Feminist Narrative Ethics: Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form by Katherine Saunders Nash (review)

Feminist Narrative Ethics: Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form opens with a three-part introductory chapter signposting the goals and contents of its four main chapters. In the first part, Katherine Saunders Nash provides a concise description of her primary focus: “This is a book about feminist novels written in modernist-era Britain. Most of them, though, have little to do with feminism as a theme, as a way of life for characters, or as a subject directly addressed by the narrator. Rather, these novels establish ethical standards and rhetorical strategies that guide audiences toward particular judgments about gender” (2). Indirection will thus be the critical means used to find out authorial directions. More specifically, Nash proposes to examine the oblique and, at times, tacit or wordless ways in which four British novelists “promote particular feminist beliefs and critique normative gender constraints” during the 1920s and 1930s. For readers, then, the challenge is to identify the writers’ ideological commitments that, albeit unstated, are nonetheless integral to their novels on different levels, including narration, focalization, and characterization. While not overtly feminist in theme, these modernist novels, Nash argues, do have “undercurrents” or agenda that enable alert readers “to trace meaningful connections among feminist aspects” (3).

By closely reading not only words and images but also techniques and strategies, Nash would achieve the general goal of her study: namely, “establishing a new theory of feminist narrative ethics.” (I will return to the word “theory” presently.) Her more specialized goal lies in analyzing what she calls “the ethics of telling,” which is defined as “the values endorsed by narrator and/or implied author in the act of narrative transmission.” In her subsequent analyses, however, Nash also discusses in detail other aspects such as the characters and events, or the stories involving what she calls “the ethics of the told” (4; emphasis in text). Apparently, whereas the concepts of “telling” and “told” are distinct and divisible in principle, you cannot easily have the one without the other in actual practice.

In the second part of her introduction, Nash presents a rigorous and, in my view, convincing defense of the controversial, even maligned entity designated the “implied author” — a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) — as no less vital and necessary than narrators, flesh-and-blood writers, and historical contexts for understanding the ethical-political investments of literary texts. “The implied author concept,” as Nash cogently explains, “allows me to attribute rhetorical purposiveness to … someone proximate but not equivalent to the novelist, a figure located outside the text, who attempts to guide the readers’ imaginative ethical judgments” (10). The third part gives readers a helpful overview of the ensuing chapters in which Nash examines the works of four novelists: two usually classified as high modernist, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and two deemed low modernist, if modernist at all, Dorothy L. Sayers and John Cowper Powys. Although this is not expressly mentioned, Nash’s study thus entails an equal representation of female and male high- and low-modernist writers or, in short, a two-times-two equitability.

Analogously, the four chapters devoted to analyzing these writers’ novels are made to tally neatly, perhaps too neatly, with the four paradigms proposed in Nash’s introduction: the ethics of distance (Forster), the ethics of fair play (Sayers), the ethics of persuasion (Woolf), and the ethics of attention (Powys). The paradigms are said to epitomize “four distinct ways novelists may promote feminist principles” for the purpose of encouraging their acceptance by readers (4). Hence a tension arises and persists between Nash’s declared aim to establish “a new theory” that immediately precedes her delineation of the four paradigms — an aim pointing to abstract, comprehensive, or meta-critical levels of discussion — and the “distinct ways” that accurately anticipate her emphasis on specific narrative techniques, rhetorical tropes, and actual story content. The chapters corresponding to the paradigms do not so much offer...