Locating Gender in Modernism: The Outsider Female by Geetha Ramanathan (review)

In the past few decades there has been a great proliferation in scholarly work on the movement known to its critical commentators (if not to its original practitioners) as modernism. This abundance of scholarship has been fueled in no small part by the adoption of a more expansive definition of the term itself, to the point where it no longer makes sense to talk of modernism as a singular, cohesive enterprise. The parameters of this expansion have been disciplinary (the investigation of new intersections between literature and other modes of cultural production), political (the recovery of lost or marginalized voices), formal (the interest in alternative modes of expression to the experimentation of High Modernism), temporal (the consideration of works written before and after the interwar period as modernist), and geographical (the analysis of non-Western works that engage fruitfully with issues of modernity).

Geetha Ramanathan’s important new study Locating Gender in Modernism: The Outsider Female encompasses each of these five dimensions. The title’s seemingly comfortable invocation of modernism in the singular sense—one that might imply a consideration of the usual canonical suspects—actually sets a playful trap for the reader, one that Ramanathan springs in the very first sentence when she announces that she will “question the central importance of Euro-modernist aesthetics to the field of literary modernist studies” (1). To conduct this inquiry, Ramanathan considers a set of texts that swim far beyond the geographic and temporal nets of traditional modernist studies: for instance, Bessie Head’s Maru, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, and Salman Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence. In addition to their common exclusion by traditional definitions of modernism, what these texts have in common is that they each narrate the experiences of women—the “outsider females” of the book’s subtitle—who come into contact with modernity. In studying these characters, Ramanathan hopes to show that these texts “have reshaped notions of the modern, albeit in different ways” (2).

Before she proceeds to the close readings of these texts, Ramanathan lays the theoretical foundations for these readings in a sweeping and often dazzling introductory chapter that approaches the question of how we can read such texts as modernist from several directions. One of these tactics is to emphasize modernism as an approach to an intra-diegetic dilemma rather than as a set of aesthetic compositional practices. Ramanathan asserts that modernism “should be a term reserved for modes of representation used to narrate experiences of modernity and should not be confined to specific aesthetic modalities” (2). This argument allows her to liberate her analysis from two prevalent tenets of modernist studies: first, that modernism necessitated some sort of embrace of experimental narrative structures and second, that modernism was principally a movement that chronicled the urban experience. It also inaugurates one of the most impressive sections of Ramanathan’s introduction: her analysis of the intersections between modernist and realist modes of literary discourse. Ramanathan argues that “theorizing realism(s) as a modernist mode in third-world texts shifts the focus from the bloated, if perforated, center of the modernist narrative” (12). For Ramanathan, the centrality of European modernism has obscured the ways narrative realism can function as a modernist discursive form. Using the term “imperfect realism” to describe the realist mode that these texts frequently evince, she usefully situates this mode in the context of influential theories of narrative realism proposed by Georg Lukács and Colin McCabe.

This critique of aesthetic definitions of modernism that emphasize experimental technique is linked to her consideration of the question of modernism and gender. To what degree have traditional accounts of modernism privileged a masculine experience? This issue is particularly important for Ramanathan since the “experiences of modernity” in which she is particularly interested are those that chronicle “the entrance of women in the modernity [that the texts] delineate” (3). Recognizing the important work done by scholars such as Bonnie Kime Scott to...