Gender and the Writer's Imagination from Cooper to Wharton by Mary Suzanne Schriber (review)

Studies in American Fiction121 Windows, and Peeping Toms: Women as the Object of Voyeuristic Scrutiny" in A New Life and Dubin's Lives and finds that "they share a common shallowness and common values" (p. 185). Finally, Sidney Richman's "Malamud's Quarrel with God" explores the author's God's Grace and concludes that it is "at once the most elaborate of his attempts at the fable and unquestionably his most ambiguous," although the message of piety and redemption is passed down without scar or break (pp. 203, 219). There are, undeniably, at least two Bernard Malamuds. The most recognizable is the one who has expressed his identification with those who suffer, whose "humane sensibility," as Salzburg puts it (p. 1), is anchored in his use of the metaphorical and moral dimensions ofJewish experience. Malamud for more than three decades tried to wring from life a meaning in suffering; character transformations, symbolic redemptions, and moral victories were characteristic of most of his work. On the other hand, as Salzburg carefully points out in his "Introduction," there was the Malamud who was angry at divine indifference in the face of human suffering, who quarreled with God time and time again. Of course, this is a Jewish tradition, but it is significant that in a telephone conversation a few months before his death on March 18, 1986, Malamud, responding to a question about his quarrel with God, suggested that it was not an unlikely reaction of a writer living in the times that we do (p. 2). One of the most enduring aspects of Malamud's work has been his ability to frame ambiguous yet relevant questions. How a man can create for himself a new life was central to his quest. That there was an antagonism between materialism, the sexual ethic, and the Jewish ethic was not surprising. Yet it is his sensibility, incorporated into a laconic prose, free of sentimentality, that brought him to national attention as an accomplished and sophisticated writer who somehow withstood the corrosive influences of modern life. Joel Salzburg's Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud is an exceptionally well-put-together collection with the most comprehensive, incisive, retrospective, overview of Malamud's career and spectrum of criticism available. If you can buy only one book in this field, this is the one. If you have everything up-to-date, get this one. It is highly, enthusiastically recommended. Pennsylvania State UniversityDaniel Waiden Schriber, Mary Suzanne. Gender and the Writer's Imaginationfrom Cooper to Wharton. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1987. 214 pp. Cloth: $22.00. Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Cooper's Natty Bumppo, Melville's Ishmael and Billy Budd, Twain's Huck Finn, James' Christopher Newman, until the advent of feminist criticism, it was primarily these male avatars of Adam who defined the American character in the nineteenth century. Granted, critics also discussed at length female characters such as Hawthorne's fascinating adulteress, Hester Prynne, andJames' vivacious, victimized heiresses, Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer. Nevertheless, American fiction, as defined by literary critics, was concerned primarily with the exploits of male heroes and anti-heroes. In recent years, however, the configurations of the literary map have been altered considerably . Thanks to the efforts of Nina Baym, Mary Kelley, Judith Fetterley, Elizabeth Ammons, and others, the forgotten works of many important nineteenth-century women writers have been recovered; Harriet Beecher Stowe and Kate Chopin have been added to the literary canon; and justice has at last been done to the works of Edith Wharton, who no longer is dismissed as being a pale imitator of Henry James. Moreover, the women characters in the works of male and female writers alike have become the subjects of critical inquiry 122Reviews in such studies as Paul John Eakin, The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells andJames (1976); Judith Fryer, The Faces ofEve: Woman in the Nineteenth Century Novel (1976); Kristin Herzog, Women, Ethnics, and Exotics (1983); and Joyce W. Warren, The American Narcissus (1984). The most recent critical study to focus on female characters and the issue of gender in nineteenth and early twentieth century American fiction is Mary Suzanne Schriber's Gender and the Writer's...