Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing (review)

Correction:
The print version of this review contained a typographical error in the first sentence. At the request of the publisher, the online article and pdf have been corrected.

Dorri Beam's Style, Gender, and Fantasy is a bracing study of écriture feminine in nineteenth-century American writing. What makes Beam's book valuable is her rigorous and passionate exploration of a specifically feminine poetics in the period. Disabusing the reader of any staid notions of what constitutes literary value, Beam makes a persuasive case for a legitimate female literary style that emphasizes what she calls "highly wrought" language and imagery. Often dismissed as flowery and frilly, this style, through Beam's insightful and tough-minded presentation, comes into its own as a highly self-conscious mode of literary art-making and self-expression. Beam's work significantly adds to our understanding of what was at stake for the nineteenth-century woman writer on multiple levels—and not least, her claim to aesthetic legitimacy to begin with. The standards of taste and decorum relegated even popular women writers (and women were by far the more popular writers of the era) to the sidelines. Beam restores the importance of female writing in the century to contemporary literary studies, but crucially he does this by taking women's writing seriously as an aesthetic project. In so doing, she also illuminates what was generally at stake for this century's literature in aesthetic terms.

Regarding the latter, Beam's work expands the emergent scholarly interest in literary style in the period. Indeed, many prominent male writers of the period have often been accused of being prolix or florid—Edgar Allan Poe comes to mind. While the entire question of nineteenth-century literary style will now be reexamined in light of Beam's project, her focus will have its most salutary effect in our sustained reappraisal of significant figures such as Margaret Fuller and Harriet Prescott Spofford, among others, artists whose challenging work has often been simultaneously dismissed and misunderstood, especially in aesthetic terms. Writers such as Spofford have been ignored or undervalued until very recently because they offer no "proposal[s] for practical change, . . . no alternative to the cult of feminine beauty" they foreground (134). Yet Beam demonstrates persuasively that Spofford "mines the possibilities of gorgeous or ornamental style for a woman writer, perversely developing its potential as a feminist aesthetic" (134). Personally, I find Beam's appreciation for Spofford's perversity as bracing as her elucidation of what Spofford—a languorously, sensually weird writer—does with the word.

For Beam, nineteenth-century women's writing is characterized by a "stylistic floridity" that invites a "trance-like entrance" into a literary world in which "fruits flush, waters brim and cascade, color pulses, and light saturates"; the "personified elements of nature—sun, rocks, and flowers—take on lives of their own and speak to alternative sensual ways of being in the world that marriage will imperil" (2). Surprisingly, Beam makes no mention of the great French feminist Hélène Cixous's dynamic and controversial theory of l'écriture féminine, literally "women's writing." Regardless of how Beam might view Cixous's work, it would have been interesting and also helpful to see her engage with the theorist's ideas. In any event, Cixous's ideas take on a new force for me if I link them to the historical context Beam provides.

"Language that was transparent, that did not grant immediate access to the text or to the author," Beam writes, "was inappropriate for a woman writer"; language that evinced "labor" disrupted limited notions of female propriety. Writing with a flourish, an accentuated personality, further disrupted these standards by flaunting style, a "dubious accessory" (4). The highly, almost disorientingly stylized language and imagery of writers like Spofford—so routinely dismissed or ignored for precisely these reasons—take on a new purposefulness here. What has seemed like...