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Book Reviews271 Whittemore's suggestion that we look more deeply into the past for the roots of biography is clearly part of a broader concern over a dilemma in modern thinking about self and others. The rewards of increased awareness of the individual are undeniable but not without problems. That individualism is part of the larger approach calling for ever-finer and fuller description, while reminding that criteria for judgment—epistemological as well as moral and aesthetic—are arbitrary and subjective. That means we have more to read and do, with less to tell us what is important and why. To his credit, Whittemore's book presents a balanced, good-humored understanding of this dilemma. DANTE CANTRILL Idaho State University PATRICIA YAEGER. Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 317 p. Feminist literary thought in recent years has often tended to emphasize the restrictive nature of language, especially for women writers. Excluding, marginalizing, or objectifying women's experience, patriarchal discourse (the argument goes) estranges women to such a degree that language necessarily becomes the site for a struggle to express themselves, to speak accurately about their own experience. Patricia Yaeger wishes to modify our perception of this phenomenon by showing how a number of women writers have gone beyond these felt limitations of language to reverse, exploit, invent, and play with various conventions to express their sense of empowerment and their enjoyment of the "pleasures of the text." Yaeger sets alongside Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's rebellious figure of the madwoman in the attic a happier companion, the honey-mad woman. Borrowing from Lévi-Strauss's discussion of a South American tale about a honey-mad woman, Yaeger emphasizes that this woman, like honey itself, exists on the border between nature and culture, that she threatens the divisions and boundaries society establishes to keep things in their place. She serves as a metaphor for the woman writer, "mad for the honey of speech" (4), who is elated by successfully embracing language and making it serve her wishes. Gathering language like food, the woman writer incorporates and makes it her own, and then uses it to articulate her own desires and experiences. Yaeger offers several examples of how, even earlier in literary history than we might have assumed, women writers have found power in particular forms of appropriation of language. Using bilingualism as her vehicle, Charlotte Brontë, in Villette and Jane Eyre, lets her protagonists' encounters with a second language serve as a means ofquestioning and "dispelling the power ofthe myth systems represented by the text's primary language" (37); in doing so, she provides an image of her characters seeing the world newly. What for male 272Rocky Mountain Review authors such as Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure is an occasion for facing one's limitations or enduring oppressive constrictions becomes in authors like Brontë and George Eliot (in The Mill on the Floss) a transcendence or an opportunity to establish a dialogue with the dominant, masculine tradition. Among her best discussions of other "emancipatory strategies" is Yaeger's analysis ofMary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman, which some have criticized for its rigorously rational framework and stoic denial of subjectivity and emotion. Yaeger shows how Wollstonecraft successfully confronts Rousseau with his ideas on women by creating a dialogue format that challenges the authority of his speech, makes it narratively available for debate , and eventually isolates and exposes the violence ofhis ideas through their interplay with her own. In a very different vein, she shows that Emily Brontë and Eudora Welty (in Wuthering Heights and "A Piece of News") depict their protagonists as acting out, however briefly, other readings oftheir lives so that the hegemony ofmasculine assumptions in their worlds is mocked or otherwise questioned. Yaeger's argument is highly suggestive for rethinking some texts we have not earlier recognized as embodying such emancipatory dimensions, and she reveals to us an entire range of strategies that should enable us to recognize similar moments of empowerment and pleasure in other authors' work. Her book is difficult reading, though. Yaeger's text is filled to overflowing with theoretical terms and...

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