Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women's Writing by Donna M. Campbell (review)

Donna M. Campbell's latest book, Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women's Writing, sets out not just to redefine the boundaries of the popular male-centric conceptions of naturalism but also to place women writers at the heart of it. Campbell, one of the most prominent scholars of literary naturalism, has been publishing on gender and naturalism since her 1997 book Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1880–1915. In her current work she examines how American women writers—who have often been placed into a distinct category and defined as producing their own types of work, such as regionalism—crafted texts that are simultaneously traditionally naturalist and uniquely focused on concerns of gender, class, race, and nationality. Campbell labels such work "unruly naturalism," which she defines as texts that often include the common tenets of classic naturalism, such as "determinism, Darwinism, and death," but that move beyond it through unruly features (4). These unruly features appear as highlighted themes that are usually relegated to the background in classic naturalism, such as "issues of waste and abjection, disability and age, structural unevenness or excess, sentimentalism and melodrama, social reform, and women's use of technology" (4). Campbell sets a high bar in ultimately recasting the role of an important group of American women writers and completely redefining our understanding of naturalism itself.

Bitter Tastes is broken into seven chapters of impressive scope. The first chapter, "Grim Realism and the Culture of Feeling," presents a larger historical context by examining how Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Lillie Chace Wyman invoke an aesthetic of disgust to create a grim realism that prefigures naturalism and critiques the lack of social acceptance for women who were in prison, fallen, or considered too independent. Chapter 3, "Bohemian Time," brings women's issues even more to the fore by illustrating how Ellen Glasgow, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather employ women's biological time to critique the male-defined space and irregular time of modern Bohemia. Chapter 6, "'Manure Widows' and Middlebrow Fiction: Rural Naturalism in the 1920s," focuses on how writers like Edith Summers Kelley, Cornelia James Cannon, and Willa Cather, as well as filmmaker Dorothy Scarborough, show how the harsh conditions and restricted gender roles of farm and pioneer life reduce their women protagonists to a state on par with animals, machines, or insanity.

Two standout chapters in the book are chapters 4 and 7. Chapter 4, "Red Kimonos and White Slavery: The Fallen Woman in Film and Print," is a intriguing look at the white slave panic of the 1910s, which culminated in several novels and films that depicted foreign men kidnapping innocent country girls to sell them into sexual slavery. The xenophobic fear whipped up by white slave narratives was ultimately undercut by the naturalist memoirs of reformed prostitutes such as Louise Wooster and Josie Washburn and madams like Nell Kimball and Madeleine Blair, who placed the bulk of the blame not on foreigners but on political corruption. The final chapter of the book, "Waste, Hoarding, and Secrets: Modernist Naturalism and the Servant's Body," is a high point where many of the work's important themes involving race, class, and gender coalesce in particularly significant ways. Here Campbell shows how Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Evelyn Scott, Fannie Hurst, and Zona Gale incorporate servants into their work to reveal how waste and the women who deal with it are inherent to the success of modern society. Yet these very women are consequently hidden and, in a naturalistic turn, treated as waste themselves.

As a whole, the selection of texts is the crowning achievement of Bitter Tastes. Campbell focuses on a remarkable number of texts in an impressive variety of genres, including fiction, film, drama, memoir, and more. Many were authored by women she reclaims from the margins of...