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116 the minnesota review Rabine finds even in the modern romance the contradictions she has insisted belong to the romantic myth. The nineteenth century spUt between feeling and reason reappears in the romances as the conflict between undivided women, who inherit a socialized "nature" that does not divide home from work, feeUng from reason, and divided men, whose worlds are separated and fragmented. Rabine argues that the relational demands of women would be revolutionary if directed toward action rather than escape. Noting the recent work on romances by Snitow, Modleski, and Radway, Rabine adds a new development. She points out the increasing importance of work in the books, both as the place where romance develops (with the boss), and the place defining new heroines. Romances alone, she says, of all the massmarket reading materials, focus on the conflicts among segments of women's Uves. Rabine carefully untangles various strands entering into the narratives of romances to show ambiguity, multipUdty, and contradiction where the monologjc has seemed to prevail. She acknowledges the ideological constraints and the coercive structures of the love stories she examines, but also shows us their potential for subversion of the singular plot. She admits what her reader may have feared from the beginning: that romantic fiction does not present "a positive alternative." It acts as the negativity of patriarchal capitalism, but exists only as fantasy. Rabine, in other words, does not Id romance off the hook. But she does show us how to read the romance so that we can discover its multiple and critical possibilities. She shows us that we are not altogether caught in linear literary history. As Rabine says of Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, perhaps "the last word does not come at the end." SUZANNE CLARK The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Joyce W. Warren. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1084. xi + 345 pp. $27 (cloth). It has been some thirty years now since R.W.B. Lewis outlined a peculiarly American native mythology, and since that time it has become critical commonplace to identify his prototypic hero, the American Adam, with nineteenth-century American individualism. According to Lewis, the American myth saw history as beginning anew: "It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first chance had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World." Insular and self-reliant, concerned only with his own unfolding destiny and regeneration in the fresh, green garden of the New World, the American Adam was that Emersonian figure, "the simple genuine self against the whole world." What is less usual, although this is changing rapidly, is to think of this myth from the point of view of the Other, the one being absorbed by the American Adam's project. In a myth that stresses preoccupation with self, others are important only insofar as they are material for that self. Seen from the point of view of the Other, then, the American Adam is, or so Joyce W. Warren argues, the American Narcissus. Warren criticizes America's persistent belief in the virtues of individualism, which she claims perforce dwarfs "otherness": In a nation that stresses the development of the individual, there has been little room for the "other" person. Nineteenth-century individualism, particularly as reflected in the writings of Emerson and the prescriptions of the American myth, encouraged an insular self-assertion that prevented the individual from recognizing the selfhood of others. Persons regarded as outside the American experience—persons who by their soriety's definition did not themselves qualify as individuals—were not seen as individuals . Women, blacks, Indians, and other "others" had no place in the drama of American individualism. Reviews 117 Warren argues more specifically that the American Dream ofpersonal growth and unlimited expansion is a peculiarly male dream, with women in particular serving either as aids or obstacles to fulfillment. Being conditioned to believe that he is all-powerful, the American Narcissus has created an all-powerful persona for himself, one which compensates for his own shortcomings by dwarfing all others. And to the extent that an author buys into the inflated...

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