He Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text (review)

Bringing together “a myriad of perspectives re-covering such primal narratives as the Bible, the Torah, mythology, traditional literary texts, male depictions of female sexuality, patriarchal Marxism, American democracy, and multiculturalism,” as the book jacket hyperbolically says, He Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text is indeed wide-ranging in its approach to women’s rewriting. Discussions of a number of mostly contemporary American novels that retell well-known, “mythic” stories side with, among other things, an exposition of Lacanian theory in the light of a matrixial paradigm, an analysis of “apocalyptic discourse” as a means of raising awareness of the realities of Castro’s Cuba, and an examination of a so-called “autobiographics of re/presentation.” The media for rewriting cover mostly narrative, yet also feature theater and film. And the approaches include, besides the trope of re-vision (and a re-vision thereof), Cixous’s “white ink” writing, Gates’s “signifyin(g),” Gilbert & Gubar’s “ambivalent affiliation,” and Irigaray’s “mimicry.” The problem with such a broad range is that the individual essays are on occasion so divergent that they seem to have virtually nothing in common. However illuminating it might be to find such a variety of kinds of rewriting, texts rewritten, and theoretical approaches to rewriting within the bounds of a single book-cover, and however excellent some of the contributions may be, the “reflect[ion of] the widening sphere of feminist literary revision” (Introduction 13) alone is not sufficient. Here then lies a noble task for the editors of such a collection: actually to assess the ongoing revisioning processes, explicitly to evaluate not only the nature and magnitude of contemporary women’s rewritings, but also the theoretical approaches employed by criticism to appraise them. For, as the editors suggest in the Introduction: “After years of exhortations by feminist theorists for authors to retell the world from the women’s perspective, and after many have heeded the call, assessments may be made” (13).

Opening with Adrienne Rich’s much-quoted 1971 call for women’s re-visions of literary texts, Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar define feminist re-vision as inevitably oppositional, its triple purpose being: to question and renew established male texts, to ascertain and/or extend the female character’s subjectivity in those texts, and to contest or upset the authority of those texts. A number of essays in the collection fit this definition. For instance: Ruth Bienstock Anolik’s discussions of the retelling of the Jewish folktales of the golem and the dybbuk in the fiction of Cynthia Ozick, Marge Piercy, Ellen Galford and Judith Katz; Lynn Alexander’s analysis of Gloria Naylor’s recovery of the term “whore” in Bailey’s Café; or (and perhaps not surprisingly) Sarah Appleton Aguiar’s own discussion of revisions of King Lear from the perspective of the daughters.

The approach to rewriting as oppositional re-vision inevitably invites taking the measure of the “discourse of opposition” the rewriting embodies. Contrasting literary criticism (arguably a form of critical rewriting) of Nabokov’s Lolita with literary rewritings of it, Timothy McCracken maintains: “while criticism can contest, negotiate, rethink, and reframe, it cannot rewrite Lolita” (134). In her examination of revisionist mythmaking in young adult fiction, Elise Earthman comes to the disappointed conclusion that the possibilities offered by myth are left for a large part unrealized in two out of the three texts she considers. Taking her point of departure in the claim that young women read “to learn how to solve their problems” (qtd. 163), and her cue from Alicia Ostricker’s conception of revisionist mythmaking as “instructions for survival” (qtd. 162), Earthman concludes that the texts she examined are not oppositional enough, ultimately offering no model that could aid the young woman reader’s development into adulthood. In a similar way, Ellen Peel distinguishes degrees of subversion in her essay on rewritings of the Pygmalion and Galatea myth. Though the myth already...