Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction by Nina Auerbach (review)

Book Reviews Nina Auerbach. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. 212 p. This ambitious book examines English and American novelists' versions of communities of women, with special attention to the relationship between these communities, male-dominated society, and history. Although the study covers a number of works by and about women, each chapter focuses on a pair of novels that reveal contrasting ideas about females in domestic and public life. Auerbach shows the difference between the mother-centered communities of women in Pride and Prejudice and Little Women, while both groups are excluded from society and, by extension, history, Austen's Bennets are portrayed as existing in a vacuum, waiting to be called by marriage into the larger circle which is the world, whereas Alcott's March sisters happily ignore society in favor of each other's company. They draw men from society into their tight circle. In Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford and Charlotte Bronte's Villette, Auerbach finds "communities of women that have moved from the sphere of household management into that of government," but they govern separate female worlds. Not until the end of the century does the author find novels depicting interaction between female communities and the world at large. Auerbach compares such interaction in Henry James' The Bostonians and George Gissing's The Odd Women where she discusses the confrontation between "institutionalized feminism" and masculine society in both novels. Although James was the more pessemistic of the pair, she shows both authors' hope that women's entrance into public life would effect the renewal of society. Most of Auerbach's interpretations are stimulating and informative. Only in her concluding chapter do readings seem forced. In the interest of finding in contemporary works fictional communities of women that have taken command of history, Auerbach accepts or advances evidence of women's transcendence where I see none. For example, Auerbach cites uncritically Ti-Grace Atkinson's claim in Amazon Odyssey that woman's oppression "contains the radical promise of all human transformation," since oppression is "history's vital essence." This is the same kind of thinking that leads someone to find poverty the virtue of the poor and inexperience the virtue of the adolescent. Auerbach's failure to distinguish realism from allegory leads her to credit Muriel Spark's Jean Brody and the Abbess of Crewe with transcending male behavior by becoming the "symbolic embodiment" of it. My chief criticism of this well-researched and wide-ranging book is that Auerbach's conclusion points in the wrong direction. The latest version of communities of women is more likely to be found in Grace Paley's loosely-bound groups of urban women or in Marilyn French's perplexed 64ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW graduate students in The Women's Room, striving to rise but still mired in history. CONSTANCE M. PLATT, University of Denver Nina Baym. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. 320 p. Probably no other group of writers has been as thoroughly condemned and as little read in recent years as the women who cornered the novel market for half the nineteenth century. Those critics who have bothered to consider them at all have tended to treat individual books as peculiar demonstrations of capricious feminist taste rather than as serious literary efforts. Certainly, an Nina Baym is careful to point out, the women who wrote the works did not believe that they were producing great art so much as assiduously pursuing one of the few trades for women that was both respectable and lucrative — a cottage industry of the highest order. But the writers took their subject matter seriously and explored their single theme and its multiple variations with specific ends in mind; Baym respects both her subjects and their goals — the development of feminine independence, the assertion of a feminine ego, the understanding of female worth. She makes no excuses for the distressingly similar plots that emerge from a single story of a beleaguered young woman — orphaned, widowed, somehow deserted — struggling in a world in which the abusers of power try unsuccessfully to prevent her from...