Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering by Cynthia R. Wallace (review)

The title of Cynthia Wallace’s Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering cleverly announces her ambitious attempt to re-envision poet and feminist Adrienne Rich’s 1976 work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Intuition. A “provocative” source for the exploration of the relationship between literature and ethics, Rich’s work and her personal battle to bring attention to the indivisibility of art and moral behavior and the reality of women’s experience and suffering inspire Wallace’s authorial stance (including the interweaving of her own story of suffering into the text) and anticipate her concerns with ethical reading practice. The expansion of Rich’s title from “woman” to “women” and from the particularity of women’s suffering in motherhood to a generalized understanding of women’s suffering in relation to redemptive suffering underpins the study. In addition to Rich, Of Women Borne devotes a chapter on redemptive suffering to each of three other modern women writers: Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Wallace introduces her project not with a “definitive” argument but with “a series of premises” that “build to a hypothesis” (209). The first is that ethical criticism needs correction. She identifies two strands of ethical criticism: the traditionalist “moral criticism” (Martha Nussbaum and Wayne Booth are among its exponents); and the “new ethical criticism” (allied with post-structuralist criticism and represented by, among others, J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge). Despite differing approaches, both camps, in her view, erase gender and religion: Of Women Borne seeks to remedy this absence doing “justice to redemptive suffering” by providing a “contextual framework for the ongoing presence of the religious—and the specifically Christian—in conversations of suffering and self-sacrifice” (9). This context, Wallace believes, will be strengthened by an examination of women’s writing, particularly of the “historiographic metafiction” (18) variety, that engages “a dynamically related ethics of literary representation and ethics of readerly attention” (11) and “the problematics of language” (209). Thus, by looking to the continuous reimagining, re-figuring and re-representing exemplified by female texts, Of Women Borne hopes to steer between the Scylla of traditional moral universalism and the Charybdis of new ethical criticism (particularly that influenced by the writings of Emmanuel Levinas) that ignores the presence of religion and gender.

The author expands on these premises by embracing Rich as forgotten foremother of ethical feminism. Rich’s interrogation of suffering and constant revisiting of her own premises is central to ethical literary and reading practice. As Rich moves from her early white American feminism to an embrace of all the particularities of feminist experience, Rich, unlike most ethical literary critics who present a “strangely contentless structuralism as an ethical paradigm,” makes “explicit” the “implicit gendered and religious history of the terms ‘suffering’ and ‘self-sacrifice’” (79–80).

Read through the lens of Barbara Christian’s insight that “people of color always theorized in . . . narrative form,” Toni Morrison’s literary praxis is congenial to Wallace’s hypothesis. Suffering in myriad forms appears through Morrison’s oeuvre yet Morrison resists easy assignments of blame, revealing instead the complexities of context and the interwoven frameworks of oppression. A master of form, Morrison not only illustrates injustice but embodies particular injustices in literary form. Morrison presents an exemplar for the kind of reading that integrates form and content while always insisting on the ambivalence of both the act and the reading of the act: “Justice, universal and blind, is longed for but yet always challenged by the call for mercy, tentative, concrete and narrative bound” (124).

In the fourth chapter offers a reading of Ana Castillo’s “subversively mystical-political” novels and their “paradoxical evaluations of religion and of sacrificial motherhood” as somewhat “tentative and gestural” because of their “textual strangeness” (156). Wallace transmutes her own difficult reading experience into an acceptance of the revelations offered by Castillo’s representation of the particularities of Chicana suffering whose central premise is that due to misogyny, all...