- Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing by Donna Campbell
Bitter Tastes continues a project Donna Campbell began in Resisting Regionalism. Both books ask readers to question matters of canonicity and genre through the lens of gender. Both texts undertake the feminist project of bringing women authors into central focus but whereas the earlier book focused on canonical naturalist authors, largely men, responding to feminized local color, this new book undertakes a more radical revision of what naturalist literature might mean.
To do so, Campbell takes a two-pronged approach that first argues for the inclusion of women writers often conceived of as separate from traditional naturalism for their focus on social problems, sentiment, melodrama, and (somewhat) happy endings, and second argues that a broader understanding of naturalism should include the popular forms in which women both produced and consumed narrative, including the early cinema. Because aspects of the films and novels Campbell discusses do not fit neatly into definitions of the genre, she dubs these works “unruly naturalism.”
The project is expansive, running from what Campbell dubs the “grim realism” of Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, to white slavery films and autobiographies, to the “manure widow” middlebrow fiction of Edna Ferber and Willa Cather, to the “waste” and “hoarding” narratives of Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton. I’ve here noted some of the most well-known texts Bitter Tastes gathers, but part of what makes this text so valuable is Campbell’s generous offering of her deep knowledge of the field, as she places lesser-known magazine novels and social problem films side-by-side with more canonical texts, including those by male naturalists such as Crane, Norris, and Dreiser.
Indeed, at a certain point, I found myself wishing Campbell would have dropped “unruly naturalism” as an organizing term, for her many, many examples and deep knowledge of both “minor” and “major” literary figures more than proves the point that women writers of the period were more hard-edged than readers typically acknowledge and that male naturalists were frequently more sentimental and melodramatic than scholars might [End Page 185] prefer to admit. For example, thinking the middlebrow farm fiction of Cather and Ferber in this context allows Campbell to pull forward the “hard spine of naturalistic elements” in these novels, including “environmental determinism” as well as more female-focused but nonetheless gritty themes such as “children as waste, scenes of childbirth,” and “men’s violence towards women.” What’s more, alongside the novels and films Campbell brings to light in her chapter “Red Kimonos and White Slavery,” the “fallen-woman” novels of Crane and Dreiser become recontextualized as part of a much broader set of concerns about sexuality, modernity, and sensational representations of women in public.
The quibble some readers might have with the book, that it contains material enough for two manuscripts, is also the quality that gives Bitter Tastes the authority to make synthetic claims both small and lovely—in farm novels husbands “control the money and houses . . . but wives control the pie”—and large and field-shifting—servant women in modernist novels remind “modernism of what it leaves behind and the naturalistic elements that it can never erase.” For scholars and students of turn-of-the-century U.S. literature, this is a book to return to, again and again.