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

Throughout her theologically informed readings of the literature of Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wallace stays in a long slow dance with the question of how to relate the suffering of victimization with the self-chosen sacrificial suffering of caring for others. Are there ethically authoritative insights in the experiences of each of these forms of suffering; when do they (the experiences, the insights) bleed into one another in messy ways; and how can we think about such ethical questions amid reading literature by women who represent—in particular ways that resist simple theorizing—both victimizing and self-sacrificial forms of suffering (including mothering)?

These are deeply Christian questions as well. Long before feminist theologians like Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, the eleventh-to-twelfth-century theologian Peter Abelard worried that perceiving the death of Jesus as something willed by God (even if embraced by Jesus) turned God the Father into a divine child abuser. And while many late twentieth-century feminist theologians insisted there is never redemptive meaning in suffering—to avoid encouraging victims to endure sexual abuse or domestic violence as redemptive for themselves and their abusers—a growing number of us were concerned that a thoroughgoing hermeneutics of suspicion about suffering means that the difficult spiritual dimensions of victimization get attributed exclusively to bad patriarchal theology, as if inner affliction ought to vanish once one recognized one was not to blame for being harmed. So I read with interest how Wallace traces attentively the complex ways that both chosen and unchosen suffering is expressed and interrogated in the oeuvres of Rich, Morrison, Castillo, and Adichie, and noticed that Wallace’s approach parallels that in my own theological work (e.g., “A Hermeneutic of Providence amid Affliction: Contributions by Luther and Weil to a Cruciform Doctrine of Providence,” Pro Ecclesia, 2007). Where I seek to interpret theologically (indeed, providentially) experiences of divine affliction by the sinned-against without either reading those experiences at face value or dismissing them as false faces of God, so too Wallace wants “to discern a literary ethics that neither refuses redemptive suffering altogether nor elides the history and dangers of such a paradigm” (xiii). And while I suggest that providence is discerned in the very process of interpreting and reinterpreting the many forms of divine countenance that come to us while moving through trauma or abuse, Wallace likewise calls for an ongoing ethical practice of reading and rereading suffering “both within texts and within the material world” (229), “arguing that chosen suffering can be redemptive, and that unchosen suffering can be redeemed through the lessons sought within it. Yet . . . such an ethics never should be forwarded apart from the stories that challenge it, apart from awareness of the gendered and religious (and raced and classed) histories and connotations that accompany it” (229).

Feminist or not, Christian readers who engage literature for ethical and theological reflection will find a feast in Of Women Borne, starting with its informative theoretical chapter. “History (Herstory) and Theory, or Doing Justice to Redemptive Suffering” tracks themes of gender, Christianity, and sacrificial suffering in writings by women in English since 1400—starting with Julian of Norwich’s depiction of the crucified Jesus as Mother—before analyzing the dis/placement of redemptive suffering in twentieth-century literary and feminist ethics. While eliminating pain is a motif in secular Enlightenment and second-wave feminist thought (and popular pharmaceutical culture), suffering is re-valued in two kinds of “ethical turns” in literary theory of the late twentieth century: one mimetic (narrative expresses experience, somewhat), the second a Levinas-shaped poststructuralist emphasis on readers doing justice to a text as if being responsible asymmetrically to the face of an “Other”—raising feminist worries that oppression will be rationalized anew unless this is an ethics for offenders, not victims. Wallace adds both gendered complexity...