Rooms of Our Own (review)

If there is a young scholar, somewhere, who does not know Susan Gubar’s work, or the history of feminist thought, Rooms of Our Own would make an excellent gift. Indeed, the book itself reads as a kind of gift: a gift to feminist scholars, to university communities, and to the reader rooted among either of these. Which is to say, this book is a gift to the people and institutions its author has lived among with such brilliance and wit for the past four decades as one of our most influential feminist literary critics.

Those three words—“feminist,” “literary,” “critic”—are as reductive as they are appropriate when applied to Susan Gubar, and Rooms of Our Own demonstrates, and also reflects upon, why this is so. Susan Gubar is a scholar of astonishing range. She has been a fearless voice in the evolution of feminism—a founder of “second-wave” feminist criticism—and yet, today, a provocateur who is leading the way into what she has called the “fourth stage,” calling feminism to account for its divisions, conflicts, and sometimes alienating rhetoric. Two of her more recent books, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face and Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century, took up race and gender in a way that sought to reconcile emerging theories in these areas with the work that had already been done in feminist literary studies. Rooms of Our Own continues that effort in a different register.

As the title announces, Gubar has crafted a meditation on the situation of the woman scholar today using the model of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay. This is not a passing allusion, but an engagement with Woolf’s work in the truest sense. The book is a fictional first-person narrative, spoken in the voice of “Mary Beton,” a scholar of literature working at a state university in the middle of the United States. (While many of the details about Mary Beton match up with the biography of Susan Gubar—a fact that Gubar wryly acknowledges—there are also departures from that biography.) The chapters each center on an event or day in Mary’s life over the course of an academic year and take up accompanying questions facing feminist work. Chapters revolve around the sex/gender distinction, the role of “theory” in feminism’s evolution, the jostling between race and gender as intellectual (and material, and political) concerns, the implications of a global point of view for feminism, the stakes of institutionalizing women’s studies, and the status of family and reproduction in relation to all these concerns.

Mary Beton’s interior monologues on these subjects have the distinctly interruptive quality of Woolf’s prose and, like Woolf’s prose, interweave the abstract and the material in strands both gorgeous and funny. Gubar uses Woolf’s sentence form (the form Woolf had to invent for herself in the absence of a women’s tradition) to reflect the interruptive challenges that contemporary life poses for the woman scholar who has plenty of rooms to call her own. We see the stacks of grading from ever-larger classes; we see the tenured boor, hater of feminism, harassing graduate students during oral exams; we see the dog Mary takes care of for a friend. And there is young Chloe, a friend of Mary’s students, who disappears, and is presumed dead, perhaps murdered by her abusive boyfriend. As Mary moves through these experiences they call to mind for her the questions that have defined feminism over the course of her career and that, she worries, may threaten its future.

Mary Beton’s voice waxes, by turns, grumpy or naive or profound but it is always grounded in the moment. Perusing the Harlem Renaissance shelf in her friend Melissa’s carrel she reflects on the intellectual tradition it represents and simultaneously tries to remember the meaning of instant-messaging abbreviations she and Melissa had learned from their students: “But why, I could not help asking, as I ran my eyes over the spines of these...