Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (review)

120 the minnesota review of capitalism in her days as a rent collector, and the success of collectism in Bacup, but Booth's sdence offered no solutions. Fabianism offered her one. Nord argues convincingly that the Fabianism of the 1880s, because it was "both quasi-religious and Utopian," allowed Webb to reconcile the (male) Victorian conflict between faith and reason. Webb's choice of a marraige partner whose professional and political interests coincided with her own also allowed her to minimize the female conflict between home and career. So Webb ends her autobiography. But such neat reconciliations were not possible for Victorian women. Nord uncovers the conflict as she probes the crises which provoked Webb's writing of her autobiography—the pressure of trying to conform to her husband's interests, as weU as the beginning of World War I and the failure of Fabianism. The woman who found an equal marriage, who combined her marriage with a career, wrote in her diary: "In writing I am parasitic on Sidney: I never write, except in the diary, in my own style, always in a hybrid of his and mine" (8 December 1913). The solution that Webb had found in Fabianism was replaced by her ambivalent embrace of Soviet communism. In concluding, Nord presents the Soviet Union of the 1940s as a paradigm for Webb's Ufe: "The two different elements of religious faith she wought—morality and mysticism, orthodoxy and personal freedom, ethical directions and spirituality—were at odds in the Soviet Union, and they were at odds within her own Ufe." By going beyond Webb's pubUc writing to her private writing, Nord shows that Webb's Ufe, which is written into a "male" tradition, is "female" after aU—the reconciliation of faith and reason, private and pubUc spheres, is problematic and incomplete. Besides allowing us to see whole this Victorian woman, whose struggles to be herself and female even in a male world parallel many modern women's struggles, Nord has given us two fascinating chapters on Victorian autobiography. Nord's identification ofdifferent types ofautobiography is an invitation to feminist literary critics to analyze further the male and female traditions. VIRGINIA SICKBERT Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1985. xvi + 253 pp. $12.95 (paper); $27.50 (cloth). Narrative strategies by twentieth-century women writers often refled not just styUstic choices, but political agendas that challenge both traditional narrative and cultural scripts for women. Rachel DuPlessis' Writing beyond the Ending makes a major contribution to the task of re-examining and redefining twentieth-century fiction and poetry by exploring the narrative difference found in twentieth-century women writers and clarifying their strategic choices. DuPlessis thus challenges traditional twentieth-century critical standards in much the same way as the authors she studies challenge traditional narrative patterns. While acknowledging limits to any sampling of writers, DuPlessis explains her choice of women for this politically and theordicallly ambitious project: Gilman, H.D., Levertov, Piercy, Rich, Richardson, Rukeyser, Russ, Walker, and Woolf all "critique. . .androcentric culture in non-fictional texts" and ''scrutinize the ideological character of the romance plot...to change fiction so that it makes alternative statements about gender and its institutions " (x). DuPlessis begins her study with nineteenth-century women writers, delineating the narrative strategies available to them, all of which play out Freudian definitions of femininity. These narrative scripts—social or literary—reject the marriage of romance and vocation for women. The "female hero" must become a "heroine"; the quest must evolve into romance (or vice versa) to oblige both ideology and its rdfication. The traditional ending for women— Uving or fictional—is thus dther social integration (usually marriage) or separation (madness or death), an ending that fails to encompass female experience fully. In contrast, twentieth-centurywomen writers write beyond this traditionalending, criticiz- Reviews 121 ing both psychosexual and socioculturel scripts by revising the conventions which sustain ideology through narrative choices. DuPlessis grounds this strategy in Woolfs fictional character from A Room ofOne's Own, Mary Carmichad, who proposes that women should be "breaking the sentence and breaking the sequence." Appropriating Carmichad's agenda , she...