Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940 (review)

According to Dale M. Bauer, "[W]e have misread American women writers as too repressed, too polite, or too prudish without grasping their various intentions" (218). Her Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940 strikes a blow against this "misreading, offering an alternative view of the representation" of sexuality in writings by American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bauer argues that women writers responded to the sexualization of American culture by coining words, developing tropes and symbols, and "attempt[ing] to master the new code of sex relations" (217-18). Her study traces the development of "a new rhetoric of sexuality" that came to dominate American women's conceptions and forms of self-expression (1).

Taking into consideration a prodigious range of authors and texts, Bauer's perspective is perhaps most novel in her treatment of nineteenth-century writers such as Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose works are not widely read with attention to discourses of sexuality. This study enriches the archive of fiction by American women, shedding light, for example, on Rebecca Harding Davis's "Anne," a short story about a middle-aged widow who fantasizes about herself as a sixteen-year-old girl, and Fannie Hurst's Five and Ten, in which the wife of one of the nation's wealthiest men supports a male lover by extracting pearls and diamonds from her extravagant regalia. Bauer's recovery of these fertile, neglected works will provide scholars of women's writing with new objects of study and will compensate for the absence of better-known works by women grappling with "sex expression" that would seem to be obvious choices for this analysis, such as Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1).

Bauer creates a strong sense of these works as a tradition by identifying a number of tropes that will be particularly helpful to teachers of women's writing, including, for example, the trope of the "crash," in which women writers imagined violent accidents as the endgame of sexuality, leaving bodies scarred and lives ruined (45-47). She demonstrates great flexibility in mapping the development of these tropes. Consider ugliness, for example. In the nineteenth century, Bauer writes, "sex was displaced onto unsentimental—that is, ugly—bodies" (56). The representation of sexuality in women was yoked to physical deformities that were often racialized. In the twentieth century, however, "'ugliness' came to represent repression . . . something to be fixed and reconstituted for the new sexual arena" (148).

What makes this book complex, if somewhat inconclusive at times, is that Bauer preserves the unevenness of women's opinion about whether sex is liberating or repressive, psychologically or physically healthy or harmful, or economically and politically disempowering or enabling. She asserts, "[T]hese binaries are not useful or even particularly relevant for the debates in which women writers created a language that would encompass more variable ways of symbolizing desire" (220). Furthermore, Bauer holds that women writers' "disagreements about what sexuality and intimacy could actually do for women reveal a literary history whose contours we have not seen clearly enough" (33).

Bauer is laudably sensitive to these differences of opinion in the literary history she traces. Yet the social differences that informed American women's uneven experiences and treatments of sexuality do not receive a similarly rigorous analysis. Seemingly aware of the objections that might be raised to her exclusive focus on heterosexuality, she writes, "[S]ex expression did not leave out lesbianism, but writers thought that a generally expressed sexuality would include everything by virtue of its democratized language. The move to make sexualities distinct—to emphasize difference rather than sameness—came later in the 1940s and 1950s" (225). Similarly, in a chapter on works by Anzia Yezierska, Vina Delmar, Julia Peterkin, and Jessie Fauset, she argues that their "novels aim to establish a new kind of normative heterosexuality based on the overcoming of sexual ignorance and the emerging hope that...