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  • Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing
  • Rebecca Harrison (bio)
Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing. By Laura Laffrado. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2009. 216pp.

In her 1997 pop hit, "Bitch," Meredith Brooks sings about a woman embracing multiple identities, from "bitch" to "lover," from "child" to "mother"—some expected and abiding by conventional gender norms, others deliberately flouting those conventions and thus frustrating the attempts of the male addressee to contain and predict her. The nineteenth-century American women authors and their autobiographical narratives Laffrado discusses in her book—Sarah Kemble Knight (whose early eighteenth-century travel account was first published in the 1820s), Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, S. Emma E. Edmonds, Mary Livermore, Annie Turner Wittenmyer, and Harriet Jacobs—all seem to exemplify this notion of ambiguous, multiple pliable selves that Brooks celebrates in her song. The actual typesetting of the title on the cover of Laffrado's book, with each phrase in a separate line, allows the reader a glimpse of her argument that may otherwise be lost in transcription: "UN / COMMON / WOMEN." The "selves" that Laffrado's subjects represent in their autobiographical writings are simultaneously "common" and "uncommon"; they conform to and challenge prevailing gender scripts in nineteenth-century America. Yet, unlike the persona in Brooks's song, the "Un / Common / Women" of Laffrado's book appear to disguise, consciously or unconsciously, the radical potential of their autobiographical selves behind conventional gender scripts. Laffrado judiciously weighs these women writers' subversive potential for undermining the prevailing sex-gender ideology against their "heightened attention to cultural pressures for women to organize their lives in accordance with dominant cultural scripts such as apolitical passivity, domesticity, heterosexuality, marriage, and motherhood" (3). Thus, she claims to make "critically visible the ways in which these texts dispute restrictive constructions of the female, test boundaries of race and class, and anticipate conventional reaction to their disruptive discourses. At the same time," Laffrado continues, she maintains an "awareness of these texts as autobiographical, historical, and literary documents reflective of American beliefs, practices, and values" (3).

Beginning with her first chapter on Sarah Kemble Knight's early eighteenth-century travel narrative, Laffrado meticulously examines [End Page 298] the publication history and reception of Knight's Journal, first published by Theodore Dwight in 1825, and its place in an emerging receptivity to women's voices and experiences. Her reading of the narrative itself evidences both the range of women's voices represented in Knight's text, and Knight's own "adhering to culturally sanctioned female codes" (51). While a cogent read of Journal, the argument itself downplays the way that autobiographical texts by women often have something one might call a "radical remainder," i.e. a radical potential that is preserved beyond restitutions of gender order. Even in the referenced captivity narratives, seventeenth-century Puritan women far exceeded the normative roles Laffrado ascribes to their narratives: "Early American women narrators such as Hannah Dustan, Mary Rowlandson, and Hannah Swarton traveled, but were forced to do so as captives; they were commodities, not buyers or sellers, in economic exchange" (40). Prevalent captivity scholarship inspects how women's transgressive experiences during their captivity—such as Dustan's slaying of Indian women and children or Rowlandson's frequent commercial exchanges with her Indian captors—turned the resulting narratives into socially and culturally challenging agents. This point might seem irrelevant for a book focused on the nineteenth century, yet Laffrado downplays how the texts she analyzes create radical potentials beyond the immediate response to and engagement of the authors to the gendered expectations of their own time. Rather than examining how or whether Knight's Journal impacted women's travel writing after its publication, chapter one seeks "to position Knight's text in a developing discourse regarding gender and representation" (38). Consequently, Laffrado rejects Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's notion of "relationality," i.e. "one common female identity or experience that transcends form" (14). While Laffrado sees as the common denominator between these texts the "larger ordering system" they "confronted and navigated" (15), she otherwise emphasizes differences between these authors.

Chapter two of...

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