Discursive Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

Alison Piepmeier. Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth- Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 278 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

In recent years the boundaries between history and tangential disciplines have become increasingly permeable. As a historian who holds a joint appointment in both a history department and a women's and gender studies department, and who publishes in both disciplines, I, as a great number of my colleagues, generally welcome this destabilization of rigid restrictions. There are, however, pitfalls into which scholars can stumble. At times a work of scholarship cannot meet the exacting standards of every discipline to which she, or her publisher, might wish to market her publication. What may well be a satisfactory study in one discipline can fall short in another. Unfortunately, this is just the case with Alison Piepmeier's Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. Peipmeier's work, while a worthy addition to the growing body of scholarship examining the writings of nineteenth-century American women, does not successfully stand as a historical inquiry. Out in Public may be a good example of critical literary scholarship, but is not as successful as historical scholarship.

Piepmeir provides a textual analysis of the works of five figures in the nineteenth century: actress Anna Cora Mowatt; Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy; abolitionist Sojourner Truth, civil rights and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells; and Godey's Lady's Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale. Piepmeier contends that the writings of these women created a discursive body, or "corporeal identity" that existed beyond the alleged private sphere of middle-class womanhood and domesticity. These "outings" illustrate how women, particularly the ones mentioned, "gained access to the power and authority of the public world without becoming transgressive figures" (p. 9). In this way, Piepmeier uses her findings to argue for the deconstruction of the binaries of the private and public spheres historians and literary critics use to research and interpret the experiences of women, especially nineteenth-century women. Piepmeier argues that she "utilizes a careful poststructuralist approach" to illustrate how an examination of women's bodies—physically and linguistically, culturally and legally constructed, can lead to the breakdown of these simplistic binaries (p.10; emphasis in original). Analytically, this issue allows us to see the more complex spaces between these binaries in which nineteenth-century women lived and made sense of their worlds. Piepmeier contends that "Out in Public is less a straightforward literary history of nineteenth-century women's public embodiment" than one of a "theoretically informed exploration of particular strategies for women's public embodiment" (pp. 14–5). She acknowledges that her study is not one concerned with historical facts, but one that questions facts, and how we construct meaning from those facts.

It is just this assertion that makes this book of limited value to historians. Peipmeier's extensive use of jargon and poststructuralist linguistics is much better suited to literary scholars than historians. Peipmeier's work lacks the finesse that is present in other poststructuralist historical analyses in which historians craft narratives that are informed by the theoretical, yet do not lose sight of the empirical; Joan Scott's body of scholarship comes to mind. Historians with a background in feminist theories will have an easier time than those unfamiliar with the theories of Jacques Lacan, Julie Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, or Carol Gilligan. Indeed, Kristeva's discussion of the abject is a reoccurring theme throughout the book. For all of her subjects, Piepmeier posits how each carefully negotiated the public space they discursively inhabited to avoid being a "freak," a label she identifies as a point of no return. Because they did not physically abandon their proper gender roles, only discursively, they avoided the negative repercussions of public display that would brand them as such.

In addition, Peipmeier's argument for the deconstruction...