No Man's Land

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 NO MAN'S LAND Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. $22.95 Readers of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic will come to No Man's Land with high expectations. They will not be disappointed, though they may find themselves looking forward to the publication of the last two volumes of the three volume work. This first volume, The War of the Words, is designed as a general treatment of the place of women in modernist and contemporary contexts. Volume two, Sexchanges, will treat in substantial detail such writers as Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rider Haggard, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton; volume three, Letters from the Front, will discuss the "flowering of feminist modernism" and the move beyond modernism represented in the work of Sylvia Plath and others. The War of the Words takes the original question of The Madwoman in the Attic, "is the pen a metaphorical penis?" and rewrites it, significantly , to "is the pen a metaphorical pistol?" Gilbert and Gubar argue that the distance between mid-Victorian responses to women writers and modernism is measurable in the escalation of antagonism between the sexes. In response to women's political demands and their increasing success in the public sphere, many women and men not only described violence between the sexes but viewed the very act of writing in terms of sexual hostility. The woman question increasingly became a sex war. Further, Gilbert and Gubar argue that the growing success of women writers led to a "reaction-formation against the rise of literary women [which] became not just a theme in modernist writing but a motive for modernism" (156). In exploring this hypothesis, Gilbert and Gubar present a strong case for a fundamental reconceptualization of modernism and its meanings. They argue that in explaining the genesis of modernism literary historians have emphasized the various social and metaphysical crises of the early twentieth century-the difficulties attendant on industrialism, the disappearance of God, presentiments of the recessional of the British Empire-to the exclusion of questions of sex and gender. Gilbert and Gubar's literary history is of necessity a social history, and they demonstrate clearly that the development of a strong tradition of writing by women, the campaign for suffrage, and the expansion of women's education had a significant impact on men and women writers. As their title implies, while not wishing to minimize the impact of World War I, Gilbert and Gubar understand the sex wars 129 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 to have created a no man's land (in several senses) in England and the United States even before the military catacylsm. Tracing the emergence of modernism and its aftermath, Gilbert and Gubar have taken on a task of considerable scope, which they admit is made all the more difficult by our proximity to the recent past and by the general flux of relatively recent canons. This second difficulty is also a virtue of Gilbert and Gubar's work. One of the most refreshing things about No Man's Land is that even the specialist is likely to encounter treatments of unfamiliar texts or writers. To present a comprehensive picture of literary relationships between the sexes in the last hundred years inevitably requires one to select texts in conformity with what one identifies as a dominant historical pattern. Readers will undoubtedly raise their own counter-examples to further complicate Gilbert and Gubar's scheme. Gilbert and Gubar themselves suggest ways in which their historical paradigm may be too teleological when they broaden their historical scope in order to illuminate particular literary conflicts. Though they develop a scheme of historical change, they often conflate the moments they elsewhere separate, yoking Edwardian, modernist, and contemporary texts. Generally, however, Gilbert and Gubar argue that we can see modern literary history as a seqpence of conflicts: between Victorian husbands and mad wives; between turn-of-the century misogynists and rebellious suffragists; between modernist no-men and autonomous New Women...