Women's Vision in Western Literature: The Empathic Community (review)

In his most recent book, Laurence Porter masterfully demonstrates how "many major women writers have discovered a third path of creativity that transcends the dominant sexed dichotomy used to shape our experience. These writers create nonhegemonic, collaborative forms of virtual communities" (13). Women's Vision in Western Literature spans the centuries and national borders separating Sappho, "the earliest Western woman author whose works have survived in any quantity" (17), from Christa Wolf, "'the foremost female-voice of the German-speaking world'" writing in the 21st century (159). In this study of remarkable breadth and brilliant depth, Sappho joins Wolf in an "empathic community" including five other major women writers: Marie de France, Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Marguerite Yourcenar. Porter's highly original approach opens up new ways of thinking about women's literary achievements beyond the binary constructs of modern feminist criticism.

Incisive introductory comments on gender differences elaborated from the findings of recent brain research and ethical considerations link the overarching theme of a "woman's vision" to an ethos of empathy distinct from the masculine model of competition. The essential question for Porter is "how the contrast between the competitive and collaborative styles might be realized in literature" (6). In Chapter 1, Porter deftly exposes competing, biographical legends of a "misleadingly hyperfeminized" Sappho, worse yet "a hysterical lesbian," which fail to account for her creativity (17–20). Reading instead for textual ambiguities, Porter teases from surviving fragments of Sappho's love lyrics, for example, the subversion of "conventional, masculinist thematizations of the Trojan War and of woman's role in love relationships" (27) and "a world whose very creation makes a revolutionary egalitarian statement on behalf of women" (32). Rescued from the confines of previous critical interpretation, the Sappho brought to light by Porter expresses creativity that transcends defining gender labels (34). Chapter 2 develops the unique feminist dimension of Marie de France's art of storytelling that disentangles the moral nature of male and female characters from gender stereotyping (37). Close readings of "Bisclavret" and "Guigemar" from her Lais (37–48) and a number of texts selected from her Fables (48–57) show the course of the feminist intervention she charts, choosing "a third path that transcends gender opposition by de-essentializing and relativizing the role of gender in her works in order to open a broader, more tolerant vision of sexual identity" (37).

Madame de Staël's development of "a radically new style, which allowed her effectively to shift the mode of expression of her views from analytical to synthetic thought, from an Enlightenment to a romantic mode of exposition" (59)—and articulate her empathic vision of international cooperation—is the focus of Chapter 3. Porter astutely reveals an "extraordinary aesthetic transformation" in Staël (63), from the Cartesian methods of analysis in her treatise on literature (De la littérature 1800) to the intuitive styling of a European intellectual and cultural union in her manifesto of French romanticism (De l'Allemagne 1810) (60–78). Chapter 4 offers an insightful rereading of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (1818). This well-known tale, which "inaugurated the literary genre of science fiction" (78), remains subject to misreading based on historical or psychoanalytical biography as Porter persuasively argues (78–82). To uncover instead an "ethics of care" (87) and a stance against "social inequality" (91) at the core of Shelley's innovative narrative, Porter conducts meticulous structural analysis. From the nested layers and attendant thematic indeterminacy of the story, Porter puzzles out the unsympathetic world Frankenstein's creation confronted—and the empathy Shelley expressed for the oppressed Other (92–101).

In Chapter 5, Porter deftly counters the assimilation of Virginia Woolf's creative life to "the failures of androgyny" that Elaine Showalter outlined (104), and instead asserts, "for Woolf androgyny means the capacity for empathic identification with both sexes" (105). A penetrating analysis of Mrs. Dalloway discloses the aim "to evoke not exclusively an esthetic...