Women and Modernism

ELT 37 : 1 1994 various constables and police inspectors were rewarded. Social mythology uses sexually-motivated crimes to show that women need male protectors, when what they really require is protection from men. New Historicism probably differs from traditional history by using a structure based on "and" rather than cause-and-consequence. Angus McLaren does not try to prove that society's heightened gender struggles made Cream into a killer or even that women were more apt to be murdered in the 1890s than at other times. Indeed, increased public and press attention may suggest that actions once ignored are being recast as criminal. As McLaren points out, the growing importance of reputation made blackmail a typically nineteenth-century crime, and discovering which secrets men would pay to conceal identifies the difference between moral standards in practice and those defined by law. Around the crimes of Dr. Thomas NeUl Cream, Angus McLaren has crafted an expertly unsensational narrative of a murderer in his society which makes us pay attention to the interrelationship of sex, medicine, morals, gender, science and crime. Sally Mitchell ------------------- Temple University Women and Modernism Mary Loeffelholz. Experimental Lives: Women and Literature 19001945 . New York: Twayne, 1992. xi + 256 pp. $40.00 ATTHE CLOSE of her first chapter, Mary Loeffelholz announces that her intention in this work is "to combine some of the virtues of the new critical approaches to modernism into a comprehensive general introduction to women and literature in the years 1900-1945." While such a broad program is hardly unusual for a book in a Twayne series, this volume achieves the all-important balance between general and specific, descriptive and critical, better than most. Moreover, its tone and pitch are well gauged for an audience of undergraduates and general readers, maintaining an intelligent level of discourse (particularly in introducing recent theoretical approaches to modernism) whUe stUl acknowledging the occasional need for explanatory material, which consistently remains within the limits of necessity and does not compromise the quality of the larger discussion. Especially delightful, however, is the book's celebratory posture, which is initiated with the dust j acket: its whimsical photograph of two well-dressed women perched in the jaws of a crane overlooking an urban landscape adroitly suggests the dual 82 BOOK REVIEWS sense of women poised on the brink and of modernism's dialogue with the new world of technological complexity. It is clear from the outset that Loeffelholz, true to the historical nature of this series, has chosen breadth over depth; her chapter titles alone—Women Poets to World War II, Expatriates and Experimentalists , Women Playwrights and Modern Drama—provide a sense of the encyclopedic nature of her project. If such a scheme naturally results in a certain brevity of treatment that makes this book more useful as a reference work than for general reading, it also allows for the inclusion of genres, such as detective fiction and autobiography, that are frequently ignored in standard literary histories—often because they smack of the "feminine" realm of mass culture and are hence questionable as "art." And if Loeffelholz's early promise to interweave the approaches of revisionist critics such as GUbert and Gubar, Cary Nelson, and TorU Moi (aU introduced in Chapter One) becomes more implicit than explicit, she nevertheless succeeds in consistently positioning her discussion of modern women writers within the context of women's issues—social, political, and literary—in the period. What she produces is, indeed, a solid presentation of the great diversity of women's writing of this era and of the variety of cultural poses these writers assumed. The individual chapter discussions are rather predictable in their emphases, but are organized logically and are generally successful in providing a broader context for important genres, themes, and/or styles (the chapter on women imagists, for example, relates them to Pound, whUe that on Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woólf opens by briefly explaining the realist mode from which these writers departed). While Loeffelholz offers no spectacular insights, neither does she attempt to reduce these writers to a single cultural or literary paradigm; she successfully resists the blanket assessments that until recently have shaped canonical modernism and served to exclude...