The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (review)

118 the minnesota review caused by his father's death and his mother's total withdrawal from society, by an injury at age nine that left him confined to home and books, and by his removal to a remote area of Maine. His detachment, claims Warren, is rdnforced by his derision to Uve twdve years after coUege graduation with his mother and two sisters in Salem. Warren would have us see Hawthorne as somehow removed from American values while Emerson is steeped in them. Despite its faults, however, Warren's discussion is valuable because it once again directs attention to the American literary canon and how that canon is defined and read, as critics Uke Judith Fdterley, Judith Fryer, and Nina Baym have done before her. By looking at American Uterature from the point of view of the Other, she makes us think about what it is for women—or minorities—to read against themselves. It raises again essential questions about whom we enshrine and why, but perhaps even more to the point, it raises questions about how we teach. In the same way that it has become a critical commonplace to speak of the American Adam at the center of our national myth, perhaps one day it may be commonplace to view in the sweep ofAmerican Uterature its historically deeply problematic relationship with the Other. ANDREA GALE HAMMER The Apprenticeship ofBeatrice Webb by Deborah Epstein Nord. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1985. 294 pp. $25 (cloth). What happens to a woman in a man's world? Beatrice Potter Webb, Victorian sodai scientist, political writer and Fabian socialist, was both subsumed by her husband's fame and mythologized by contemporaries (and, later, scholars) as a voradous man-eater, a halfmasculine freak. Deborah Epstein Nord's analytical biography, TheApprenticeship ofBeatrice Webb, seeks to humanize—and feminize—Webb. Nord succeeds admirably. Webb emerges as a real woman who was a bundle of contradictions . She was first a single woman flaunting her independence and then a wife using her husband's voice in her writing. She was a social scientist searching for strict methodology and a devout believer in prayer who defended her practice to skeptical friends. She was an upper middle-class socialist who believed not in Marx's revolution but in Fabianism, the gradual spread of moderate socialism through influencing members of both existing political parties. Nord also argues persuasively that Webb's autobiography, My Apprenticeship, was "the first British woman's autobiography to take the classic Victorian form ofspiritual crisis and conversion." But Webb's "classic Victorian" resolution of that crisis, Nord demonstrates, disintegrates in Webb's private diaries; Webb's autobiography becomes fiction. The one problem in Nord's book is her apparent reluctance to identify herself or her book as feminist, though both seem so. Nord locates Webb in the tradition of famous women who have been mythologized, citing the feminist critic Ellen Moers, whose revisionary Literary Women came out in 1976; but she neglects to note, or identify herself with, the feminist critics who have worked on demythologizing such legends as Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf in the last ten years. Nord's ambivalence about aUying hersdf with feminist criticism also appears in the titles of her two chapters on autobiography, "A Tradition of Victorian Autobiography" and "Female Traditions of Autobiography." Symmetry suggests "a tradition" and "other traditions" or "male tradition " and "female traditions." In fact, the first tradition does seem to be male—it presents only male examples. One can understand, perhaps, that to identify the two traditions as "male" and "female" might be too ideological or too restrictive; but by calling the first type of autobiography simply "a tradition" and then defining it by using male examples, Nord seems to be re-asserting the old categories of "human (i.e., male)" and "female"— the very categories which her book seeks to discard or transcend in analyzing Webb's life. Moreover, the unacknowledged division of autobiographies into "male" and "female" creates problems in the first chapter on Webb's life (ch. 2). A discussion of Webb's mother quickly Reviews 119 becomes a discussion of Webb's mother's friend, Herbert Spencer...