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American Literature 74.3 (2002) 679-680



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Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature . By Valerie Rohy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. 2000. 191 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $16.95.

Lesbians are "impossible women" because they are unrepresentable, according to Valerie Rohy. And this is how we are represented in American literature: as figures for the impossibility of representation.

Despite references to the nation, which suggest an interest in history, Rohy's focus is strictly textual. She builds her argument out of elaborately interwoven readings of two distinct bodies of writing: a selection of literary works from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries (Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Henry James's The Bostonians, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and two short stories by Elizabeth Bishop) and psychoanalytic theory, from Freud to his contemporary interpreters. She is particularly indebted to Lee Edelman, who, in Homographesis (1994), identified male homosexuality with the literary through the problem of representing desire between men.

The premise of Impossible Women is that psychoanalysis is a productive framework for the interpretation of lesbianism, women, and literature—a claim often disputed, particularly with regard to lesbianism and women. Rohy's argument depends precisely, however, on the limited ability of psychoanalysis to deal with lesbianism. Lesbians are impossible women, she proposes, because lesbianism can be neither integrated into nor distinguished from psychoanalytic understandings of femininity.

Rohy joins her reading of the impossibility of lesbianism within psychoanalysis to the proposition—now conventional within lesbian, gay, and queer criticism and theory—that in modern Western cultures same-sex desire has most commonly been represented as unrepresentable. Focusing on U.S. literature, Rohy then unites psychoanalysis and literature around the figure of the lesbian, who cannot be represented in either arena but comes instead to represent, in each, the problem of representation itself. [End Page 679]

Rohy has thus gained purchase for a psychoanalytic reading of lesbianism as a cultural idea and as an idea central to American literature. She offers detailed and often elegant—though sometimes syllogistic and narrowly focused—readings of psychoanalytic and literary works. While she insists that her literary subjects are not in themselves intended to be representative, they can hardly appear otherwise, given their canonicity, their historical range, and her own framing discussions of American literature.

By instantiating lesbianism at the center of a discussion of American literature and of literariness, Rohy is fulfilling the inaugural injunction of queer theory—not so much to make it new (though queer theorists of the 1990s claimed a radical break with their lesbian and gay predecessors) as to make it central. But the word queer hardly appears in this book, an absence reflecting in part the failure of queer to unite lesbian and gay theorising but perhaps also the tension between another key goal of queer theory—resistance to "the normative"—and the queer commitment to demonstrating that homosexuality is culturally central.

To provide additional justification for her use of psychoanalysis, Rohy presents lesbian theory and criticism as narrowly devoted to the figurative and in dire need of an infusion of sophistication. To maintain her focus on lesbianism as unrepresentable, she has had to overlook a wide range of writers and texts that nonetheless represent same-sex desire between women, as well as the rich history of nonfigurative lesbian representation within U.S. literature. If such writings are overlooked, the lesbian theory and criticism that engages that work also disappear from view. By ending her discussion with Elizabeth Bishop, Rohy forgoes consideration of the ways in which understandings of lesbianism as unrepresentable, as well as attempts to represent lesbianism, have developed in the decades since Stonewall. Her project, presented as a new theoretical alternative to more familiar efforts to map lesbian specificities, has, then, its own historical specificity.

Rohy's Impossible Women is an ambitious addition to contemporary lesbian theory and criticism. But it is also an oddly hermetic study, whether because of the hermeticism of psychoanalytic theory itself or the...

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