The Women’s Reviewof Books

W hen the United States made itsopening gambit in the war againstterrorism by bombing Afghani-

stan in October 2001, the need to liberateAfghan women from the Taliban regimelent moral justification to the attacks.Among some who had long sought to bringinto view human rights abuses under theTaliban, such justification rang hollow.Riffat Hassan, a feminist Muslim theologianand contributor to Women for Afghan Women,one of a number of recently released bookson the topic, observes that the “‘liberation’

of Afghan women from Taliban ruleoccurred as a by-product of the U.S.-ledmilitary action in Afghanistan.” Indeed,Hassan believes that were it not for theSeptember 11 attacks, Afghan women“would have continued to live and die inhorrific conditions under Taliban rule.”

The emergence of Afghan women as ahuman rights cause in the last year raisesanew questions about the relationshipbetween politics and the information market.

continued on page three

In This Issue In her first novel, Korean

American Caroline Hwang tells thestory of Ginger Lee, the comicallyrebellious daughter of Korean par-ents: Christine Thomas reviews In FullBloom, p. 14.

Indian activist Arundhati Royspeaks out around the world againstthe evils of globalization: now, in“Come September,” an essay writtento mark the first anniversary ofSeptember 11, she reflects on themultiple, interconnected anniversariesthat fall on that date, p. 6.

Is it true that writers of children’sbooks are really children who nevergrew up? In her review of Girls andBoys Forever, Elizabeth Bobrick takesissue with Alison Lurie’s claim, p. 8.

In The Country Under My Skin,Nicaraguan poet Gioconda Belli looksback on her life as a feminist in theheart of the Sandinista revolution:Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reads herpoignant recollections of the triumphand defeat of a dream, p. 12.

What is it like to be a foster par-ent? Kathy Harrison’s Another Place atthe Table offers an unusual glimpse ofthe satisfactions and tribulations thatcome with the job: Edith Miltonreviews her account of caring for “anendless succession of abused and neg-lected children,” p. 13.

and more...

Out of the rubbleby Amy Zalman

Competing perspectives on the

lives of Afghan women

Caroline Hwang,, author of IInn FFuullll BBlloooomm..

Vol. XX, No. 7 April 2003 74035 $4.00

PRINTED IN THE USA

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NINA AUERBACH is John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written widely aboutVictorian England. Her books include Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth and Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time.HEIDI BELL is a freelance writer and editor living in Aurora, Illinois. Her writing has appeared in Salon.com, Seattle Review and PrairieSchooner. She is working on a novel.ELIZABETH BOBRICK, an essayist and fiction writer, teaches non-fiction writing at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.She has written on children and children’s literature for Salon, the Living section of MSNBC.com and Psychology Today.ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ is a historian specializing in US imperialism and Latin America. She has published two works of mem-oir, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997) and Outlaw Woman: Memoir of the War Years, 1960-75 (City Lights, 2002). South End Press willpublish her memoir of Sandinista Nicaragua in 2004.SHAHLA HAERI is the director of the women’s studies program at Boston University. Her latest book, No Shame for the Sun: Lives ofProfessional Pakistani Women, is published by Syracuse University Press (2002). Her video documentary, “Mrs. President: Women andPolitical Leadership in Iran” (46 min. subtitled, 2002) is distributed by Films for Humanities and Sciences (www.films.com) in the UnitedStates and Canada.HEATHER HEWETT is a freelance journalist, book critic and essayist living in New York City. She writes frequently about Africanwriters.MELANIE KAYE/KANTROWITZ is a writer, teacher and long-time activist. Her books include poetry (We Speak in Code) and fiction(My Jewish Face & Other Stories, Diaspora: a Novel and Tales of Late Capitalism, in progress) as well as essays and reviews. She works as thedirector of the Queens College Worker Education Extension Center in Manhattan.JEANNE MARECEK holds the W. R. Kenan, Jr. Professorship of Psychology at Swarthmore College where she is a member of theWomen’s Studies Program. Her publications include Making a Difference: Psychology and the Construction of Gender (with Rachel Hare-Mustin,Yale University Press, 1990); “Trauma talk in feminist clinical practice” in New Versions of Victims: Feminists Struggle with the Concept, editedby Sharon Lamb (New York University Press, 1999); and “Unfinished business: Postmodern feminism in personality psychology” inRethinking Mental Health and Disorder, edited by Mary Ballou and Laura S. Brown (Guilford, 2002). She teaches courses on psychotherapy,abnormal psychology, gender and feminist theory.EDITH MILTON has written fiction, essays and literary reviews for many periodicals. She is working on a memoir of her childhoodyears with an English foster family.VALERIE MINER is the author of ten books. Her first novel, Blood Sisters, has just been issued in a new edition by Michigan UniversityPress. She is professor of English at the University of Minnesota and travels widely giving readings, workshops and lectures.KAREN ROSENBERG is a writer of essays, fiction and plays. Her article on the anarchist cult of self-sacrifice appeared in Yiddish andthe Left, edited by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Legenda, 2001). In 2002, her fiction appeared in Britain in Spiked, TheInterpreter’s House and Moodswing and in the US in PMS:poemmemoirstory. She is currently conducting research in European archives on theRussian- and Yiddish-speaking Socialist Revolutionaries.ARUNDHATI ROY’s novel The God of Small Things was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. She is also the recipient of the 2002 LannanFoundation Prize for Cultural Freedom. She lives in New Delhi, India.CHRISTINE THOMAS was born and raised in Hawaii. Her reviews have appeared in such publications as The Times Literary Supplementand San Francisco Chronicle, and her fiction in literary journals and anthologies in the United Kingdom.SHARON THOMPSON is the author of Going All the Way: Teenage Girls’ Narratives of Sex, Romance and Pregnancy. She is writing the storyof her father’s life (a novel).AMY ZALMAN recently completed her Ph.D. in Arab cultural politics at New York University and a book manuscript, Where It Was YouMeant to Travel: A Sephardic Memoir. She has work forthcoming in the International Review of Middle Eastern Studies and Arab Studies Journal.She lives in New York City.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 20032

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Volume XX, No. 7April 2003

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Contents1 Amy Zalman OUT OF THE RUBBLE: Competing perspectives on the lives of Afghan women

5 Heather Hewett The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera

6 Arundhati Roy COME SEPTEMBER: Will things get better after they get worse?

8 Elizabeth Bobrick Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter

by Alison Lurie

9 Sharon Thompson The Story of My Father: A Memoir by Sue Miller

10 Shahla Haeri Inside Iran: Women’s Lives by Jane Howard

11 Jeanne Marecek The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy

by Bonnie Friedman

12 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War by Gioconda Belli

13 Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz Love after 9/11 (poem)

13 Edith Milton Another Place at the Table by Kathy Harrison

14 Christine Thomas In Full Bloom by Caroline Hwang

15 Heidi Bell The Chelsea Whistle by Michelle Tea

16 Valerie Miner Good Faith by Jane Smiley

17 Karen Rosenberg Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume One:

Made for America, 1890-1901 edited by Candace Falk, Barry Pateman and Jessica Moran

18 Nina Auerbach Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience

by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman

19 Books Received

Under what circumstances do issuesappear in global purview, and why dosome engage an American audience morethan others? With respect to women inAfghanistan, the interest relates to howwomen’s rights historically have beenleveraged in the West to justify interven-tion on behalf of “Eastern” women’s lib-eration. A quick glance at the covers ofnew books on Afghan women says a lotabout how much both politics and pub-lishing rely on this history to make theirsales. Their titles—Behind the Burqa, MyForbidden Face, Veiled Courage, VeiledThreat—exploit long-standing myths inthe Western imagination about the veil,Islam and women. Pitched into theAmerican book market in the current cli-mate, these titles, and the photos of unin-dividuated blobs of burqa-clad womenthat illustrate their covers, may inadver-tently serve a political purpose.

The good news is that beyond theveil-obsessed titles and covers of somerecent books, there is a wealth of analysisdocumenting the situation of Afghanwomen and placing it in cultural, histori-cal and political context. Ranging frompersonal testimonies by ordinary Afghanwomen and professional human rightsadvocates to rigorous scholarship andmore freely declarative journalism, thesebooks attempt to account for the rise ofthe Taliban and their singularly brutal rul-ing tactics. Most of the authors of thesebooks have taken the current interest inAfghan women as an opportunity notonly to bring to light the details of theircurrent situation, but to lay out the com-

plex political interactions that permittedit, while proposing steps for the future.Taken together, they raise provocativepoints specific to the reconstruction ofAfghanistan, but which may also informpolicy in other contexts, especially since itappears likely that the United States isabout to enter a new era of engagementin the Middle East.

T he first point, which cannot bestated often enough, is that thegrotesque situation in which

Afghans found themselves under the

Taliban has nothing to do with Islam. Ithas to do with politics. This bears repeat-ing precisely because of the way in whichthe case for Afghan women is beingmade in book titles that reference Islamiccultural markers such as the veil.However, there is no civilization or reli-gion whose ideals tolerate the Taliban’streatment of women and men. No rela-tivist accommodation of tyranny—in thename of tolerance—need be made.

Books such as Canadian journalistSally Armstrong’s Veiled Threat confusethe issue by reviewing theological argu-

ments about gender and religion.Armstrong’s is a well-intentioned, butrhetorically over-written and garbled,account of the culture of Afghan women.More invidiously, while reviews of thetenets of Islam, Islamic history and theo-logical considerations of women’s roleshave their place, that place is not in a dis-cussion of the Taliban. The claim that“the interpretation of Islam by the post-Taliban regime will likely determine thecountry’s future” is not only untrue, itfeeds the premise that Islamic societies liebeyond the exigencies or possibilities ofmodern social and political frameworks.

The second point consistently madein new books about Afghan women isthat gender is a crucial practical and the-oretical consideration in rebuildingAfghanistan. This means not only thatwomen must play substantial policy-mak-ing and other public roles, but also thatthe roles of men and masculinity must befactored in. In Women for Afghan Womenthis argument is examined at length.Several contributors to this excellent col-lection of essays, poems and photo-graphs are members of the organizationfrom which the book takes its name, agroup of Afghan and non-Afghanwomen from the New York area who dofundraising and advocacy work. The col-lection provides both basic informationfor a newcomer to Afghan history andculture, and sophisticated critiques andanalyses of the steps being taken towarda viable future. Sima Wali’s introductioneradicates, in about a page of bullet-pointed remarks, some of the factualconfusion that has arisen around whoAfghans are—historically and ethnicallydistinct from Arabs or Iranians—the lan-guages they speak, chiefly Dari and

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 2003 3

Out of the rubblecontinued from p.1 Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future

edited by Sunita Mehta. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 240 pp.,$13.95 paper.

Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan bySally Armstrong. New York. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002, 208 pp.,$24.95 hardcover.

Veiled Courage: Inside the Afghan Women’s Resistance by CherylBenard. New York: Broadway Books, 2002, 293 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

My Forbidden Face: Growing Up Under the Taliban, A YoungWoman’s Story by Latifa. New York: Talk Miramax, 2002, 210 pp., $21.95hardcover.

Prisoners of Hope: The Story of Our Captivity and Freedom inAfghanistan by Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer. New York: Doubleday,2002, 309 pp., $19.95 hardcover, $12.99 paper.

Behind the Burqa: Our Life in Afghanistan and How We Escaped toFreedom by “Sulima” and “Hala” as told to Batya Swift Yasgur. New York:John Wiley & Sons, 2002, 256 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Repression, Resistance and Women in Afghanistan by Hafizullah Emadi.Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002, 264 pp., $64.95 hardcover.

Torn Between Two Cultures: An Afghan-American Woman Speaks Outby Maryam Qudrat Aseel. Sterling, VA: Capital Books, 2003, 208 pp., $24.95hardcover.

Pashto, and their relationship (none) toOsama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

Wali, the President and ChiefExecutive Officer of Refugee Women inDevelopment, also devotes part of herintroduction to the necessary reconstruc-tion of our understanding of gender. “Itmay surprise Westerners,” she remarks,“to discover that the stereotype ofAfghan men as women-haters andoppressors is incorrect.” This perceptionhas ramifications in the arena of interna-tional policy. Wali points out that thewell-meant effort of the US governmentto redress Taliban decrees against femaleeducation by earmarking funds for girls’education “created yet another prob-lem—educational programs that excludeboys.” In their absence, parents sendboys to the Quranic schools, madrasas,“the very same institutions that indoctri-nated and educated the Taliban.” Theessays that follow usefully place women’srights and struggles in local and globalcontexts. Sara Amiryar, for example, asksin a brief essay whether the conventionalinstitution for dispute resolution, theLoya Jirga, will serve women. AngelaKing reviews UN policies and actionsregarding Afghan women since 1997.

A fascinating and elegantly writtenexploration of the relationships ofgender to politics is offered in

Cheryl Benard’s Veiled Courage. Benard’sintroduction to the RevolutionaryAssociation of the Women ofAfghanistan (RAWA) began in 1982, whenshe went to Pakistan to assess the deliveryof international aid to refugees. TheAfghan refugee situation has existed sincethe late 1970s, when the 1979 Soviet inva-sion, followed shortly by an American-backed guerrilla war, led to the flight oftwo million Afghans to the borders ofPakistan and Iran. This number wouldincrease to five million by the mid-1990s.

Benard chronicles the shift in her ownviews about Afghan women. Aid workerssometimes discussed among themselvesthe particular problems of femalerefugees: the high mortality rates forwomen and newborns in childbirth, anepidemic level of domestic violence, thelow female literacy rates. “The outcomeof these discussions was always thesame,” she recalls. “There was nothingyou could do... you weren’t here to changepeople’s cultural traditions... [I]t waspointless to offer services that would ben-efit the women, because the Afghans justdidn’t want that. They were used to thingsbeing this way.” Benard was distressed bysuch conclusions, but the sex-segregatedorganization of society in the campsmade it difficult to find out what womenthemselves might think, since they sorarely appeared in public. When offeredthe opportunity to visit a women’s hospi-tal near Peshawar, Benard discoveredwomen suffering not so much from med-ical ailments as from social and politicalones. They had been abused by husbands,become ill after extended forced seclu-sion, or had sunk into depression whensons as young as eight years old wereforcibly taken to fight a “holy war”against the Soviets. Their attitudeschanged Benard’s views: “These womenwere not resigned, they hadn’t grownindifferent to the deaths of their children,they didn’t accept loveless arranged mar-riages as a given, they didn’t feel secure inthe arms of an extended family, theyweren’t content in deep traditionalism.”

Benard’s discovery eventually led herto RAWA. The feminist political associa-tion was founded by an extraordinarilycharismatic woman known as Meena inthe late 1970s, and would later be the

only organized opposition group tothrive during the period of Taliban rule.Benard’s collection of testimonials bymembers and supporters enhances herhistory of this unique organization.Meena herself was killed by Pakistanipolice with ties to the Afghan secretpolice in 1987, but the memory of herleadership continues to permeate RAWAand is among the elements Benard identi-fies as basic to the group’s coherence.

RAWA’s leadership and membershipprinciples are also distinct. At its core areeleven elected women. Membership hasexpanded into the thousands through thepainstaking work of its existing mem-bers, who cultivate interested outsiders,both women and men (although onlywomen can be members), throughlengthy conversations and correspon-dence. RAWA members—active, literate,confident—also serve as role models forwomen demoralized by extreme circum-stances and by a culture that trivializestheir worth. The willingness of membersto make extended personal contact withsupporters, as well as challengers, paysoff. As Benard observes, RAWA’s tacticsillustrate how ordinary people are trans-formed into resistance fighters. Womenwho might in other circumstances bedenied political participation, such as illit-erate widows, are given tasks in the party.Their participation ties them even morefirmly to RAWA’s aims: to change funda-mentally the position of women in a cul-ture in which female inferiority is adeeply embedded value, and to create abasis for Afghan civil society.

Benard devotes the final third of thebook to the role of RAWA in the post-September 11 future. She presents aninteresting comparison between Al-Qaeda and RAWA: both have flourishedin the same unstable atmosphere, andboth constitute what she calls “post-modern” political movements, combin-ing archaic and contemporary modes ofcommunication to be effective. Theirdifference, of course, is that from “theglobal ideology mix, [RAWA] hadpicked democracy and equality; al-Qaeda had drawn anti-Westernism andauthoritarianism.”

Benard concludes with a stringent cri-tique of the global diplomatic flurry thatfollowed the fall of the Taliban. RAWA isagain in the forefront of underminingstatic traditions, by working to “subvertthe autonomy project of modern diplo-macy, which wants to mold Afghanistaninto a nice conventional male-preponder-ant nation-state according to the old cri-teria of ethnic composition” in a contextin which ethnicity may not be the mostrelevant or fruitful means of creating anational consensus. Like other closeobservers of the situation, Benard warnsof the consequences if the issues of malesocialization and masculinity remainunremarked: “In various places, youngmen who have never known a single dayof normal life are being psychologicallymisused for someone’s dreams of glory.Not just their own populations, but therest of us, too, are likely to pay the price.”

Among the most powerful and sim-ply rendered books to appearrecently is a personal narrative by

“Latifa” (a pseudonym), My ForbiddenFace. The cover shares the lurid titlingand imagery that markets Afghanwomen to the West: a photograph of aburqa-clad head with two eyes barely vis-ible behind their embroidered lattice. Butthe contents of Latifa’s book reveal asharp intellect with a literary and politicalprescience that should put her on thesame shelf as Anne Frank.

Latifa, from a progressive and relative-ly well-to-do family of seven, was a six-teen-year-old student preparing to beginuniversity life as a journalism major whenthe Taliban entered Kabul in September,1996. In May 2001, she and her motherwere given the opportunity to travel toParis to inaugurate an information cam-paign about women sponsored by anadvocacy organization, AfghanistanLibre, and Elle magazine. While there, theTaliban issued a fatwa against them fordenouncing the regime and gutted theirKabul apartment. Latifa and her parentsremained exiled in Paris, where Latifa wasgiven the opportunity to write her book,an effort to “explain how a girl fromKabul, educated first during the Sovietoccupation, then under Communistregimes throughout four years of civilwar, was finally locked away by a mon-strous power, her life confiscated whenshe was only sixteen.” Latifa’s narrativeconcludes in October 2001, just as theAmerican bombing has begun. “I know,”she writes, “that refugees on the bordersof Afghanistan’s neighbors endure hard-ships much worse than mine. What can Ido—except tell you what my life has beenlike in the city of Kabul, a city of rubbleand ruins?”

What, and how, she tells of her fami-ly life makes for a powerful critique ofpolitical hypocrisy, whether this meansthe flourishing black market in televi-sions under the Taliban (who banned tel-evision), the drug trade on theAfghanistan-Pakistan border, the perver-sions of humanitarian standards undertheir rule, or the news, in February 2001,that the Taliban’s Minister of Health (ina regime that forbade women fromreceiving medical care) had traveled toFrance to discuss humanitarian matters.The eloquence with which this youngwriter expresses her convictions is mov-ing; in their light it seems worth listeningwhen they waver: “I’ve come to the endof my story, at a time when weapons arespeaking in our place. As always… Butwho speaks for Afghanistan? I don’tknow anymore.”

The eloquence and power of thesewriters makes it clear that women mayspeak for the nation. But it is worth keep-ing in mind how their images, and thoseof the liberated, individual voices andfaces of American women to whom theyare contrasted, can be manipulated into amoral justification for a range of objec-tives. Prisoners of Hope makes just such anunintentional contrast. It is narrated byDayna Curry and Heather Mercer, twoyoung Christian missionaries from Waco,Texas, whose dream of “serving the pooroverseas and expressing the love ofJesus” led them to Afghanistan in thespring of 2001. While there, they wereimprisoned and put on trial by theTaliban. They were mid-trial in theautumn of 2001 and, in November, air-lifted from the country by US SpecialForces. The book makes a fascinatingread for anyone interested in such anexperience and in the genre of Christiansalvation narrative; the young womenperceive their imprisonment and the tri-

als before them during interrogation astests of their faith. But the narrativeobtains a secular political currency via theendorsement of President Bush, whoseremarks on their courage are recorded onthe book’s back cover. The front cover, aphotograph of the women’s beamingfaces, radiates with the implication thatthe very ability to show one’s name andface as a woman relates to a singularlyAmerican concept of freedom.

In symmetrical contrast to Prisoners ofHope stands Behind the Burqa. It recountsthe quest for asylum in the United Statesby two sisters as told to Batya SwiftYasgur, a freelance writer who met themwhile reporting on detained asylum seek-ers. Although “Hala” and “Sulima”(pseudonyms) too ultimately arrive inAmerica, they are pictured fully veiled onthe cover of the book.

The tale within is well-told. Both sis-ters, sixteen years apart, describe theirlives from early childhood to the present,setting their personal experiences againstthe conflict between communists andmujahadeen that structured much oftheir existence. Sulima, the elder of thetwo, recalls her father’s increasinglyextreme vision of Islam over the 1970s, anationalist response to the rise of com-munism in Afghanistan that had severerepercussions for her. Ironically, Sulima, aCommunist Party member, fled thecountry in 1979, when her reliance onQuranic edicts to educate rural womenled her into conflict with the Communistpresident, Hafizullah Amin. Hala left thecountry in 1997, following the discoveryof her work as a schoolteacher and herviolent persecution by the Taliban.

All of the books mentioned here offersomething of value to the reader interest-ed in the recent history of Afghanwomen. At their most optimistic, all makeit clear that the technologies and values ofa globalizing world create new opportuni-ties for women’s empowerment, and foralliances across national boundaries onbehalf of human rights. For those seekinganalyses of the concrete possibilities forwomen to effect policy change, Women forAfghan Women and Benard’s Veiled Courageare valuable reads.

Two other books not discussed here arealso of note. The scholarly reader seekingan overview of the cultural and politicalroles of women in modern Afghanistanmay turn to Hafizullah Emadi’s Repression,Resistance and Women in Afghanistan. A num-ber of his chapters, which place women’schanging status in the context of a shiftingstate and capital structure, might be usefulsupplements to a college course. In a dif-ferent vein, Maryam Qudrat Aseel, anAfghan American, has recorded herimpressions in Torn Between Two Cultures.While written in a fairly banal and oftensentimental style, it guides the readerthrough some of the misunderstandingsAmericans have about Afghanistan from apersonal perspective. But the gem amongall of these books is Latifa’s My ForbiddenFace. This concise memoir is riveting,insightful and quite lovely: a testament tothe human capacity to grow beauty in therockiest soil.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 20034

MOVING?Don’t miss an issue!Please give us six to eight weeks’ notice of your change of address. We needyour OLD address (on your mailing label, if possible) as well as your NEWone. Send the information to: Address Change, The Women’s Review ofBooks, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, or phone toll-free 888-283-8044/ fax 781-283-3645/ email nwechsler@wellesley.edu.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 2003 5

I n a nation where fear has ruled fordecades, Yvonne Vera has consis-tently spoken out against injustice

and violence. Vera, the author of fournovels and one collection of short sto-ries, has built a writing career out ofcriticizing Zimbabwe’s shortcomings—no small feat in a country where out-spoken journalists, writers and artistshave been imprisoned and oppositionparty members have routinely disap-peared. Even more remarkable is thatVera, who earned a doctorate in litera-ture from York University in Ontario,still lives and publishes in the country ofher birth. Unlike the many African writ-ers who have been forced into exile, shecontinues to explore her deep love ofZimbabwe from her home in Bulawayo.

Vera’s commitment to her countryhas emboldened her to take on contro-versial subjects in her fiction, most of allthe impact of violence on Zimbabweanwomen. Her central characters arewomen who suffer from the wars,poverty and patriarchal oppression thathave plagued this southern Africannation for years. She refuses to offer herreader conventional or tidy resolutions;rather, she weaves fragmented narrativesthat inexorably build to their tragic end-ings, wrapping incisive social criticism inimpressionistic and elliptical language.One wonders whether her style has pro-tected her from those who might notlike what she has to say.

After exploring the conflict betweenZimbabwe and Britain during the latenineteenth century in Nehanda (1993),her first novel, Vera moved beyond theconcerns of anticolonialism to examinethe violence within African communi-ties during the tumultuous twentiethcentury. Without a Name (1994), a briefbut powerful novel that moves betweenpast and present, tells a story centeredaround rape and infanticide; Under theTongue (1996), a highly fragmented andpoetic narrative, focuses on a younggirl’s struggle to survive incest, herfather’s murder and her mother’s incar-ceration. The equally imagistic ButterflyBurning (1998), which marked Vera’s USdebut two years later, deals with moreforbidden topics: abortion and suicide.

Vera aims even higher with The StoneVirgins, a piercing, lyrical novel thattakes on another subject surrounded byfear and silence: the massacres of inno-cent civilians that took place in the1980s, shortly after the country won itsindependence. Newly elected presidentRobert Mugabe, attempting to consoli-date his power, sent soldiers to rid thecountry of black insurgents and dissi-dents. No one knows precisely howmany people were killed, but the num-bers run into the thousands.Matabeleland province, where Vera’sstory takes place, was particularly hardhit. Years of terror silenced many peo-ple; now, with her new novel, Verabreaks that silence to give voice to someof the victims of the violence perpe-trated under black rule.

Like Vera’s previous work, The StoneVirgins tells a story of wounding and

trauma. But whereas her earlier workplumbs the traumatized psyches of indi-vidual characters, this one ambitiouslyreaches outward and across time. Sheinterweaves the lives of two sisters withthe story of their community, Kezi, arural town located 200 kilometers westof the city of Bulawayo. Unlike its moreurban neighbor with its modern, grid-like streets, Kezi is a forgotten town atthe end of a tarred road. Its inhabitants,who live in mud huts and congregate atthe small, dusty general store, patientlywait for the arrival of a phone for thetown’s empty telephone booth and cau-tiously watch the wars being fought inthe nearby hills of Gulati. With thisexpansive sweep—across the geographyof Matebeleland province, over a periodof 36 years—the story of an entirenation unfolds.

T he first third of the novel spansthe colonial era and the decades-long fight for independence

from white rule. It begins in Bulawayoin 1950, when Rhodesian society keptAfricans and Europeans separate. Veraevocatively describes how black menand women were forced to conducttheir lives within the interstices of thecity: “Ekoneni is a rendezvous, a place tomeet. You cannot meet inside any ofthe buildings because this city is divided;entry is forbidden to black men andwomen; you meet outside buildings, notat doorways, entries, foyers, not beneatharched windows, not under gracefulcolonnades, balustrades, and cornices,but ekoneni. Here, you linger, ambivalent,permanent as time. You are in transit.”

As the story moves to the ruralenclave of Kezi, we meet Thenjiwe, abeautiful young woman who has a briefbut intense love affair with a man whosteps off the bus from Bulawayo. Theydrift apart and the affair ends; the storyhints that words have failed them. Withmasterful foreshadowing, Vera sug-gests the unforeseen calamity that liesahead for Thenjiwe: “She has no ideanow, or ever, that some of the harmshe has to forget is in the future, not inthe past, and that she would not haveenough time in the future to forget anyof the hurt.”

The remainder of the novel recordsthe devastating violence that tore apartthe young nation between 1981 and1986. Vera’s characters are not spared:one sister is brutally murdered, the

other is raped and mutilated by a blackinsurgent. Vera captures these excruciat-ing events in images that are simultane-ously explicit and metaphorical:

He enters her body like a vacu-um. She can do nothing to saveherself.... He forces her down.She yields. She is leaning back-wards into his body. He holds herbody like a bent stem. He drawsher waist into the curve of hisarm. She is molded into theshape of his waiting arm—a ten-dril on a hard rock.

He is at the pit of her being.Her anger rises furiously. Hersaliva is a sour ferment of bile.She would like to speak, to spit.

(p. 68)

The metaphor conveys the victim’svulnerability with an unexpected lyri-cism, but it does not erase the violence.Rather, Vera’s use of metaphor suggeststhe inadequacy of language in the faceof trauma. Again and again, the storyreturns to the same moments, as repeti-tion suggests how a human conscious-ness would struggle to grasp theunthinkable. With each new stroke ofthe pen, the hazy picture becomes a lit-tle clearer—or as clear as these unspeak-able horrors can become.

Vera’s story reminds one of works byToni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat andMichael Ondaatje, all of whom similar-ly grapple with physical and psychologi-cal trauma. Like them, she explores howviolence affects both body and mind.How can healing take place whenwounds cut deep into places that no onecan see? What happens to language and

to memory? “Only the skin heals,” shewrites. But “[t]hese are the wounds ofwar, which no one can heal; bandagesand stitches cannot restore a humanbeing with a memory intact and trueinside the bone.”

Given her earlier work, Vera’s preoc-cupation with trauma is hardly surpris-ing. But what differentiates The StoneVirgins from her previous novels is herwillingness to ask more searching ques-tions about the violence that hasplagued Zimbabwe. She ventures intoentirely different territory—the mindof the killer—as the rest of the novelalternates between a woman’s struggleto heal and her attacker’s story. Readerswho haven’t already felt disoriented bythe story’s shifts in point of view (Verafrequently and unexpectedly switchesbetween first and third person) willcertainly feel the shock of experiencingthe story through the eyes of the rapistSibaso. Slowly we come to realize thathe, too, is a victim of the war, awounded man who takes refuge in aGulati bomb crater filled with dead,dismembered bodies and ancient stonecarvings of virgins which exert anenigmatic power.

As Vera plunges into Sibaso’s scarredpsyche, she takes one of the greatestartistic and psychological risks of herwriting career. It is the gamble of amature and compassionate writer and itsucceeds: as the story deepens, we catcha glimpse of the full extent of the war’sravages. Both dissidents and soldierswreak havoc on the country, destroyingKezi with a systematic, planned brutali-ty. As the violence ricochets from per-son to person, no woman or manremains untouched.

A country in fragmentsby Heather Hewett

The Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera. New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 2003, 184 pp., $18.00 hardcover.

Yvonne Vera©

Tafad

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 20036

L iving as I do, as millions of us do,in the shadow of the nuclear holo-caust that the governments of

India and Pakistan keep promising theirbrainwashed citizenry, and in the globalneighborhood of the War Against Terror(what President Bush rather biblicallycalls “the task that does not end”), I findmyself thinking a great deal about therelationship between citizens and thestate.

In India, those of us who haveexpressed views on nuclear bombs, BigDams, corporate globalization and therising threat of communal Hindu fas-cism—views that are at variance with theIndian government’s—are branded “anti-national.” While this accusation does notfill me with indignation, it’s not an accu-rate description of what I do or how Ithink. An anti-national is a person who isagainst her own nation and, by inference,is pro some other one. But it isn’t neces-sary to be anti-national to be deeply sus-picious of all nationalism, to be anti-nationalism. Nationalism of one kind oranother was the cause of most of thegenocide of the twentieth century. Flagsare bits of colored cloth that govern-ments use first to shrink-wrap people’sminds and then as ceremonial shrouds tobury the dead. When independent, think-ing people (and here I do not include thecorporate media) begin to rally underflags, when writers, painters, musicians,film makers suspend their judgment andblindly yoke their art to the service of thenation, it’s time for all of us to sit up andworry. In India we saw it happen soonafter the nuclear tests in 1998 and duringthe Kargil War against Pakistan in 1999.In the US we saw it during the Gulf Warand we see it now, during the War AgainstTerror. That blizzard of made-in-ChinaAmerican flags.

Recently, those who have criticizedthe actions of the US government(myself included) have been called“anti-American.” Anti-Americanism isin the process of being consecrated intoan ideology.

The term “anti-American” is usuallyused by the American establishment todiscredit—and not falsely, but shall wesay inaccurately—define its critics. Oncesomeone is branded anti-American, thechances are that he or she will be judgedbefore they’re heard and the argumentwill be lost in the welter of bruisednational pride.

What does the term “anti-American”mean? Does it mean you’re anti-jazz? Orthat you’re opposed to free speech? Thatyou don’t delight in Toni Morrison orJohn Updike? That you have a quarrelwith giant sequoias? Does it mean youdon’t admire the hundreds of thousandsof American citizens who marchedagainst nuclear weapons, or the thousandsof war resisters who forced their govern-ment to withdraw from Vietnam? Does itmean that you hate all Americans?

This sly conflation of America’s cul-ture, music, literature, the breathtakingphysical beauty of the land, the ordinarypleasures of ordinary people with criti-cism of the US government’s foreignpolicy (about which, thanks to America’s

“free press,” sadly, most Americans knowvery little) is a deliberate and extremelyeffective strategy. It’s like a retreatingarmy taking cover in a heavily populatedcity, hoping that the prospect of hittingcivilian targets will deter enemy fire.

There are many Americans whowould be mortified to be associated withtheir government’s policies. The mostscholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious cri-tiques of the hypocrisy and the contra-dictions in US government policy comefrom American citizens. When the rest ofthe world wants to know what the USgovernment is up to, we turn to NoamChomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn,Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, MichaelAlbert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blumand Anthony Arnove to tell us what’sreally going on.

Similarly, in India, not hundreds, butmillions of us would be ashamed andoffended if we were in any way implicat-ed with the present Indian government’sfascist policies which, apart from the per-petration of state terrorism in the valleyof Kashmir (in the name of fighting ter-rorism), have also turned a blind eye tothe recent state-supervised pogromagainst Muslims in Gujarat. It would beabsurd to think that those who criticizethe Indian government are “anti-Indian”—although the government itselfnever hesitates to take that line. It is dan-gerous to cede to the Indian governmentor the American government or anyonefor that matter, the right to define what”India” or “America” are, or ought to be.

To call someone anti-American,indeed, to be anti-American (or for thatmatter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan),is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imag-ination. An inability to see the world interms other than those that the establish-ment has set out for you: If you’re not aBushie, you’re a Taliban. If you don’t loveus, you hate us. If you’re not Good,you’re Evil. If you’re not with us, you’rewith the terrorists.

Last year, like many others, I too madethe mistake of scoffing at this post-September 11th rhetoric, dismissing it asfoolish and arrogant. I’ve realized that it’snot foolish at all. It’s actually a cannyrecruitment drive for a misconceived,dangerous war. Every day I’m takenaback at how many people believe thatopposing the war in Afghanistanamounts to supporting terrorism, or vot-ing for the Taliban. Now that the initialaim of the war—capturing Osama binLaden (dead or alive)—seems to have runinto bad weather, the goalposts havebeen moved. It’s being made out that thewhole point of the war was to topple theTaliban regime and liberate Afghanwomen from their burqas. We’re beingasked to believe that the US marines areactually on a feminist mission. (If so, willtheir next stop be America’s military allySaudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: inIndia there are some pretty reprehensiblesocial practices, against “untouchables,”against Christians and Muslims, againstwomen. Pakistan and Bangladesh haveeven worse ways of dealing with minori-ty communities and women. Should theybe bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad

and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible tobomb bigotry out of India? Can webomb our way to a feminist paradise? Isthat how women won the vote in theUnited States? Or how slavery was abol-ished? Can we win redress for the geno-cide of the millions of Native Americansupon whose corpses the United Stateswas founded by bombing Santa Fe?

None of us need anniversaries toremind us of what we cannot forget. So itis no more than coincidence that I hap-pen to be here, on American soil, inSeptember—this month of dreadfulanniversaries. Uppermost on everybody’smind of course, particularly here inAmerica, is the horror of what has cometo be known as “9/11.” Three thousandcivilians lost their lives in that lethal ter-rorist strike. The grief is still deep. Therage still sharp. The tears have not dried.And a strange, deadly war is ragingaround the world. Yet, each person whohas lost a loved one surely knows secretly,deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, nodaisy-cutters dropped on someone else’sloved ones or someone else’s children willblunt the edges of their pain or bringtheir own loved ones back. War cannotavenge those who have died. War is only abrutal desecration of their memory.

To fuel yet another war—this timeagainst Iraq—by cynically manipulatingpeople’s grief, by packaging it for TV spe-cials sponsored by corporations sellingdetergent or running shoes, is to cheapenand devalue grief, to drain it of meaning.What we are seeing now is a vulgar dis-play of the business of grief, the com-merce of grief, the pillaging of even themost private human feelings for politicalpurpose. It is a terrible, violent thing fora state to do to its people.

It’s not a clever enough subject tospeak of from a public platform, butwhat I would really love to talk to youabout is loss. Loss and losing. Grief, fail-ure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty,fear, the death of feeling, the death ofdreaming. The absolute, relentless, end-less, habitual unfairness of the world.What does loss mean to individuals?What does it mean to whole cultures,whole peoples who have learned to livewith it as a constant companion?

Since it is September 11th that we’retalking about, perhaps it’s in the fitnessof things that we remember what thatdate means, not only to those who losttheir loved ones in America, but to thosein other parts of the world to whom thatdate has long held significance. This his-torical dredging is not offered as anaccusation or a provocation. But just toshare the grief of history. To thin themist a little. To say to the citizens ofAmerica, in the gentlest, most humanway: Welcome to the World.

Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, onthe 11th of September 1973, GeneralPinochet overthrew the democraticallyelected government of Salvador Allendein a CIA-backed coup. “I don’t see whywe need to stand by and watch a countrygo Communist due to the irresponsibilityof its own people,” said Henry Kissinger,Nobel Peace Laureate, then PresidentNixon’s National Security Adviser.

After the coup President Allende wasfound dead inside the presidential palace.Whether he was killed or whether hekilled himself, we’ll never know. In theregime of terror that ensued, thousandsof people were killed. Many more simply“disappeared.” Firing squads conductedpublic executions. Concentration campsand torture chambers were openedacross the country. The dead were buriedin mine shafts and unmarked graves. Formore than sixteen years the people of

Come Septemberby Arundhati Roy

Will things get better after they get worse?

V era’s work, which combinesemotionally difficult subjectmatter with a dense, poetical

writing style, has garnered a great dealof praise and recognition from the lit-erary community in Zimbabwe andinternationally. While it’s difficult forAfrican writers to receive such atten-tion, it’s also professionally crucial. Thescarcity of resources for publishingAfrican literature and its typically smallreadership create a series of hurdles forany aspiring African writer. But Verahas benefited from a close relationshipwith Harare-based Baobab Books,which published her first four novelsand, more recently, the newly estab-lished Weaver Press, also in Harare,which published The Stone Virgins in2002. She has also racked up animpressive number of literary awards.After coming close with her first threetitles, she won the 1997Commonwealth Writers’ Prize forUnder the Tongue. (Her other awardsinclude the 1999 Voice of AfricaAward and the inaugural 2002Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa forThe Stone Virgins.) Some critics havecompared her to Ben Okri, theacclaimed Nigerian writer from an ear-lier generation.

In spite of all this praise, Vera hascontinued to develop as a writer, andher latest novel manifests this growth.While in many ways a culmination ofher work thus far, The Stone Virgins alsorepresents a departure for a writer whountil now has been more comfortablewith poetry than plot. Her previous fic-tion verges on the overly poetical,almost self-indulgently so, at timesleaving the reader lost in oblique lan-guage. Now, however, Vera hingespoetry to narrative. While her styleremains literary, she does not forget herreader, whom she invites into the storyat the very beginning. Using the secondperson, she asks us to behold the beau-ty of Bulawayo’s flower-covered citystreets, and in particular SelborneAvenue with its magnificent jacarandas:“you can look down it for miles andmiles, with your eyes encounteringeverything plus blooms.”

When the prose disorients the reader,it’s usually in service of a greater goal: toreproduce in us the feelings of uncer-tainty and fear that the characters experi-ence. Yet along with suffering, Vera givesher readers hope—a conspicuousabsence in her earlier novels. At the end,some measure of healing comes from aman who, unlike Sibaso, aims to recon-struct history instead of destroy it andbelieves that a “new nation needs torestore the past.” Given all the anguishand terror, the whiff of redemptionpasses too quickly; I wanted Vera todevelop this character and his relation-ship with the victim. Still, his missionechoes one of the book’s central themes:that somehow, in the face of war anddestruction, some things endure.

Above all, the landscape provides asource of beauty and strengththroughout the novel. The Shona wordzimbabwe, which means “house ofstone,” is most certainly not lost onthe author of a novel featuring carvedstone virgins which have silently wit-nessed years of devastation and lossand have outlasted them. So too, TheStone Virgins whispers, Zimbabwe mayyet survive. If communities can berestored and history remembered—iffear dissipates and men and womencan speak out—then perhaps the seedsof regeneration will sprout in this war-and hunger-torn nation.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 2003 7

Chile lived in dread of the midnightknock, of routine disappearances, ofsudden arrest and torture.

In 2000, following the 1998 arrest ofGeneral Pinochet in Britain, thousands ofsecret documents were declassified by theUS government. They contain unequivo-cal evidence of the CIA’s involvement inthe coup as well as the fact that the USgovernment had detailed informationabout the situation in Chile duringGeneral Pinochet’s reign. Yet Kissingerassured the general of his support: “Inthe United States, as you know, we aresympathetic with what you are trying todo,” he said, “We wish your governmentwell.”

Those of us who have only everknown life in a democracy, howeverflawed, would find it hard to imaginewhat living in a dictatorship and enduringthe absolute loss of freedom reallymeans. It isn’t just those who Pinochetmurdered, but the lives he stole from theliving that must be accounted for.

S eptember 11th has a tragic reso-nance in the Middle East too. Onthe 11th of September 1922,

ignoring Arab outrage, the British gov-ernment proclaimed a mandate inPalestine, a follow-up to the 1917 BalfourDeclaration, which imperial Britainissued, with its army massed outside thegates of the city of Gaza. The BalfourDeclaration promised European Zionists“a national home for Jewish people.” (Atthe time, the empire on which the sunnever set was free to snatch and bequeathnational homes like the school bully dis-tributes marbles.) Two years after thedeclaration, Lord Arthur James Balfour,the British foreign secretary said,

[I]n Palestine we do not proposeeven to go through the form ofconsulting the wishes of the pres-ent inhabitants of the country….Zionism, be it right or wrong,good or bad, is rooted in age-longtradition, in present needs, infuture hopes, of far profounderimport than the desires and preju-dices of the 700,000 Arabs whonow inhabit that ancient land.

How carelessly imperial powerdecreed whose needs were profound andwhose were not. How carelessly it vivi-sected ancient civilizations. Palestine andKashmir are imperial Britain’s festering,blood-drenched gifts to the modernworld. Both are fault lines in the raginginternational conflicts of today.

In another part of the Middle East,September 11th strikes a more recent

chord. It was on the 11th of September1990 that George W. Bush Sr., thenPresident of the United States, made aspeech to a joint session of Congressannouncing his government’s decision togo to war against Iraq.

The US government says that SaddamHussein is a war criminal, a cruel militarydespot who has committed genocideagainst his own people. That’s a fairlyaccurate description of the man. In 1988he razed hundreds of villages in northernIraq and used chemical weapons andmachine-guns to kill thousands ofKurdish people. Today we know that thatsame year the US government providedhim with five hundred million dollars insubsidies to buy American agriculturalproducts. The next year, after he had suc-cessfully completed his genocidal cam-paign, the US government doubled itssubsidy to one billion dollars. It also pro-vided him with high quality germ seed foranthrax, as well as helicopters and dual-use material that could be used to manu-facture chemical and biological weapons.

So it turns out that while SaddamHussein was carrying out his worst atroc-ities, the US and the UK governmentswere his close allies. Even today, the gov-ernment of Turkey, which has one of themost appalling human rights records inthe world, is one of the US government’sclosest allies. The fact that the Turkishgovernment has oppressed and murderedKurdish people for years has not pre-vented the US government from plyingTurkey with weapons and developmentaid. Clearly it was not concern for theKurdish people that provoked PresidentBush’s speech to Congress.

What changed? In August 1990,Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. His sinwas not so much that he had committedan act of war, but that he acted inde-pendently, without orders from his mas-ters. This display of independence wasenough to upset the power equation inthe Gulf. So it was decided that SaddamHussein be exterminated, like a pet thathas outlived its owner’s affection.

The first Allied attack on Iraq tookplace in January 1991. The worldwatched the prime-time war as it wasplayed out on TV. (In India those days,you had to go to a five-star hotel lobbyto watch CNN.) Tens of thousands ofpeople were killed in a month of devas-tating bombing. What many do notknow is that the war did not end then.The initial fury simmered down into thelongest sustained air attack on a countrysince the Vietnam War. Over the lastdecade, American and British forceshave fired thousands of missiles andbombs on Iraq. Iraq’s fields and farm-

lands have been shelled with three hun-dred tons of depleted uranium. In theirbombing sorties, the Allies targeted anddestroyed water treatment plants, awareof the fact that they could not berepaired without foreign assistance. Insouthern Iraq, there has been a fourfoldincrease in cancer among children. In thedecade of economic sanctions that fol-lowed the war, Iraqi civilians have beendenied food, medicine, hospital equip-ment, ambulances, clean water—thebasic essentials.

About half a million Iraqi childrenhave died as a result of the sanctions. Ofthem, Madeleine Albright, then USAmbassador to the United Nations,famously said, “I think this is a very hardchoice, but the price—we think the priceis worth it.” “Moral equivalence” was theterm that was used to denounce thosewho criticized the war on Afghanistan.Madeleine Albright cannot be accused ofmoral equivalence. What she said was juststraightforward algebra.

A decade of bombing has not man-aged to dislodge Saddam Hussein, the“Beast of Baghdad.” Now, almost twelveyears on, President George Bush Jr. hasratcheted up the rhetoric once again. He’sproposing an all-out war whose goal isnothing short of a “regime change.” TheNew York Times says that the Bush admin-istration is “following a meticulouslyplanned strategy to persuade the public,the Congress and the allies of the need toconfront the threat of Saddam Hussein.”Andrew Card, the White House Chief ofStaff, described how the administrationwas stepping up its war plans for the fall:“From a marketing point of view,” hesaid, “you don’t introduce new productsin August.” This time the catchphrase for

Washington’s “new product” is not theplight of Kuwaiti people but the asser-tion that Iraq has weapons of massdestruction. Forget “the feckless moralis-ing of ‘peace’ lobbies,” wrote RichardPerle, chairman of the Defense PolicyBoard, the United States will “act alone ifnecessary” and use a “pre-emptive strike”if it determines it’s in US interests.

Weapons inspectors have conflictingreports about the status of Iraq’s“weapons of mass destruction,” andmany have said clearly that its arsenal hasbeen dismantled and that it does not havethe capacity to build one. However, thereis no confusion over the extent and rangeof America’s arsenal of nuclear andchemical weapons. Would the US govern-ment welcome weapons inspectors?Would the UK? Or Israel?

What if Iraq does have a nuclearweapon, does that justify a preemptiveUS strike? The United States has thelargest arsenal of nuclear weapons in theworld. It’s the only country in the worldto have actually used them on civilianpopulations. If the United States is justi-fied in launching a preemptive attack onIraq, why then any nuclear power is justi-fied in carrying out a preemptive attackon any other. India could attack Pakistan,or the other way around. If the US gov-ernment develops a distaste for theIndian Prime Minister, can it just “takehim out” with a preemptive strike?

Recently the United States played animportant part in forcing India andPakistan back from the brink of war. Is itso hard for it to take its own advice?Who is guilty of feckless moralizing? Ofpreaching peace while it wages war? TheUnited States, which George Bush calls“a peaceful nation,” has been at war with

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 20038

I n her foreword to Boys and GirlsForever, Alison Lurie outlines herthesis and offers an implicit expla-

nation for her title: “It often seems thatthe most gifted authors of books forchildren are not like other writers:instead, in some essential way, they arechildren themselves.” She points to theschism between what adults thinkmakes good children’s literature andwhat children themselves prefer, name-ly, books in which the kids are heroesand which contain a subversive messageabout adult authority. She concludes bydiscussing the predominance of animalcharacters on the shelves of the chil-dren’s section, describing in detail theAnimorphs series and the way it epito-mizes the commercialization of chil-dren’s books—neither of which topicsshe ever mentions again.

This foreword points to the book’sstrengths and weaknesses. Lurie’sinsight into childhood as a culture ofits own, one that is often in oppositionto adult morals and manners, is clearlyand convincingly manifested through-out. By contrast, her frequent digres-sions—Sharon Stone’s interest in film-ing Louisa May Alcott’s adult fiction,for example—are puzzling, especiallysince they come from so distinguisheda novelist and scholar writing in herarea of expertise.

The notion that writers of children’sbooks are themselves essentially child-like, although touted on the back coveras central to the book, is explored onlysporadically. It dominates the first chap-ter on Hans Christian Andersen, but isabandoned in the second chapter on thehighly capable Louisa May Alcott, whoseems not to have had much of a child-hood and who supported herself andher family with her writing from a youngage. The thesis is equally neglected in thethird chapter, on the Oz books of L.Frank Baum (unless being an avowedmale feminist well before the fashion isthe same thing as being childlike). It ispicked up again in the fourth and fifthchapters on Walter de la Mare and JohnMasefield, where it is convincingly illus-trated. It is dropped again in the sixthessay on the Finnish author ToveJansson’s series about creatures calledthe Moomintrolls, and called into play inthe chapter about Dr. Seuss. In her trib-ute to Salman Rushdie’s thinly veiledresistance to censorship, Haroun and theSea of Stories, Lurie wisely refrains fromsuggesting that the author rediscoveredhis child-like naïvete after being theobject of a years-long fatwah. Of J. K.Rowling, author of the Harry Potterseries, Lurie says, “Like many famouschildren’s authors… [Rowling] remainsin close touch with her own childhood.”

This observation is particularlytelling, and it goes to the heart of whatis wrong with Lurie’s thesis. She doesnot consider, here or elsewhere, thatbeing in close touch with one’s child-hood is a trait shared by many authorsof fiction (not to mention memoirists),

whatever the age of their intendedaudience. Nor does she seem to haveentertained the idea that to draw onchildhood experience as material forfiction does not necessarily make anauthor child-like.

M ost of the chapters, we aretold, appeared originally asessays in the New York Review

of Books. Many contain informative andilluminating readings of children’s liter-ature in the context of individualauthors’ private lives and social histo-ries, particularly the chapters on Alcottand Baum. But despite their prestigiousprovenance, the essays betray ratherunsteady hermeneutics. For example,when writing about the idealized deathsof Dickens’ Little Nell and Alcott’sBeth (in Little Women), Lurie declares,“The hidden message to the reader isthat to stay at home safe with your par-ents is to die.” This reading is problem-atic on its own with regard to questionsof authorial intention. Equally difficultto understand is why the feminist criti-cal approach in which it is groundeddisappears from Lurie’s subsequent dis-cussions of Rushdie’s Haroun and the Seaof Stories and in the chapter on J. K.Rowling’s Harry Potter series, whichprovides a particularly obvious targetfor feminist readers: the female profes-sors at Hogwarts School are either fussyor ditzy, and Harry’s friend Hermione isa homely, teacher-pleasing prig, central-casting shorthand for a studious girl.

The final third of the book is com-prised of more general essays that focuson a theme rather than an individualauthor, and here the book’s now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t thesis disappearscompletely. This section begins with“What Fairy Tales Tell Us.” The readerwill look for a reference to BrunoBettelheim in vain: this turns out to bea discussion of the ideological functionof the genre in English and Americanfairy tales from the Victorian age to thepresent. A particularly interesting fea-ture of this essay is the contrastbetween English and American talesand the lessons they contain about howindividuals take their places withinsocial structures:

The standard European fairy tale,both traditional and modern,takes place in a fixed socialworld. In the usual plot, a poorboy or girl…becomes rich ormarries into royalty. In a varia-tion, a prince orprincess…regains his or herrightful position….Usually thesocial system is implicitly unques-tioned, and remains unchanged;what changes is the protagonist,and what he or she hopes for isto succeed within the terms ofthis system. (pp. 132-133)

By contrast, Lurie claims, Americanfolk and fairy tales do not set much

Arrested developmentby Elizabeth Bobrick

Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella

to Harry Potter by Alison Lurie. New York: Penguin

Books, 2003, 208 pp., $13.00 paper.

one country or another every year forthe last fifty years.

Wars are never fought for altruisticreasons. They’re usually fought for hege-mony, for business. And then of course,there’s the business of war. Protecting itscontrol of the world’s oil is fundamentalto US foreign policy. The US govern-ment’s recent military interventions inthe Balkans and Central Asia have to dowith oil. Hamid Karzai, the puppet pres-ident of Afghanistan installed by theUnited States, is said to be a formeremployee of Unocal, the American-based oil company. The US government’sparanoid patrolling of the Middle East isbecause it has two-thirds of the world’soil reserves. Oil keeps America’s enginespurring sweetly. Oil keeps the free marketrolling. Whoever controls the world’s oilcontrols the world’s markets.

And how do you control the oil?Nobody puts it more elegantly than theNew York Times columnist ThomasFriedman. In an article called “CrazinessPays,” he says “the US has to make clearto Iraq and US allies that… America willuse force, without negotiation, hesitation,or UN approval.” His advice was welltaken. In the wars against Iraq andAfghanistan, as well as in the almost dailyhumiliation the US government heaps onthe UN. In his book on globalization, TheLexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman says,“The hidden hand of the market willnever work without a hidden fist.McDonald’s cannot flourish withoutMcDonnell Douglas…. And the hiddenfist that keeps the world safe for SiliconValleys technologies to flourish is calledthe US Army, Air Force, Navy, andMarine Corps.”

Perhaps this was written in a momentof vulnerability, but it’s certainly the mostsuccinct, accurate description of theproject of corporate globalization that Ihave read.

T here is a notion gaining credencethat the free market breaks downnational barriers, and that corpo-

rate globalization’s ultimate destination isa hippie paradise where the heart is theonly passport and we all live together hap-pily inside a John Lennon song (Imaginethere’s no country…). This is a canard.

What the free market undermines isnot national sovereignty, but democracy. Asthe disparity between the rich and poorgrows, the hidden fist has its work cutout for it. Multinational corporations onthe prowl for sweetheart deals that yieldenormous profits cannot push throughthose deals and administer those projectsin developing countries without theactive connivance of state machinery—the police, the courts, sometimes eventhe army. Today corporate globalizationneeds an international confederation ofloyal, corrupt, authoritarian governmentsin poorer countries to push throughunpopular reforms and quell themutinies. It needs a press that pretends tobe free. It needs courts that pretend todispense justice. It needs nuclear bombs,standing armies, sterner immigrationlaws and watchful coastal patrols to makesure that it’s only money, goods, patentsand services that are globalized—not thefree movement of people, not a respectfor human rights, not internationaltreaties on racial discrimination, or chem-ical and nuclear weapons, or greenhousegas emissions, climate change, or, godforbid, justice. It’s as though even a gesturetoward international accountabilitywould wreck the whole enterprise.

Close to one year after the WarAgainst Terror was officially flagged offin the ruins of Afghanistan, freedoms are

being curtailed in country after countryin the name of protecting freedom, civilliberties are being suspended in the nameof protecting democracy. All kinds ofdissent is being defined as “terrorism.”All kinds of laws are being passed to dealwith it. Osama bin Laden seems to havevanished into thin air. Mullah Omar issaid to have made his escape on a motor-bike. (They could have sent Tin-Tin afterhim.) The Taliban may have disappearedbut their spirit, and their system of sum-mary justice, is surfacing in the unlikeliestof places. In India, in Pakistan, inNigeria, in America, in all the CentralAsian republics run by all manner ofdespots and of course in Afghanistanunder the US-backed Northern Alliance.

Meanwhile down at the mall there’s amid-season sale. Everything’s discount-ed—oceans, rivers, oil, gene pools, figwasps, flowers, childhoods, aluminumfactories, phone companies, wisdom,wilderness, civil rights, ecosystems, air—all 4.6 billion years of evolution. It’spacked, sealed, tagged, valued and avail-able off the rack (no returns). As for jus-tice—I’m told it’s on offer too. You canget the best that money can buy.

Donald Rumsfeld said that his mis-sion in the War Against Terror was topersuade the world that Americans mustbe allowed to continue their way of life.When the maddened king stamps hisfoot, slaves tremble in their quarters. So,standing here today, it’s hard for me tosay this, but The American Way of Life issimply not sustainable. Because it doesn’tacknowledge that there is a world beyondAmerica.

Fortunately power has a shelf life.When the time comes, maybe this mightyempire will, like others before it, over-reach itself and implode from within. Itlooks as though structural cracks havealready appeared. As the War AgainstTerror casts its net wider and wider,America’s corporate heart is hemorrhag-ing. For all the endless empty chatterabout democracy, today the world is runby three of the most secretive institu-tions in the world: the InternationalMonetary Fund, the World Bank and theWorld Trade Organization, all three ofwhich, in turn, are dominated by theUnited States. Their decisions are madein secret. The people who head them areappointed behind closed doors. Nobodyreally knows anything about them, theirpolitics, their beliefs, their intentions.Nobody elected them. Nobody said theycould make decisions on our behalf. Aworld run by a handful of greedy bankersand CEOs who nobody elected can’tpossibly last.

Soviet-style communism failed, notbecause it was intrinsically evil, butbecause it was flawed. It allowed too fewpeople to usurp too much power.Twenty-first century market capitalism,American-style, will fail for the samereasons. Both are edifices constructedby human intelligence, undone byhuman nature.

The time has come, the Walrus said.Perhaps things will get worse and thenbetter. Perhaps there’s a small god up inheaven readying herself for us. Anotherworld is not only possible, she’s on herway. Maybe many of us won’t be here togreet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen verycarefully, I can hear her breathing.

This essay is excerpted with permission froma lecture given in Santa Fe, New Mexico, atthe Lensic Performing Arts Center, Septem-ber 18, 2002, sponsored by the LannanFoundation. The full essay appears in WarTalk by Arundhati Roy, published this monthby South End Press. © 2003 Arundhati Roy.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 2003 9

Amazon.com’s over 700 books onAlzheimer’s are medicine-wagonstuff for the most part, but about

a quarter are first-person accounts byfamily members. Occasionally a giftedwriter enters Alzheimer’s narrative vor-tex—John Bayley, for example, and nowthe novelist Sue Miller, probably bestknown for The Good Mother, a disturbingnovel that made a fan of me.

Miller has worked a very circum-scribed terrain, a middle-class world ofministers and psychoanalysts, wives andmothers, whose families characteristicallyhave “camps” in Maine or NewHampshire. She calls herself a “quintes-sential WASP—without the familymoney.” It’s an odd claim in these times,but it does accurately describe her turf,and I for one am interested. I respect theway she creates suspense out of theminute ethical decisions on which inti-mate domestic life turns. And I wouldforgive her a lot for her women, at oncewillful and sexual and “good.”

In the past, Miller has steered clear ofnonfiction out of a sense that facts can’tconvey “exactly how it was.” That requiresrearranging personal memories, in herview. “If I have a call,” she says, “I sup-pose it is that.” Even while producing amemoir, she clearly believes reorderingmemory is the higher narrative path. TheStory of My Father is filled with rationalesfor having written it, as if she believes theform needs as many excuses as she canmuster. And The Distinguished Guest—oneof three novels she wrote while procras-tinating over The Story—implicitly con-demns the form as too shapely and self-interested to reflect fairly the multipleperspectives of family life.

Given these views, Miller would prob-ably never have turned to memoir ifAlzheimer’s hadn’t made its demand thatunadulterated memory be honored. Butin 1986 the police called her about a manwho had gotten lost in the middle of thenight and knocked on someone’s doorsaying he had met “small strange people”in his journey. He had been driving a van,he said, but he had no idea where it was.It was her father, James Nichols.

There had been previous signs hismind was deteriorating. Author of TheHistory of Christianity, 1650-1950 andAcademic Dean of Princeton TheologicalSeminary, he’d always been writing some-thing. But after her mother died from asudden heart attack, he stopped writingand, for the first time in his career, stu-dents began to complain about his lec-tures. His sermons, too, suffered, andonce when Miller arrived for a plannedvisit, he was surprised she was there.

Despite these lapses, she didn’t thinkhe was in really serious trouble. After all,he had always been somewhat abstract,and he was getting older. She assumedthe police had overreacted. They had not.When she picked her father up, sherecalls, “He saw me with a kind of relief,but with none of the deep recognitionthat lights a face.” And he was delusion-al, telling her “with delight… about littlepeople who had spoken to him.” At firstshe opposed his hallucinations with logic,

as if he were a misguided and irritatingchild. “So I guess I was seeing things,” heresponded. Then, “Doggone, I neverthought I’d lose my mind.”

Miller herself was not so nonchalant.Her father had been her refuge from the“high drama” of her mother, a womanMiller still dislikes so much that she canbarely mention her without a sarcasticaside. And now this bulwark of sanitywas rapidly losing his grasp on reality.There was the fear, too, that Miller mightshare his fate.

Throughout her father’s decline,Miller found herself clutching at any signthat he was superior to other victims ofAD, a tendency common, she observes,among those whose intimates are over-taken by the disease. At his continuingcare facility, she kept signing him up forlectures as though she shared his notionthat he was enrolled in an odd sort ofcollege. (One thing he couldn’t figure out:“No one ever seems to graduate fromhere.”) She even bought him a ticket forthe symphony at a point when he clearlycouldn’t be trusted not to wander off.

For a long time after the facility’s stafffound her father intractable, Miller tookpride in the fact that she could still man-

age him. Then he turned on her as well.Ultimately, he died from a tumor Millersuggests she might have recognized earli-er if she had trusted her instinct that hewas in pain—or known, as the staffshould have, that AD victims often useaggression to express discomfort.

A fter her father’s death, Miller suf-fered from dreams in which shefailed to help him. She tried thera-

py; then, like so many of AD’s secondaryvictims, began to write a memoir. “Ofcourse,” as she says, “it was not so simple.”She abandoned the memoir three times inthe next decade, writing The DistinguishedGuest, While I Was Gone and The World Belowin the process. As she explains in the after-word of The Story of My Father, these nov-els “interrupted” work on the memoir;they “came along” like unintended preg-nancies. In fact, they represent extremelyinteresting attempts to deal both with thethemes her father’s illness brought to mindand with her unease about writing nonfic-tion. They are part of her project, in otherwords, not interruptions.

They must not have satisfied her con-science, however, because in the end shecame back to the intransigent memoir.Her problem, she thought, was produc-ing a confident nonfiction voice. Butmemoir does not require a confidentvoice. It isn’t textbook stuff. And the fic-tions Miller wrote when she wasn’t writ-ing The Story of My Father include remark-able examples of successful nonfictionvoices. Something else was wrong.

One challenge she faced was that herfather had never “called up any of thoselittle incidents from childhood” that hermother “specialized in.” She doesn’t think“he used his personal memories in coming

Stranger than fictionby Sharon Thompson

The Story of My Father: A Memoir by Sue Miller. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 174 pp., $22.50 hardcover.

store by wealth and position. Theirheroes and heroines are sceptics, criti-cal of those who abuse power and oftraditional social roles they themselvesare expected to play.

I n “Louder than Words: Children’sBook Illustrations,” Lurie considersthe differences between older and

more recent visual depictions of tradi-tional stories, concluding that the morerecent versions are, with some excep-tions, less realistic and hence less fright-ening than their predecessors. (Anyonewho has seen the older Disney animat-ed movies—Sleeping Beauty, for exam-ple—with a child, or as a child, may dis-agree.) She does not address the effectson illustration of changing technologiesof pictorial reproduction, nor does shetake into account the influence of mod-ern art on modern artists, the children’sbook illustrators themselves.

The conclusions drawn in this chap-ter are sometimes difficult to under-stand. Although this reviewer is no fanof the Disney versions, which Luriesays “leave no space for the imagina-tion,” it seems gratuitous to lumpauthor/illustrator Arnold Lobel withUncle Walt. Lurie objects to Lobel’sversion of Mother Goose: “The comicexaggerations and loose, sketchy tech-nique of his drawings, in which pencillines and brush marks are visible, candestroy the illusion, reminding us thatthese pictures were made by a humanhand and are not magical visions.”Lurie, elsewhere a decided critic of thesentimental view of children, hereshows herself to be perhaps uncon-sciously inclined toward it, or at least todoubt children’s ability to understandthat sometimes a wonderful picture isjust a wonderful picture..

The final chapter, “EnchantedForests and Secret Gardens: Nature inChildren’s Literature” is beautifullywritten, a true essay in which we seethe author’s mind at play. Lurie uses avoice more unfettered than anywhereelse in this collection and warms to hertopic in a way that excites enthusiasmin the reader.

For me, and I think for mostchildren who have really knownit, untamed nature seemed bothpowerful and sentient—a con-scious force. The simplestrhymes assumed this: “Rain, rain,go away! Come again some otherday,” my sister and I chanted asthe gray drops blurred the glass.The clear implication was thatthe rain could hear us, even if itchose not to do as we asked.This didn’t seem strange: afterall, nature often spoke by signs—the rainbow that marked the endof the storm, the groundhog thatdid or did not see its shadow onFebruary second. (p. 172)

She goes on to incorporate into herdiscussion, briefly but seamlessly andwith great sensitivity, how nature isportrayed in a host of children’s clas-sics: Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Goodnight Moon,At the Back of the North Wind,Huckleberry Finn, The Wind in theWillows, Winnie the Pooh, Little House onthe Prairie, The Secret Garden andCharlotte’s Web. I wish that Lurie hadchosen to expand this chapter into abook, for here we see what we havecome to expect from this PulitzerPrize-winning novelist: a vibrant,engaging style and a wide and deepknowledge of children’s literature.

Built to WinThe Female Athlete as Cultural IconLESLIE HEYWOOD AND SHARI L. DWORKINForeword by Julie Foudy

The sculpted speed of Marion Jones. Thegrit and agility of Mia Hamm. The slam-dunk style of Lisa Leslie. Built to Winex p lo res the confide nt, empowe re dfemale athletes found everywhere inAmerican popular culture through inter-views with girls and boys; readings of adcampaigns by Nike, Reebok, and others;discussions of movies like Fight Club andGirlfight; and explorations of their ownsports experiences. Important, refresh-ing, and engrossing, Built to Win exam-ines sport in all its complexity.

$19.95 Paper ISBN 0-8166-3624-9

Mind-altering books fromUniversity of Minnesota Press

www.upress.umn.edu773-568-1550

N OTTHE SWIMSUIT

I S S U E

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 200310

T o most outsiders,” writes JaneHoward, a former correspondentfor the BBC World Service and

The Guardian, “Iran remains a mystery.”

It is Middle Eastern, but not Arab.It has a grim, dark image of revo-lution and terror, yet travelersreport warm, hospitable peoplewho love to meet foreigners.Women cannot travel abroad with-out their husband’s permission, yetmore girls than boys go to univer-sity. Iran defies description, andvisiting journalists, even the mostcommitted, tend to find what theyexpect to find and seek no further.Few of them travel outside the bigcities of Tehran, Isfahan andShiraz, and few grasp the geo-graphical complexities and vast-ness of the country. (p. 17)

Now a free-lance journalist living inGeneva, Jane Howard lived in Iran from1996 to 2000 with her two sons and herhusband, whose job with the UnitedNation had taken them there.

Iran traces its civilization to pre-IslamicZoroastrian roots: although “at the greatceremonial site of Persepolis and else-where, women are notably absent… Yetthe queen’s quarters are clearly marked,and in later periods several women tookthe throne.” Contemporary Iran is anIslamic (Shi’a) state in search of politicallegitimacy while fiercely struggling tobecome modern, independent and eco-nomically self-sufficient.

Howard was fascinated to observeIran’s difference from Turkey, wherereligion is kept carefully out of govern-ment. “Compared to Turkey,” she notes,“Iran has comparatively few mosques oroutward signs of mass worship. IfMartians landed tomorrow in bothcountries, there might be some confu-sion about which state was the post-rev-olutionary theocracy.”

Aware of the complexity of Iran’s cul-ture, geography and ethnic diversity,Howard takes her critique of “visitingjournalists” seriously and avoids limitingher observations to the big urban centersand their people. She traveled widely toshed light on experiences of Iranianwomen, from the agricultural villages ofnorthern Iran to the inaccessible tribalareas of the south, from the urban poorto the educated middle-class and upper-middle-class women in Tehran, frommembers of parliament to the newlyempowered women political elite. Intenton unraveling many of the prevailingmyths, Howard set out to explore the“paradox of Iranian women who find nocontradiction between traditional,Islamic values and Western-style ambi-tions.” The result is a comprehensive andhighly engaging account of a self-con-sciously religious state and a transitionalsociety coming to terms with its educat-ed, restless young and its rapidly growingpopulation.

“The great variety of ethnic originsand different lifestyles,” Howard notes,“make it a hopeless task to try to describe

a typical day in the life of an Iranianwoman.” For example,

Many highly religious women stayat home, cover themselves careful-ly and center their lives on theirchildren and husbands. Yet othersfrom the same traditional back-grounds go to work, leaving theirchildren with relatives or puttingthem in the office daycare…Others lead lives a Westerner couldidentify with. If they have themeans, they shop in supermarkets,own two cars, take holidays abroadand wear international brand-nameclothes. Most people’s social livesrevolve around their family, yet inthe big cities, youngsters go to par-ties and cafés to socialize. (p. 20)

Howard cogently covers a host ofissues: social life in Iran, including religionand politics; health and reproduction;education and employment; marriage anddivorce; art and entertainment; tribalnomads and foreign “nomads” whoselives, for better or for worse, are inter-twined with those of their Iranian-bornhusbands. To understand the experiencesof women first-hand and to learn of theirproblems and the sociopolitical constraintfacing them, Howard visited, observed,talked and interviewed state officials inthe provinces as well as ordinary peoplewhose lives were directly influenced bythe state policies. She treats the subjectsof each chapter critically but fairly, neitherromanticizing them unduly nor disparag-ing them harshly.

W hat is refreshing aboutHoward’s approach to the livesof Iranian women is that she

focuses on their worldviews and experi-ences and resists the temptation to inter-ject her own voice and interpretations. Sheallows her subjects to explain the realitiesof their own lives. Howard is, of course,not without ideas, opinions or interpreta-tions of her own. She is an astute observ-er and asks pertinent questions to bringout the complexities of the situation.Where she does venture her opinion oroffer interpretation, it is with knowledgegained from her long interactions withIranians and reflects her resistance toentrenched stereotypes and lazy general-izations. Her effective use of photographsfurther adds to the richness of data onIranian women’s lives.

Of particular interest isthe chapter “Knowledgefrom Cradle to Grave,” inwhich Howard followswomen’s educational prog-ress since the revolution of1979. Women’s literacy hasimproved phenomenally,and schoolgirls are pullingahead of boys, even inmany rural areas. TheIslamic regime

poured money intobuilding new schoolsand employing more

teachers…. [T]he curriculum forboys and girls is exactly the same.The laws on Islamic dress, no mat-ter how restrictive they are forWesternized city dwellers of northTehran, have had a liberating effecton young village girls. Their fathersallowed them to go to school forthe first time, in the belief thatthey were safely covered up on thestreets. Moreover, they did nothave as far to travel, now that prac-tically every village had a school,the teachers were women and thecurriculum was reassuringlyIslamic. (pp. 84-85)

“To put Iran’s achievement in the fieldof education into context,” Howardobserves, “by the year 2000 the adultfemale literacy rate was around seventy-two percent” and “more women thanmen were entering university.”

Howard is correct in underscoring therapid and continuous rise in the literacyrate in Iran. But she should have alsonoted that the growth in the overall liter-acy rate of girls could not have comeabout had the ground not already beenpaved by the literacy core program initiat-ed by the late Shah and sent all over Iran.What is significant in the educational pro-grams implemented after the revolutionof 1979 is that the state provided religiouslegitimacy and a hospitable environmentthat encouraged conservative familiesthroughout the country to send theirdaughters to school: “The emphasis onsegregated education and compulsoryIslamic dress, which outside Iran symbol-izes women’s oppression, has enabledmany girls from conservative families togo to school for the first time.”

D espite such progress, however,big problems still remain, includ-ing the quality of education, the

ability to use one’s education in a satisfy-ing profession and the generation gap.Howard attributes the last to the increaseof literacy among youth, which has result-ed in restlessness. But then, “one of themost delicious ironies of recent Iranianhistory is that newly educated womenhave used their votes to redirect thecourse of the Islamic revolution.”Women and youths overwhelminglyvoted for Khatami, the reformist presi-dential candidate in 1997 and 2001, whoadvocated rule of law, democracy, civilsociety and greater individual rights forwomen and youth.

Howard discusses the role of womenpoliticians and legislators in bringing aboutchanges in the status of women in Iran.She provides evidence of the allianceswithin and between the religious dynastiesthat constitute the ruling elite in Iran. Forexample, one of the women representa-tives who was “inspired to go into politicsby Ayatollah Khomeini” is FatemehRakeie, a linguistics professor at the all-women Al-Zahra University and a “mem-

Participant observerby Shahla Haeri

Inside Iran: Women’s Lives by Jane Howard. Washington, DC:

Mage Publishers, 2002, 255 pp., $29.95 paper.

to understand himself.” Much as Milleradmires this reserve, she must have foundit frustrating to have so little about his his-tory to tap. She solves the difficulty, to adegree, by focusing on him as an adult—already her father, the man whose “calm”and “forgetfulness of self ” was herrefuge. On its face, this is an apt solution.But her devotion to her father’s reputationand perspective clouds her peripheralvision, with very damaging results.

In the opening elegant passage of thebook, for example, she recalls that hisvoice always changed when he talkedabout her uncles, radical Christians whobelieved Jesus “was speaking of a neces-sary action… when he called on his follow-ers ‘to turn the other cheek.’” One unclehad refused to register for the draft,spending the Second World War in a fed-eral prison; the other had requested alter-native service. Her father, in contrast, tookadvantage of a ministerial exemption, achoice Miller sees as ethically inferior. It’snot an idea she likes—her father at thebottom of the ethical pecking order—andher attention is so fixed on making himinto her uncles’ ethical equal that she over-looks the possibility that a reader mightfind an invocation of Jesus’ turn-the-other-cheek philosophy tone deaf in thecontext of the Second World War. (Shouldthe Jews have turned the other cheek?)

Then there’s Miller’s treatment of hermother. In looking back at her parents’marriage in light of learning thatAlzheimer’s may begin very, very early inlife, she realizes that her mother’s tirelessefforts to get her husband to recognize hermay have helped forestall his disease. It’spotentially an illuminating lens on theirrelationship: her mother’s struggle toimpress herself on his blank mind led ulti-mately to her heart attack; losing her gaveAlzheimer’s free rein in his mind. Were TheStory of My Father a fiction, Miller wouldhave done both sides of the conflict jus-tice. I’ve never felt bias in her fictions. Buthere she never leaves her father’s side,never drops her grudge against her moth-er—a failure that leads her to find it“funny,” for example, to imagine her hys-terical mother “as a chemical force… lay-ing siege” to her husband’s brain.

How can such a subtle, intelligentwriter make mistakes like these? Herchild’s-eye view, I think, is to blame, heradulation of her father. Miller simplyloves him too much to read his life, or herown writing about his life, with a criticaleye. As a result, to the extent The Story ofMy Father is about James Nichols, it is lessa memoir than a eulogy. But it is also amoving and perceptive case history, a con-tribution to the literature of Alzheimer’s, aliterature that I hope the progress of sci-ence will soon curtail. If only GeorgeBush would get out of the way.

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Lur tribeswomen in traditional dress have orange hennaed hair and henna tattoos. From IInnssiiddee IIrraann..

I n Bonnie Friedman’s memoir aboutseven years of therapy, she followswhat Freud called the fundamental

rule of psychoanalysis: communicateeverything that comes to mind. Do notexclude any idea because it is too dis-agreeable, indiscreet, irrelevant, or non-sensical. The Thief of Happiness includesinterchanges with her pseudonymouspsychoanalyst Dr. Harriet Sing, a pas-tiche of childhood remembrances,assorted musings about love and life,and feverish fantasies. Friedman reportssundry details of meals, shopping trips,phone conversations and householdchores. She puts readers in the positionof the psychoanalyst who must locatewhat Freud called “precious metal”buried in the “many tons of ore” thatfree association produces. Those whoprefer stories with discernible plots willthrow up their hands. But there ismethod to Friedman’s madness:although she risks sounding self-indul-gent, there is no more truthful way totell a psychoanalysis.

As in most varieties of psychody-namic therapy, transference—the emo-tionally charged relationship betweentherapist and patient—was the pivot ofthe therapy. Dr. Sing was remote, aus-tere and sparing in her words. Apartfrom her wardrobe—blue skirts,starched white blouses and ridingboots—Friedman knew little about her.This left ample room for her uncon-scious to run free, which is precisely theeffect Sing intended. Friedman wasinstantly propelled into an intense infat-uation: “Little mattered now besidesHarriet Sing. Everyone else was merelymetaphoric.” Sing encouraged thisabsorption: “If I say I felt lonely, sheresponds, ‘You felt lonely for me,’ and Iknow she’s right. A journalist…writesme a flirtatious letter and I compose aflirtatious reply. ‘Don’t send it to him,’she advises. ‘It’s meant for me.’”

As the years wore on, Friedman’sfeelings for Dr. Sing grew more compli-cated and volatile, careening from slav-ish admiration to resentment to disillu-sionment. Nonetheless, she remainedbesotted. Even when Friedman came tosee Sing as the “thief of happiness,” thepsychoanalyst’s hold remained tenaciousand the attachment difficult to sever.

In the century since Freud proposedtransference love, psychoanalysts havereconceived it in a number of ways.Transference is now broadly construedto encompass the full range of emotionsthat come into play in self-other rela-tionships inside and outside therapy.Many analysts now understand it notonly as the residue of early childhoodbut also as continually reshaped throughdaily living. Many theorists no longerfocus narrowly on the patient’s emotion-al baggage: instead they view the thera-pist-patient relationship as an emergentprocess in which both psyches mutuallyinfluence each other.

Friedman’s notions of transference,in contrast, hew closely to Freud’s early

formulations. She portrays her years intreatment as a time when mysteriousforces gripped her psychic life. Like tor-nadoes, they seemed to touch downwithout warning. They took their toll onher marriage, friendships, psychic equi-librium and even physical health, whileshe felt powerless to curb them. Then,unaccountably, the forces dissipated.Friedman seems to find the gains shemade in psychoanalysis equally mysteri-ous and unwilled. She says, for example,“[T]o my surprise, I turned into a personwho could think judiciously.” In hereyes, psychoanalysis is akin to witch-craft, and she sums up the experience asa “supremely useful…spiritual appren-ticeship.” But attributing so much powerto psychoanalysis keeps her from credit-ing her own agency.

R eaders may well ask what actuallydid happen in Friedman’s therapy.Did she change because of her

therapy or in spite of it? Her writer’sblock—the problem for which sheentered therapy—dissipated in twoweeks. Why did she stay in therapy for

seven additional years? Was analysis atrap that sidetracked her from productiveand healthy living? Or did it ultimatelyenable her to write, live zestfully andrekindle a humdrum marriage? Thesequestions have no easy answers. This iswhy scientifically-minded practitioners(and cost-conscious managed-care com-panies) are wary of psychoanalysis.

Some will read The Thief of Happinessas a story of self-discovery, spiritualgrowth and healing. Others will read it asa grim tale of humbuggery. At one point,Friedman herself pronounces Dr. Sing ahumbug—the “Great Gatsby ofPsychoanalysis,” the “Wizard of Oz.”Was Dr. Sing brilliant or inept? Was shedeluded by her own theories? Was shejust fleecing her patient? Friedman posesthese questions, but adroitly sidestepstheir answers, leaving them for the read-er to ponder. Psychoanalysis, after all,implies that reality is never what itappears to be.

I must underscore that Friedman’sencounter with psychotherapy was notat all typical. Even among psychoana-lysts, the orthodox form that Dr. Singespoused has been on the wane for sev-eral decades. To keep an individual,especially one who had no significantclinical psychopathology, in treatmentfor seven years is a dubious practice.And the aloof stance that Sing assumedhas largely given way to a more active,conversational, egalitarian one. InFriedman’s telling, Sing’s pronounce-ments are often stagey and her interpre-tations cryptic. Indeed, her remarkssometimes sound like a parody of ther-apeutic arrogance. One example:Friedman worried that if she deferredgetting pregnant until treatment was

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 200311

The view from the couchby Jeanne Marecek

The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary

Psychotherapy by Bonnie Friedman. Boston: Beacon Press,

2002, 274 pp., $24.00 hardcover, $16.00 paper.

ber of the Women’s Society of IslamicRepublic, [which is] headed by Khomeini’sdaughter.” “With her close links to the rul-ing establishment,” Howard observes,“Rakeie was typical of the kind of womenwho have figured in politics since the rev-olution.” Although Iran’s first HumanDevelopment Report (1999) “lists twenty-three laws and regulations enacted after1979 to protect women’s rights,” including“laws paving the way for the reintroduc-tion of birth control and amendments tothe laws on divorce, custody, widows’ pen-sions, and employment,” Howard notesthat “critics say successive parliamentshave rarely given women’s rights priorityor tackled issues head on.”

Howard’s narrative culminates in a dis-cussion of the complicated and oftencontradictory lives of foreign “nomads,”which for better or worse have becomeentangled with those of the Iranian menwhom they married. These non-Iranianwomen often find themselves caught inwebs of kinship relations and traditionalexpectations that they cannot quite com-prehend. Howard highlights the pain andjoy of those Euro-Americans who live inIran with their husbands. Some, like Jane(not the author), who opened a highlysuccessful restaurant with her husband inKashan (an ancient city at the edge ofIran’s great Salt Desert), preferred to stayin Iran because of the “kids.” Jane liked“the people here, they are very kind, verynice and very polite.” But others have suf-fered, particularly those who have marriedinto religious families. Anna, a devoutRoman Catholic who escaped fromHungary at the time of the 1956 uprising,described her anxiety to Howard in theaftermath of her hysterectomy: “Whileher husband nursed her throughout herillness and manfully looked after the chil-dren, her in-laws pressured her to get adivorce, the implication being that she wasnow ‘damaged goods.’”

Howard does not give the same atten-tion to the lives of non-European wivesof Iranian men. She highlights a gather-ing of foreign women converts in Qom,where an articulate black AmericanMuslim woman organized an annualmeeting in memory of Malcolm X andchallenged the masculinist monopoly onmartyrdom. One would have liked tohear about how such women engagedissues of kinship and patriarchy in Iran.

But overall, Howard’s readers comeaway better informed about the societyand women of Iran, carrying with themstories about the lives of a wide range ofindividuals and the structural limitationsof a culture. I enjoyed reading her bookand highly recommend it.

Afghan refugee children in Kashan. From IInnssiiddee IIrraann..

L ike many other North Americansand other “internationalistas”from Latin America, Japan and

Western Europe, I spent a lot of timeduring the Reagan years either inNicaragua or organizing solidarity againstthe Contra war. Following the July 1979Sandinista Revolution that dislodged theSomoza dictatorship and its cruelNational Guard from power, activistsfrom the sixties movements along with anew generation of anti-imperialists,including huge numbers of NorthAmerican lesbian and gay activists, flood-ed Nicaragua in response to theSandinistas’ call for international brigadesto assist with a literacy program and helprebuild the war-torn and impoverishednation of 2.5 million people.

I didn’t get to experience that firsteuphoric moment. Within a year theUnited States government, led by JimmyCarter, began its project to banish theSandinistas and to restore Somocismowithout Somoza, who was assassinated inhis Paraguayan exile in June 1980. By thetime I visited the new Nicaragua in May1981, three months into the Reaganadministration, his campaign promise tooverthrow the “communistic terrorists”in Nicaragua was well under way. On mysecond trip to Nicaragua in December1981, the (sole) Nicaraguan airliner that Iwas waiting to board in the Mexico Cityairport blew up in our faces. It was thefirst admitted act of terrorism by thequickly assembled former Somozaguardsmen in Honduras under the aegisof the US embassy, soon to be headedand controlled by John Negroponte (nowUS ambassador to the United Nations).

I spent most of the next seven years inthe northeastern war zone of Nicaragua,monitoring the vicious Contra war and itshuman rights violations, reporting backin the US and to the United Nations’human rights bodies. I spent little time inthe western interior or the capital,Managua, so I never met many of thebrilliant Sandinista leaders, includingGioconda Belli.

But by 1970, years before the revolu-tion, I knew of Belli’s work—prize-win-ning feminist poetry and fiction. Shewas the first Nicaraguan woman writerproudly to write erotic verse thatshocked the establishment. It was poet-ry and feminism that led Belli to jointhe Sandinista National LiberationFront (FSLN), as she began leading adouble life outside her bourgeois mar-riage and motherhood in semi-clandes-tine Managua bohemia.

Now Belli has treated us to a literarymemoir that reads like the best fiction.Many memoirs, even penned by thefinest of writers, fall short as literaturedue to the constraints involved in truth-telling about oneself and, even more so,about friends and family. Belli’s memoiris so open, truthful and generous in spir-it that one forgets or finds it hard tobelieve that the author is the protagonist.

Belli takes seriously the feminist slo-gan, “The personal is political,” andmoves through her coming to conscious-ness, revolutionary ventures and feministfailings, making connections and self-criticism rarely found in revolutionarymemoirs—Emma Goldman and ElaineBrown being notable exceptions,although neither claimed to be a greatwriter. She exhibits no bitterness, no vin-dictiveness or self-righteousness. Nordoes she apologize for the revolution orregret her historical role in it.

I n some ways, Belli’s story is a collec-tive memoir, reflecting the experi-ence of thousands of professional

and upper-class young women and menwho abandoned their privileged lives tojoin what was, at its base, a mass peasant-worker movement. It resonates with theexperiences of the critical mass ofwomen who became Sandinistas—nearlyhalf the combatants and clandestineactivists by the time of the revolution.

The Sandinista revolution was not theonly national insurgency to coincide withthe Women’s Liberation Movement. Insouthern Africa, Mozambique, Angolaand Zimbabwe won their freedomthrough guerrilla warfare during the sec-ond half of the 1970s. The Iranian,Afghan and Grenadian revolutions tookplace at the same time that the FSLNcame to power in Nicaragua. But theFSLN was the first successful revolutionconsciously to recruit and incorporateself-proclaimed feminists into its ranks.Women like Gioconda Belli, NoraAstorga, Sofia Montenegro, DaisyZamora and dozens of others attributetheir revolutionary consciousness (anti-imperialist and pro-working class) totheir new-found feminist consciousness.Once inside the FSLN, they were notwilling simply to serve coffee and malesexual appetites or to crank the mimeo-graph machine. These women alsobrought a feminist consciousness to thepoorer women they worked with. Thiswas one of the reasons that thousandsof North American and WesternEuropean feminists were drawn to sup-port the Sandinistas.

Belli convincingly argues that therewould not have been a triumphal revolu-tion in Nicaragua without the women,and specifically without a feminist con-sciousness that allows women to fulfilltheir powerful potential. Perhaps morecontroversially to those identified withthe revolution, she argues that a fatalflaw that contributed to the FSLN’s1990 electoral defeat was the systematicexclusion of women from top leader-ship positions in government, foreignpolicy and the military. She does notdeny that the US-sponsored Contrawar—dubbed “low-intensity warfare”by its designers—whittled away supportfor the FSLN as the government wasforced to impose the draft, rationing,censorship and curtailment of civil lib-

erties. Even by 1983, the entire popula-tion (including foreign supporters likeme) was exhausted, sleep-deprived, inconstant danger of death and afraid ofwhat appeared to be an imminent full-scale aerial bombing of Nicaraguancities by the US military. “I will nevercease to be appalled at the utterly ven-omous, unwarranted manner in whichthe United States acted toward a tinycountry that simply tried to do things itsown way, even if this meant making itsown mistakes,” Belli writes.

The saddest section of the book isChapter 55, in which Belli recalls hergrief at the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat.She had been disgusted with the FSLN’selectoral campaign:

I watched the advertising on tele-vision in disbelief, wonderinghow they could have put togethersuch an incredibly tactless,obnoxious campaign, completewith rock and roll music. Whilepeople mourned so many youngkids who had died in the war,while they endured hunger andterrible hardships, the FSLN’spropaganda conveyed such a fes-tive atmosphere… (p. 355)

Belli, like most Sandinistas, believedthe FSLN would win, and that with thedisintegration of the Soviet Union andReagan out of office, perhaps the ColdWar rationale for ousting the Sandinistaswould halt and the short-lived democracyof the revolution could return toNicaragua. But it was not to be.

My desolation filled with the pres-ence of all my dead friends, butthis time the feeling was devastat-ing. I felt they were dying again,dying in vain, their deaths futile,their lives wasted. So many liveshad been lost. And now therewere more. With the counterrevo-lution, the death toll was up tofifty thousand. And it had to endlike this! (p. 358)

T he Country Under My Skin is theultimate insider’s view of a rev-olutionary process. In his rave

review in the New York Review of Bookslast November, New York Times corre-spondent Stephen Kinzer, who coveredSandinista Nicaragua for the Times andknew Belli well when she was the FSLNpress secretary, writes that it’s “not real-ly an insider’s account… No womanwill ever be able to write such anaccount, because no woman was everadmitted to the Sandinista elite.” I dis-agree with that view. Before the FSLNcame to power and for three years after,Belli was the companion of Henry Ruíz(she uses his nom de guerre, Modesto),one of the nine members of the all-male National Directorate. The rela-tionship is straight out of RobinMorgan’s The Demon Lover, an obsessive,humiliating and self-destructive affairfrom which Belli finally liberated herselfand the feminist ideals she had sacri-ficed. She writes:

I didn’t know how to be alone. Ihad exposed myself to bullets,death; I had smuggled weapons,given speeches, received awards,had children—so many things, buta life without men, without love,was alien to me, I felt I had noexistence unless a man’s voice saidmy name and a man’s love ren-dered my life worthwhile. It wasnot a question of denying men a

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 200312

Inside the revolutionby Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War

by Gioconda Belli, translated by Kristina Cordero with

the author. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002,

380 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

over, she might be too old to conceive.“Have you and Paul considered adop-tion?” Sing responded.

It’s difficult to see what Friedmanoffers to a feminist audience. The Thiefof Happiness is a book about relation-ships among women—Friedman andher mother, sister, girlfriends and thera-pist. Friedman’s difficulties with ambi-tion, envy, achievement, self-depreca-tion and invisibility all have gendereddimensions. But she does not draw ongender as a framework for understand-ing her experiences. Nor, evidently, wasfeminism a part of the social worlds shemoved in.

Dr. Sing, it seems, slept throughfeminism. Many feminist therapists willtake issue with the book jacket’s claimthat this offers “a portrait of…whatgood therapy is like.” According toFriedman, Sing created a therapist-client relationship in which a hierarchyof power and authority prevailed. Shescrupulously avoided self-disclosure,fostered a cult-like atmosphere of spe-cialness and encouraged Friedman’semotional dependency. She refused tobend her therapeutic practices toaccommodate practical realities. Someyears into therapy, Friedman movedfrom Massachusetts to southernConnecticut, now four hours fromSing’s office. Yet when she raised thequestion of changing to another thera-pist, Sing’s response was swift and suc-cinct: “Switching therapists is likeswitching mothers.” When Friedmanbroached the topic of termination(“When will you ever let me leave?”),Sing said, “Your very restlessness is asign that you have more work to do.”

L overs of language may relishFriedman’s poetic sensibility. Herprose overflows with lush word-

pictures and glittery imagery. When thelanguage works, the effect is incandes-cent. Consider this admiring descriptionof her sister’s handwriting: “a parade ofcharacters tumbling across the page, herplump lowercase a’s Winston Churchillspropped by a cane, her m’s the top ofthe Ten Commandments.” However, asone ornate simile was piled on another,I began to feel like a dessert cart hadtoppled over on me. Some are strained:“Her flaws proliferated like the arms onShiva…. Each flaw was a myriad coldblue hand”; “These thoughts… [resem-bled] the jellyfishlike lobes of an under-water plant, bloated, pallid.” Some arebaffling. This reader longed for somecrisp, clean sentences.

First-person accounts of therapy arenot plentiful. Although therapists oftenwrite about their cases to promote cer-tain treatment methods, such accountstell us little about the ways in whichclients experience therapy. Someclients’ accounts are intended to bedidactic, such as Ann France’sConsuming Therapy. Others capitalize ona trendy diagnosis, such as Jane Phillips’The Magic Daughter, a depiction of mul-tiple personality disorder. But Friedmantakes a different path, and for this sheshould be praised. Her book is not abrief for psychoanalysis. She has nodiagnosis to flaunt, only ordinary mis-eries. Lying on Dr. Sing’s couch, sheinevitably seems myopic; her perspec-tive reaches only as far as herstockinged feet. She often sounds self-absorbed, petulant and childish. Yet toundergo psychoanalysis is a humbling,uncertain and radical project. To com-pose a portrait of the experience is anact of courage, and to share the portraitan act of generosity.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 2003 13

I am puzzled how to approach KathyHarrison’s book. Should it be lookedat as an ordinary woman’s day-to-day

journal of the banal routine of caring foran endless succession of abused and neg-lected children (which it is)? Should it beread as the passionately personal accountof the successes and failures with some ofthose children, or as a lucid introductionto the byzantine intricacies of the ChildWelfare system (which it is)? Or should Isimply accept it as a very good read(which it quite definitely is)?

Harrison has been a foster parent, pro-fessionally, for thirteen years, and AnotherPlace at the Table is a report of a few highand low points of her experience in thefield. It begins with her decision to take intwo young sisters to care for in her ownhome. Though the Harrisons adopt Angieand Neddy soon afterwards, their arrivalinvolves the family in the Massachusettsfoster care system and draws KathyHarrison’s attention to the desperate, des-perately growing need for foster care.

She is blessed with an extraordinarilysupportive husband; the family of threealmost-grown sons and the two adoptedlittle girls soon swells even further withtransient waifs and foundlings who comeand go, and whose young lives are graph-ic demonstrations of physical and sexualabuse, parental neglect, congenital disabil-ity, mental handicap and psychologicaltrauma. The birth mothers who show up,sporadically and unreliably, for visitations,

are often children themselves, helplesslyin the throes of poverty or addiction andvictims of a general cluelessness aboutchildren’s needs. As Harrison gains expe-rience, she takes on emergency place-ments and harder and harder cases. She isalso eager to adopt another little boarderwith whom she’s fallen in love. She won-ders herself, periodically and poignantly,what’s the matter with her. But clearly herinsights into the needs of these forsakenchildren make her as inevitably and intrin-sically their nurturer as—well—as Mozartwas a musician. Some things there is nogetting away from, and it is no surprisethat by the end of her account Harrisonhas become something of a leader in fos-ter care as well as a spokeswoman andadvocate for the cause.

So I am ashamed to confess that, forme, the pleasures of reading Another Placeat the Table had more to do with the dra-matic content of Harrison’s failures thanthe triumph of her good works. If Icouldn’t put the book down, it was forpretty much the same reason that I ate upthe first six copies of True Confessions Iever laid eyes on—cover to cover on atrain from Utica in 1951—flinging asidethe respectable volume I’d brought alongto be seen with in public, and wallowingblissfully all the way to Springfield in theinteresting squalor of True Life.

Unfortunately, while the squalor ofTrue Life makes for absorbing reading, itdoesn’t readily lend itself to cogent liter-

One child at a timeby Edith Milton

Another Place at the Table by Kathy Harrison. New York:

Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2003, 240 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

role in my life, but I was deter-mined to stop being emotionallydependent on them. I no longerwanted a man to have life-or-deathpower over me. (p. 290)

Belli’s retrospective understanding isprofound. Hers is truly an insider’saccount of a kind unlikely to be writtenby a man, or even a woman who was nota feminist.

Now married to a US citizen, a fel-low-writer, Belli divides her timebetween her beloved Nicaragua and herhome and family in Los Angeles, anactivist in both places: “I continue to beanother of the many citizens of thisworld who are passionately convinced

that our planet will only survive if weeliminate the gross inequalities thatdivide its people,” she writes.

Every young woman involved inpolitical movements—mainstream oroppositional—should read this bookas a self-help manual. For them, andfor the rest of us, it is a true work ofliterature, story-telling at its best, aswell as an inspiration. Belli’s closingwords are a call to stay in the revolu-tion for the long haul: “My deaths, mydead, were not in vain. This is a relayrace to the end of time. In the UnitedStates, just as in Nicaragua, I am thesame Quixota who learned throughlife’s battles that defeat can be as muchof an illusion as victory.”

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Love after 9/11

1.

The worst photos were not beaming wedding birthday graduation tapedto lampposts subway billboards any walls at all

not even the ones you start to recognize yeah that’sAngela Brendan Carmen Teresa last seen wearingMohammed, yes, Mohammed

The worst clips were not the plane striking the towerand then the second plane the first then the second.Again. Again.

Not the hordes of people running through streets covered in ashnot the pet rescuersnot the weeping firefightersnot the vast twisted steel not the mountains of contamination

not even the people insisting their loved one was not dead justmissing after 7 days 10 days 15 days

No, to me the worst were the ones they stopped showing after the first day somaybe the papers agreed, photos of tinybodies hurling themselves from windows 90 100 floors upso hot they jumped

caught by the worst photos in the vertical flow of trafficjust jumped midfall almost to ground zero not yet named

Are we that small?A bad question but not the worstNo, to me the worst question is were they

that frightenedthat desperatethat hot

2.

Yesterday we made love for the first time since 9/11–too tired, too raw, too in motion. I had to saylet’s do it: later, after we walk the dog,after Key Food, after the delivery of 12 bottles of seltzer and a giantlaundry detergent, after 5 lbs of potatoesarrive, finally. You make one more call. Icheck emails mostly about 9/11 and the impendingwar and how to stop it when we arethat small, falling from a great height

Finally, by 6, 6:30 we had cleared away a smallspace in which we might touch, sink into each other’sbodies, and sleep a deep restful sleepeven for half an hour. And so we touchedthe wordless comfort of skin. Youcame first, loud and raucous, that deep place ofrelease. Then me: and as I came I sawbodies falling from a great heighteach a tiny streak of light slashing the darkness and coming I sobbed for all the bodiesand all the bodies who loved them, sobbed in my own bodycoming fully alive

—Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 200314

I nhabiting the space between worldscan leave one with the uncomfortablefeeling of having two identities and

none at all. The Korean American narratorof In Full Bloom is a fashion assistant in hertwenties climbing the career ladder and aloyal Korean daughter whose bloom isfading, which in Korean culture meansthat she should already be married andstarting a family. Ginger Lee is paralyzedby these conflicting paths and strugglingto discover the best way to eliminate oneor to merge the two into a single self.

Catapulted into action at the start ofthe novel by her mother’s arrival in NewYork to find her a husband, Ginger beginsto think actively about the desires, preju-dices and expectations that have trickleddown into all aspects of her life:

I wasn’t vehement AmericanGinger and I wasn’t traditionalKorean Lee. I was the collision ofthe names—the accidental adverbresulting from the clash of twoworlds, gingerly, how I was meantto go through life. I was the spacein between the names. I occupiedthe short pause between them, thebreach between the two states, likea ghost who was neither alive norsufficiently dead. (p. 99)

Ginger has hidden her true self sinceshe was a child; as an adult, she concealsevidence of alcohol and cigarettes withpracticed speed before her mother canreach her walk-up apartment. “I didn’twant to discuss my unladylike behavior,”she acknowledges. “It was better that shecontinued living in the dark. A policy Igenerally adhered to.” The stereotypicalKorean mother dressed in a Chanel suit,Ginger’s mother “clung to her respectabil-ity like a life preserver” and concerns her-self more with appearances than real feel-ings. Controlling her daughter’s life is theultimate form of caring, and her manipu-lations are received as such by Ginger;even casual cruelties, such as the expecta-tion that Ginger suppress her emotions—”I’d stopped crying at the age of seven—‘you ruin your face,’ my mother used toscold”—are accepted without question.

Hwang has drawn Ginger as a walkingcontradiction. Although characterizing her-self as an independent woman—”I wasn’tone of those Korean-y women. I knew myactions sometimes contradicted who I wasinside, but I trusted that people whoweren’t my mother could see or sense thereal me. The feminist, independently mind-ed, hiply dressed me”—Ginger doesn’tseem particularly feminist or independent-minded. After putting her through gradu-ate school, which Ginger dropped out ofin order to follow her best friend to A laMode magazine, her mother still pays herrent in Manhattan and buys her furniture.Ginger doesn’t protest her mother’s effortsto fix her up with prospective Korean hus-bands; she forgoes her own desires tomake her mother happy, even while sheplans to sabotage the arranged dates.

Ginger fiercely disdains Korean menand customs and prefers to date whitemen, but she also claims she is “always up

for a Korean meal, especially one orderedby Korean speakers” in a restaurant with“shoulder-to-shoulder people jabberingKorean—testament to the authenticityand quality of the food.” Yet when thefood arrives, she doesn’t eat the authenticdishes loaded with spicy kimchi or “hard-core—raw octopus, sea cucumbers,tripe.” Instead, she regrets that her moth-er “hadn’t ordered any of the foods Iliked, like short ribs marinated in garlicand soy sauce, shrimp eggrolls, glass noo-dles with julienned vegetables”—exactlythe kind of “watered-down, bottom-of-the-barrel food” Ginger complains thatKorean restaurants serve to “Americansand people like me.”

At work her priorities are clear and sheis more assertive, arguing for the respect-ful portrayal of Asian models and for theright to take on more responsibilities. Shewants to get serious about her career, notonly to prove to her mother that she does-n’t have time for an arranged marriage butto do something she can be proud of.Throughout the book, which is lightheart-ed and amusing, Ginger confronts herchallenges with steady stamina, whether itis competition for advancement at themagazine, a blind date with a childhoodfriend or a boisterous Korean American—”As embarrassing as he was, I had to handit to him. He was the most AmericanKorean I’d ever met”—or photo shootswith a lecherous photographer. She isfunny and sincere, and it is a pleasure tofollow her natural progress from oneentertaining adventure to another.

I t is a challenge to write about the con-tradictions that immigrants face with-out sounding preachy (a pitfall Hwang

successfully avoids by using the first per-son) and overall the sardonic tone of thenovel and the genuine feel of the charac-ters and situations allow us to grasp justhow conflicted immigrants are about thesecontradictions in their own lives. Ginger isso embedded in webs of loyalty and cul-tural responsibility, as well as in her desireto live a life she can be proud of on herown terms, that she never seems able tofully recognize the hypocrisies, inconsis-tencies and contradictions of her dealingswith her mother and others. Either that, orHwang herself can’t.

For beneath the book’s, and Ginger’s,flirty, fun exterior lies a more painful,unexplored history. As a young child,Ginger was abandoned by her father forhis first family, “the wife he never divorcedand the children he never forgot.” Herparents’ marriage had been arranged,because “his wealthy, bourgeois parentshad disapproved of his wife… forced himto forsake her… brought him back toSeoul and entered him into a false mar-riage with my mother”—a situation withunpleasant echoes in her mother’s insis-tence on arranging Ginger’s marriage andher earlier disowning of Ginger’s brotherfor marrying a white woman. Only twentyyears later does Ginger ask herself howthese events have affected her family andher life, and why, until now, she hasn’tthought about reconnecting with herbrother on her own.

From kimchi to ketchupby Christine Thomas

In Full Bloom by Caroline Hwang. New York: Dutton,

2003, 291 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

ary review. I was riveted by Harrison’saccounts of little Lucy’s desperate attach-ment to her indifferent mother and six-year-old Sara’s furious, foul-mouthedinsurgency against the world, but whatcan one say by way of comment? I cantell you that the book is moving, honestand disturbing. Reading it makes oneangry that, despite the talent and dedica-tion of so many generous people, oursociety in general seems to handle itsunwanted children cruelly and bureau-cratically. But though the system’s work-ings are as central to Another Place at theTable as the fate of its children, Harrisonhas no ambition to make judgmentsabout its failures or to offer alternatives.And it would be as frivolous to analyzeher description of the children’s stay withher, or her brief résumés of their livesbefore and after their time with her, as itwould be to critique a newspaper articleabout the casualties of war.

H arrison’s writing, in fact, is unim-peachable, a model of both clar-ity and charity. The book opens

with a brief and lucid description of theway children come into and pass throughthe foster care system, but sums up theeffects placement has on them only afterwe have had a chance to meet a few:“Every time a child moves from onehome…to another…a piece of him islost,” Harrison writes. “And in the small,seemingly insignificant details of themove, that piece is often a measure ofself-worth, usually from a child who has-n’t any to spare.”

Her relationship to her wards is deeplyperceptive. She seems to have boundlessenergy, cleaning, cooking, nursing babies,handling parental visitations, dealing withlawyers, social workers, psychologists andcourts. And she is blessed with a sort ofnatural empathy which informs her per-spective with a simultaneous sense of thechild’s point of view. “They have to gosomeplace,” she writes, “the children youread about in the paper….Sometimes…someplace is a hospital or a shelter or adetention center. Sometimes, someplace ismy house. For me it begins with a knockon the door and a child standing on theporch. For the child, my porch is justanother scene in a very long nightmare.”

Harrison is engagingly practical indealing with her charges. When Sara—who has heard that the tooth fairy leavesa dollar for every tooth she finds under apillow—admits that she’d like the moneybut is leery of fairies around the bed,Harrison tells her, “You give me thetooth and I’ll give you the dollar, and wewon’t worry about the tooth fairy…” Sheis also admirably humble, often amusedby her own lack of success when shetries to lure her frequently waywardcharges towards civilization. Bribed byway of a cookie which she will get only ifshe agrees to sit down at the table withthe rest of the family, Sara gives in: sortof. “Fine, I’ll sit down at the goddamntable,” she says and shoves the cookie inher mouth. And Harrison, always gener-ous, comments admiringly, “She man-aged with one cuss word, to salvage bothher dignity and her cookie.”

But despite Harrison’s good humorand good works, I was disturbed byAnother Place at the Table—for rea-

sons besides its montage of unlucky chil-dren at the mercy of an atrociously under-funded system. My malaise centered onDanny and Sara, both ejected from fostercare because of their sexual behavior.Danny is unattractive, neurotic and nineyears old when he’s exiled from theHarrisons’ house of many children

because his department record designateshim as a potential sex offender. Placedwith a ditzy childless couple, who see noneed for rules or boundaries, Danny issoon discovered “molesting” a visitingtwo-year-old. “Dan hit, Dan kicked, Danpunched,” Harrison writes of the event,before he “committed one final, unforgiv-able act,” which propels him out of fostercare and into an institution.

I understand that any fandangling withtwo-year-olds is unfortunate and shouldnot be taken lightly; still, I would like toknow exactly what Danny did and also ifthe danger posed by a nine-year-oldpotential sex offender is really a quantumleap beyond the danger posed by a nine-year-old random hitter, kicker and punch-er—who happens also to have disgustinghabits of personal hygiene, and seems sogenerally lost that tagging him as suffer-ing from a single disorder may be besidethe point.

As for Sara: we’re told that she flirtswith all the males in the house. But hercardinal transgression is that she asksanother little girl, Marisol, also aged six, to“touch her.” “Whenever we play upstairsshe takes her pants off and wants me toput toys and stuff in her,” Marisol reports.Sara, it goes without saying, is promptlyevicted. Harrison comments that “Being afoster parent meant I could never be cer-tain when one of the kids I offered ahaven to would make the jump from vic-tim to perpetrator.”

A perp at the age of six? A document-ed sex-offender-in-waiting by nine?Something’s not right here. We’re told lit-tle about Danny’s past, but we know thatSara—repeatedly half-drowned by a malerelative—was raped by her father fromthe time she was three. Her manipulativeapproach to men, as well as an obsessionwith those parts of her body which havebeen savaged, would seem inevitable.Given the unnatural circumstances, onemight even consider her compulsiontoward genital exploration natural. But toincarcerate her in a psychiatric hospital forthese sins—for the sins, more correctly, ofher father—strikes me as being yet anoth-er species of child abuse, delivered thistime by society at large instead of her nextof kin.

Not that I fault Harrison for a momentfor ridding her house of Danny and ofSara: she’s herself at risk of losing license,pending adoption, reputation. Not tomention putting her husband and sons inlegal jeopardy should they respond withaffection to Sara’s enticements. WhenDanny is caught in flagrante, he’s beyondHarrison’s reach; and when Sara is exiled,the situation seems already pretty muchunder Harrison’s control. With her usualpragmatism, she has drawn the wholestory from Marisol, spoken seriously andwisely to each of the girls—and then feltsufficiently enervated by the affair to tellall the kids to make themselves bananasplits for supper. In normal family life, inshort, the incident would have passed, andno harm done.

But the world of foster care demandssomething other than good sense: it relieson approval and funding from the societywhich it serves and therefore it mustreflect the values, myths and idiocies ofthat society. Another Place at the Table leavesone with a portrait of a wonderfully func-tioning family cared for by an extraordi-narily warm, generous and conscientiouswoman. Paradoxically, despite the bestefforts of a few good people, it speaks toa culture which is hide-bound, prudishand so materially and emotionally ungen-erous that it fails to provide the basicnecessities for the survival of the neediestof its children.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 200315

F or anyone in their thirties, readingMichelle Tea’s coming-of-agememoir The Chelsea Whistle will be

a lot like reconnecting with a childhoodfriend—reminiscing about episodes ofLove Boat, Billy Idol videos on MTV andthe various flavors of Maybelline KissingPotion. Tea even resurrects periodvocabulary like “grody,” which warmedmy heart with nostalgia. For those of uswho grew up in the working-class neigh-borhoods of America’s small cities dur-ing the late 1970s and the 1980s, Tea’snarrative also contains a strikingly famil-iar cast of characters—scary, unpre-dictable neighborhood boys, tough girlsand parents who are often too busy bare-ly earning a living and navigating theirdysfunctional marriages to do what isbest for their kids.

These days, Tea lives in San Franciscoand travels with Sister Spit’s Ramblin’Road Show, an ever-morphing group ofwriters, actors and performers co-foundedby Tea and spoken word artist SiniAnderson (you can learn more at www.sis-terspit.com). But she spent her first 21years in Chelsea, a near suburb of Bostonand at the time the poorest city inMassachusetts.

As a child, Tea is a thoughtful girl in asetting where thoughtfulness in generaland specifically in girls is not rewarded,and her social consciousness makes her anoutsider in her family and in their working-class neighborhood. From a young age,she protests her parents’ and grandparents’muttered complaints about “the” PuertoRicans, Cambodians, Italians and Blacks.As a teenager, she expresses her estrange-ment from her family and Chelsea byembracing the romance of gothic rock, aneighties phenomenon that melded synthe-sizers and guitars with gloomy and oftensilly lyrics about love, death and mysticism.At fifteen, Tea sports a “gigantic gothhairdo” and regularly sneaks over theTobin Bridge into Boston—though hermother has forbidden it—to buy thingslike Doc Martens and Siouxsie and theBanshees records.

The relationship between Tea and hermother, Louisa, is central to the narrative.Louisa warns her about the “Sickos” in theworld, how dangerous people “don’t havehorns on their heads,” advice that echoesin Tea’s consciousness throughout her life.Tea is convinced she is a Sicko, mainlybecause she is compelled to play gameslike “death” and “sex” with her younger

sister, Madeline. Later, when she finds abook of erotica in her mother’s dresserthat features bestiality, she suspects hermother might be a Sicko too, though shealso thinks it might be true that “sexualfantasies were okay and normal,” as thebook itself tells her, even though it depicts“women being tied up and raped by men,by gangs of them sometimes.”

The men in The Chelsea Whistle arealways vaguely menacing, and many ofthem are casually violent. As girls, Tea andMadeline watch their father, a bitter unionpostal worker, get ready to cook a live lob-ster: “Dennis took the pair of metaltongs…and he dipped the pinching tipsinto the blue gas flame and heated them,then clamped them on the lobster’s twitch-ing antennae. That’s the most sensitive part ofthe lobster, he explained, enjoying this last,extra bit of pain.” Dennis kicks his wifeand daughters out of the house when Teais twelve, telling her and Madeline “that ifwe ever saw him walking toward us, weshould cross the street, because he wouldnot say hello to us. He would not be a part-time dad.” Tea’s mother immediately getsmarried to Will, an orderly at the veterans’hospital where she is a nurse. Will looksscary “in his big black car, blaring BlackSabbath, wearing mirrored asshole sun-glasses,” but he is much nicer than Dennis,painting Smurfs and rainbows on hisadopted daughters’ bedroom walls.

The boys in Chelsea are beautiful andwild. Neglect and poverty have made themdangerous, and they turn walking downthe street or going to the store into a terri-fying experience. Tea describes vividly theparadox of wanting boys’ attention butknowing that with it comes the very realpossibility of pain and humiliation. In onescene, a boy standing with a group of his

Survival skillsby Heidi Bell

The Chelsea Whistle by Michelle Tea. New York:

Seal Press, 2002, 331 pp., $14.95 paper.

Despite these belated reflections,Ginger expresses little emotion aboutthem and Hwang doesn’t push the sub-ject very far—unfortunate, given theirobvious connection to her current strug-gle to carve her own path. Ultimatelyconcentrating on her own problems andjudgments about others, Ginger doesn’tgive much thought to her brother’s toughexperiences or confront the traditionsthat have caused everyone in her familyso much pain. Her insights end up half-baked, her prejudices highlighted but notovercome. They are sufficient to help herdeal with the pressure of getting mar-ried, but inadequate to help her face herfuture as an individual or as an offshootof her mother.

In the end, Ginger opts for blind con-tradiction, a resolution that appears to sat-isfy both author and narrator: “I wasfounded in my dualities, my differences, mysplits. I didn’t need to resolve all the incon-sistencies and contradictions. Sometimes itwas enough to know they were there,because the core, uncharted, invisible-but-felt part of me was unchangeable.”

For Hwang, it is apparently enough toraise these issues, which she does success-fully, with a surprising mixture of comicdescription and earnest investigation.Though she might have gone further touncover and confront the painful con-flicts embedded within it, In Full Bloomdoesn’t seem meant to be that kind ofbook. Hwang presents the first-genera-tion perspective in a way that moves awayfrom traditional literary explorations ofthe Asian American experience to providean immediate, recognizable voice forKoreans finding their way in America,while offering an entertaining and widelyaccessible tale.

The Scandal of theSpeaking BodyDon Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seductionin Two Languages

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Virtually VirginsSexual Strategies andCervical Cancer in Recife, Brazil

J E S S I C A L . G R E G GThis book examines the conflict between cultural idealsof female sexuality in Braziland the lived reality of sex forwomen in a poor shantytownin the country’s northeast,probing the interplay betweensexual expectations, sexualreality, and disease. $19.95 paper $49.50 cloth

Silicon Valley, Women, andthe California DreamGender, Class, andOpportunity in theTwentieth Century

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The Difference“Difference” MakesWomen and Leadership

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Writing and Madness(Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis)

S H O S H A N A F E L M A NTr a n s l a t e d b y M A R T H A N O E L E V A N Sa n d O t h e r s , W i t h a n e w P r e f a c e a n d t w o i n t e r v i e w s w i t h t h e a u t h o rThis is the author’s most influential work of literarytheory and criticism in whichshe explores the relationsbetween literature, philosophy,and psychoanalysis. $19.95 paper $55.00 cloth

great minds at work

GE N D E RE N G E N D E R I N G D E B A T E

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 200316

J ane Smiley’s twelfth book is a big novel.In 414 pages she introduces scores ofcharacters (some larger than life) and

such hot topics as property development,illicit sex, financial conquest and familyfeuding. This ambitious novel is taut withmoments of daily tension as well as withoverarching theatrical suspense. Framed bythe 1980s land boom and S and L scandal,it examines material and social entitlement,greed, loyalty and moral responsibility.

Forty-year-old Joe Stratford, narratorand protagonist, opens his story in 1982, atthe Viceroy Bar in the rural Northeasterncommunity where he grew up and nowworks as a realtor. A smart, principled, fair-ly straitlaced guy, Joe finds himself seducedby the real-estate ambitions of his oldfriend and boss Gordon Baldwin and theerotic dreams of Baldwin’s daughterFelicity. When Marcus Burns, a former IRSagent, moves to town, the crucible is fired.

Smiley’s wry, breezy style counterpointsher serious appraisal of the nature of faith.Good faith and bad faith. Joe observes hisparents’ devout faith in God; Felicity’s faithin pleasure; Marcus’ faith in free enterprise.He is drawn into all these beliefs, and into hisown late-blooming faith in “best friendship.”

The sometimes unwieldy cast is filledwith engagingly idiosyncratic people inmajor and minor roles. Perhaps the mostaverage character is Joe, a slightly lonelydivorced man who is almost universallyliked and respected. A friendly, dutiful fel-low, he visits his ageing parents regularly toshovel snow from their sidewalk, deliver drycleaning, or celebrate holidays. Joe’s lover,Felicity—an upper-middle-class Cher—issmart, excitable, lusty and bored with herhusband and two kids. When Marcus Burnsarrives from New York, he intrigues somelocals and arouses suspicion in others.

Smiley has displayed a talent for weav-ing topical research into fiction, notably inThe Greenlanders and Horse Heaven. Here sheescorts you into bank vaults, constructionsites and real-estate transactions. She writesso convincingly about listing agents andbuyers’ agents and brokers and inspectionsand incentives and interest rates and mort-gages and loans and closings—not to men-tion wallpaper, curtains, carpets, roofs—that you’re tempted to buy a house fromJoe (if only you could afford one).

G ordon Baldwin, a consummatedeveloper, decides to buy magnifi-cent, expensive Salt Key Farm

from the wealthy, warring Thorpe family.He appoints Joe to finalize the deal and tohelp him transform the secluded patriciandomain into a recreational retreat, com-plete with golf course, swimming pool,clubhouse and weekend homes for NewYorkers. Soon Marcus Burns has insinuat-ed himself into the plan. From his firstsighting of the self-confident Marcus, Joeis both attracted and unsettled.

The guy who got out of the Caddywas very smooth looking—creasedtan slacks, expensive-looking whiteshirt, Italian-cut jacket, tasseledloafers. He pocketed his keys andthrew his sunglasses on the seat ofhis car, then glanced around for our

door. When he saw me looking athim through the plate glass, hebroke into a smile. There was noone with him. House deals withoutwomen put you out into unknownterritory sometimes. (p. 8)

Joe embarks on the complex process ofsupervising renovations and publicizingSalt Key’s development. Marcus’ grandideas astonish him.

…if you lay some pipe, you can linkit up with your little shopping centerand your other development a cou-ple of miles down the road, a moremodest development of, say, three-bedroom houses on quarter-acrelots. Two hundred houses there,four hundred houses here, the littleshopping center—I think JimCrosbie is going to go for it in a bigway, especially when he realizes thatwith this deregulation of the S andLs that Congress just passed, he canget a branch of his savings-and-loanout here before anyone else thinksabout it. And they’re going to let Sand Ls develop properties now. Itlooks to me like they’re going to letthem do just about anything theywant…. (p. 177)

Smiley’s setting is evocatively, if enigmat-ically, depicted: the novel is placed in ageneric region, not a precise geographicallocation. This mountainous area of a RustBelt state, one and a half hours from NewYork, features such colorful place-names asNut Hollow, Maple Glen, Hardy Well Road,Roaring Falls. Joe is clearly at home here: “Itwas a sharp, but clear spring morning, notquite to the daffodil stage. The sky was acold blue-gray, but the grass had greened upon the hillsides, and it seemed like you couldsee each blade shining with chlorophyll.” Afastidious, attentive man, he is often given toreveries on seasonal change: “In the middleof March, the trees were bare, wet, andblack and the roadway was lined with pud-dles and dirty patches of snow, but therewas nothing unbeautiful about it.”

If the physical locale is idyllic, the socialscene among these upwardly mobile realtorsand bankers and investors is fraught withprofessional rivalries, sexual acrobatics anddubious business practices. Joe tries to main-tain his integrity and optimism as he glidesfrom one cocktail party and holiday celebra-tion to the next. Though some neighborsdemonize the urgently confident Marcus,Joe decides to trust him. When Felicity dis-appears from Joe’s life for a while, he acceptsthis loss rather passively, then takes up withSusan, a pretty young druggy artist.

Smiley takes you on periodic detours asshe fills in the intricate background of aminor character or elaborates on an inci-dental moment. This technique, coupledwith the often melodramatic characteriza-tion, gives the novel a mock-Victorianambience. Many sentences are overlongand artless. Entire pages could be distilledor cut. Smiley fans may long for the grace-ful language of her previous fictions AtParadise Gate and “Ordinary Love” or forthe sharp, punchy style of Moo.

Low financeby Valerie Miner

Good Faith by Jane Smiley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2003, 414 pp., $26.00 hardcover.

friends on the street calls Tea over (shegoes because he’s very cute and thereforepowerful), and when she arrives he swatsher in the crotch with a tree branch. Tea’stough friend Rita offers to teach her theChelsea whistle, a signal the neighborhoodboys use to call for help, but Tea doesn’twant to learn it because “The boys it wasmeant to call were the boys I would needto be saved from.”

T he thematic thread runningthrough The Chelsea Whistle isfemale sexuality, a topic Tea

explores with frank humor, passion andattention to the influences of family, com-munity and pop culture. Tea’s mother andthe women Tea knows as a girl tell her,directly and indirectly, that she will have to“get used to” or “put up with” pain andbetrayal from men, in much the same waya mother in the eighteenth century warneda soon to be married daughter what wouldhappen on her wedding night. Asteenagers, Tea and a friend babysit for awoman named Jessie, who “cooked uspancakes and told us about having anal sexwith her husband. She didn’t like it, said itactually hurt, but her husband liked it a lotand that was part of being married.” At St.Rose’s all-girls Catholic high school, MissLanders tells her class

the reason she wore pants and notskirts was so that men wouldn’trape her, men being more likely torape girls who wore tight clothesand dressed like tramps. This infor-mation was directed at ShirleyLombardi in particular.…On no-uniform days, [Shirley] wore thetightest black-and-red leopard-printjeans with a curving zipper thatbisected her ass into neighboringcountries, her right and left labiasplit into plump little leopard-printpillows. (p. 164)

Despite these warnings, Tea tries toemulate the sexy women she sees on MTV,but admits “I didn’t have the resources so Ijust looked weird. Like a child prostitute.”A significant portion of the memoir is con-cerned with her various boyfriends. Sheloses her virginity to a skater named Beau,an experience she finds profoundly alienat-ing. “I couldn’t believe,” she writes, “thatthe girl end of this whole thing was just tolie there.” The Chelsea Whistle paints a damn-ing picture of the dynamics of heterosexu-ality, so it’s not exactly shocking when Teapersuades a later boyfriend, Clive, to helpher seduce a woman named Juniper, nor isit particularly surprising when Tea beginsdating women exclusively. What is strangeis that until she meets Juniper, about two-thirds of the way through the book, Teahas never mentioned or even hinted atbeing sexually attracted to women,although the topic of lesbianism has comeup at least twice. So it doesn’t quite ringtrue when she insists that “Having sex witha girl seemed like the most romantic thinga girl could do.” Tea’s conversion to les-bianism as portrayed here makes datingwomen seem like a trend she is following,as though her decision is governed by thesame urge that compels her to befriendstrangers she thinks seem outrageous orunconventional. Why did she approachJuniper in the first place? What happenedto her boy-craziness? What led her to theconclusion that, as she tells Clive, “I JustThink I Like Girls”?

Tea’s narrator might not be capable ofanswering these questions, since sheremains young even as Tea’s character inthe memoir grows to adulthood. The voicethat is perfectly appropriate describing herexperiences at nine or even fourteen years

old seems immature once she has grown.The kinds of insights we expect from athoughtful young adult are present butrare, flashes rather than sustained illumina-tion. Often she leaves a topic preciselywhen analysis, insight, or soul-searchingwould be most welcomed by the reader, sowe get only tantalizing glimpses of heralcoholism or how growing up in Chelseahas influenced her career choices.

Tea also digresses within chapters,seeming to free-associate until she happensagain upon the original topic. Sometimesthis method is successful, as in a chapterabout dance class that becomes an explo-ration of masturbation, bestiality andpower. Traveling into the unknown withsomeone as intense and funny as Tea canbe an exhilarating experience and often herroundabout approach livens up overlyfamiliar territory and provides vital detailabout her family and friends. Sometimes,however, I had to revisit the beginning of achapter to remember the significance ofthe subject to which she had finallyreturned. In the chapter titled “HowRunaways Keep Their Hair Clean,” forexample, we endure an excessively detaileddescription of Chelsea’s Mystic Mall, fol-lowed by a paragraph on the author’s loveof fire, followed by more about the mall,before we reach the actual runaway, discov-ered washing her hair in a mall bathroom.

J eanette Winterson describes a certaintype of writing as marked by the belief“that sincerity of feeling will be

enough,” while more developed writing“knows that feeling must give way toform.” Ultimately, The Chelsea Whistleemphasizes feeling over form. In the mid-dle of a memoir that begins and ends well,Tea seems to lose the ability to discernwhich details will add to the story’smomentum. In the first half of the book,the stories are arranged chronologicallyand are largely unified by the theme ofsexuality, but they lack strong plot devel-opment. Then more than halfway through,she begins a story so riveting I can’t helpbut think it must have been her impetusfor writing the memoir. This story-line,which involves a family mystery I won’tdivulge, has a potent effect on the readerdespite its late introduction, and it provesthat Tea’s writing, at its best, contains allthe necessary formal elements—sustainedplot, narrative suspense and a chillingemotional weight.

While readers’ interest might falterthrough the middle of The Chelsea Whistle,the resonance and eccentricity of Tea’swriting will likely propel them forwardnonetheless. Her unconventional stylemimics speech with its mixture of spas-modic energy, poetic phrasing and casualirreverence. I found the contrast betweenlyric turns such as “School let out like afever breaking” and the cheeky “MissLanders thought Shirley Lombardi wasbegging for rape with her leopard-printcameltoe” refreshing and hilarious.

Despite her obvious sense of humor,which takes a grim turn in the second halfof the book, Tea doesn’t believe in creat-ing happy endings where none exist. Forher difficult adolescence, she reproachesher parents, Chelsea and the larger culturethat allows cities like Chelsea to exist, citiesawash in poverty, where desperationbreeds desperate behavior and creates gen-eration after generation of victims. TheChelsea Whistle provides no escape from ortranscendence of the consequences ofgrowing up in Chelsea. What it does pro-vide is a window on working-class girl-hood, a perspective that, considering howmany of us grew up in circumstances sim-ilar to Tea’s, seems sorely lacking amongcurrent memoirs.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 2003 17

For the most part, Smiley has succeed-ed in an authentic rendering of her mid-dle-aged male protagonist. One of Joe’sunusual habits is his tendency to describeeveryone’s wardrobe in detail. Of coursethere’s no reason a man couldn’t noticeclothes. But when he compares SusanWebster’s sexy bikini to “everyone else’sCole of California bathing suits,” youwonder how a man who has spent most ofhis life without a female partner couldidentify specific brands of women’s cloth-ing. Then there is the vocabulary: wordslike “gamboling” come from the author’svoice, not that of her character.

Smiley’s wit is evident in Joe’s lightirony and in the novel’s larger satire aboutcollective hypocrisies and vanities, abouttemptation in the Salt Key kingdom. Herplayfulness extends to the allegoricalnames of Marcus Burns and FelicityBaldwin. Marcus’ sister, who plays a direc-torial if not authorial role in the business,is called “Jane.” Joe Stratford’s initials arethe same as Smiley’s.

J oe endures one calamity after another.His new-found male camaraderie isjeopardized when Marcus hires his sis-

ter Jane as office manager. He has entrust-ed all his finances to the jointly held busi-ness, and he is fascinated and appalledwhen Marcus explains his bookkeepingphilosophy.

Here’s the main life lesson I learnedat the IRS. As long as you keep intouch, you’re fine…..This is some-thing everyone does. No one hasenough money to follow his visionand also pay all the bills. That’s thepoint of a windfall. A windfall is likean overnight success. You work hardfor it and sweat and then, all of asudden, there’s plenty of money—more than you ever expected—andthat’s when you pay all those billsyou let accumulate. No one reallycares that you let them accumulate.They say they do, and they yell andscream and even try to bully you,but everyone knows the samething—they’ll get it eventually. Soyou string them along, pay a littlenow and then so they don’t cut youoff, and when your ship comes inyou settle up. (p. 300)

Joe is susceptible to Marcus’ tempta-tions for many reasons. He often evalu-ates himself by his net worth. As he ages,he grows self-conscious about his rela-tively modest prosperity. Gradually heallows his partners’ ambitions to fuel hisown dreams.

I was a successful realtor and small-time developer. That I should buildon this solid base wasn’t surprising,it was natural, the almost automaticeffect of normal ambition. I hadlived, without understanding it, theproper American trajectory, risingand rising, dropping off the firststage rocket, then the second stage,then shooting into space, destinedto orbit the earth for someuncounted number of times beforesplashing into the ocean offFlorida, retired in the far-off twen-ty-first century. (pp. 274-275)

Given Joe’s close fiscal ties to Marcus,readers begin to doubt that Joe’s rocket willalight off the coast of his dreams. Clearlydescent—of one kind or another—is inthe cards. But you have to read 137 morepages of adventures in late-twentieth-cen-tury American capitalism before you learnif he lands safely.

N o more Emma, no moreRosa,” the editor of a once-alternative journal announced

to me in the early 1980s. The times theywere a-changing, and Goldman andLuxemburg were out, over, history.Fortunately history has its historians: in1991, the Emma Goldman PapersProject at the University of Californiaat Berkeley, headed by Candace Falk,put out a massive microfilm edition ofwriting by and about Goldman calledThe Emma Goldman Papers, destinedmostly for libraries. And now the firstin its series of annotated books con-taining a selection from those micro-films and some material discoveredlater has been published.

Making little-known documentsavailable to the general public for thefirst time, Volume One of EmmaGoldman: A Documentary History of theAmerican Years offers an alternative to“no more Goldman”: no more cult ofGoldman which ignores or downplaysuncomfortable aspects of her biogra-phy. As Falk notes in her introduction,this anthology shows “the darker shad-ows of her youthful political militancy.”Readers who only know Goldman fromher memoir Living My Life are likely tobe surprised, even shocked, by this vol-ume. Treating the period from 1890 to1901, it presents Goldman’s emergenceas an agitator for anarchism and itscauses, including free speech, free loveand the eight-hour-day. These were theyears when she made a name for herselfby delivering lectures and speeches inthe US and Western Europe, writing forfar-flung anarchist publications and giv-ing interviews to the mainstreamAmerican press.

In 1892 Goldman’s former lover,anarchist Alexander Berkman attempt-ed to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, thegeneral manager of the Carnegie SteelCompany who used lockouts,Pinkerton detectives and other repres-sive tactics against unions. Documentsfrom the anthology show that sheframed it as an act of war, justified byFrick’s suppression of strikers atCarnegie’s Homestead mill: “The criesof starving mothers and innocent chil-dren gave him courage and will powerto combat the enemy. He made anunsuccessful attack on Frick, slightlywounding him, but creating consterna-tion in the enemy’s camp. By the lightof subsequent events it is shown thatthe act was not altogether in vain;Plutocracy has never raised its head soproudly since,” she wrote in a letterprinted by two anarchist periodicals, inPortland and London, in 1895. And inan article published later the same yearin the same journals, she argued thatthe deed made good propaganda:“Alexander Berkmann’s brave actshowed to all who wish to see the real

cause of the people’s misery.Anarchists are no longer looked uponas a set of fools or ruffians, and theprinciples of those who ... are lan-guishing in prison are to-day discussedin the press, in the pulpit, and in themansions of the rich.”

The fact that Goldman andBerkman had been lovers is surely onereason for her defense of him, butprobably not the main one, for thedocuments here show that she glorifiedmany perpetrators of political violence.“In France the admirable acts ofRavachol, Henry, Vaillant, Caserio andothers have done more for the spread-ing of our principles than ten years ofwriting and speaking,” she proclaimedin the Portland anarchist journal in1896. “Exceptional conditions produceexceptional characters, so I have notyet lost hopes that some day Englandand America may furnish us with aKropotkin, Tschaikoffsky,Tscherkesoff, Perovskaya, Angelilio,Caserio and other such wonderful menand women,” she wrote in Free Society, aSan Francisco anarchist periodical, in1900. And the next year, in the samejournal: “Each age has its John Browns,its Perovskayas, its Parsons, Spies,Angiolillos, and its Brescis, who weremisunderstood, persecuted, mobbed,tortured, and killed, by those whocould not reach the sublime heightsattained by these men. Yet they havenot lived in vain, for it is to them thatwe owe all that is good and noble,grand and useful in the world.” Thehelpful short biographies at the back ofthe anthology reveal just how manyassassins and would-be assassins are onGoldman’s lists, although readers willhave to know to look there under themodern Russian transliteration forChaikovsky and Cherkesov.

M y purpose here is not to res-urrect the old canard thatanarchist equals terrorist, but

to demonstrate that, in the 1890s,Goldman was convinced that her causewas well served by acts of retribution.Whether this was the sentiment of themajority of anarchists then is impossi-ble to know. All one can say with assur-ance is that many anarchist publicationsof this period, both in Europe and theUS, showed respect and even enthusi-asm for those who employed violentmethods. Ecstatically, insistently, suchmen and women were lauded forcourage and willingness to sacrificethemselves and were dubbed heroesand martyrs. For Goldman, Berkmanwas “the noble youth.”

When Johann Most, the influentialGerman-American anarchist (and alsoGoldman’s former lover), deviatedfrom his usual celebration of politicalviolence and criticized Berkman’s attackon Frick for stirring up prejudiceagainst anarchists in America, Goldmancastigated Most in print as well as onthe speaker’s platform: “It is simplyugly personal hatred, envy, and fear thatdrove this man to speak in such a way.That Most is rotten, rotten to the core,is apparent to everyone who knows himat all,” she wrote in 1892 in a German-American anarchist newspaper. (Thearticle appears here both in the originalGerman and in English, though thetranslator is not named.) The recourseto ad hominem invective suggests thatfor the Goldman of that period, propa-ganda by the deed was not open todebate or question.

Yet it is hard to be certain ofGoldman’s views. It is likely that hercorrespondence and articles were edit-ed by anarchist journals, for her privateletters here show many more problemswith English, which she learned as ateenager. Newspaper articles about herare even less reliable. “‘No: I have neveradvocated violence, but neither do Icondemn the Anarchist who resorts toit,” she is reported to have said in aninterview published in The New YorkSun on January 6, 1901. Shortly there-after, on February 17, she wrote to FreeSociety in San Francisco to correct

the reports in the daily press, thatI am against force, or propagan-da by deed.... I have neveropposed force or propaganda bydeed, either publicly or privately.I demand and acknowledge theright of an individual, or a num-ber of individuals, to strike back

Apostle of anarchyby Karen Rosenberg

Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American

Years, Volume One: Made for America, 1890-1901 edited

by Candace Falk, Barry Pateman and Jessica Moran.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,

2003, 655 pp., $60.00 hardcover.

Police mug shot of Goldman in August 1893, just after her arrest in Philadelphia on charges of unlawful assembly . From EEmmmmaa GGoollddmmaann..

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 200318

S educed scholars assure us periodical-ly that Victorians’ sex lives wereoften delicious. Ellen Bayuk

Rosenman is one of them. UnauthorizedPleasures is more appealing than most ofthese books. In general, they rebut, not theself-presentations of Victorians them-selves, the best-known of whom wereproudly steamy, but our own condescend-ing stereotypes of the past. After all, it isbetter to write about sex when you imagineyou are shocking your reader.

The most reputable sexy-Victorianbooks have been written by men so emi-nent that they could almost be Victoriansthemselves. Steven Marcus psychoanalyzedpornography with a sharp scalpel in TheOther Victorians; Peter Gay is best knownfor The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,but in fact he writes over and over aboutVictorian happy romping. Both Marcusand Gay are Freudians, but of differenttemperaments. Marcus takes refuge inappalled irony at his subjects’ weird pro-clivities, while Gay seems to beam approv-ingly at their healthy adjustment. But bothMarcus and Gay cultivate an appropriatedetachment from their captive Victoriansthrashing about.

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman is one of thefirst women to write a sexy-Victorianbook, and while her implicit attitude is thesame as Marcus’ and Gay’s (“I bet younever knew those repressed Victorians DidIt”), she forgoes their air of detachment.Her accounts of various little-known erot-ic fictions are appealingly non-judgmental;she writes with such empathy thatUnauthorized Pleasures is finally inconclusive,as if the author got lost in her stories.Though Rosenman may lack the diagnosticassurance of her patriarchal progenitors,unlike them she admits gleefully thatVictorian sex turns her on.

Unauthorized Pleasures is divided into fiveanecdotal chapters on unorthodox materi-al few general readers or even Victorianistswill have heard of. It begins with a wittyaccount of spermatorrhea, a pseudo-dis-ease that terrified Victorian men, in whichinordinate penis-oozing was supposed tobe caused by masturbation. Rosenman

claims that Victorian doctors inventedspermatorrhea in good faith, though shedoes not make the intriguing connectionto self-interested gynecologists today,many of whom specialize in inventingshameful “female” reproductive diseases.Less testy than I am, Rosenman com-mends nervous Victorian doctors for theirimplicit endorsement of sexual pleasure,despite the shame and pain they inflictedon their male patients.

In general, Rosenman dwells on anxiousmen. Women exist more as a cause of thatanxiety than in themselves. She sums upthe urban seductress so many male writersimagined by claiming “she is a kind of funhouse mirror, throwing back at men theiralienated desire,” and this metaphor fitsmost of her female characters. Her chapteron sex and the city focuses on WilkieCollins’ Basil, Alexander Walker’s Beauty inWoman (an instruction manual for menwho fear seduction on city streets) and thenow well-known diaries of Arthur Munby,who wrote copiously about the bodies ofworking women, one of whom he secretlymarried. This gallery of urban men tryingto grasp women and failing to do soinverts the familiar story, as told by suchgroundbreaking scholars as JudithWalkowitz, of women’s own precariousposition in the city. Real or imaginedthreats to men abound in this book, butmost of its women are what we used tocall images of women.

Rosenman goes on to discuss GeorgeW. M. Reynolds’ forgotten best-sellingnovel, The Mysteries of London, which shepraises largely because it features a womanwhose sexuality goes unpunished; the actu-al case of Charles Yelverton, pursued byavid Maria Theresa Longworth whoclaimed (untruthfully, it seems) that shewas his abandoned wife; and My Secret Life,that pornographic farrago of acrobaticreveries Steven Marcus has long turnedinto an old chestnut. Rosenman likes MySecret Life because, she claims, it under-mines conventional paradigms of mas-culinity, but she should probably haveomitted this final chapter, which seems tome superfluous and anti-climactic.

Earnestly eroticby Nina Auerbach

Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic

Experience by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 2003, 218 pp.,

$49.95 hardcover, $18.95 paper.

at organized power, and todefend themselves against inva-sion; and I have and always willstand on the side of the one whohas been courageous enough togive his own life in taking orattempting to take the life of atyrant, whether industrial orpolitical. (p. 434)

Hold on there. Who gets to decidewhether someone is so terrible as tomerit death? Can any individual orgroup serve as a self-appointed judge,jury and executioner? As political andmoral philosophy, this is dangerouslyfacile stuff. At other times Goldman getsaround the thorny issue of moralresponsibility by turning to the imageryof determinism. Her language shifts:suddenly the agents of history are nolonger human beings but metaphors likestorms, volcanoes and waterfalls. In1901, a month after Leon Czolgosz triedto kill President McKinley, she wrote inFree Society, “Resistance against force is afact all through nature. Man being partof nature, he, too, is swayed by the sameforce to defend himself against invasion.Force will continue to be a natural factorjust so long as economic slavery, socialsuperiority, inequality, exploitation, andwar continue to destroy all that is goodand noble in man.”

As the documents show, Goldmanhad performed this slide from advoca-cy of violence to the mere prediction ofit before. At her 1893 trial in New Yorkfor unlawful assembly, the anarchistEdward Brady, then Goldman’s lover,stated in court that she “did not say thatthe people would do right if they wentto the palaces of the capitalists andtook anything that they could get. Thedefendant spoke as though prophesy-ing, ‘If certain things would happen,then the people would be compelled todo such and such a thing.’” And whenGoldman was examined, the transcriptsays, “She wished it to be understoodthat she did not tell the workingmen todo anything at present, or to do it later,but she simply said that their terriblecondition of starvation would drivethem to do this and that.”

My reading of this material is thatGoldman was more effective as a pub-lic speaker than as a writer and thinker.In an era when lectures were popular asentertainment as well as instruction,she probably made up in theatricalitywhat she lacked in theoretical consis-tency. Like many a preacher, she wasable to hold an audience even whilelambasting them. (In 1897 sheaddressed a crowd in Rhode Island as

“fellow slaves.”) Some English-lan-guage newspaper reports of the periodconvey the charisma in her eyes andvoice, and Falk and her team are to becongratulated for digging up theseobscure articles.

W hat I missed, however, bothin the microfilmed EmmaGoldman Papers and now in

this book of documents, is more fromthe American foreign-language periodi-cals which were so important to work-ing-class immigrants in this period.And I wonder why Falk didn’t excerptfrom the German memoirs of JosefPeukert and Sepp Oerter, or theYiddish autobiography of IsraelKopeloff, which discuss Goldman’searly period in New York. Made forAmerica is the subtitle of this book, andit reflects not only Goldman’s increas-ing interest in reaching native-bornmiddle-class Americans but Falk’semphasis on the US mainstream press.Unfortunately, this orientation is notexplained: Falk’s 89-page introductiondevotes a little more than one page toher research procedures and editorialchoices. Clearly a great deal of time,effort and money has gone into theEmma Goldman Papers Project, butreaders should not overestimate itscomprehensiveness.

Kopeloff ’s Formerly in America, pub-lished in 1928 in Warsaw, for instance,is a valuable source about the breakbetween Goldman and Most, whichtook place even before Most criticizedBerkman’s attempt on Frick’s life.According to Kopeloff, Goldman andBerkman had incurred Most’s wrathsimply by attending a meeting ofanother leader of German-speakinganarchists in the US, Josef Peukert.Most’s hatred of Peukert had manycauses: ideological differences, rivalryfor a position of dominance, and hisbelief that Peukert was responsible forthe arrest of one of the most success-ful anarchist couriers in Europe. Withhis intolerance of any and all associa-tion with Peukert, Most virtually droveGoldman and Berkman into hisenemy’s camp, Kopeloff suggests.

Jewish anarchists like Kopeloff whowere disciples of Most at that timelined up against “Goldman and Co.”—their sarcastic nickname for Berkman.But, says Kopeloff, after the attempt onFrick’s life, Berkman was admired byhis anarchist enemies as well as hisfriends. Even Most praised him at first,and when he later spoke out againstBerkman’s assassination attempt, theJewish anarchists split over the issue.While Kopeloff doesn’t go so far as toblame “Goldman and Co.” for the dis-solution of his Yiddish-speaking anar-chist group, the Pioneers of Freedom,he does depict them as a major factor inits demise. That’s another thing youwon’t find in Living My Life.

Goldman’s relation to the Yiddish-and German-language anarchist move-ments in North America is a complexstory which has yet to be told. Indeed,though a number of books onGoldman have come out in the lasttwenty years, many aspects of her life—especially those tied to foreign-languagesources—remain to be reconsidered.Neither foreign-language periodicalspublished in America nor Europeannewspapers and magazines have beencombed for her name, and many mem-oirs are yet to be mined. I can’t speakabout the state of Rosa Luxemburgstudies, but I’m sure that when it comesto Emma, we still need more.

Voltairine de Cleyre in 1891, among thefew women of stature in the anarchist

movement. From EEmmmmaa GGoollddmmaann..

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 7 / April 200319

William L. Andrews, ed., Classic African American Women’sNarratives. New York: Oxford University Press. (A collectionof prose written by African American women before 1865.)

Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis, eds., Women’s Experience ofModernity: 1875-1945. Baltimore, MD: John HopkinsUniversity Press.

Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, eds., Experience andExpression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. Detroit, MI:Wayne State University Press. (Jewish and non-Jewish women’sexperiences of the Holocaust, including those of victims andsurvivors, German nurses and French resistance fighters.)

Jean Barman, Constance Lindsay Skinner: Writing on the Frontier.Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2002.(The writing and life of the Canadian journalist.)

Susan Bernadin et al., Trading Gazes: Euro-American WomenPhotographers and Native North Americans, 1880-1940. NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Patrick Brode, Courted and Abandoned: Seduction in Canadian Law.Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Patrick Califia, Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex. SanFrancisco: Cleis, 2002.

Joan F. Cammarata, ed., Women in the Discourse of Early ModernSpain. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

Alicia Carroll, Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot. Athens,OH: Ohio University Press.

Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds.,Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture inFrance, 1981-2001. New York: Palgrave.

Lorraine Code, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer.University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.(Fifteen essays on the author addressing his treatment ofwomen, or lack thereof, in his work.)

John J. Conley, The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers inNeoclassical France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Terrell Armistead Crow and Mary Moulton Barden, eds., LiveYour Own Life: The Family Papers of Mary Bayard Clarke, 1854-1886. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Margaret Cruikshank, Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging.Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Jack E. Davis and Karl Frederickson, eds., Making Waves: FemaleActivists in Twentieth-Century Florida. Gainesville, FL: UniversityPress of Florida.

Kathy Davis, Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: CulturalStudies on Cosmetic Surgery. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, Language and Gender.New York: Cambridge University Press.

Shirley Jane Endicott, China Diary: The Life of Mary AustinEndicott. Waterloo, ON, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier UniversityPress. (Biography of a Canadian missionary and teacher inChina during the first half of the twentieth century.)

Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, andCastration in the Italian Renaissance. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press.

Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper andGeorgia O’Keeffe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (A lookat the artists’ rocky marriages and how that affected their work.)

Merrill Joan Gerber, Gut Feelings: A Writer’s Truths and MinuteInventions. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Elizabeth Elkin Grammer, Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies byFemale Itinerant Evangelists in 19th-Century America. New York:Oxford University Press.

Phyllis Greene, Shedding Years: Growing Older, Feeling Younger. NewYork: Villard. (An exploration of the delights and challengesof the senior years.)

Mary Hamer, Incest: A New Perspective. Cambridge, UK: PolityPress, 2002. (A look at abuse and the neurological damage suf-fered by the victim.)

Judith Harris, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self ThroughWriting. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Kristina Huneault, Difficult Subjects: Working Women and VisualCulture, Britain 1880-1914. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002.

Sherrie A. Inness, ed., Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the1970s. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Sandra Jackson and Ann Russo, eds., Talking Back and Acting Out:Women Negotiating the Media Across Cultures. New York: PeterLang, 2002. (A collection of writing by women who refuse toconform to media stereotypes.)

Kristin A. Kelly, Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press. (Examination of the desire topreserve the privacy of the family tempered with the publicconcern for vulnerable individuals, and how to address theseconflicting concerns.)

Sarah Kember, Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life. New York:Routledge. (A look at the contemporary scientific and techno-

logical world from a feminist perspective.)Michael S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, eds., Privilege: A Reader.

Boulder, CO: Westview. (On the dynamics of power and privi-lege, challenging the readers to see how inequalities benefitsome members of society.)

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Christina Rossetti and Illustration: APublishing History. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002.

Thomas W. Lacqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History ofMasturbation. New York: Zone Books.

Paula McLain, Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses.New York: Little, Brown. (Memoir of growing up in the fos-ter care system, living with several temporary foster families.)

Jan McNess, The Thirteenth Night: A Mother’s Story of the Life andDeath of Her Son. Fremantle, Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: DecolonizingTheory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier and Janise Hurtig, eds.,Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America. NewYork: Palgrave, 2002.

Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women’s Anthology for aNew Millennium. New York: Washington Square.

Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus, eds., Elizabeth I: AutographCompositions and Foreign Language Originals. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press. (A collection of writings by the queen intheir original state.)

Anka Muhlstein, ed., Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne: Volume I,1781-1815 and Volume II 1816-1830. New York: Helen Marx.(Memoirs of a lady-in-waiting during the upheaval of theFrench Revolution, the reign of Napoleon, the Restorationand the Revolution of 1830.)

Pamela S. Nadell, ed., American Jewish Women’s History: A Reader.New York: New York University Press.

Jennifer A. Parks, No Place Like Home? Feminist Ethics and HomeHealth Care. Bloomington, IN; Indiana University Press. (Thepoor working conditions in the home health care industry andthe harm that does to both patients and employees.)

Paula Penn-Nabrit, Morning by Morning: How We Home-Schooled OurAfrican-American Sons to the Ivy League. New York: Villard.

Carmel Quinlan, Genteel Revolutionaries: Anna and Thomas Haslamand the Irish Women’s Movement. Cork, Ireland: Cork UniversityPress, 2002.

Patricia Ranft, Women in Western Intellectual Culture, 600-1500. NewYork: Palgrave, 2002.

Catherine M. Roach, Mother/Nature: Popular Culture andEnvironmental Ethics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UniversityPress. (An examination of our relationship with naturethrough the language and imagery we use to describe it.)

Becky Ropers-Huilman, ed., Gendered Futures in HigherEducation: Critical Perspectives for Change. Albany, NY: StateUniversity of New York Press. (Discussion of issues suchas women’s colleges, female faculty, race and gender, andviolence on campuses.)

Amy Schapiro, Millicent Fenwick: Her Way. New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press. (A biography of the New Jersey con-gresswoman.)

Donna Schuurman, Never the Same: Coming to Terms with the Deathof a Parent. New York: St. Martin’s.

Loretta Schwartz-Nobel, Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic inAmerica. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

Jillian Shanebrook, Model: Life Behind the Makeup. Brooklyn, NY:Blue Bali Editions, 2002.

Laurie Shrage, Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing theDebate. New York: Oxford University Press.

Carol J. Singley, ed., A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. NewYork: Oxford University Press.

Laura Spielvogel, Working Out in Japan: Shaping the Female Body inTokyo Fitness Clubs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.(Examination of Japanese attitudes toward fitness, combiningphysical health with leisure and socializing, and the limited suc-cess of fitness clubs despite Japan’s physical ideal of slimness.)

Betsy Stirratt and Catherine Johnson, eds, Feminine Persuasion: Art andEssays on Sexuality. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.(Collection of paintings, sculpture, video and photography fromthe past five hundred years celebrating female sexuality.)

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, ed., Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The BlackFemale Body in American Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University ofMichigan Press, 2002.

Sharon Rose Wilson, ed., Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations:Recent Poetry and Fiction. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UniversityPress.

Kimberly A. Yuracko, Perfectionism and Contemporary Feminist Values.Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (An argument thata clearer set of feminist perfectionist principles would helperadicate lingering gender inequality.)

The BookshelfEach month we list the recently published books received during the preceding month or so which we think readers of the Women’sReview will want to know about. This is, however, a very partial selection of the books by and about women published each month.Our listing is informational, not evaluative; the only annotation added is a brief indication of the subject-matter, where the title is notself-explanatory. All are non-fiction titles published in 2003, unless otherwise noted.

U nauthorized Pleasures is a hard booknot to like. It is always fun to readabout sexy Victorians, who were as

earnest in their transgressions as in theirwork, and Rosenman often describes herresearch well, bringing to life a trove of sillymaterial few of us will read but most of uswill like to know about. However, thicketsof jargon crop up which I wish someonehad weeded out. A lively discussion ofWilkie Collins tangles itself in language likethis: “Once she is unveiled, Margaret isredrawn as profoundly, transparently other,her depravity specified through a class rhet-oric marking her as an urban contagion.”Surely this could be better put. Theorytalk isitself a contagion in recent academic writ-ing, and Rosenman is a good enough stylistto have done better than this. The effect ofsuch briar-patches is not so much to makethe book heavy as to make it sound com-placent, suggesting a corporate language,and a knowing corporate groupthink, thatrob her material of its suggestiveness.

As she has trouble finding a language,Rosenman also has trouble finding a tone.I’m not sure what, finally, she wants to say;the five chapters, fun as each is, don’t coa-lesce in a unified argument. Since theydon’t build to a statement, their organiza-tion seems arbitrary; if the order of thechapters were scrambled, the book wouldbe the same.

I suspect Unauthorized Pleasures may suf-fer less from a failure of thought thanfrom a failure of nerve. Sex is harder towrite about than it feels: it becomes amagnet for anything the reader might diag-nose as the author’s own inadequacies.Except for her repeated perky insistencethat she likes sex, Rosenman leaves out alot. We all like sex, I think, but it is alsofraught with danger. In the nineteenth cen-tury it was even more dangerous than it istoday, carrying fears of pregnancy, disease,ostracism, clumsiness and simple, consum-ing embarrassment. I suspect Rosenman istrying to avoid what she sees as the puri-tanical tone of her feminist elders, but sheconsiders few of the real hazards thataccompanied sexual release in the nine-teenth century. Any Victorian who relisheshis or her sexuality becomes a hero ofUnauthorized Pleasures.

Moreover, there are almost no women inthe book who feel and speak. Though itsfocus is heterosexual—male and femalehomosexuality are mentioned only inciden-tally—Unauthorized Pleasures is essentiallymen’s studies, implying that sexuality is amale subject. The only woman with a majorrole is Theresa Longworth, who over manyyears and legal briefs pursued a man sheclaimed (delusionally, Rosenman thinks)was her husband. Rosenman likes Theresabecause she was immodest, boldly living herdesires, but I find Theresa uncomfortablyclose to the Glenn Close character in FatalAttraction. Saturated in romantic fantasiesabout a fumbling respectable lover whowants only to get rid of her, she expressesher eroticism by becoming a fury, laughableand ruinous at once. Though TheresaLongworth really existed and Glenn Closestole Fatal Attraction, neither woman makessexual or psychological sense to me: bothseem to be emanations of male terror, thereal subject of Unauthorized Pleasures, ratherthan three-dimensional subjects of desireopen to variety and change.

As a token of the author’s unease,Unauthorized Pleasures ends disappointingly,with a lifeless afterword listing various the-ories of the female voice, as if women’svoices can be heard only through the prismof someone else’s theories. Her conclu-sion, academic in the worst sense, under-mines the subtlety and care with whichEllen Rosenman listens to the confusedvoices of Victorian men.

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