Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction, and: Mothers and Daughters in the Twentieth Century: A Literary Anthology, and: Is it Really Mommie Dearest? Daughter-Mother Narratives in Young Adult Fiction (review)

Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction by Hildegard Hoeller. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000, 225 pp., $49.95 hardcover.

Mothers and Daughters in the Twentieth Century: A Literary Anthology edited by Heather Ingman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 272 pp., $19.95 paper.

Is It Really Mommie Dearest? Daughter-Mother Narratives in Young Adult Fiction by Hilary S. Crew. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000, 296 pp., $48.00 hardcover.

These three books illustrate a developing canon of feminist criticism. Two of these texts analyze mother-daughter relationships in literature and the third advocates sentimentalism as a canonical constituent. These authors embrace the woman's story. Each work offers an alternative feminist or womanist view of literature. The titles invite critics to embrace more than a narrow approach to literature and broaden their literary horizons.

All three illustrate how gender affects our lives from political, social, and historical standpoints. In the past, mother-daughter books were dedicated to the instruction of mothers in caring for their children. These books differ based upon accepted norms of the time, seldom taking into account the needs of the female herself, whether she was the grandmother, mother, or child. Society dictated the roles to be played by caretakers.

Hildegard Hoeller's Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction does not deal with the idea of motherhood or mother-daughter relationships. It argues the importance of the acceptance of Wharton's text as sentimental. The books can be considered together because women's writings have been deemed more sentimental when compared to the texts of males. Hoeller's book examines the bias against sentimentalist writing. She argues that Edith Wharton, though famous for her realist novel, House of Mirth, is an exemplar of sentimentalist writing. Hoeller explores House of Mirth and some lesser-known works by Wharton in order to defend her theory that Wharton dialogued between realist and sentimentalist styles in her writing.

Hoeller defines realism as a theory of economy and sentimentalism as a theory of excess. She asserts that sentimentalism is deemed as flawed judgment rather than description, such as in realism. She appeals to critics to alter their assumptions that realism is superior to sentimentalism because of its unique method of signification. Hoeller applies her realist versus sentimentalist argument to Wharton's various works, including her love letters to Morton Fullerton. As part of her analysis, Hoeller examines the sentimental approach to motherhood in Wharton's works "The Old Maid," "Her Son," and "Roman Fever." The idea of motherhood leads the reader on to Wharton's The Mother's Recompense; a text that, according to Hoeller, ties this story to her previously mentioned writings through the marriage of sentimentalism and realism. Hoeller concludes her book by mentioning Wharton's revisionist approaches to her own works.

The second title is an anthology of mother-daughter literature. Mothers and Daughters in the TwentiethCentury: A Literary Anthology, edited by Heather Ingram, supplies us with short stories, extracts from longer literary pieces, and poetry about mothers and daughters. This book includes mother-daughter accounts from different cultures and time periods, attempting to trace the evolution of the mother-daughter relationship throughout the twentieth century. Ingram includes biographical excerpts that relate the various authors to their accompanying literary piece. She also includes psychoanalytic theory that pertains to the mother-daughter relationship.

Ingram's introduction illustrates the structure of her anthology. She writes of the relationship of the author to her piece and theorizes why the author may have created in a specific manner. Ingram features numerous authors, including Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, and Amy Tan. An exceptional choice is Maya...