Through Random Doors We Wandered: Women Writing the South (review)

The title of this study of southern women writers and their responses to the South comes from southern-born African American poet Naomi Long Madgett's Exits and Entrances (1978), an excerpt from which Clara Juncker uses as her epigraph. Imagining herself as hostess at a party to which the authors within this study have been invited, Juncker explains that each writer entered the work in her own way and for a unique reason. As if her readers also attend this imagined party, the good hostess offers interesting introductions of each author in turn. All of these women, Juncker tells us, "have written about the South." Moreover, they all "recognize that the South is a good story, but wish to complicate the master narratives by the female, even feminist tradition they collectively represent. They aim to uncover the story of southern femininity from a positional alterity" (22). Juncker goes on to explain that these women writers see beyond traditional binaries employed by their society and offer multiple definitions of the feminine, the southern, and the literary.

Most of the writers this study includes have received little critical attention. Juncker offers an informative overview and analysis of the lives and works of twelve southern women, beginning with British-born actress Fanny Kemble, who wrote a memoir in the 1830s, and concluding with Ruth Moose, a contemporary short story writer who lives in North Carolina. As the title of the book suggests, however, the selection process for inclusion in this study seems somewhat random. The first six chapters focus on the autobiographical writings of planter-class women from before and shortly after the Civil War. In these chapters Juncker effectively combines close readings of the primary texts with cultural and historical contextualizations and with theories of narrative and female autobiography. The reader learns how these women used their journals to define and control their experiences in tumultuous times. For example, Juncker explains that, "the narrative of [Gertrude] Thomas's bodily experiences becomes, in other words, the story of the social body to which she pledged allegiance" (67). And she interprets the autobiographical writings of Kate Stone: "Any invasion of home thus means an invasion of self" (72).

While these first six chapters are quite cohesive, chapter 7 differs markedly in focus. Andrew Sheffield, a female mental patient in Alabama from 1890 to 1920, bears little resemblance to those diarists of previous chapters. And the letters Sheffield wrote to the hospital superintendent, though they do reflect their author's attempt to define herself and her experiences, have little else in common with the writings that Juncker focused on earlier. Sheffield's madness, her family's and the hospital's response to it, as well as Juncker's analysis of the letters, make this a fascinating chapter. For example, as Juncker analyzes Sheffield's use of repetition, she concludes, "But repetition suggests as well that even language closed in upon Sheffield. As her mental and verbal horizon shrunk during the decades she spent on asylum back wards, her linguistic imprisonment mirrored only too accurately her physical one" (150). But Juncker does not supply enough conceptual ligaments to provide continuity between this chapter and the ones that preceded it. This discontinuity mars the rest of the book.

Chapter 8 focuses on Grace King, a novelist and short story writer in the 1920s, and chapter 9 shifts to Mamie Garvin Fields, an African American educator and memoirist who published in 1983 but whose most formative decades were the 1920s and 1930s. Juncker offers an intriguing analysis of the dual audiences targeted by Fields and her academic co-author, granddaughter Karen Fields, and she grounds her analysis in current studies of African American literature and autobiography. However, the book lacks critical synthesis to bridge the gap between this twentieth-century African American writer and the nineteenth century white writers who began the study. And the gaps only widen as chapter 10 focuses on Alice Walker's novel...