The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (review)

Judith Fetterley. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington and London: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978. 189 pp. 12.50. Judith Fetterley takes up a series of classic nineteenth and twentieth-century texts to demonstrate that "American literature is male," that "the experience of being American is equated with the experience of being male," and that "in such fictions the female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded" (p. xii). Elaborating on Fiedlerian premises, Fetterley has written a sophisticated, textual Iy responsive, radical feminist study that details the American dream of escaping the power of women, from the sleep of Rip Van Winkle to the waking nightmare of Stephen Rojack. In explanation of her title, Fetterley proposes that since "women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view," "the first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting reader rather than an assenting reader ... to begin the process of exorcising the male mind that has been implanted in us" (pp. xx, xxii). Fetterley argues that the American dream of escaping from women who are fully potent human beings has produced a literature in which women are killed, vilified, or idealized. She first discusses Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," Sherwood Anderson's "I Want to Know Why," Hawthorne's "The Birthmark ," and Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." The treatment of the Irving and Faulkner stories, perhaps of the Hawthorne as well, offers impressive testimony to the rewards of her feminist approach. The four succeeding chapters take up Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, James's The Boston i ans, and Mailer's An American Dream. Of these, the chapters on Mailer and James seem to me best. Fetterley shrewdly diagnoses the main difficulty in interpreting Mailer, which is that "it is impossible to determine to what degree lhis fetishism about being male! is parody and to what degree it is endorsement" (p. 155). Of James's works, The Boston i ans is, of course, the most explicitly concerned with feminist Issues, though Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady, for example, explore the same concerns. Indeed, feminist issues are central to James's novels, both to those which explore the way power is distributed in patterns of tyranny and subordination—and also, occasionally, the way power is used collaboratively—and to those which ambivalently present the costliness of the feminine stereotype that keeps consciousness "in the cage," genteelly separate from the world. Fetterley's interpretations, especially of the short stories, offer compelling syntheses of psychology, history, literary history, cultural politics, and literary observation. She calls "Rip Van Winkle" "the inevitable dreamwork of the persona created by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, the inevitable consequence of the massive suppressions required by Franklin's code of success. The voice to which RIp gives ear is the exact opposite of the [Franklin! voice . . . with its imperatives for se If-1mprovement and for constant and regulated activity" (p. 2). Fetterley then turns this interpretation on a feminist axis: "Dame Van Winkle is linked to civilization and . . .[its] institutions. . . . She ¡s connected to politics through the somewhat elaborated metaphor of 'petticoat government.' . . . The basic fantasy ... is that of being able to sleep long enough to avoid at once the American Revolution and the wife" (p. 6). Irving's ant i femini sm, she notes, makes Rip's flight to the mountains contain "the classic elements of American male culture: sport invested with utter seriousness; highly ritualized nonverbal communication; liquor as communion; and the mystique of male companionship" (pp. 6-7). Fetterley also demonstrates that even the idealization of women, as ¡n "The Birthmark," and the display of chivalry towards them mask hostility. In Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," she argues that "men's attitudes toward women turn back upon themselves; it is a demonstration of the thesis that it is impossible to oppress without in turn being oppressed, it is impossible to kill without creating the conditions for your own murder. Ά Rose for Emily' is the story of a lady and of her revenge for that grotesque identity...