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American Literature 76.3 (2004) 605-607


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The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820–1860 . By Linda M. Grasso. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 2002. xi, 249 pp. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $18.95.
The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II . By James Dawes. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 2002. viii, 308 pp. $39.95.

Despite this nation's revolutionary beginnings, literary criticism has generally failed to recognize the centrality of violence and dissent to U.S. culture. Violence occasionally consumes Hawthorne's dream worlds, rage crystallizes in the figure of Ahab or is transferred onto rebellious slaves, and the United States has had to address its destruction of indigenous populations and the violence and aftermath of the Civil War. Nonetheless, such violent literary and historical interludes seldom disrupt the tight, well-ordered composition of U.S. nationalism. But in a terror-obsessed present where violence has moved [End Page 605] to center stage, Linda Grasso's The Artistry of Anger and James Dawes's The Language of War are particularly relevant to emergent theorizations of dissent and violence in the United States.

Grasso argues that anger, when acknowledged as part of the U.S. tradition, is typically coded as masculine, and women are charged with neutralizing it to ensure political order. Complicating this gendered division of social life, Grasso argues that the submerged anger of the U.S. Revolution surfaces in the writing of women who challenged their exclusion from democratic representation. Because it was coded as "treasonous" (61), women's anger is almost never the explicit theme of the texts Grasso analyzes (including Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok, Maria Stewart's Productions, Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig); rather, this anger is a powerful undercurrent in novels that thematize "illness, acts of sacrifice, supplicating tones, captivity motifs, death, hunger, and emaciated bodies" (7).

White women writers, Grasso argues, often expressed anger through displacement. Thus, the Native American character Hobomok is a conduit for a Puritan woman's—and a nineteenth-century reformer's—resistance to patriarchal culture. As this example suggests, Grasso believes that white women writers' expressions of anger frequently depend on a not-so-subtle racism and classism. Middle-class, white womanhood, with its creed of "moral emotionalism," is kept intact when women writers displace less than pious emotions onto nonwhite or lower-class characters who are chastened by women characters claiming the disciplinary power of white masculinity. African American women writers, however, resist such disciplinary efforts. Maria Stewart, for example, articulates her anger by appropriating the power of an Old Testament God who criticizes gender and racial discrimination, and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig refuses the ideology of moral exceptionalism that was imperfectly available to black women. Moreover, "unlike many of her white peers, Wilson does not mask her desire to secure retribution" (184).

Grasso imagines that marginalized writers occupy a space of freedom from which the constraints of the dominant culture can be resisted more easily. However, a sustained analysis of marginality as something other than the inverse of white womanhood might provide a fuller account of African American resistance to white U.S. culture. It's also worth noting that Grasso, like many Americanists, assumes that the preoccupation of marginalized writers is inevitably U.S. nationalism or its possible reformation, even though most of the texts she discusses are not national allegories.

James Dawes's study of war literatures from the Civil War to the Geneva Conventions is structured by the debate between broadly poststructuralist and neo-universalist accounts of language: is language coextensive with violence (as poststructuralism's "disciplinary model" would suggest), or is it opposed to violence (as the neo-universalist, Habermasian "emancipatory model" argues)? Given that each of these questions can be aptly answered [End Page 606] "sometimes," it might seem...

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