Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern ed. by Cheryl B. Torsney and Judy Elsley (review)

Book Reviews211 and fetish making. According to Neely, utopias are analogous to fetishes in that their production and analysis emerge out of clashes of cultural values at particular historical moments and in turn are created under conditions of loss and desire. Analyzing MEirgaret Cavendish's New Blazing World and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands ILa Frontera, Neely challenges our ability to maintain easy divisions between fiction and theory: "Theorists draw on fictions to rethink and de-naturalize gender and sexuality; they appropriate the fetish for women's use and satisfaction, creating new spaces for mobile subjects like those fiction writers imagine" (84). The essays in Part 2, which explore postmodernism's relation to and effect upon the individual human body, clearly contest any possibility of a postmodern Eden of heterogeneity. David Morris' essay "Postmodern Pain" is representative of this section. Arguing that there is no such thing as a single dominant utopia, Morris states that the postmodern condition is rather one of an "excess of utopias, utopias without end, a heteroglossia of utopian thought that supplies even its own nightmarish opposite in a series of toxic, robotic, totalitarian dystopias" (151). Morris' essay challenges Siebers' celebration of postmodernism as potentially heterotopian. Rather than permitting an excess of utopias resulting in heterogeneity, autonomy, and multiplicity (all positive byproducts of postmodernism according to Siebers' definitions) postmodernism has colonized individual human bodies demanding a totalized image of health which, while it externally boasts perfection , internally yields chronic pain and depression. Tobin Siebers has edited a provocative collection of essays, which suggest that what we may choose to call the postmodern age is hardly an era that has successfully acknowledged or reconciled differences. Despite Siebers' optimistic ideals, the impression that ultimately emerges from the essays is that the postmodern age is one in which the vehement desire for utopia, and hence homogeneity, has created a dystopian nightmare. KIMBERLY J. ENGDAHL University of Utah CHERYL B. TORSNEY and JUDY ELSLEY, eds. Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. 197 p. 1 he creation of textile work as art or craft has been a part of literary images from Penelope and Arachne to Silas Marner, the Lady of Shalott, and Madame Defarge. Quilt Culture, by Cheryl B. Torsney and Judy Elsley, focuses on one common textile image—the quilt—and explores the multiple ways in which it has been used by both literary and fiber artists. This wonderful book contains eleven essays, grouped by editors Torsney and Elsley into three categories: "essays . . . which treat quilts as literary metaphors [seven], as well as those on political [one] and aesthetic [three] figures" (6). The relationships between and among these essays is, however, more rich and more interesting than that introductory statement implies. 212Rocky Mountain Review The first essay in the volume, Torsney^ " 'Everyday Use': My Sojourn at Parchment Farm" (11-17), belongs more comfortably in the genre of literary nonfiction than pure literary analysis because it describes the author's new understanding ofAlice Walker's short story "Everyday Use" that grew from personal experiences, particularly her association with a black woman quilter , who also was a prison inmate. Likewise, Anne L. Bower's essay on six contemporary poems (33-48), Cathy Peppers' on Morrison's Beloved (84-95), and Nora Ruth Roberts' on reexamining Marxists use-value (125-33) all incorporate personal experience into more traditionally scholarly analysis. (The personal tone and personal anecdotes integral to many of these essays tempt me, too, to make my own experience with quilts and quilting a part of this review, a temptation I will suppress but which illustrates the power and immediacy of this metaphor.) The six essays following Torsney's all take literary representations of quilts as their starting point but exhibit exhilarating variety in both the texts they analyze and the critical approaches they employ. Audrey Bilger focuses on the novel A Patchwork Screen for Ladies published by Jane Barker in 1723; Anne Bower compares poems by six contemporary women (Joyce Carol Oates, Marge Piercy, Kathleen Spivack, Robin Morgan, Sandra McPherson, and Marilyn Waniek), all of whom use quilt images but for both comforting and discomforting purposes (33-48); and Page R. Laws explores the ways...