today's reader the Dark Woman of the earlier novels is infinitely more interesting than her pale, pious sister, but this was not always the case. [Even as late as 1957, when the girls in a high school class were asked if they identified with Scarlett O'Hara or Melanie Wilkes, only one chose Scarlett. In 1970, however, three-fourths of the girls in a similar class said they identified with Scarlett.] Contemporary reviews of these novels reveal that the nineteenth-century sympathies were with the Fair Maiden, who stayed well inside the traditional woman's role.

The early women novelists, too, tended to keep women within the usual boundaries, but a study of the domestic novel reveals an unsuspected twist. These novels—written by, about, and for women—have long been dismissed with a sniff by academicians as being unworthy of study. It is true that their literary quality is usually very poor, and their portrayal of the ordinary woman's daily trials and sacrifices in the home, ludicrously heroic. But it was not because of literary quality that the work of such women as Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth and Augusta Jane Evans Wilson outsold that of better writers each year by a wide margin.

In one domestic novel after another, the heroine, who embodies all of the idealized traits of womanhood, glories in her role as wife and mother. She is worshipped because she is that mystical thing known as Woman, and she rules her father, husband, and children through "love." She is the mawkish product of the fireside poets, the epitome of the Victorian ideal of motherhood. The men in the novel, alas for their brute natures, do not always have the higher sensibilities necessary to appreciate these paragons. Thus in the domestic novel the roles of long-suffering martyr, forgiving wife, and indispensable helpmeet reach their apotheosis. No doubt these novels, with their glorification of women, served to keep women satisfied with their roles as wives and mothers, but they also helped to work out unconscious feelings of aggression and hostility by means of fantasy.

On the surface the domestic novel is merely a sentimentalization of woman, but this is only on the surface. When Helen Waite Papashvily analyzed a number of the books, she found that by the end, the husband's or father's great powers had been diminished or destroyed. Frequently the hero died and the novel ended in an orgy of tears at his bedside. (Did someone say wish-fulfillment?) Other times the hero was somehow mutilated, emasculated, bedridden, blinded, or otherwise incapacitated in the course of the novel, and was put under the complete control of the heroine by the end. Sometimes the hero reformed his evil ways (frequently he gave up drinking), but his burden of guilt rendered him as manageable to the heroine as the physical injuries sustained by the heroes of other novels did.

Papashvily writes that although their women characters retained the traditional women's roles, the domestic novels were "a witches' broth, a lethal draught brewed by women and used by women to destroy their common enemy, man": "No man, fortunately for his peace of mind, ever discovered that the domestic novels were handbooks of another kind of feminine revolt—that these pretty tales reflected and encouraged a pattern of feminine behavior so quietly ruthless, so subtly vicious that by comparison the ladies at Seneca appear angels of innocence."⁴ Perhaps the true viciousness of these novels lies in their absolute lack of self-knowledge and honesty. While the self-righteous heroines exploit the roles that are sanctioned by society, their hate and hostility are completely unconscious and completely buried under sentimentality. Thus these women are able to devour their families by "love" and crush them with guilt—while God and society look on approvingly.

In the nineteenth-century popular literature written by men, the heroine shows many of the same characteristics found in the domestic novel, without her proclivities toward castration. A combination of the sentimental and Fair Maiden heroines, she emerges as an idealized, desexed creature, brimming over with piety, purity, and innocence. She has an innate moral sense vastly superior to that of the men around her. She is ethereally beautiful, sensitive, loving, kind, and generous, and if she is occasionally willful, she is just headstrong enough to add spice. She is all heart, and she acts on feminine instinct rather than on the basis of rationality. She is spoken of in diminutives and is invariably described with flower imagery. In fact, she could be called the Dew Drop heroine. Naturally, Dew Drop has no goal in life except marriage and few concerns outside of the domestic.

Dew Drop enjoyed a widespread revival in the popular culture of the 1950's. She was modernized to the extent that she was no longer pious and became inordinately fond of baseball, but she remained incorrigibly virginal and kittenish. Dew Drop reached her apotheosis in Doris Day, and while today the type may still easily be found in popular literature, girls' books, women's magazines and innumerable television series and commercials, her popularity is somewhat diminished.

Even in the nineteenth century, there was a reaction against the saccharine Dew Drop, and by the late 1900's, two different reactions were easily discernible. One reaction sprang from the intellectual currents set in motion by realism and naturalism, and eventually led to a more realistic treatment of women. The other stemmed from the feminist movement and led to the reintroduction of the New Woman into American literature. In the case of the former, it is obvious that at first American novelists could be realistic and naturalistic about almost everything except their heroines. Generally, their women characters continue in the tradition of Dew Drop or they are lightly varnished over with a thin coating of realism or naturalism.

Such a novelist as Frank Norris, for example, who is hailed as a pioneer in naturalism, has given us the following description of a young woman: "She sat thus, as on a throne, raised about the rest, the radiance of the unseen crown of motherhood glowing from her forehead, the beauty of the perfect woman surrounding her like a glory."⁵ Even in the most frequently cited example of American naturalism, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane is able to evoke sympathy for Maggie because she initially embodies so many of Dew Drop's characteristics: blushing shyness, innate delicacy and daintiness, love of beauty and flowers, and so on. Similarly, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie is said to be naturalistic because it shows a woman controlled by external circumstances and animal instincts. However, much of the novel's naturalism is undercut by the sentimental overtones in Dreiser's description of Carrie. In time, of course, the heroine was treated with brutal realism, but the early attempts at realism and naturalism reveal how deeply the stereotype of the ideal heroine was imbedded at the turn of the century.

That the tide against Dew Drop was turning, however slowly, becomes clear when we consider the emergence of a new type of heroine—the New Woman. She has been described by Beatrice K. Hofstadter:

At the turn of the century a new heroine appeared, epitomized in the drawings of Charles Dana Gibson and hailed everywhere as the "New Woman." She was tall and active, she held her body straight and her head high. Her free and easy manners shocked her genteel mother, and her determination to live her own life appalled her father and his world of domineering men.⁶

The New Woman, however, was not as universally admired as Hofstadter would lead one to believe. In many of the popular novels written by men around the turn of the century, the New Woman is shown declaring her independence, making a mess of things, and then confessing that her way of thinking was mistaken and gratefully reverting to her role of Dew Drop. In other novels she is simply satirized and her principles are deliberately misrepresented for a humorous effect. But despite these distortions and jibes, the New Woman had entered our literature for good. She was a product of the feminist movement and frequently, like Mary Johnston's Hagar, a fervent advocate of women's rights. At other times, as in the novels of Hamlin Garland, she simply embodied the feminist ideals—independence and control over her destiny—without actually advocating the franchise for women.

The New Woman is guided by her rational mind rather than intuitive emotion. This heroine is interested in specific reform instead of being invested with a vague spirituality and goodness. She is portrayed as having a sharp mind and an indomitable will, a combination that makes her successful in her attempts to control her destiny. The New Woman is more physical than spiritual; thus for the first time sex begins to enter into the portrait of the American heroine.

The New Woman is still with us today, but unfortunately she is no longer the dominant stereotype. She is most clearly seen in the figure of the popular girl detective, Nancy Drew. In the Nancy Drew stories Nancy is flanked by the dark and fair standbys of American literature. The blond is overly feminine, formless, and afraid of things, while the brunette lacks true feminity and womanly grace. With archetypal simplicity, Nancy is titian-haired, and she combines the best qualities of the blond and the brunette. In addition, she is a marvel of efficiency, independence, and self-reliance, rivaled only perhaps by Batman. When a homing pigeon falls at her feet, she immediately exclaims, "I'll wire the International Federation of American Homing Pigeon Fanciers and give them the number stamped on the bird's leg ring. All homing pigeons are registered by number so the owners can be traced."

Nancy would never be guilty of fluttering over the pigeon wondering what was to be done or looking to her football-hero friend, Ned Nikerson, for advice. In fact, when examined closely, Ned exists solely as a prop to Nancy—much as the Ken doll is a useful accessory for Barbie. Nancy's father, too, is only a shadowy figure in the background who supplies her with legal advice and new cars from time to time. Judging from the Nancy Drew cult that exists among young girls today, one can conclude that these books serve much the same function as the domestic novels did in the nineteenth century. [In a recent conversation about various heroines, a nine-year-old girl dismissed Beth of Little Women as one of those things in literature that are "not real—like houses that fly and animals that talk." She considered Nancy Drew to be quite real because "after all, girls do get kidnapped and things and they area lot smarter than their boyfriends and fathers and policemen and everybody."]

In addition to supplying little girls with a model of feminism, the emergence of the New Woman in American letters had an adverse effect. Male authors, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, were so unsettled by this display of feminism that they came to write with what she called "the male side of their minds." The excessive maleness of Hemingway's novels are classic examples of this preoccupation with the masculine. [It is difficult, however, to really hate Hemingway now that we have Norman Mailer.]

From out of all this maleness, a new female stereotype emerged in American literature—the American Bitch. Prime examples are Temple Drake in Faulkner's Sanctuary, Daisy Buchanan in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the heroines in Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." No longer the innocent, suffering woman or the pliable Dew Drop, the American Bitch is utterly shallow and inhumane. She is the spoiled product of luxury and freedom, the self-centered child whose favorite pastime is destruction—especially the destruction of men. In many cases she is not only a bitch but a hypocrite, retreating behind the code that traditionally protects the ladies when she is challenged. Far from being pure, she is portrayed as being sexually insatiable, devouring the hapless men who attempt to satisfy her lust. Just as Dew Drop grew out of the Fair Maiden stereotype, the American Bitch is an updated version of the Dark Woman.

Even while the novelists of the 1920's and 1930's were creating these destructive monsters, many were also presenting an alternative image of woman: that of the mother-savior. This character is a strong, primitive matriarch, usually nonwhite, who symbolizes the traditional enduring qualities of love, sacrifice, maternal strength, and devotion. If the rest of the characters in the novel survive at all, it is because of her. Dilsey in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Pilar in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Ma Joad in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath are typical examples of the mother-savior figure.

Various critics have pointed out that the heroine created by a male author is frequently a projection of his own hopes, fears, and frustrations.⁷ William Wasserstrom feels that in American literature the heroine reflects the national spirit as frequently as she does the personal aspirations of her creator. It is his thesis that Dew Drop embodies the optimism of nineteenth-century America and that Henry James's fledgling heroines in Europe reflect the emergence of our young country into the world arena. In these terms it could be argued that the novelists of the 1920's and 1930's used the American Bitch and mother-savior stereotypes to symbolize the conflicting value systems in American society—specifically the modern versus the traditional.

Certainly, the American Bitch is sometimes so closely identified with industrialization as to be indistinguishable from it. She is described in mechanical imagery, and her emasculating, threatening qualities seem to reflect the depersonalizing influences of an industrial society. In contrast, the mother-savior is a primitive or peasant woman closely connected with the simple agrarian life and the traditional values associated with it.

By the 1960's, however, the two characters, savior and destroyer, had merged, and only the negative side remained. The strong matriarch was replaced by Ken Kesey's Big Nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Thus the destroyer absorbed the savior, and symbolically, all hope that the agrarian ethic would save modern man was lost. Big Nurse became the objective correlative for the Super State, a monster with complete legal control over man, but inhuman and rotten to the core.

Also by the 1960's, the American Bitch had reached hysterical proportions in the novels of such writers as Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Gore Vidal, and John Updike. Not since the days of Saint Augustine has woman been so reviled as she is by these novelists. As one would expect when woman is viewed as an evil force, man-woman relationships in these novels are reduced to a vicious battle. The struggles range from the relatively mild ones in Updike's Couples, where the relationships are based on a tedious expediency, to the more violent ones in Mailer's An American Dream, which are filled with pain and hate. Kate Millett points out that much of Mailer's degradation of women lies in his specifically lower-class attitude toward them.⁸ No doubt it is machismo—an excessive concern with maleness—that makes his novels read like extended castration fantasies.

In addition to serving as a sort of inkblot into which the author projects his personal fears, the Ultramodern American Bitch is identified with her society, as was the traditional American Bitch before her:

Woman becomes something far more insidious than a mere scold; she becomes that force in life which not only has its own unconquerable and even indefinable power but also operates to rob man of his last shred of purpose and dignity. Sexually, she is all hunger and depredation. In terms other than those of sexual desire she is an empty shell, as empty and meaningless as the society in which we find her and with which she has come to be so disastrously identified.⁹

Thus, as our society has disintegrated, so has our heroine—both to the point that one wonders whether either can be redeemed.

In order to rebalance and humanize the image of woman in American literature—to show that she, too, is the victim and not just the product of our society—women novelists must present the female point of view. Moreover, they must write as well as men novelists and receive equal consideration from readers and reviewers. Within our culture, however, the difficulties involved in doing this are almost overwhelming. In order to write well, as Virginia Woolf points out, a woman must have a substantial income and a room of her own with a lock on the door.¹⁰ Even then, just writing well is not enough, as the fate of Kate Chopin and of her novel, The Awakening, painfully shows.

This novel, published in 1899, is the story of the awakening of Edna Pontellier, the wife of a wealthy but stuffy New Orleans businessman. Through a lover she awakens first to physical passion and then to herself as a human being. In her quest for self-discovery and personal growth, she gradually awakens to the true nature of the position of woman in society and to the restrictions imposed on her because she is a woman. Edna begins to realize that her lover, like her husband, is insensible to her need for autonomy. As she awakens from her illusions about romantic love, she realizes that a series of lovers will probably follow her present one and that such socially unacceptable behavior on her part will destroy her children. In the end she decides not to sacrifice her essential being by resuming her empty role as wife and mother, and chooses death instead.

Naturally, Kate Chopin had trouble getting her novel published. Not only is its theme outrageous for 1899, but the novel is written with a detached simplicity that never argues for or against the heroine's actions. When it was finally published, it created a scandal. Even in her home town, Saint Louis, the citizens—including T. S. Eliot's mother—demanded that it be removed from the library shelves. A newspaper proclaimed that it was "too strong drink for moral babes and should be labeled poison." Chopin, stunned by these vicious attacks, withdrew from society, never to write again. She died a few years later.

Although The Awakening is beautifully written and contains many themes that were later to become major ones in American fiction, it has been forgotten. Since it not only contains a deeply unsettling image of woman that totally contradicted the prevailing stereotype at the time of its publication but also projects a most unflattering portrait of a successful businessman, one suspects that it was too disconcerting to win the attention it deserved. Even today, when Kate Chopin is mentioned at all, her name is usually mispronounced [It should be pronounced like the composer's name.] and she is relegated to that innocuous pigeonhole of "local colorists." She is noted for her Creole stories, but The Awakening is rarely mentioned. The novel itself remained virtually unknown until it was reprinted in 1964. Even the cover of the 1964 edition hails it as "an American Madame Bovary." This comparison not only somehow gives Flaubert the credit for the book's excellence but also undercuts its meaning, for if anything, The Awakening is a woman's answer to Madame Bovary.

The fate of Kate Chopin's The Awakening is but one example of how the feminine world view is banished from literature. Women are just beginning to be aware of—and to rebel against—the process that keeps the male mythology intact.¹¹ In the field of criticism, the male critic is able to destroy a book that threatens to present a dissenting view by ignoring it, by damning it with faint, paternalistic praise, or by distorting its meaning, whether as a result of simple blindness to feminine nuance or of a more conscious attempt to denigrate the feminine viewpoint. A subtle form of distortion is to relegate all feminine works to either the mediocrity of "popular" literature or the quaintness of "local color."

Another perennial tactic in criticism is to see women characters and authors only in biological terms. [This is known among critics as "innovative criticism" and among feminists as "the biological put-down."] One critic, for example, divides Faulkner's women into cows and bitches, while another relates the poems of Emily Dickinson to her menstrual cycles. Male characters and authors, however, are not reduced to their biological functions. No one divides Faulkner's men into studs and geldings or relates Carlyle's work to his indigestion, although the evidence is certainly there in both cases.

Women authors and characters are also frequently distorted in classroom discussions. It is not uncommon for a literature teacher to agonize over the trials that beset modern man as they are reflected in Quentin Compson's character, but to dismiss Caddy as a slut. Often women authors are completely ignored. It is perfectly possible today to received a bachelor's degree in literature without studying any female author other than Emily Dickinson; a master's degree by adding only Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather; and a doctorate by adding only another handful, usually the "local colorists."

While it is true that writers such as Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, and Joan Didion have begun to create new images of women, their work is usually not dealt with except in the few courses that deal specifically with women in literature. These specialized courses are a valuable first step, but until their insights and perspectives are incorporated into the larger literary framework, the image of women in literature, as in life, will continue to be created and perpetuated by the patriarchy. Since what is known as literature is almost entirely dictated by the taste of the male critic/publisher/professor, the image of woman is defined in his terms. Naturally this image tends to reinforce the traditional ideas of women with which the male is most comfortable. Thus, a woman striving to create a mature, wellintegrated image for herself certainly cannot find a model for it in our well-known literature. Nor will she find her special problems honestly confronted, explored, or transcended there. Instead she will find stereotyped heroines—monstrous extremes of virtue and bitchery—acting out stereotyped responses.

In order to rebalance this image of woman in literature, it is not enough merely to increase the number of honest women authors or to rediscover perceptive female writers of the past. Only when women can make their influence felt in the fields of criticism, publishing, and education will literature serve to liberate rather than enslave the woman. Only then will the image of woman in American literature change and begin to reflect woman as a human being rather than a stereotype, symbol, or scapegoat.

NOTES

¹ This line from Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Tempie is typical of the rhetorical tone of most sentimental novels.

² For a complete discussion of Brown's treatment of women, see my article "The Continuity of Charles Brockden Brown: Feminism in Alcuin, Weiland, and Ormond," Women's Studies, Fall 1973.

³ Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1960), p. 11.

⁴ Helen Waite Papashvily, All the Happy Endings (New York, 1956), p. xvii.

⁵ Frank Norris, The Octopus (New York, 1956), p. 504.

⁶ Beatrice K. Hofstadter, "Popular Culture and the Romantic Heroine," American Scholar, XXX (Winter, 1960-61), 98-116.

⁷ See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, 1968); William Wasserstrom, The Heiress of All the Ages (Minneapolis, 1959); and H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil (New York, 1964).

⁸ Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York, 1970).

⁹ Diana Trilling, "The Image of Women in Contemporary Literature," in The Woman in America, ed. R. J. Lifton (Boston, 1965), p. 63.

¹⁰Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York, 1957).

¹¹ See Mary Ellman, Thinking About Women (New York, 1968).

Barbara Meldrum

SOURCE: "Images of Women in Western American Literature," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XVII, No. 3, 1976, pp. 252-67.

[In the following essay, Meldrum surveys women characters in Western American literature, finding them largely confident and independent compared with portrayals of women in other regional literatures.]

Women played a major role in the settlement of the American West, and they have often had prominent roles in the literature of the westward movement. In spite of these facts, scarcely any attention has been given to western American literature in the numerous anthologies of women in literature that have appeared in recent years. Since the westward movement was so integral to the formation of an American national character (at least as claimed by Frederick Jackson Turner and his successors), a study of women in western American literature should provide some insights into the character of American woman, as envisaged by various authors. Such a study is, of course, beyond the scope of a single essay. I would, however, like to suggest three possible approaches to the subject and exemplify the kinds of insights which these approaches can yield. First (thematic approach), woman has frequently been portrayed in western fiction as a civilizing force (usually identified with the East) in a western, uncivilized environment. Second (archetypal approach), the masculine vs. feminine ideals provide dramatic tension and thematic importance in some western fiction. Third (historical role approach), the pioneer woman—probably the most typical role of western women—provides a wide range of images of women on the western frontier as portrayed in the fiction.

The first area of consideration—woman as civilizing force—is very clearly represented in one of Bret Harte's short stories, "The Idyl of Red Gulch." Mary, the schoolmarm, is a newcomer from the East and is literally idolized by the rough Westerners. In contrast, the women in the story who are most closely identified with the West are "bad" women. When the unwed mother of Tommy (one of Mary's pupils) comes to Mary and asks her to take Tommy and get him into a good school, she says, "'Do with him what you like. The worst you can do will be kindness to what he will learn with me. Only take him out of this wicked life, this cruel place, this home of shame and sorrow. . . . You will make him as pure, as gentle as yourself.'" The contrast between East and West and the important role of woman as a force for civilization and virtue are clearly portrayed in this tale of an eastern schoolmarm.

Owen Wister's Molly in The Virginian (1902) is also an eastern schoolmarm, though much better developed than Bret Harte's Mary. Wister's schoolmarm is one who has spunk, is somewhat appalled by western roughness, is beautiful and cultured, and therefore is attractive to the hero who proves his worth in part by becoming more cultured (or at least able to "pass" in eastern society). One can of course argue as to whether the West capitulates to the East, or whether the easterner Molly becomes a westerner, or whether the marriage of Molly and the Virginian represents an ideal amalgam of the best traits of both worlds. The latter was, I believe, the intention of Wister and is analogous to the view expressed by Cooper in his Preface to The Leather-stocking Tales: Cooper asserted that Leatherstocking represented the best traits of the white man and the red man, of civilization and savagery. In a parallel way, Wister sought to suggest in the marriage of East and West an ideal union which would point the way for productive development of the West. This thesis is undercut by several aspects of the story: the Virginian is from Virginia originally and contrasts with the more identifiably western men such as Trampas. Moreover, although the Virginian reads books recommended to him by Molly, he doesn't broaden his literary tastes significantly. Molly's role as civilizing force is limited largely to prompting the Virginian to settle down to marriage and a family; the Virginian is not appreciably more civilized at the end of the tale than he was at the beginning. Indeed, in the first chapter, the narrator, newly arrived from the East, concludes that the tall hero is more of a gentleman than himself.

Thus, whether in fact or fancy, the woman in western fiction is often portrayed as a civilizing force opposing the irresponsible freedom of the West. Though typically this role is filled by an eastern schoolmarm, the role can be played in other capacities. Mary Hallock Foote, for example, in her early novel Led-Horse Claim (1892) uses as her eastern woman the sister of a mining superintendent in a Colorado mining town. In this tale the West, as seen through the eyes, of the eastern newcomer, is rough, violent, greedy and destructive. Significantly, the hero with whom she falls in love is really an easterner who has managed to adapt to the West, and their love is consummated in the East, not the West.

We find, then, a dichotomy in the typical western tale: the woman represents that which is eastern, cultured, and feminine; she is the worthy prize for the most virtuous and masculine hero. The man is western (or at least identified significantly with the West), is rough but appreciates culture, and is of course very masculine. In some tales this simple dichotomy becomes far more complex, and in a novel such as Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), the masculine ideal is shown to be destructive. Max Weatherbrook has dealt with this notion very skillfully and convincingly:

The American Dream ... has emphasized individuality, which is both the price and privilege of democracy. As it releases man from cultural and political tyranny, individualism also begins to imprison man within the confines of his own temporal powers of creation. Too often, the emphasis on free will leads to an emphasis on ego and degenerates into greed and into an exaggerated evaluation of the male ego. Clark . . . holds that the male ego tends to separate man from the permanent, to distort projection. The intellect, also severed from the permanent, is associated with a degrading version of the feminine. Thus the lynch mob in The Ox-Bow Incident misappropriates for itself a monopoly on virtuous masculinity, and thus the protestations of Davies and Gerald Tetley are repeatedly associated—both in language and action—with a degrading femininity (Western American Literature, Summer 1966).

What we see in the novel are fragments of human beings; what is needed, is unity.

Westbrook focuses his discussion on the men in the novel; I would like to suggest a few points about some of the women. None of them are major characters in this male-dominated novel, but they are important for the light they shed on the masculine vs. feminine concepts which are so crucial to an understanding of how the men regard each other and how they become involved in executing three innocent men.

Frena is a woman who champions Kincaid, the cowboy who has supposedly been murdered; when the lynch mob is slow to form and get on its way to avenge the death of Kincaid, Frena tries to shame the men into action with sarcasm. Later, young Gerald Tetley says of her that she wants power; men are the biggest part of a woman's power; Frena can't get a man, so she'd like to see them all dead and gone—then she would have power over the other women. What is significant about Gerald's view of Frena is that he suggests a similar goal for both men and women: power. They are different only in their manner of pursuit—the men are bullies, the women are sneaks.

Ma Grier is physically a very big, buxom woman, strong as any man in town, reputed to have a bad past. She dresses like a man, and hates women. She too is a fragment of a person, as represented by her perverted femininity. She tries to be a man, and thus she too is caught up in the masculine ideal which motivates the men in the lynch mob. The others are afraid of her. However, she fears one person, and that is Tetley (the father of Gerald), who eventually leads the mob. It is his notion of he-man masculinity which prompts him to force his son's participation in the lynching—a participation which eventuates in Gerald's suicide. Tetley says at one point, "I'll have no female boys bearing my name." Ma Grier, then, exemplifies the power of what might be called the "masculine mystique," whereas Frena, who fails with men, thereby fails to prove her femininity.

Rose Mapen is the most feminine woman in the novel. She is feared by the women of Bridgers Wells, who succeed in driving her out of town because they are afraid she will do something; because she is attractive to most of the men, she is feared by the other women. Rose is a somewhat ambiguous woman, her image depending on one's point of view: the narrator Art sees her as a tart, but his pal Gil wants to marry her. She is capable of sustaining contrasting images of women projected on her by men with varying perspectives. After being driven out of town, she goes to San Francisco and marries Mr. Swanson, then returns to show off her husband to Bridgers Wells. On this return trip the stage runs into the lynch mob while they search for the rustlers. Her husband, we find, represents a different kind of masculinity which contrasts with the western masculine ideals of the mob. Although Art's first impression is that Swanson is a "weak sister," he begins to revise his opinion. Swanson has a kind of strength the cowboy Gil can't cope with. "I don't know how to start a decent fight with that kind of a guy," Gil concludes. The character of Swanson is not sufficiently developed for us to make any sweeping conclusions, but it is significant that Clark here gives us a man who achieves recognizable masculinity without the destructive distortions typical of the men in the lynch mob. Rose gains an advantage by her marriage, for she gains the power of a man, and in this instance a man set apart from those of Bridgers Wells. Yet she is not, I believe, presented as an ideal woman, for she flaunts her conquest in marriage before the townspeople. Also, more important, at the end of the novel, after the mob has returned to Bridgers Wells in shame and guilt for having hanged three innocent men, Rose and her husband are in the tavern, and Rose's vivacity and attractiveness lead to laughter—at a time that is hardly appropriate for frivolity. Her role here reminds one of the complaint in "My Fair Lady"—you take a woman to a play or ballet and she sits there searching for her gloves. Woman is here represented as empty-headed, not concerned with values apart from her own vanity.

The image of woman in this novel is quite grim. The women may not be any worse than the men, but Clark does seem to use the image of woman to suggest generally negative qualities. The men who seek to be masculine are undone by their efforts—their egos lead them into the actions of a murdering lynch mob. The men who are weak and ineffectual are characterized as feminine. The masculine woman (MaGrier) is at best humorous, at worst disgusting. The most feminine woman (Rose Mapen) is basically frivolous. What is needed, then, is unity of self, rather than the fragmented projections of parts of the self. In sexual terms, what is needed is a unity of masculine and feminine (the androgynous ideal), but this is not achieved in the novel. In fact, the thrust of the story tends to confirm Westbrook's notion that the emphasis on individualism in the western experience is ultimately destructive. Ironically, the individualism which focuses on ego eventually results in conformity to the group, in the story of the lynch mob in the novel.

When we turn to the role of the pioneer woman, we are confronted by a large body of material, for the pioneer woman's experience has attracted western writers (both men and women) for many years. The pioneer woman usually was the follower of her husband in their western venture; as exemplified in A. B. Guthrie's The Way West (1949), the man typically took the lead in wanting to go West, and the woman followed, with varying degrees of willingness and adaptability. Although certainly not all men were constitutionally and temperamentally suited for such an adventure, those who were not seldom made the effort; whereas the women, in their role as followers of their husbands, might find themselves forced to make adaptations for which they were not well suited. In this process, some were crushed; others survived and, in doing so, often achieved dimensions of character that had been dormant during their earlier pre-pioneer experience. Guthrie, in The Way West, shows us how the women learn to cope with their new experiences. It is not easy. Rebecca, the wife of Lije Evans, concludes that men are "queer. . . . The more miles they made the better-spirited [her husband] was, as if there wasn't any aim in life but to leave tracks, no time in it but for go." When they sight Fort Laramie, Lije is jubilant to see this landmark of his progress toward the Pacific; Rebecca, however, is jubilant because the Fort means buildings and probably chairs. "I just want to set in a chair," she says. In spite of the difficulties, most of the women not only manage to survive but become contributing members of the party. Guthrie tells us, "the women did their part and more. They traveled head to head with men, showing no more fear and asking no favor. . . . They had a kind of toughness in them that you might not think, seeing them in a parlor. So, on a trail, women came to speak and men to listen almost as if to other men. It was lucky for the pride of men that few traveled with their wives to Oregon. They'd never quite believe again a woman was to look at but not to listen to."

The demands placed on the pioneer women were great. Not only did they have to learn to make do without the conveniences of the homes they had known before, but they often had to do men's work, and pregnancy might come when things were most difficult, during their journey or during the early back-bending days of breaking the sod and building a new home. Some simply were not able to bear the strain. One of the most poignant pictures of a woman crushed by the pioneering experience is the picture of Kari, in Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927). Kari, the pioneer woman who has lost her child on the prairie, is crazy with grief and must be tied inside the wagon lest she leave it in search of her dead son. The anguish of grief, the frightening immensity of the prairie spaces—these are too much for Kari. And her husband, though trying to help, is a bungling novice; he lacks the ingenuity, common sense, and stamina of a Per Hansa, and as the wandering family fades away into the distance, we feel that they are wandering closer to despair and death.

Mari Sandoz portrays many failures (both men and women) in her biography of her father, Old Jules (1935). One example is a woman who takes the lives of her children, then commits suicide. The context is significant. The winter is bleak and difficult; the men can break away from the isolation when the storms let up, but the women cannot: "They had only the wind and the cold and the problems of clothing, shelter, food, and fuel." One neighbor woman says as the bodies are prepared for burial, "If she could a had even a geranium—but in that cold shell of a shack." The brutalities of nature, and the economic difficulties, prove to be more than this woman can bear.

But many of the pioneer women did achieve a measure of success in their experience. I would like to consider here a few of the more successful ones, in an ascending scale of achievement. Near the bottom would be the women in Vardis Fisher's The Mothers (1943), a historical novel based on the Donner Party. The title suggests the focus Fisher achieved in this work; the wives and mothers proved to have greater stamina, ingenuity, and general survival capacity than the strongest men. The reason for their advantage seems to lie in their roles in the family—their drive to protect and care for their offspring and/or their husbands (and usually the ties to children proved to be stronger than ties to husbands). These mothers could be self-sacrificing for their own loved ones, but some could also be ruthless towards others, even the children of others. In this grim study of starvation and desperation, Fisher portrays both the noble and the horrifying lengths to which these women will go for the sake of those whom they value. Here, the strenuousness of totally new experiences engendered by conditions peculiar to the western environment as experienced by novices produces a crucible for human character.

Beret, wife of Per Hansa in Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, is nearly defeated in her western experience. In this novel Rovaag explores with great sensitivity the psychological trauma of a woman who is not able to adjust easily to the open spaces of the prairie or the rigors of pioneer life and who must also endure the shock of these adjustments while pregnant. She becomes increasingly neurotic during her pregnancy, but regains a degree of mental health when she gives birth to a child graced by the good omen of being born with a caul, and when she surprises herself by living through the birth. For a time, the demands of caring for her new child restore her will to live. But she has not yet adjusted to the open prairie where there is nothing to hide behind; during harvest, when the locusts swarm over the little farms and eat many of the crops, Beret suffers a nervous collapse. Her condition continues for several years, with periods of relative sanity and insanity. She regains control of herself when she realizes that God has not deserted them there on the prairie (the visiting minister plays an important role here) and when she learns that Per Hansa has confidence in her. She has had to come to terms with herself in relation to the natural environment, which in its seeming hostility was pagan to her, and in relation to her husband, who has brought her to this forbidding land. The fact that she has indeed become reconciled to her situation is evident in the next novel, Peder Victorious (1929), when she decides to remain after Per Hansa's death, for she now realizes that this is her children's home as well as Per Hansa's dream and that it must, therefore, be her home too. As the settlement grows and some of the traditional elements of civilization (particularly the church and the school) become well-established, she finds it easier to manage, and she is even successful in fulfilling a supposedly male role when she engineers the construction of the barn which had been her husband's dream.

Mari Sandoz portrays a variety of pioneer women in the gallery of Old Jules' four wives. In addition, there is Rosalie—the girl back home who refuses Jules' many invitations to join him. She is Jules' childhood sweetheart in the old country who remains his goddess, the vision of perfect love which he will never know, and which consequently is never tarnished by the realities of pioneer life. Estelle, Jules' first wife, is abandoned by him because he believes she is lazy and won't work. Jules demands much of a wife and little from himself in return toward his wife, so we are inclined to believe Jules has treated his first wife harshly—until we meet her later in the book. Though she is no villain, she is hardly admirable and fails to win much sympathy. Jules' second wife, Henriette, comes to him from Switzerland on the recommendation of her good friend, Jules' sister. She finds life hard on the Nebraska prairie, but stays with Jules until a financial settlement leaves her independent, whereupon she promptly kicks Jules out and files for divorce. The two later become good friends, and on one occasion Henriette mortgages her farm to help Old Jules, but the years of drought are too much for her, and she, like so many others, goes insane. Although she has periods of recurrent sanity, Henriette is a victim of the land. She succeeds in gaining an adjustment of self with her husband, but never achieves reconciliation with the land.

Emelia, Jules' third wife, also comes from the old country, encouraged by Jules' glowing descriptions of the land. But what he has written has been his dream, not reality. And so she comes, expecting to be mistress of the fine house of a well-to-do husband. What she finds, is grizzled Old Jules and his two-room shack, no dishes to eat from, no cloth for the table, a stove propped up by bricks. And Jules invites her to his bed with its greasy blankets, no sheets. Emelia stays for two weeks, then disappears and makes a new life for herself, though remaining in Nebraska. Here is one who makes a working adjustment to the demands of life in the pioneer West, and who does not allow herself to be smothered by a mistake.

Mary, the fourth wife, is the most able one of all. She nearly leaves Jules during their early marriage but waits too long and becomes pregnant. Thereafter she remains primarily to care for her children. Mary labors very hard—she is up early and works late, whereas Jules sleeps until nearly noon and exerts himself only to care for his orchard and to go hunting (which is his masculine escape, not available to Mary, when things get tense around home). One example will demonstrate the role of husband and wife in this family and the desperate plight of Mary. She tries to get Jules to castrate the calves before they get too big for her to handle. But Jules procrastinates, and when he finally attempts the job, Mary is unable to hold the large calf when he kicks. Jules, furious, says, "I learn the goddam balky woman to obey me when I say 'hold him.'" He chases Mary and beats her with a handful of wire stays; she rushes into the house, grabs poison from the poison drawer, and tries to take it, but is intercepted by the grandmother and then by Jules. The grandmother shields Mary, and Jules leaves on a hunting expedition. The children cower under the bed like frightened rabbits.

Life is very difficult for Mary, and she is nearly defeated. But she manages to endure, even to gain some of her own wishes by skillful diplomacy, which always leaves Jules with the impression that he is the boss and the provider. But it is an extremely hard life, and Mary ages prematurely. It is no wonder that the daughter Mari never marries.

Another author of midwestern pioneer life, Sophus Keith Winther, has given us, in the character of Meta Grimsen, a pioneer woman who succeeds admirably on the frontier. In a series of three novels, Take All to Nebraska (1936), Mortgage Your Heart (1937), and This Passion Never Dies (1938), Winther traces the history of a family of Danish immigrants from about 1898 to the early 1920s. This is not the more rugged pioneer period of Rolvaag or even Sandoz and Cather; the forces to be contended with here are in part nature, but more especially the social and economic forces facing immigrants attempting to adjust to a rural community. Again we see the husband as the driving leader, the one who wanted to go West; Meta would just as soon return to Denmark, but her destiny is with her husband. Again we see the hardships faced by the pioneer woman; she loses her only daughter through illness, which might have been cured had adequate medical care been available on the prairie. Meta's working hours are long, and she seldom gets a day off. More often than not, when a trip to town must be made, she must remain behind, and her husband has the pleasure of a change of routine. Although she often does little things to please her children and husband, they seldom think to do something special for her. The bleakness of her life is typified by her efforts to make their home a little brighter: she talks Peter into buying some wallpaper and they work hard to put it up. That evening, she goes to bed tired but happy with the new look in her home. But the next morning, she awakens to find the paper in shreds on the floor; the walls are simply too old and musty to hold the paper. In spite of the disppointments, hard work and economic set-backs, Meta endures and inspires her children with a quiet courage. She is a symbol of the triumphant pioneer woman whose fulfillment is in the lives of her children.

No discussion of the pioneer woman would be complete without mention of Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918). In this beautiful nostalgic evocation of the past, Cather has given us several successful women. There is Tiny Soderball, who goes West to try her fortune. She does very well in the Klondike and eventually settles in San Francisco. Here is one who succeeds in a career of her own. She leads a life of adventure, but eventually her only interest is making money. I quote here the narrator's comment: "She was satisfied with her success, but not elated. She was like someone in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out." Another woman who, in psychological terms, might be regarded as even more successful than Tiny is Lena Lingard. She becomes a seamstress and thus enjoys an independent career, first in Lincoln, then in San Francisco. She avoids marriage and a family, for she has seen enough of the rigors of family life as an immigrant child on the prairie, and as for married life she says, "It's all being under somebody's thumb." Her independent life seems to bring with it a great deal of satisfaction and fulfillment, and she faithfully contributes financially to the family she has left behind.

But Willa Cather's focus is of course on Antonia. This immigrant girl endures many hardships as a child and young woman. She works in the fields until she becomes hard and coarse, but friends and relatives of the narrator help to rescue her from this situation before it is too late. While working as a hired girl in town, she learns much from the Harlings that helps her to adjust to her American environment. Although seduced and enticed away from her friends by a young man who soon abandons her, she returns, has her baby, and rises above this trauma to marry a man who can help her achieve fulfillment as a mother. The narrator describes her, when he visits her surrounded by her children: "she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. .. . It is no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like founders of early races."

One could of course object to Cather's portrayal by pointing out that she, like so many others, follows the old stereotype that woman can achieve fulfillment of self only through the biological function of sex and the sociological role of mother. The image of Antonia at the end of the book tends to confirm this notion. However, it is worth noting that Lena Lingard and Tiny Soderball do achieve a large measure of self-realization. More important, perhaps, is the significance of comparisons between these characters and the narrator, Jim Burden. He marries, but his marriage is childless, and we get the impression that his marriage is not happy or rewarding. Jim Burden loves the land of his childhood and the memories of his past more than his present situation. Thus, although Antonia as the earth-mother founder of races may demonstrate the greatest degree of self-fulfillment, I would rank Lena Lingard second, ahead of Jim Burden. In Willa Cather's approach, self-fulfillment is not markedly different for men or for women.

In reviewing the images of women presented in western fiction, I find one stereotype generally missing, and that is the image of the submissive wife. Hamlin Garland portrays some pretty beaten down women, but they often reveal real gumption. For example, in "A Branch Road," Agnes responds to her childhood sweetheart and deserts her husband and escapes the dismal life she has had with him. In "Mrs. Ripley's Trip," the wife saves money, a dime at a time, for a trip back to New York State; she declares her intention to her husband, who soon realizes there is no use contradicting; she carries through with her trip, and then returns home and resumes her role as hardworking, faithful wife. Willa Cather's Antonia is clearly head of the household, and Mary firmly and effectively bans Old Jules from her bedroom when she has had enough of child-bearing. In H. L. Davis' Honey in the Horn, more often than not it is the woman who leaves her husband in the pursuit of some other man, and not vice versa. And even Beret—in response to her urging Per Hansa goes out into the snowstorm that claims his life. One can find examples of the submissive wife in western fiction, but they are more typically the Indian squaws than the white American wives: Teal Eye, who is Boone's squaw in Guthrie's The Big Sky (1947), or Hugh Glass' squaw in Frederick Manfred's Lord Grizzly (1954). The white pioneer wife may have started out as the submissive wife when her husband told her they were going out West, but the ones who succeeded in their roles as pioneer wives also attained a degree of independence and resourcefulness that made them no longer totally submissive. If we can say that the westward movement exemplified the capitalistic drive to a growth economy wherein the white pioneer assumed an aggressive role toward natural resources and typically sought to conquer his environment, then perhaps we may conjecture that the pioneering experience placed the women in a similar role: they stood beside their husbands, and they too became aggressors. Also, the western experience often contributed to a breakdown of traditional roles; in some cases the individuals felt less bound by marriage vows than did their counterparts in the East. Because of circumstances, then, the women often did men's work and often attained independence of thought and action. All this is not to say that the women of western fiction are truly "liberated." But then, neither are the western men.

Victoria Aarons

SOURCE: "The Outsider Within: Women in Contemporary Jewish-American Fiction," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 28, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 378-93.

[In the following essay, Aarons examines the writing of several contemporary Jewish American women writers, finding in their works a consistent awareness of being outside both American culture and Judaism.]

For quite some time now the issue of ethnic identity in Jewish-American fiction has posed a central concern for critics and writers alike, a concern bred from the necessity to identify the place of Jewish fiction within the broader scope of American literary culture. Not unlike other literatures that we have come to call "ethnic," black or chicano fiction, for instance, or even those which comprise the "immigrant experience" in fiction (such as Maxine Hong Kingston's novels of Chinese-Americans), Jewish-American writing emerges as yet another example—if not the primary paradigm—of both an "ethnic" and an "immigrant" fiction. Certainly the Jewish-American literature that directly grew out of the early immigrant experience in America, Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), and Anzia Yezierska's Hungry Hearts (1920), for example, yielded to such literary concerns as dialect and a preoccupation with themes of assimilation and ethnic identity. Perhaps the best-known novel of the Jewish immigrant's journey from steerage to New York tenement life, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), selfconsciously calls attention to the problematic mingling of languages and customs that characterized the "greenhorn's" struggle to integrate into American culture. This novel in many ways stands as a beacon to the immigrant's epic survival, much as Roth's metaphorical description in the prologue of the towering statue in New York's harbor ironically illuminates the immigrant's precarious passage into mainstream America: "the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light—the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty." By its very nature, then, early Jewish-American fiction was relegated to a certain outsider status. Both the writers and their fictions were situated on the outskirts of our perceived notions of the American literary heritage.

For post World War II Jewish writers, however, this outsider posture seemed no longer a requirement. Bellow, Malamud, and Philip Roth merge into the mainstream of American literature to stand alongside Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. More and more, Jewish writers speak about and within American culture, transcending an earlier "immigrant" identity imposed by an alien culture. In Jewish Writing and Identity in the Twentieth Century,¹ Leon Yudkin suggests such a shift in the place of American Jewish writers from the outskirts to the mainstream of literary culture when he argues that:

By the 1940's, a substantial native-born generation considered itself as much a part of the national fabric as any other element, religious or ethnic. To be an American Jew became increasingly one of the ways of being an American. . . . This did not mean that there was no longer a characteristically Jewish literature but its form of expression changed. The Jew could not easily see himself as an immigrant if he was of local provenance and an English-speaking American national. He was already, on the whole, commercially successful, socially established if not totally integrated, and did not have another mother country to look back to nostalgically or to summon as a measure. (112)

Yudkin's point here seems particularly significant in light of our attention to defining literature in terms of its ethnic origins. He argues even further that in American literature since the 1940s,

the Jewish voice is not only heard but increasingly accepted as the norm. Jewish terminology, except in certain instances of specialist exposition, is no longer explained to the reader. Yiddish has entered the American language, and the Jewish type with the implication of his cultural, social and historical background is understood as part of the scene. Bellow does not have to translate to the extent that Cahan did. And the Jew is not seen on the fringes of society, trying to edge his way in. In many ways, he exemplifies that society. And Jewish literature is peculiarly American literature. (112-13)

Yet Jewish women writers, at least in our formal recognition of them, remain beyond the pale of established critical acclaim. Less recognized than their male counterparts, yet nonetheless emerging in the American literary scene, contemporary Jewish women writers continue to be faced with issues of ethnic identity and self-definition, reinforcing the "immigrant" status that defined earlier Jewish fiction in America. For, if Jewish fiction in America has been marked by a certain outsider status, it may be all the more so for Jewish women writers, who are outsiders to the traditional, male-dominated literary culture, as well as to the more traditional Jewish laws, which limit women's roles in public worship and in institutional power.

What we find in the writing of many contemporary Jewish women, such as Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Cynthia Ozick, and Hortense Calisher, is a self-conscious recognition of an outsider position in both American culture and Judaism. When coupled as oft-perceived products of a literary subculture, Jewish ethnic identity and an emerging "women's fiction" become finally questions of voice, a voice that is at once a source of richness and tension in the fiction of contemporary Jewish-American women. In defining that voice, we come somewhat closer, I believe, to securing a coherent vision, a common world view, shared by many Jewish women writers in America.

I do not mean to suggest that literary concerns of ethnicity no longer remain central to the more established male Jewish writers. Indeed, the ethnicity of writers such as Malamud and their categorization as Jewish writers result in critical debate still. Robert Alter, in After the Tradition, suggests this tension:

It is by no means clear what sense is to be made of the Jewishness of a writer who neither uses a uniquely Jewish language, nor describes a distinctively Jewish milieu, nor draws upon literary traditions that are recognizably Jewish.²

Here the complexity of the issues surrounding Jewish identity in the fiction of American writers crystallizes. Unlike other literary subgenres that call attention to questions of ethnicity and identity (such as black, hispanic, native American, or lesbian literatures), Jewish-American fiction seems to raise issues of a distinctively different nature. Because the Jews assimilated so quickly (unlike other minority groups still pursuing their rights and fashioning their American identities), Jewish identity has been complex enough to force itself upon the design of American fiction. While group affiliation would be the apparent linking concept of minority literatures, such public matters of identity give way to more private concerns with personal identity for the Jew in America. Jewish-American literature is still an "immigrant fiction" because of the complexities of the question of what it means to be a Jew in America. Can one remain a Jew in a secular "melting pot" and still feel at home there, still maintain a posture of economic and social success? This is the essential focus for contemporary Jewish-American writers. The question of whether one can remain a Jew in America, that is, can remain connected to the faith, underlies the thematic tensions in works as diverse as I. B. Singer's "The Son from America," Grace Paley's "The Loudest Voice," and Philip Roth's "Defender of the Faith." As one might expect, however, the issue of whether one can remain a Jew in America is not only a matter of faith, but involves an even deeper connection to the heritage, to the past, to the disappearing world of the "fathers."

Because of these complexities, a singular "Jewish" voice is untenable. Before one could identify a Jewish voice, one would have to answer some very vexing questions: How does one define the ethnicity of a writer: by his or her direct political statements? By his or her depiction in fiction of Jewish characters, environment, and issues? By his or her birth alone? Must a writer address particular Jewish issues or situations to be considered a Jewish writer? These questions are difficult because of the uncertainty in the definition of a uniquely Jewish character or context in America, where the character is as much American as Jewish and the context grounded in an American ethos. Questions of Jewish identity in writing are not unlike those currently faced by contemporary women writers, who have often felt compelled to address the issue of a "women's fiction," whether or not they consider themselves advocates of the genre. The current controversy among feminist critics and writers highlights this concern.³ As Adrienne Rich and others have argued, how we define ourselves involves complex personal and political issues. This process of self-definition—especially for women who have been alienated historically from the Western literary heritage—presents itself in the literature by women as more than a search for identity, for a fixed personal identity. (I make the distinction here, knowing that it is a controversial one, between feminist writers, unified by a political ideology, and writers who are women.) Rather it seems to me that the attempts at self-definition through literature become a process of self-fashioning, of forging an identity. For contemporary Jewish-American women writers, faced with dual issues of sexual and ethnic identity, the process of self-definition is further complicated.

Can we make certain assumptions about Jewish women writers that will not simply reinforce well-worn stereotypes about both Jews and women? Does a self-perceived "ghettoization," the formative influence in the development of the Jew as "outsider," keep Jewish women writers on the margin of American literary culture? Such selfconscious distinctions go no little way in reinforcing an outsider status, despite, for example, Leon Yudkin's contention that the Jew in literature has secured a firm place by moving "from the periphery to the centre" (113) of American literary tradition.

The motif of the outsider as fictional stereotype has been overly simplified in much of the writing about Jewish literature. To call the Jewish writer simply an outsider, distanced from both the American experience and from his or her Jewish heritage, ignores the dichotomy that lies at the heart of the problems of ethnic identification in fiction. As outsider, the Jew—as fictional character and as writer—becomes much more than a stereotype. The very tension in the fiction of Jewish-American writers is the insider-outsider paradox, the ability of the Jew to be at once insider and outsider, in terms of both America and Judaism.

Nonetheless, Jewish-American writers, I would maintain, remain in many ways on the periphery of the literary culture still, in no little part as a result of their own selfconsciousness of their position in the literary community. Cynthia Ozick defines this troublesome position well when she depicts herself as "a third-generation American Jew (though the first to have been native-born) perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal."⁴ Ozick's description of the Jewish writer as defined by a precarious balance between acculturation and estrangement reflects a self-consciousness on the part of the Jewish writer, a self-conscious Judaism that extends to the characters' visions of themselves and to their perceived place in America.

Tillie Olsen's famous story, "Tell Me a Riddle,"⁵ depicts a woman, an immigrant, who has spent her adult years struggling for equilibrium and comfort in America, who finally when her children are grown, when her death is imminent, renounces Judaism, renounces a connection to any specific faith. In the hospital, when told she is on the Jewish list for visiting rabbis, she proclaims: "Not for rabbis. At once go and make them change. Tell them to write: Race, human; Religion, none" (89). For this old woman, Judaism—the religion and inherent traditions—represents backwardness, persecution, and restriction. Her daughter, American-born, tries to recreate tradition, ritual. She looks to her mother for a key to the past, for a link to Judaism, hoping to enrich the present. However, instead of being drawn to the tradition of her youth, the dying woman regards such rituals as the lighting of candles as "Superstition! From our ancestors, savages, afraid of the dark, or of themselves: mumbo words and magic lights to scare away ghosts" (90). Her vision of Judaism militates against her principles of humanity, principles for which she fought in Olshana, in the old country, principles that flew in the face of a centurieslong stronghold of oppression. In a bitter recollection of what it meant to be Jewish, Olsen's protagonist decries the faith of her "fathers":

Candles bought instead of bread and stuck into a potato for a candlestick? Religion that stifled and said: in Paradise, woman, you will be the footstool of your husband, and in life—poor chosen Jew—ground under, despised, trembling in cellars. And cremated. And cremated. . . .

Heritage. How have we come from our savage past, how no longer to be savages—this to teach. To look back and learn what humanizes—this to teach. To smash all ghettos that divide us—not to go back, not to go back—this to teach. (90; ellipses added)

Olsen's protagonist rebels against a determined adherence to a faith that persecutes and against long-ingrained gender expectations that reinforce her alienation from a religion that persecutes even more because of her status as a woman. To the amazement of her family, she cannot respond to her grandchildren. Her husband scolds her: "Unnatural grandmother, not able to make herself embrace a baby" (92). The kind of isolation felt by the protagonist in "Tell Me a Riddle" is derived from the pressure to be what she is not, to live up to an externally defined posture of doting Jewish grandmother, solicitous wife, acquiescent old woman, content with the passage of age. She views these predetermined roles as denials of the progressive secular humanist she sees herself to be. She tells her granddaughter, '"it is more than oceans between Olshana and you'" (113), and yet her hopes for equality and freedom, values symbolized by America, plummet in the face of continued oppression. Those socialist ideologies of her youth in the old country—ideologies that gave her life-blood—failed to materialize in the "land of the free," and so she remains an immigrant still, ghettoized, as she was in the shtetl, by her refusal to "move to the rhythms of others," to accept the diminished circumstances willed to her. The old woman's husband finally comes to understand his wife's longing and loss, and remembering the ideals of the past, sees them now in the light of betrayal and failure of the twentieth century: '" "in the twentieth century ignorance will be dead, dogma will be dead, war will be dead, and for all humankind one country—of fulfillment?" Hah!'" (120).

The immigrant's distance from his or her homeland, the "outsider" status, provides us with a vision of loss, disappointment, and disillusion. In Cynthia Ozick's brilliant short story, "Envy: Or, Yiddish in America,"⁶ the main character, Edelshtein, must forever remain un-noticed because he writes his poetry in Yiddish and has no English translator. He derides America as "the empty bride" (171), without dowry, without history, without identity. The wry humor with which he is portrayed by Oziek is constantly checked by our sympathies for him. Edelshtein's despair over the fate of Yiddish in America is momentarily arrested by his delight in finding a young woman, American-born, who reads Yiddish. Edelshtein's delusion that he has finally found a translator who will make him famous, will make his works known in America, founders when he discovers that Hannah, the would-be translator of his work, will not translate poems of the "ghetto." She is interested only in poetry that reflects universal concerns, poetry in the mainstream, "'In the world. . . . Not in your little puddles'" (173). Edelshtein's response to Hannah's attack demonstrates the enormous gap between the immigrant and the American-born Jew, the latter a Jew by descent only:

"Again the ghetto. Your uncle stinks from the ghetto? Graduated, 1924, the University of Berlin, Vorovsky stinks from the ghetto? Myself, four Godgiven books not one living human being knows, I stink from the ghetto? God, four thousand years since Abraham hanging out with Jews, God also stinks from the ghetto?"

"Rhetoric," Hannah said. "Yiddish literary rhetoric."

(173)

Hannah, unlike the American-born daughters in Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle," perceives her "heritage" not as a source of richness and continuity, but rather as a preoccupation with suffering, as a curse: '"Suffer suffer,' she said. "I like devils best. They don't think only about themselves and they don't suffer'" (174). Hannah seeks a universal—not a peculiarly Jewish—history, much in fact like Olsen's protagonist, a history without the emotional vestiges of the "old country," free from suffering, from defeat, from self-delusion. Edelshtein's outrage at Hannah's neglect of the past emphasizes the chasm between generations, between cultures. He, in turn, denies her a past, curses her: '"Forget Yiddish!' he screamed at her. 'Wipe it out of your brain! Extirpate it! Go get a memory operation! You have no right to it, you have no right to an uncle, a grandfather! No one ever came before you, you were never born! A vacuum!'" (175).

As Edelshtein cries out, it ultimately may be a matter of "rights," that the birthright, the right of identity, a connection to the past, to Judaism, carries with it the emotional baggage of the outsider. However, being a Jew in twentieth-century America takes on a decidedly different meaning from what it meant to be a Jew in the Eastern European shtetls. This difference in definition finally prevents Hannah and Edelshtein, Tillie Olsen's dying mother and her American-born children, and the host of Jewish characters separated by generations, from residing comfortably under the same "roof."

Problems with generational differences and with "place" are deeply connected to issues of identity and ethnicity. Grace Paley's protagonists, especially the women, struggle with identity, with their physical place in the world, and in relationships with other people—parents, husbands, children, peers. For Paley, Judaism often appears in her short stories as a nagging reminder of the past, a loss, a constant source of disquiet for many of her characters. The main character, Faith, in Paley's short story, "Faith in the Afternoon,"7 for example, is caught between differing visions of the world. On the one hand, she remains connected to the world of the "fathers," as characterized by her parents, and on the other, she lives in a more modern America, a world seemingly free from the bonds of historical and religious dictates. Having left Judaism in a formal sense, reinforced by her marriage to a gentile, a union that finally—acrimoniously—leaves her to raise her children on her own ("'I love their little goyish faces'" [48], her father says of his grandchildren), Faith attempts to bridge the two worlds. Although she has abandoned the old neighborhood of her childhood, she nostalgically turns to her mother in search of information of people from her past, and feels connected to them; their tsouris, their suffering, is akin to her own. Yet she remains inevitably outside of both worlds, her predicament ironically similar to the very immigrant parentage against which she shields herself:

Her grandmother pretended she was German in just the same way that Faith pretends she is an , American. Faith's mother flew in the fat face of all that and, once safely among her own kind in Coney Island, learned real Yiddish, helped Faith's father, who was not so good at foreign languages, and as soon as all the verbs and necessary nouns had been collected under the roof of her mouth, she took an oath to expostulate in Yiddish and grieve only in Yiddish, and she has kept that oath to this day.

Faith has only visited her parents once since she began to understand that because of Ricardo she would have to be unhappy for a while. Faith really is an American and she was raised up like everyone else to the true assumption of happiness. (33)

Yet in. her failure to achieve the American image of happiness—the immigrant's dream—Faith can neither reconcile herself to her family, which is her past, nor adjust to the present. So her relationship with both parents, but especially with her father, is wrought with emotional turbulence; her "Judaism" becomes self-conscious, very much on the surface of her actions and responses.

While the father figure in Jewish literature is a powerful force with whom to be reckoned, the figure of the mother provides a deep connection to the past. Unlike Olsen's protagonist in "Tell Me a Riddle," it is often the mother who, because of her garrulity and penchant for participating actively in the lives of her neighbors and friends (frequently depicted humorously), is a rich source of information and continuity. It is not surprisingly the mothers who strongly adhere to the "world of the fathers," the mothers to whom the American-born children return time and time again. The tradition of the mother in Jewish literature—a tradition that unfortunately often lends itself to the worst kind of stereotyping—has a long history for both male and female Jewish writers. Shenandoah Fish, for instance, in Delmore Schwartz's short story, "America! America!,"⁸ suffers from a loss of identity while traveling abroad and returns home to his mother's kitchen where, almost despite himself, he listens and is drawn to his mother's stories of old family ties. In them he recognizes his connection to the people in his past, not without a good deal of selfrecognition and guilt, born from his conscious attempt to distance himself from his mother's immigrant history and to intellectualize his family's past. He comes to recognize his condescension toward his family and their friends with no little self-disgust:

Shenandoah was exhausted by his mother's story. He was sick of the mood in which he had listened, the irony and the contempt which had taken hold of each new event. He had listened from such a distance that what he saw was an outline, a caricature, and an abstraction. How different it might seem, if he had been able to see these lives from the inside, looking out.

And now he felt for the first time how closely bound he was to these people. His separation was actual enough, but there existed also an unbreakable unity. (32)

Despite Shenandoah's recognition of his unbreakable connection to his heritage, an insight he has not come upon without considerable turmoil, he remains an outsider still: "'I do not see myself. I do not know myself. I cannot look at myself truly'" (33). Shenandoah, like many of the fictive American-born children of immigrant parentage, suffers from a self-imposed but equally uncomfortable "immigrant" condition. He is and is not a part of his parents' world. Thus in characters like Shenandoah and Faith, we see, not a transcendence of traditional values, but a fragmentation of identity resulting from, on the one hand, a guilt-ridden attraction to the old ways and, on the other, the realization that the attraction, both curiosity and instinct, is felt inevitably from the "outside."

The outsider's sense of difference often results in a perceived failure to live up to the expectations of one's parents—a theme itself consistently found in the literature. We find it, for example, in such works as Chaim Potok's The Chosen, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's Falling, and Herbert Gold's "The Heart of the Artichoke," in which the conflict of values and choices between children and their parents—mothers who know intimate details of the lives of their neighbors, fathers who ascribe to postwar American notions of success, parents who believe in fixed absolutes, such as family loyalty, hard work, and the like—creates considerable ambivalence for the protagonists. This tension manifests itself, I believe, most strikingly in the depiction of the "modern" Jewish woman, who is, in many ways, expected to carry on the tradition. In Hortense Calisher's short stories this ambivalence manifests itself in a quiet recognition, but by no means an unqualified acceptance, of change. In "The Rabbi's Daughter,"⁹ for example, Calisher's protagonist leaves the refined "world of the fathers," for her the relatively genteel world of the Jewish middle class, surrenders her career as a pianist for marriage to a man who works with his hands, yields finally to a style of dress and decorum unlike those to which she is accustomed, and takes up a life of transience. The difference in the rabbi's daughter's two hands, one more roughened than the other, reflects with understated power the dual nature of her existence. Gazing at her hand, she proclaims: "This one is still 'the rabbi's daughter'" (288), the hand unmarred by work, unblemished by worries about finances and domestic concerns.

Characteristic of many of the protagonists uncovered in the fiction of Jewish-American women, the rabbi's daughter breaks from the tradition, the life, but can never entirely leave the world of her "father," that world so ingrained, so very much at the heart of her identity and her struggle. This kind of ambivalence prevents the female protagonists from living comfortably in either world. For the rabbi's daughter, it breeds resentment, dissatisfaction, a sense of self as "visitor." The rabbi's daughter, upon leaving her family and moving into new temporary lodgings found by her husband, "heard her own voice, sugared viciously with wistfulness. 'Once I change [my attire] I'll be settled. As long as I keep it on . . . I'm still a visitor'" (288; ellipsis in original). Shedding her "travel" clothes—an adornment of past luxury—becomes a metaphor for relinquishing a past life for a much less certain future, a future without the fixed values and traditions of the "fathers."

Similarly, Paley's character Faith is equally infused with an ambivalence that causes both shame and anxiety, manifested by an uneasy love for her father, whom she can no longer look in the eye:

He leaned over the rail and tried to hold her eyes. But that is hard to do, for eyes are born dodgers and know a whole circumference of ways out of a bad spot. . . .

Mr. Darwin reached for her fingers through the rail. He held them tightly and touched them to her wet cheeks. Then he said, "Aaah . . ." an explosion of nausea, absolute digestive disgust. And before she could turn away from the old age of his insulted face and run home down the subway stairs, he had dropped her sweating hand out of his own and turned away from her. (48-49)

The image presented here is strikingly visual; Faith's father virtually pulls on her, drawing his daughter to him, begging her to return to the fold. A tug of war ensues, from which neither emerges as victor.

Paley's characteristically ironic—often tentatively humorous—voice balances the pathos of her characters and situations. This voice might best be characterized as a kind of self-irony, born perhaps from the inherent problems of self-definition and from the recognition of the precarious posture of the American Jew. Jewish writers thus are ironically detached from, yet identify with, their characters.

As distanced from traditional Jewish values and culture as many of the characters are—Hannah, the rabbi's daughter, the dying old woman who denounces a faith that denies humanity, the young mother in Paley's story who recognizes the disparate needs of her father and herself—they have nonetheless a bond, a haunting connection to Judaism, an obsession with the past, an often unspoken alliance with "the fathers." Susan Fromberg Schaeffer metaphorically suggests this link to a collective sense of identity:

they remembered with wonder, how their lives, and their characters, and their morals and their fates had always hung there like long clothes in the closet, waiting for them to grow into them.¹⁰

This compelling link to the past, a past experienced often elusively as a sort of collective memory for the American-born children, is nowhere more apparent than in the fiction that draws heavily upon the tension between the immigrant parent and his or her American-born child. This reliance on collective memory is what allows Grace Paley's narrator in "Mom" to relate the images of her childhood memory of her mother, like all mothers, who calls to the child from the window to come in off the street: "I am not the child. She isn't my mother. Still, in my head where remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness), she leans far out."¹¹ For the American-born children of Jewish immigrants, life in America is both a blessing and a curse, ironically for the same reason: because one is not in Europe. Paley, in "The Immigrant Story,"¹² establishes this paradox, when a young couple attempt to grapple with their parents' lives, and with their own childhoods (a common theme in Paley's works):

Jack asked me, Isn't it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person's sorrow?

I suppose so, I answered. As you know, I grew up in the summer sunlight of upward mobility. This leached out a lot of that dark ancestral grief. . . .

What if this sorrow is all due to history? I asked.

The cruel history of Europe, he said. In this way he showed ironic respect to one of my known themes. (171)

The narrator of the story remembers her childhood perception of America, reflected by an incantation: "I made an announcement to the sixth-grade assembly thirty years ago. I said: I thank God every day that I'm not in Europe. I thank God I'm American-born and live on East 172nd Street where there is a grocery store, a candy store, and a drugstore on one corner and on the same block a shul and two doctors' offices" (173). Yet as the narrator itemizes the gains, her luck in being an American, Jack recounts the losses of the immigrant experience, of his parents' past. For him, America symbolizes the ultimate sacrifice, that of parents for children who constantly deny the promise. The misery, the guilt, and the confusion Jack feels stem primarily from his own sense of failure. Jack remembers the comparative ease of his life in juxtaposition with his pieced-together fictional picture of his parents' struggle, a picture that comes together in his "memory" of likely events:

My mother and father came from a small town in Poland. They had three sons. My father decided to go to America, to 1. stay out of the army, 2. stay out of jail, 3. save his children from everyday wars and ordinary pogroms. He was helped by the savings of parents, uncles, grandmothers and set off like hundreds of thousands of others in that year. . . . Mostly he put his money away for the day he could bring his wife and sons to this place. Meanwhile, in Poland famine struck. Not hunger which all Americans suffer six, seven times a day but Famine, which tells the body to consume itself. . . . My father met my mother at the boat. He looked at her face, her hands. There was no baby in her arms, no children dragging at her skirt. . . . She had shaved her head, like a backward Orthodox bride, though they had been serious advanced socialists like most of the youth of their town. He took her by the hand and brought her home. They never went anywhere alone, except to work or the grocer's. They held each other's hand when they sat down at the table, even at breakfast. Sometimes he patted her hand, sometimes she patted his. He read the paper to her every night. (174-75)

Their story is the immigrant's story, and their sorrow, their loss, becomes that of their children, American-born, both finally outsiders. Jack's efforts to explain his parents' lives in America, like the obsessive queries made of Olsen's resistant protagonist—"Day after day, the spilling memories. Worse now, questions, too. Even the grandchildren: Grandma, in the olden days, when you were little" (98)—speak to, I think, an attempt at alleviating the fragmentation that has become the by-product of contemporary Jewish-American life. Such attempts often fail, however, because of the tensions inherent in the outsider's relation to his or her culture, expressed again by Shenandoah Fish:

Shenandoah tried to imagine their arrival in the new world and their first impression of the city of New York. But he knew that his imagination failed him, for nothing in his own experience was comparable to the great displacement of body and mind which their coming to America must have been. (27)

It is not so simple to argue that what we finally uncover in Jewish-American writing is a conflict of generations, a struggle between the immigrants and their American-born children. A struggle, certainly. However, it is a struggle that connects as well as divides. For such children in fiction, even those long since grown, the oral history embedded in their memories remains paradoxically a source of both connection and estrangement. Despite the host of characters caught in an ambivalent, often warring posture with their heritage, the guiding voice of the writer, almost without exception, tempers the conflict, makes sense of the tension through empathy. It is no wonder, then, that this conflict has as its center the family, for, as Robert Alter has recently argued, "the family, after all, is the matrix of our psychological lives, of our political, moral, and theological imaginings."¹³

While this ambivalence is articulated most pronouncedly in the language of the vanishing immigrant in Jewish-American literature, the insidiousness of separateness, of identity by ethnicity, appears also in that literature remote from the immigrant experience. Hortense Calisher'sshort story, 'Old Stock,"¹⁴ for example, suggests a different vision of the outsider. The assimilated and refined Mrs. Elkin, who considers herself and her daughter removed from those "Jews whose grosser features, voices, manners offended her sense of gentility all the more out of her resentful fear that she might be identified with them" (263), finds herself the very brunt of anti-Semitism, all the more disturbing because of her own anti-Semitic inclinations. While vacationing in the Catskills, where she considers herself beyond reproach, Mrs. Elkin tries her best to shun the other Jews staying at her lodgings; she considers any such association intrusive and presumptuous. Much to her embarrassment, however, Mrs. Elkin's "disguise" is exposed by an elderly local woman, and her unease, finally out in the open, reflects the denial of her own and her daughter's Jewish lineage and ironically causes her daughter to seek such a connection:

"I told Elizabeth Smith," Miss Onderdonk said. "I told her she'd rue the day she ever started taking in Jews." . . .

Mrs. Elkin, raising her brows, made a helpless face at Hester [her daughter], as if to say, "After all, the vagaries of the deaf . . ." She permitted herself a minimal shrug, even a slight spreading of palms. Under Hester's stare, she lowered her eyes and turned toward Miss Onderdonk again.

"I thought you knew, Miss Onderdonk," said her mother. "I thought you knew that we were—Hebrews." The word, the ultimate refinement, slid out of her mother's soft voice as if it were on runners.

"Eh?" said Miss Onderdonk.

Say it, Hester prayed. She had never before felt the sensation of prayer. Please say it, Mother. Say "Jew." (272-73; first ellipsis added)

Her mother's obvious distress paradoxically causes Hester to define herself once and for all as Jewish, and so to put an end to her mother's attempts to be what she is not.

We finally return to the question: can one remain a Jew in America? This question, born of the Jewish immigrant experience, depends for its answer on the definition of Judaism, which in many ways "looks different" in America, and on the acceptance of change, the tolerance of an evolving Jewish character in the literature of Jewish-American writers, the denial of old stereotypes and archetypal patterns.

How does one reconcile the Jewish-American experience with its past, with its immigrant origins? The steerage across the waters left behind more than miles. And the sense of loss is increasingly perceptible as the generations turn for American Jews, creating a need for a new identity, a new sense of what it means to be Jewish, a need intensified for women by the inevitably transformed feminine postures available in the "new" culture of America. In the fiction I've examined, a new vision of what it means to be Jewish in America emerges. No longer do we find, as we did with the earlier immigrant fiction and even with that which came after World War II, characters who feel excluded from and at odds with American socioeconomic ideals. Malamud, Bellow, and Philip Roth, it might be argued, worked through the evolution of the Jewish male character who, always a step out of line with the rest of America, struggled unsuccessfully to merge with the American mainstream, to shed the weighty baggage of his heritage. Contemporary Jewish-American women writers present a different sense of the "outsider." No longer on the outskirts of American culture, nor even of the literary tradition, the characters find themselves paradoxically alienated from and drawn to a heritage from which they are excluded, and yet in which they play an important function—the silent foil of a male-dominated tradition. This paradox of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion results in the fragmentation of identity we've seen in these stories, a fragmentation that causes the characters to seek to resolve their ambivalent feelings toward their pasts by trying to recreate them. Often, such characters are torn between a longing for the past, for a sense of absolutes (rituals, traditions, beliefs), and a determination to forge ahead, to fashion an identity that "fits" for this time and this place. Though their defiance of the "world of the fathers" results in new possibilities for the Jewish-American woman, it remains a vision fraught with ambivalence, with mistrust of one's "place," yet with an "insider's" instinct for continuity and the potential reaffirmation of identity. It is in this way that the Jewish-American woman, and perhaps, even more so, the Jewish-American woman writer, is the "outsider within."

NOTES

¹ Leon Yudkin, Jewish Writing and Identity in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982). All quotations are from this edition.

² Robert Alter, After the Tradition: Essays on Modern Jewish Writing (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969) 18.

³ While my intentions in this essay do not allow for a comprehensive analysis of the identity politics of women's literature, I would call attention to the following texts which I have found useful: Rosalind Coward, "Are Women's Novels Feminist Novels?" in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985) 225-39; Nelly Furman, "The Politics of Language: Beyond the Gender Principle?" in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppélla Kahn (London: Methuen, 1985) 59-79; Gayle Greene and Coppélla Kahn, "Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Woman," in Making a Difference 1-36; and Elaine Showalter, "Women's Time, Women's Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3 (Spring/Fall 1984): 29-43.

⁴ Cynthia Ozick, "Toward a New Yiddish: Note," in Art & Ardor: Essays by Cynthia Ozick (New York: Knopf, 1985) 152.

⁵ Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle (New York: Dell, 1961) 72-125. All quotations are from this edition.

⁶ Cynthia Ozick, "Envy; Or, Yiddish in America," in Jewish-American Stories, ed. Irving Howe (New York: New American Library, 1977) 129-77. All quotations are from this edition.

⁷ Grace Paley, "Faith in the Afternoon," in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (New York: Farrar, 1983) 29-49. All quotations are from this edition.

⁸ Delmore Schwartz, "America! America!," in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories, ed. James Atlas (New York: New Directions, 1978) 10-33. All quotations are from this edition.

⁹ Hortense Calisher, "The Rabbi's Daughter," in The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (New York: Arbor House, 1975) 276-88. All quotations are from this edition.

¹⁰ Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Falling (New York: Avon Bard Books, 1973) 9.

¹¹ Grace Paley, "Mom," in Esquire 85 (Dec. 1975): 84.

¹² Paley, "The Immigrant Story," in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute 169-75. All quotations are from this edition.

¹³ "Kafka's Father, Agnon's Mother, Bellow s Cousins," Commentary 81 (Feb. 1986): 48.

¹⁴ Calisher, "Old Stock," in The Collected Stories 263-75. All quotations are from this edition.