The Girl: Constructions of The Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women (review)

The Girl: Constructions of The Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women edited by Ruth 0. Saxton. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, 178 pp., $39.95 hardcover.

During the 1940s, when I was a student in grammar school, my bedroom shelves were filled with books about girls and young women, from Heidi to Pollyanna to Jo March to Jane Eyre. It wasn't until I attended high school and college that I realized most "serious literature" was not judged to be about the concerns of females but about those of captains of whaling ships, spunky boys fleeing from their confining homes, wounded soldiers, wealthy men with shady pasts, and tormented Harvard students from the South. In my college English classes during the 1950s, I welcomed the opportunity to read about female protagonists such as George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver or Willa Cather's Antonia Shimerda; however, with the exception of male-authored canonical texts such as Henry James's Portrait of a Lady or Flaubert's Madame Bovary, works that focused on the experiences of girls and women usually were not included in the curriculum of the women's college where I matriculated. Subsequently, in 1974, when I began to teach literature on the college level, I realized how important it was for students to think about the formative early experiences of women as well as men. As a result, I introduced a course on the female Bildungsroman and, with a colleague in the psychology department, one on Coming of Age in Psychology, Literature and Film.

Because of my ongoing interest in fiction about female development, I was delighted to receive recently a reviewer's copy of a new collection of critical essays, The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women, edited by Ruth 0. Saxton, Professor of English and Dean of Letters at Mills College, is an offshoot of a session on The Girl that Saxton chaired at the 1996 MLA Conference in Washington, D.C. It includes nine essays that closely examine the texts of contemporary short stories, novels, and an autobiography, as well as Jane Campion's experimental short film called "A Girl's Own Story." In her very informative introduction to this volume, Saxton discusses the ways in which depictions of "the Girl" have changed over time. The purpose of the volume, she explains, was to explore "the ways in which contemporary women novelists portray growing up female and the losses, gains, and vicissitudes of this process" (xxv). The authors whose works are discussed in these essays include Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Sandra Berkley, Louise Meriwether, Dorothy Allison, Jill McCorkle, Carolyn Shute, Jamaica Kincaid, Jeanette Winterson, Esmerelda Santiago, and Bharati Mukherjee. Employing a variety of critical perspectives, the essays offer "complicated readings of girlhood," Saxton says, "with simultaneous attention to varying calibrations of race, class, location, family, context, and sexual orientation" (xxvi).

I found all of the essays in this collection to be informative, whether the writer examines a single text closely, as Isabel C. Anievas Gamallo does in her consideration of the fantasy and fairy tale elements in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are the Only Fruit; or whether the writer traces a particular trope in several works by a single author, as Deborah Cadman does in her illuminating discussion of Toni Morrison's use of the trope of the closed back door and the threatening front yard; or whether the writer considers a number of authors, as Rosemary Marangoly George does in "But that Was in Another Country: Girlhood and the Contemporary 'Coming to America' Narrative." Saxton's book suggested new ways to approach the novels with which I was familiar; it also introduced me to new works I had never read, such as Jill McCorkle's Ferris Beach, Sandra Berkley's Coming Attractions, and Esmerelda Santiago's When I was Puerto Rican.

Incorporating a variety of analytical approaches, this...