Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature by Brian Norman (review)

Brian Norman, author of Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature, states that his new book “presents accounts of what happens when female corpses speak for themselves in recent American fiction” (7). Norman shows that dead women in literature do talk, and they do so primarily for the purpose of bringing matters of past injustices—such as racial or sexual violence, national identity, or class—to light. Norman writes that the reason we don’t readily recognize dead women talking is because they are presented in such a variety of genres that no one has yet focused on them as a group.

Each chapter addresses a dead woman talking, and the chapters are grouped according to common themes. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and James’s The Turn of the Screw, because, as Norman writes, these chapters deal with “progenitors who slowly, hesitantly, and unsurely start to talk” (17). Chapters 3 through 5 address William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved because, according to Norman, these texts “concern stories that return to pasts from which characters cannot fully break, even if they want to” (18). Chapters 6 and 7 address Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. These two texts are grouped together because they both address the idea that “the contemporary world must do right by its long gone women of unjust pasts” (19). Chapters 8 through 10 address Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Getting Mother’s Body. Norman states that through “themes of burial, trauma, and return to earlier eras,” these texts address healing (19). In the final chapter, Norman uses Maxine Hong Kingston’s No Name Woman as an example of what happens when dead women don’t speak. His premise here is that perhaps it is a violation of their posthumous integrity to demand that dead women say anything at all, and that dead women wouldn’t need to speak if the living would accept their own responsibility to seek justice for the dead women.

It is not necessary to have read each text that Norman deals with in the book to understand his point. Each chapter contains enough plot summary of the novel under consideration for that text to be understandable. The book is a clearly written scholarly text—accessible, for the most part, to beginning scholars as well as those more advanced in their careers. The only exception to this is that some of the characters Norman writes about literally speak (or moan), and some do not, leading to possible confusion about his distinction between dead women talking and ghosts. He claims the difference is that dead women talking seek citizenship in their communities, and ghosts do not. This difference between these two groups is a bit fuzzy because both groups are often portrayed in many of the same ways and for many of the same purposes.

This book might prove useful for scholars in many different fields. Those studying American Literature or Gothic Fiction are obvious first choices, but it might also prove to be of use to those working in Children’s and/or Young Adult Literature, especially if their work crosses over into the realm of the hugely popular Young Adult Gothic. This is not only because of the chapter on The Lovely Bones, but also because of the possibilities that emerge with the extension of the implications of dead women talking to dead girls talking. Dead women have been speaking out in literature for a long time. What Norman does with this book is to bring our attention to them as a group so that we might bring the concerns of these women to the forefront of our discussions.