Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin by Helen Taylor (review)

270Rocky Mountain Review to the approach which governed the first halfofthe book by saying things like, although "the above is unavoidably cast in the language of objective interpretation and based on psychoanalytic assumptions ... I make no claims for its objective validity. Like all the seemingly objective interpretive statements in this book, it is ... an account of how I have tried to come to terms with my own responses" (173). The connections Steig makes are tenuous and unsatisfying, arguing that his long involved searches for authors are really reader-response activities because he is, ofcourse, constructing his own version of the author. Steig, unfortunately, fails to ever come to grips with the dualities he employs in his book—self and other, intrinsic and extrinsic, subjective and objective. While he acknowledges that much of what he discusses as other (such as the author) is really a construct of self, he does not explore the self as social construct; that is, he ignores the extrinsicness of the intrinsic. Perhaps he knows, intrinsically, that to question the distinctions too carefully will align him with those from whom he desires to part company, the deconstructionists. MARY J. FLORES Lewis-Clark State College HELEN TAYLOR. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings ofGrace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 229 p. The nineteenth-century Southern lady writer is afigure made familiar through Twain's irreverent parodies: represented by characters like Emmeline Grangerford, whose sentimental obituaries were mercifully curtailed by her own death, the Southern lady writer has tended to win more smiles than serious critical attention. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to redress this neglect. Anne Goodwyn Jones' Tomorrow Is Another Day (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981) laid the groundwork with an excellent critique of the Southern belle as ideological construct: Jones explores the effect on Southern women writers of the ideal which defined their femininity but which they paradoxically subverted in the very act of writing. Helen Taylor applies Jones' critical insight to her more narrowly focused study of three Louisiana women writers prominent as local colorists between 1880 and 1900. Taylor begins by describing the political, social, and literary conditions in which these writers produced their texts; she then offers a feminist reinterpretation of the writers' biographies and fiction. She presents the texts as sites of conflicting ideologies: for, while all three writers were politically conservative and overtly racist, their fiction problematizes race and gender in complex and contradictory ways. Taylor accounts for Local Color as a "political project" that established a unified national identity by celebrating regional diversity while subordinating it to the hegemonic culture ofthe North. Southern writers, anxious to document their versions of history, were courted by Northern publishers who sought a mythic construction ofa chivalric South. During a period ofparticularly savage Book Reviews271 repression of blacks, fiction was filled with idealized representations of harmonious race relations. For King, Stuart, and Chopin, the "tamed black figure—loyal, affectionate, desexualized" became a "recurrent and almost obsessive fictional motif" (11). It was Stuart who most fully endorsed white supremacist values, appropriating and exploiting black dialect for comic effect, and eclipsing the reality ofblack suffering by depicting ex-slaves as loyal and pathetic children, "nostalgic for their subordinate and dependent bondage" (107). Though reactionary on racial issues, Stuart's fiction is, Taylor claims, quite radically feminist. For example, The Cocoon satirizes Dr. Mitchell Weir's rest cure (made infamous by Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper") and challenges social constructions of female insanity. In the short story "Napoleon," which comically reverses traditional gender roles within a black family, Taylor discerns a parodie treatment of sexist ideology—but it seems possible to go further and read the story as subverting its own overtly racist premises. Taylor's interest in these Louisiana writers is explicitly historical. Considering the texts as cultural documents, she confronts their racial and sexual politics and explores the operations of ideology in their time; but the critique might have probed further into our own—or indeed its own—ideological assumptions, instead ofcomplacently describing the texts as "embarrassing" to a "modern liberal critic." The question Taylor acknowledges but never addresses is: how do we...