The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 by Stephen Kern (review)

theology, these essays show some of the many ways that high culture constructs woman. Editor Suleiman guides us through a museum that exhibits talented, polite, educated (fill in the other virtues of the prestige/affluent culture) people confidently interpreting and explaining the character and motives of women, visii -vis women’s physicality. Why has Western culture imposed such importance on women’s bodies? After one has read several of the book‘s clever essays, one all but cries out for some answers to this question. Indeed, one cannot ask a book to be something other than what it attempts to be; nevertheless TheFemaleBody in WesternCulturehides behind a typically academic descriptive style and does not giveuseful insight into how women might escape from being women instead of women. Or, if we must conclude that the proclivity to representation is a human inevitability, how then can women forge their own representations and not capitulate to livingthe obvious-through representations? More positively speaking, one of the strongest threads running through all the essays is the admonition that “discourse is never innocent”, be it verbal, visual, fictive, historical or speculative. There are great lessons to be learned from this one small point, since discourse is a human inevitability. The major themes that emerge across the different sections of the book, Eros, Death, Mothers, Illness,Images,and Difference,arehaving power versus lacking it, speaking versus keeping silent, acting versus supporting action, existing for oneself as subject versus existing for the other as object. In accordance with the pragmatic criterion by which I am appraising this book, it is helpfulto be reminded of thesemodalities, because in ‘reallife’it iseasyto forget that these modalities are probably in some significant way directing our feelingsand actions at this very moment, whether we are women or men. Somehighlights:Suleiman’sessaydraws on three French feminists, Luce Irigaray, HClkne Cixous and Monique Wittig, examining their writing practices in light of the challenge to women to write and read texts in a wholly different way from the commonplace and putatively literary writing that is phallocentric. Catharine R. Stimpson’s “The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein” is an intriguing investigation of how Stein’s detractors conflated Stein’sphysique and her mind. Pay attention to Thomas G. Pavel’s whimsical description of a friend who goes through a phase of identifying his paramour’s body with an ear, what his friends refer to as his “Gloss’s acoustic phase.” Nancy Huston’s essay “The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes” asserts that men make war because women have children. Sheshowshow the preferences of men often become the cultural values of humanity as a whole so that tales of warfare are received as exalting and tragic, while tales of childbirth are thought to be empty gossip. AliceBorinskyasks,“Who arethe women in Jean Rhys’ fiction, and what makes them so tired?’ Christine Brooke-Rose contributed a frisky piece indicting semiotics for being just as sexist as any other academic discipline. The point is: read and enjoy this book, but remembertoask yourselfthequestion, how can we learn to speak for ourselves rather than succumbing to images preceding and thereby killing what we like to think of as ourselves? THECULTUREOFTIMEANDSPACE: by Stephen Kern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983. 372 pp., illus. Paper, $8.95. ISBN: 0-674-17973-0. Reviewed by David Topper, History Dept., Univ. of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3B 2E9, Canada. Near the end of his book, Stephen Kern writes that Gertrude Stein “believed that the spirit of an ageshaped all things from ‘theway roads arefrequented’ to painting and war” (p. 288). That phrase, “spirit of an age”, is the English version of the German term “Zeitgeist”-a concept of historiography recently debated in this journal [13.The crucial issuehere, though, is whether Kern agrees with Stein. In the Introduction to the book Kern equivocates : “The bulk of my argumentis based on developments of similar cultural function that were causally or, at least, consciously related at that time” (p. 8). Yet he also speaks of “the culture of an age” having components with “certain commonfeatures in their essential nature or function .... The interpretation of phenomena such as class structure, diplomacy, and war tactics in terms of modes of...