New French Feminisms: An Anthology (review)

158 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Especially impressive is Peters' keen appreciation of women writers from the wellremembered Gertrude Atherton and Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman) to nowforgotten figures like Meta Frances Victor (author of powerful anti-slavery novels during the Civil War, and probably the first popular novelist to praise Nat Turner), and of eccentrics like visionary Thomas Lake Harris and fantacist Clark Ashton Smith. Peters' judgments are to the point, never dull or draggy, fun to read—and infallibly radical. Ferlinghetti's twentieth century is a tale in a different mood, especially as we approach his own era. Hammett, Saroyan, Sinclair and Oscar Lewis, Patchen and Rexroth all seem to lead up to the vibrant cultural wave of the late 1940s, Circle and Ark magazines, anti-war militance, prescient ecological consciousness, home-grown surrealism and the premonition of a Beat Generation. From there to Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Lenny Bruce, Bob Kaufman, the "San Francisco Scene" number of Evergreen Review (1957) and the famous shot of a young AUen Ginsberg pointing to the "Moloch Face of Sir Francis Drake" Hotel, visual counterpart to Howl and Other Poems. This story has been told in novels, literary histories, even movies, but not Uke FerUnghetti can tell it. Celebrating the outbreak, he was (and is) too close to be bUnded by newspaper hype and Uterary credentials. Subtly, without any meanness, but unmistakably he points to the backsUding, self-satisfaction and perfect synch of erstwhile rebels with the EST-consciousness of the Me Decade. Younger writers like Frank Chin, Ishmael Reed, Al Young along with renewed veterans such as Philip Lamantia are the promise ofan unending San Francisco Renaissance. "The coast's continuing vitality comes partly from that tension here at continent's end, the land of first and last chance," writes Nancy J. Peters in the Afterword: A pervading sense of impermanence, of mortality, urges renewed awareness of being. It not only impels life to overcome Uterature, but our best writers to make a conscious stab at the impossible, to invent a high existence. That old Terrestrial Paradise haunts the imagination yet. They're still out here, dancing on the brink of the world. And so we might say of the finest American writing on every part of the historical and geographical map, from Herman Melville to Nelson Algren to Ursula Le Guin. More's the pity that New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago and Seattle haven't seen fit to celebrate their respective Uterary insurrectionists in similar fashion. Try Literary San Francisco for clues to the possibilities of the American imagination: you'll see it in the faces of the luxurious photographs; you'U read it in the authors' lives, one by one. Paul Buhle Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivon, eds., New French Feminisms: An Anthology. University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. 279 pp. Theeditors ofNewFrenchFeminisms offer this thoughtful selection oftranslated excerpts to an English speaking audience in the hope of bridging the communication gap between American and French feminists. Although American works have been liberally translated into French, American translators have not been keeping pace with their French counterparts . This text substantially introduces French feminists who are largely women of letters —professors and scholars. Their works have a theoretical edge, far more than most efforts emerging in the United States. Most frequently, these women are attentive to the power which resides in the written word as conditioned by a phallocentric culture. Included in the text are such notable French intellectuals as Julia Kristeva, Marguerite Duras, Helene Cixous, and above all Simone de Beauvoir. There are many others who deserve our attention but as yet remain relatively unknown to an English speaking audience. Both renowned and lesser known feminists speak eloquently and fervently with a self-reflexive quality sometimes lacking in American tracts. The care with which the text has been compiled by its editors is evident from the informative introduction, useful footnotes, and painstaking organization intended as a dialectic. Following the comprehensive introduction, which summarizes the state of the 159 REVIEWS feminist project in France, is an excerpt from de Beauvoir's seminal text, 7Ae Second Sex. The book then proceeds with selections grouped dialecticaUy with all excerpts written from 1968 to...