The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition by Nancy A. Walker (review)

102Rocky Mountain Review sions on faith. However, the abundance of evidence she offers and her careful reading of text, both Pope's and his female readers', reassure us that taking Thomas' conclusions on faith is not a dangerous critical response. J. KAREN RAY Tennessee Technological University NANCY A. WALKER. The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 205 p. G or many people raised on the treasured stories of western civilization, the term "disobedience" immediately conjures the image of Eve who, as we all know, did not obey the rales. Severely punished for her disobedience, she was excluded from Eden. However, over the last several decades feminist critics have emphasized Eve as a heroine rather than a villain: Her defiant, insubordinate actions have been attributed to a process of maturation whereby thoughtful responsibility and intelligent curiosity replaces docile obedience. In her book, The Disobedient Writer: Women and Narrative Tradition, Nancy A. Walker relies on those images that resonate from the more positive connotative force of "disobedient." Walker calls the women writers she addresses "disobedient" to suggest that they are rebelling against authority. In order to make her argument compelling, she relies on the basic assumption that her audience is already aware of who has created western traditions (males) and why those traditions have conventionally excluded women (to maintain control). In fact, rather than pursue discussions about whether certain women writers should automatically be included in the expanding list of canonized authors, or whether traditional literary criteria intrinsically excluded women and should, therefore, be modified or replaced, Walker enters the feminist dialogue through a side door. Instead of asking whether women resist or why they resist, she explores how they resist. She takes Judith Fetteriys "resisting reader" and turns her into a disobedient writer who, Walker claims, "is no longer a shadow on the text, but rather makes the text a shadow of her own" (11). More specifically then, Walker examines how women's appropriation of narrative traditions—their borrowing, revising, and recontextualizing —is rooted in deliberate acts of disobedience in order to subvert conventional texts while simultaneously claiming them as part of their own inherited tradition. This double act of subverting while claiming ownership assumes that Authority, in the form of traditional western narratives, carries with it power which has led to the pervasive seductions of cultural mythologies. Clearly, cultural mythologies shape identity and ideology, but Walker highlights how women have resisted viewing them as oppressive sentences, and have instead perceived them as convenient tropes for expressing their own experiences. Through close examination of a variety of nineteenth- and Book Reviews103 twentieth-century texts, Walker not only shows how women have historically recognized the prescriptive function of cultural mythologies, but she also illuminates a pattern of behavior which, she argues, occurs across genres and periods among women writers. This pattern consists of women writers expanding their private lives into the public sphere and, consequently , of transforming the self from a "player in someone else's narrative to [the] center of their own" (175). It is important to note, however, that Walker addresses only AngloAmerican writers and, as such, the cultural ideologies she considers belong primarily to white, middle-class women. Indeed, a quick perusal of the titles on which she focuses illustrates the issues around which this ideology functions : Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson, A Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a WASP by Margaret Halsey, The Passion of a New Eve and The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon, Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall. It becomes quickly apparent that while Walker deals indirectly with identity politics, she does not confront current challenges which question the concept of identity—its supposed transparency and allegiance to patriarchal forms of humanism. In short, she neglects to address pertinent questions regarding the multiple and often contradictory meanings of identity and its various modes of construction . However, the cultural mythologies which Walker does address lead to three seemingly distinct sections in her book: Part One, "Engaging Mythologies," focuses on the reworkings of both Biblical stories and fairy...