Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, and: Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women’s Writing, 1920–1945 (review)

To paraphrase the famous opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: It is a truth currently acknowledged, that a literary critic in possession of the vocabulary of postmodernism must be in want of an iconoclastic book, or at least one that seeks to depose or re-vision the field of icons. The icons at which both Nghana tamu Lewis and Barbara Ladd take aim are expressions of class, gender, and race in the canon of Southern American literature of the first half of the twentieth century. While Ladd focuses on William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, writers decidedly within the canon, Lewis seeks to canonize lesser known writers such as Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather (who while a canonical writer is usually not seen as a Southern writer), and Lillian Smith. In the decentering spirit of postmodernism, both Ladd and Lewis attempt to broaden our views by looking at well-known works in a new light and shedding light on works currently eclipsed by those better known.

In the first chapter of Resisting History, “The Dynamo and the Virgin: Women, Modernity, and the Sublime in As I Lay Dying,” Barbara Ladd rereads Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to develop new interpretations that derive from listening to the voice of Addie Bundren. She also reviews Welty’s The Golden Apples to examine attitudes that expose the authority of the voices in her second chapter, “Putting the Colonel In: Eudora Welty’s Feminist Poetics.” She then turns to Faulkner’s The Fable in “‘The Anonymity of a Murmur’: History, Memory, and Resistance in Faulkner’s A Fable,” analyzing the voice of the runner as she did Addie in her other chapter on Faulkner. Her strongest work is her last chapter, “ ‘Tell Them Two Ti Blancs are Coming’: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘I’’s in Tell My Horse.” The overall effect of Ladd’s work is not a unified book but a series of loosely related essays. The lack of a concluding chapter, tying her thesis together, underscores my contention that this is a collection of essays rather than a unified whole. Underlying all of the essays are interpretations of modernism emerging in the South from the 1920s through the 1940s and of Ladd’s theories about the power of authorship relating both to the writers and to the narrators. The power of authorship is more clearly with the narrators in Ladd’s presentations about Faulkner’s and Welty’s work and is stressed as factors of both narrator and writer in Hurston’s work.

Ladd’s “Introduction” cites Michel Foucault’s definitions of “history as ‘the empirical science of events’ and History as a ‘radical mode of being that prescribes [the] destiny [of] those particular beings that we are’” (1). Ladd explains that History is primarily Western and imperialist in origin and that men are most susceptible to its pressures. “Only the women prove resistant, but that is because they are already ‘chained’ to what Julia Kristeva has called ‘biological fate’—interpellation doesn’t ‘take’” (3). She goes on to set up the schema under which she plans to operate:

Under the rubric of gender, I undertake, here, an exploration of choice and agency in the modernist engagement with authorship and in the act of writing itself. For William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, . . . the era of order and clear trajectories was over, and the aesthetics of authorship would be formed on the breakdown of the unified subject theorized in the...