Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (review)

Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Edited by Karen L. Kilcup. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. 352 pp. $39.95/$19.95 paper.

Ralph Waldo Emerson reacts to the news of Margaret Fuller’s death in an often-quoted journal passage: “I have lost in her my audience.” Emerson positions Fuller as his private reader, yet as Lindsey Traub argues in an essay in Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, Emerson acknowledges Fuller’s role as a cultural critic and author elsewhere in his journals. Nonetheless, Emerson’s public work relegates Fuller to the private realm of confidant, for motives that Traub shows are more complex than a desire to force Fuller into the domestic sphere (302–03). Traub’s nuanced reading of the Fuller/Emerson relationship represents one goal of Karen L. Kilcup’s collection of fifteen sophisticated essays by European contributors designed to “create a more richly textured account of American literary history” (1). The essays, as Kilcup notes, “suggest that it may be more beneficial at this moment of cultural fragmentation in the United States to inquire into the conversations between, and even the meshing of, ‘traditions’—here principally masculine and feminine, but also black and white, straight and gay, Western and Eastern—while continuing to value the particularity of each” (3).

     If one goal of Soft Canons is to explore the literary relationships that contemporary criticism often obscures, a related objective is to investigate literary fissures attributable to gender. A case in point: Hanna Wallinger cleverly opens with “a dialogue that never took place” between the prominent W. E. B. Du Bois and the less prominent Anna Julia Cooper to explore “connections that existed or most probably existed” between these two highly educated African Americans (264). Like Wallinger’s piece, this collection’s exploration of relationships that existed, or may have existed, or should have existed, results in a significant reinterpretation of a wide range of Anglo- and African American authors from the 1820s to the eve of literary modernism. The essays are united by their productive double vision; they look simultaneously at the nineteenth-century literary landscape and the twentieth-century critical terrain to investigate the canonization or marginalization of a variety of texts.

     Kilcup argues in her Introduction that to consider the complex relationship between masculine and feminine traditions, we must get beyond twentieth-century criticism that situates “women’s writing in opposition to male writing” (2). She identifies modernist aesthetic criticism as a major factor in obscuring a feminine literary tradition from twentieth-century audiences (5). Yet after considering the scope of essays in this collection, one might ask if at times “modernism” becomes a critical straw man, blocking scholars from investigating other possibilities for exclusion. For example, in an otherwise excellent essay by Aranzazu Usandizaga, we find the overly general assertion that “modernism discredited the genre of local color” (142). However, Soft Canons also contains essays that explore other possibilities for canonical exclusion. For example, Janet Floyd’s essay on Bret Harte and Mary Hallock argues that these authors were relegated to obscurity because they refused to represent the West as “the object of fantasy for Eastern Americans” (215); thus their texts’ marginalization was more about regional politics than gender and modernism.

     As Floyd’s essay suggests, the works in this collection are provocative. In addition to its contribution to scholarly debates about canonization, Soft Canons is a valuable source for multicultural pedagogy. Essays as wide-ranging as Ralph J. Poole’s “Body/Rituals: The (Homo)Erotics of Death in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, and Edgar Allan Poe” and Claire Preston’s “Ladies Prefer Bonds: Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and the Money Novel” explore thematic and stylistic points of comparison that are ripe for classroom discussion. All the essays are complex without being unnecessarily dense, making them suitable for advanced undergraduate or graduate students.

     The very presence of these diverse and thoughtful essays also reminds us of...