Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker by Elliot Butler-Evans (review)

120Reviews Given this challenge, the twenty-five contributors to this collection, dealing with some thirty neglected stories, have done very well—with very few exceptions, these original essays, solicited by Beegel, are oí a very high quality. There are names in connection with Hemingway criticism that we may not have seen before—Bruce Henricksen, Susan Swartzlander, and Robert Coltrane, for example—and names that have become familiar in the last few years—James Steinke, Ann Putnam, and Howard L. Hannum—and the names of old war horses who have come back once again into the fray—among them, Warren Bennett, Scott Donaldson, and Bickford Sylvester. While we might naturally welcome the new and the nearly new names to the roster as providing the "new perspectives" that the title promises, it is a pleasure to see so many old-timers, like Gerry Brenner, George Monteiro, and Robert Fleming, cast aside previous conceptions and positions in order to suprise us with entirely fresh approaches to stories that they, like the rest of us, had previously left behind. Yes, surprise—one of the joys of this book is to find ourselves constantly jolted by perceptions that had never occurred to us. The editor begins with a persuasive and witty introduction that is solidly grounded in a familiarity with previous criticism and knowledge of both the story texts and manuscripts. She has returned to a practice that has tended to disappear from critical anthologies in recent years, but one which can be very valuable in refreshing our memories long after we have finished the book and set it aside, that of providing an introduction to each of the essays which puts it in context and summarizes its thesis. The essays begin with Mimi Gladstein's examination of "The Mercenaries," an apprenticeship story that forecasts the themes, characters, and stylistic devices of Hemingway's best work. Running chronologically in order of story composition, the essays continue with consideration of such stories as "My Old Man," "Banal Story," "The Sea Change," and "Homage to Switzerland," and then end up with a historical discussion of the stories of the Spanish Civil War by Allen Josephs, an analysis of the hunting story in the context of The Garden of Eden by James Nagel, and an evaluation of Hemingway's last stories, "Get a Seeing Eyed Dog" and "A Man of the World," by Howard Hannum. There are a few things that bothered this reader. There is an understandable, but annoying, tendency to begin each essay with the plea "this story deserves a lot more attention than it has received in the past," and a few of the essays simply push the argument for significance too far. What I really found disturbing, however, was Bruce Henricksen's essay on the six bullfight vignettes considered as one story. Henrickson seems to be playing to the gallery, rather than writing out of conviction, in an essay that is very chic, very au courant—a potpourri of quotes from various theorists is mixed with a good dose of feminist Hemingway bashing in order to demonstrate that Hemingway, although devoted to liberal causes in life, was actually a fascist in his writing. This absurdity will no doubt bring Henrickson wild applause in certain quarters. San Diego State UniversityJackson J. Benson Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1989. 227 pp. Cloth: $29.95. In a period when the literary academy shuns the critic who talks about the politics of specific texts rather than deconstruct the discourse encoded in or theories Studies in American Fiction121 implied by these texts, Elliott Butler-Evans has succeeded in giving us a highly useful volume that combines both critical approaches. As the title implies, Evans seeks to examine the relationship between an Afro-American (racial) cultural matrix and the female subject or voice in the texts of three well-established contemporary writers, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara. Rather than privilege either the racial or gender dimension in the fictions he selects, Evans constructs a continuum in which each writer is evaluated according to her fusion of racial...