Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering by Cynthia R. Wallace (review)

A generation out from J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (1987) and Wayne C. Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988) and decades into the vigorous discussion of ethics and literature these books and others like them provoked, Cynthia R. Wallace’s Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering argues that the suffering body remains a persistent problem for ethical criticism. Observing that ethical critics have had little to say about literary representations of suffering, the book makes the case for new critical and theoretical attention to stories of suffering in contemporary poetry and fiction.

Of Women Borne focuses on women’s suffering, both ordinary forms of self-sacrifice—including pregnancy and childbirth, endless care for others, and unrelenting domestic labor—and the traumatic suffering that results from violence and repression. Wallace argues that late twentieth-century ethical criticism cannot do justice to this kind of bodily and psychological suffering, caught up as it is in an extended argument between “moral criticism,” which emphasizes the narrative content of literary texts, and “poststructural theory,” which emphasizes the relationship between text and reader (pp. 33, 31). Wallace also finds Emmanuel Levinas’s paradigm of “self-emptying receptivity” inadequate for dealing with women’s suffering (p. 14).

Theology, a term Wallace uses to cover a wide range of religious thought and practice, is a richer resource, but it inspires ambivalence in both writers and critics. Biblical theology and church teaching advance an ethic of justice, mercy, and love of others, she points out, but also—and more dangerously for women—of humility, self-sacrifice, and redemptive suffering. Conversely feminist criticism, with its focus on equality, agency, and freedom, offers resources for an ethical criticism adequate to embodied suffering, but it struggles to come to terms with voluntary self-sacrifice and a commitment to the care of others. In addition, Wallace argues, both theology and feminist criticism “under-read” narratives of women’s suffering, neglecting the nuance and complexity of literary texts (p. 34). Wallace’s chapters draw deeply on both theology and feminism but her own persistent ambivalence prevents her from accepting either as a sufficient basis for an ethics of suffering. Wallace solves this by turning to the literary texts themselves, stating:

women’s writings in the past fifty years have insistently challenged their readers with representations and interrogations of suffering. … Women continue to write about suffering in ways that grip and haunt their readers, offering no easy answers, just a strangely mingled loveliness and sorrow that raises profound questions about the relation of ethics and aesthetics, the interaction of the literary and the material world, of suffering and language, flesh and word.

(p. 9)

Wallace fleshes out this claim in chapters on four late twentieth-century writers—Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—whose work she finds attentive to the particularity of women’s suffering and aware of its complex relations to sexuality, race, class, and religion.

In all of Wallace’s readings, ambivalence and paradox are central motifs. Her second chapter explores Rich’s extraordinary self-awareness of the paradoxes at work in her own thinking and writing. Language oppresses and distorts, but without it, difficult truths cannot be spoken; bodily pain burdens and demoralizes but also provides vital knowledge of what it means to suffer; attentive care for others is a socially constructed role that radically limits the lives of women but also denotes a deeply ethical response to suffering. Rich’s literary ethic of suffering, Wallace observes, is grounded in her embodied life; it grows and changes over time, offering “a contextual, dialogical, endlessly revisable paradigm of paradoxical pain and creative power,” subverting “insidious dichotomies” in favor of “loving attention,” “openness to correction, revision, and endless reengagement” (pp. 81, 82).

Morrison’s ethics of literary suffering emerges...