Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather by Elsa Nettels (review)

action, rational control over the passions, and moral purity (97). As narrative, moreover, the novel rejects the plots ofindividual desire, both the marriage plot and the plot offemale victimization (94-95). On the other hand, the "exclusion of the masculine" because it embodies "individualistic and socially disruptive desire" paradoxically prevents the society's "free expansion into the larger social sphere" and thus guarantees its limited scope (89). Authoritative in its isolation, this community of women nevertheless remains marginalized in its larger heterosexual cultural context (101). Similarly, the dependency ofwomen on men in Grandison (66), the inability to coordinate family and urban society m Amelia (86), the exclusion of the female and rehabilitation of the male in the domestic economy in Humphrey Clinker (1 1 5), and the fundamental materiality, especially economic abuses, ofsociety in Volume the Last (127) also signal the failure of the conversational circle as a social and thus narrative alternative. Rather than revising the canon, Schellenberg says she is merely proposing "a new grouping that foregrounds features that have been overlooked" (3-4). She rightly concludes, however, that this "rich fictional experimentation" deserves more serious critical attention than it has received (132). She offers us new readings of some eighteenth-century novels and a clearer understanding of how broadly and variously the novel conceived of its possibilities in its early years. And ifour literary tastes and values are constructed by our educational and scholarly backgrounds, then Schellenberg's study also offers us an occasion and an avenue for reexaminingour reading experiences and theways in which we evaluate novels. Elsa Nettels. Language and Gender in American Fiction: HowelL·, James, Wharton, and Cather. Charlottesville: University Press ofVirginia, 1997.214p. Patricia VerStrat Washington State University Elsa Nettels's overarching project heredoesn't seem particularly innovative or new; her book is an investigation ofthe ways in which the dominant literary discourses of turn-of-the-century America (fiction and the literary criticism of influential periodicals) create, refine, and perpetuate linguistic gender distinction and inequality. Perhaps her most significant contribution occurs in her consolidation ofideas about language and gender by dominant literary "voices" ofthe era, and 82 + ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * SPRING 1998 Book Reviews in her subsequent exploration of how these ideas are challenged or reinforced through the fiction of four of the major "voices." One ofthe accomplishments ofNettels's book is its fairly thorough tour ofsites where gender and literary criticism intersect. Her synthesis ofthese intersections leads her to conclude that women were in a double-bind at the turn ofthe century: their uses oflanguage were considered by many to be inherently inferior to men's, but they simultaneously had tighter restrictions on those uses and more stringent expectations regarding them. From this conclusion, Nettels explores how four of the most influential literary writers ofthe era demonstrated a complex awareness of the effects of this double bind, and then traces their responses to these effects within their fictions. The chapters on each ofthe four main authors—William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and HenryJames—contribute insight into each author's own thinking about gender, as evidenced from their critical writings and reviews, as well as instructive close readings oftheir characters' use oflanguage in gendered ways. Nettels details Howells's skepticism ofthe naturalness ofgender restrictions together with his reaffirmation of those restrictions; she finds in James a gender progressivism tempered by the author's reverence for the balanced order ofsocial hierarchies and his personal anxieties regarding the literary marketplace; she traces the effects of Wharton's linguistic elitism and conservatism on her analyses of gender in the upper classes; and, perhaps most fascinatingly, she reveals Willa Cather's masculine identification, repeatedly demonstrated in the author's reviews, and makes connections between that identification and profound differences between Cather's male and female first-person narrators. The last substantial chapter in the book is devoted to a study ofturn-of-the-century Utopian fiction's imagined gender constructs and the ways they ultimately reinscribe many traditional roles, due to a lack ofshrewd analysis ofthe effects ofgendered language on systems ofgender. I found considerablevalue in the multitudinous examples from what must have been painstaking archival research, particularlywith respect to turn-of-the-century...