Chute Dialogics: A Sidelong Glance from Egypt, Maine

This essay focuses on the writing of working-class novelist Carolyn Chute and the theory of language developed by Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, in order to explore what I describe as a practice of feminist anti-fundamentalist epistemology. In it, I analyze Chute's earliest works, The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Letourneau's Used Auto Parts, alongside their critical reception to examine how these novels trouble certain key "truths" of class and gender discourse in the United States. I argue that Chute's writing demonstrates what Bakhtin identifies as dialogic language—that is, language that destabilizes dominant discourse by re-contextualizing it within the social power struggles from which all meanings arise—through which it not only exposes the class and gender politics that underwrite oppressive fundamentalist definitions of family, love, and home; but also offers opportunities for feminists to re-visit and re-nourish our own foundational categories such as choice and consent.