Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time

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10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott

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Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory

“The Currency of Feminist Theory.” PMLA 121, no. 5 (October 2006): 1697–1703. “Time of Death: The End of the 1960s and the Problem of Feminist Futurity in The Women’s Room and Vida.” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 143–68.



Jane Elliott’s Previous Publications

Representing National Time

Jane Elliott



Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory

First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60542-8 ISBN-10: 0-230-60542-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elliott, Jane, 1969– Popular feminist fiction as American allegory : representing national time / by Jane Elliott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-60542-7 (alk. paper) 1. Feminist fiction, American—History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature— United States. 3. United States—Civilization—1970- 4. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 5. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. I. Title. PS374.F45E45 2008 813’.54093522—dc22

2007045027

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: June 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. Cover image: Laurie Simmons, “Walking Pocket Watch (color)/The Music of Regret” (2006). Courtesy the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York. Chapter 2 first appeared as an article entitled “Time of Death: The Problem of Feminist Futurity and the End of the 1960s in The Women’s Room and Vida” and was published in Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 1 (Spring 2006). The author thanks Johns Hopkins University Press, publisher and copyright holder, for permission to reprint this material.



POPULAR FEMINIST FICTION AS AMERICAN ALLEGORY Copyright © Jane Elliott, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Acknowledgments Part I

Temporal Politics

Introduction 1

3 4

6

Feminism as Static Time

Heir Apparent: Legacies of the 1960s in The Women’s Room and Vida

49

Dead-End Job: The Stepford Wives, Domestic Labor, and the End of History

71

Promiscuous Times: Rubyfruit Jungle, Fear of Flying, and the Desire for the Event

89

Part III 5

3

The Problem of Static Time: Totalization, the End of History, and the End of the 1960s 21

Part II 2

vii

Feminism as Futurity

Alice Walker’s Hindsight: Meridian, The Color Purple, and the Production of Prolepsis

113

My Mother, My Self: Sentiment and the Transcendence of Time in The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

137

Coda: Hurried Woman Tales

163

Notes

169

Bibliography

199

Index

219



Contents



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T

his book could not have been written without the help of my mentors, colleagues, family and friends. The ideas explored here had their first incarnation in a seminar paper on Marx, working-time, and The Stepford Wives written for a course taught by Richard Dienst, and I am particularly grateful for the encouragement he gave me to return to this material. I was very fortunate to have my dissertation supervised by Marianne DeKoven, a wonderfully wise and supportive mentor who helped me find my way back from several blind alleys and kept me from straying into countless others. I am thankful not only to have received her guidance but also to have in her example such a splendid ideal to strive for in my own teaching of graduate students. The other members of my dissertation committee—Samira Kawash, John McClure, and Joan Scott—offered diverse and insightful comments that continue to shape my thinking on this topic. In particular, both Marianne DeKoven and John McClure generously shared their passion for the politics of the 1960s and 1970s while allowing me to develop my own take on the period, one that has been shaped not only by my intense cathexis to the New Left and the women’s liberation movement, but also by my inevitably belated relationship to those political bodies. Especially in light of the vitriolic struggles between feminist “generations,” I was extremely lucky to have mentors who encouraged me to explore the way my own location in time enabled a particular reading of an historical moment in which I did not participate but whose shadow has overlain the experience of radical Left politics in my lifetime. Parts of this manuscript were drafted and revised with the suport of a postdoctoral fellowship in the “Orders of Time” seminar at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. The Pembroke offered a tremendously encouraging and invigorating venue for evolving my approach to this material. My thanks to all seminar participants for their comments on versions of material from Chapters 1, 2, and 6 and to Elizabeth Weed, Tamar Katz, Flora Keshgegian, Wendy Alison Lee, Ellen Rooney, Rebecca Schneider, and Samuel Solomon in particular for making my year at the center such a stimulating and pleasurable one. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My cofellows, Rama Mantena, Adam Gutteridge, and Janelle Blenkenship, provided many fascinating conversations on time and politics during our countless meals and drinks together. I am particularly grateful to the 2004–5 Pembroke seminar leader, Rey Chow, for giving so much of her time and energy to the postdoctoral fellows. Her extraordinarily generous engagement with us and with our work fostered a sense of community among the fellows that was remarkable for both its warmth and its sense of shared intellectual excitement. In addition to the sage advice she offered in several conversations regarding my research, I am indebted to Rey Chow for reading and commenting on portions of an earlier draft of this material. At the University of York, both colleagues and students have given me the opportunity to discuss and expand ideas developed in this book. I’m particularly grateful to my colleagues in the English department for responses to my research presentation on The Stepford Wives and the end of history, to colleagues and students in the Centre for Women’s Studies for their discussion of my lecture on mother/daughter narratives and the politics of sentiment, and to the graduate students in my Contemporary Feminist Theory seminar. Both Derek Attridge and John David Rhodes were instrumental in helping me to find my feet at York in a way that gave me the time and energy required to complete this project. As my co-organizers for two different conferences, each played a key role in making my first years at York the site of such fruitful intellectual engagement for me. This book has also benefited enormously from the comments provided on various portions and drafts by colleagues and friends, including Jo Applin, Elizabeth Freeman, Theresa Geller, Natasha Hurley, Anthony Lioi, John David Rhodes, and Jennifer Worley. Heather Tirado Gilligan and Katherine Sugg both read the manuscript in its entirety, and their comments were hugely helpful. My thanks also to the Palgrave reviewer who chose to remain anonymous. For a very thoughtful and thoughtprovoking workshop of Chapter 6, I would also like to thank the members of my writing group in York, including Heather Blurton, Catriona Kennedy, Alison O’Byrne, Reena Sastri, and Helen Smith. My fabulous friends and family also provided various means of support in times of intellectual, psychological, and financial crisis, especially Nora Davenport, Todd Davenport, Judy Gran, Peter Gran, Scott Hartwig, Elizabeth Ho, Steve Jackson, Jonathan Kessler, Kathy Kline, Pat Regnier, Brian Phillips, H. D. Richards, and Jennifer Worley. My parents, Robert and Frances Elliott, and my sister, Beth Elliott, have provided encouragement in countless ways, perhaps most importantly through the excellent example they have each given me of sustained commitment in the face of trials, tribulations, and absurdly delayed 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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gratification. Special thanks go to Gabriel Sena and Katherine Sugg, my longtime companions and comrades-in-arms in the ongoing daily battle that is writing; I could not have completed this project without the profound sense of solidarity and perpetual inspiration their friendship provides. My final debt of gratitude is to my partner, Stephen Gran, whose marvelous combination of intellectual rigor and academic irreverence helps me both to work and to play. I do not think it is possible to repay the kindness, understanding, and sheer equanimity he has shown in the face of this seemingly endless undertaking, but I am looking forward to making the attempt.



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




Temporal Politics



Part I




The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there has been depressingly little belief of late. For all the intellectual enthusiasm for change manifest in the debates about postmodernism, there is probably at present less of a sense that things might actually “proceed otherwise” in Western capitalist societies . . . than at any time since the early 1950s. —Peter Osborne, “The Politics of Time” Allegories are far less often the dull systems that they are reputed to be than they are symbolic power struggles. —Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode

I

n the final pages of the flagship women’s liberation bestseller, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1979), the narrator recounts a recurring dream that encapsulates the novel’s central dilemma. In the dream, the narrator is chased by a rapist and eventually runs to the police for help. The police place her in an empty apartment and insist that she will be safe once the door is locked. The catch is that the door can’t be unlocked from the inside, so if the narrator locks the rapist out she will also trap herself inside. Given the absolute emptiness of the apartment in which the narrator is supposed to take refuge, locking out the rapist means locking out everything else as well, so that the narrator faces a devil’s choice between a world in which she will be raped and no world at all. Read as a political parable, this dream presents a shockingly grim picture of the fate of second-wave feminism: when every form of resistance is also a form of domination, there can be no viable avenue for transformation in women’s lives. Moreover, if attempting to shut out oppression means retreating to a space defined solely by its emptiness—that is, shutting out the world entirely—then the appalling corollary is that oppression is the world. Once domination is subtracted, it seems, there is simply nothing left. In the face of these two equally untenable alternatives, there can be no way forward and no way back, leaving the women’s liberation movement stilled in its tracks—merely marking time in a world where the possibility of change has been eradicated. While the narrator’s dream presents this horrific vision in capsule form, The Women’s Room as a whole returns again 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Introduction

POPULAR FEMINIST FICTION AS AMERICAN ALLEGORY

and again to this sense of stalemate, inscribing the emptiness of a time in which positive action, much less positive change, seems impossible. In passages such as these, The Women’s Room describes the sense of negativity and malfunction that often appears to accompany the experience of time when transformation is foreclosed—when we do not believe that “things might proceed otherwise,” as Peter Osborne puts it in one of the headnotes of this chapter.1 Like a prisoner marking off days on a cell wall, the narrator of The Women’s Room finds that time without change is merely a means of measuring the duration of one’s entrapment and hence a kind of punishment in and of itself.2 I refer to this experience of time devoid of significant change as static time.3 As the following chapters will illustrate, the problem of static time forms a recurring trope across the body of popular feminist fiction, linking together novels as disparate as The Stepford Wives (1972) and The Joy Luck Club (1989). From the white, middle-class housewife stuck in repetitive domestic labor to the woman of color haunted by the traumas of history, the popular feminist literary vision turns on the experience of time without meaningful change, consistently representing women’s oppression as a function of their experience of time.4 While we might expect this trend to develop during the long backlash against feminism that began in the early 1980s, this depiction of time divorced from change takes center stage in novels published as early as 1972, the high-water mark of second-wave feminist energy and promise. Feminist critics who have taken note of this discrepancy have often assumed that such grim visions were deployed as deliberate propaganda—as a means of consciousness-raising that would win readers to the feminist cause. However, such readings beg the question of what readers would find so appealing in a cause that is depicted as hopeless: emphasizing the evils of patriarchy might spark women to anger and action, but there is a crucial difference between highlighting oppression and representing it as a seamless and ineradicable world system. Despite the bleak and apparently unrewarding nature of this reading experience, the representation of static time occupies center stage in a body of literature so popular as to be identified as one of the major publishing phenomena of the late twentieth century.5 If popular feminist fiction has been fixated on depicting static time, it seems that American popular culture has been strangely hungry for such depictions. In what follows, I analyze the centrality of static time in popular feminist fiction and argue that a crucial relationship exists between this negative depiction of time and the declining sense of American history as a unified teleological process. Skepticism regarding such progress narratives has consistently been considered a defining feature of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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contemporary culture. In particular, belief in American history as a linear, progressive entity seemed to erode at both ends of the United States’ political spectrum in the last three decades of the twentieth century, with those on the Right fearing that America was in decline and those on the Left losing faith in an imminent Marxist revolution.6 That each side of the debate saw its opponents as setting a course that was leading America to ruin suggests something of the intransigence of the discourse of American decline: from precisely opposite vantage points, both camps perceived the same dethroning of their particular agenda and the same dire fate for America. Although this sense of defeat waxed and waned in the changeable political climates of the 1980s and 1990s—for example, the Reagan era produced a surge in conservative optimism that lasted for most of the 1980s—underlying economic factors contributed to the persistent sense that American progress could no longer be expected after 1973, including the decline in real wages, the dissolution of the industrial economy, and the growing disparity between rich and poor.7 Despite the all-consuming nature of this sense of stasis, however, we have usually assumed that only those cultural tropes traditionally associated with narratives of national development—for example, the war hero or the Western outlaw—served as a zone for working through this sense of failed progression in popular culture. Feminism has been linked to such concerns primarily through its ability to critique such narratives and their reliance on remasculinization as a means of retrieving national futurity or through feminism’s own critiques of teleological time as a problematic approach to history and transformation.8 Exploring the way in which the declining belief in progressive time coincides with the growth of popular second-wave feminism, I argue instead that the appetite for feminist stories of women stuck in time is linked to the anxieties about the breakdown of progressive time in the American popular imagination from the 1970s through the end of the twentieth century. From the daughter unable to separate from her mother to the suburban housewife repeating an endless round of chores, popular feminism’s literary inscription of women trapped in time resonated with the fears of a nation no longer convinced it could progress. The temporal problems of the oppressed woman thus offered a convenient and ideologically charged analogue for a widespread sense of temporal crisis, providing a set of images and narratives uniquely suited for representing the problems of time and teleology in postmodernity. Ultimately, I argue that popular feminist fiction served as a central means of registering this crisis, so that freeing women from static time came to appear as a means of retrieving the experience of positive futurity for the culture at large. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


INTRODUCTION


While building on the significant body of work that has explored the relationship of second-wave feminism to teleological, historical time, I thus shift the terms of this debate away from the question of whether or not feminism should rely on such teleological narratives and toward the question of how feminism was used to think about the problems and possibilities of teleological time after the 1960s. In other words, I ask not what historical teleology can (or cannot) do for feminism but rather what feminism has done for historical teleology. In particular, I suggest that from the early 1970s through the end of the 1990s, feminist fiction offered a means of waging a battle against the overriding perception that teleological futurity was no longer possible. The goal of this book is to reread second-wave feminist literature for the ways in which it represented these ongoing issues regarding the crisis in temporal progression—to uncover the way in which the story of the problem of positive futurity after the 1960s was told as a story of what it takes to change the lives of women. To put it in the terms of my title, this argument posits that post-1960s popular feminist discourse had a previously unrecognized, allegorical function in the political imagination of the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century, one centrally connected to the experience of historical time. Although this reading offers an unfamiliar approach to late twentiethcentury popular feminist fiction in the United States, we are in fact quite used to interpreting feminist discourse in this allegorical fashion in other geographical and historical contexts. For example, Rita Felski argues that in “early twentieth century [Europe] the figure of the New Woman was to become a resonant symbol of emancipation, whose modernity signaled not an endorsement of an existing present but rather a bold imagining of an alternative future”; thus, debates about the New Woman were used as a means to conceptualize and think through the rapid accelerations of the culture as a whole.9 In a similar reading of a slightly later moment and a different geopolitical context, critics have analyzed the way in which the unveiling of the woman in Egypt came to symbolize the removal of British power from the region, so that women’s liberation functioned as an allegory for national decolonization.10 In both of these examples, the issue is not simply that the body of the woman stands in for body of the nation, as has so often been the case, but rather that the liberation of women stands in for the liberation or transformation of the nation.11 Despite our tendency to read feminist discourse as a form of national allegory within the so-called third world, the possibility that second-wave feminism might have served a similarly allegorical function in the contemporary United States has rarely been raised. For example, feminist critics have often noted the way in which imperialist discourse deploys the issue of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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women’s rights as evidence that the West is more advanced than other parts of the globe; however, we critics have rarely considered that feminism might serve a similar symbolic purpose within those Western nations themselves, registering internal anxieties about national development or the lack thereof. It seems to me that this critical oversight has persisted in part because feminist critics have found the manifest content of second-wave feminism in the United States so necessary and arresting. By stirring up potent wishes and fears related to changing gender roles, popular feminist discourse has sparked the most heated sorts of debates, capturing and holding the attention of feminists and conservatives alike. Even when American feminists critiqued this popular feminist discourse as covertly serving reactionary agendas, they suggested that it was reactionary in its imagination of gender ideology, not that it was serving purposes unrelated to gender politics. To see what other functions debates regarding feminism and gender might have served has understandably not been a central concern. Yet, I would argue, the compelling nature of this discourse only makes it a more potent vehicle for negotiating other cultural crises. Precisely because the possibility and desirability of feminist transformation has been the subject of intense interest in American popular culture, feminist discourse could offer a ubiquitous and highly charged ground for the negotiation of more overarching questions about time and transformation after the 1960s. Feminist fiction slips into this dual role so easily because women’s fiction, of which it is a variant, had long served such double purposes. For example, the rise of the domestic novel and the courtship plot has been read not only as a sign of the changing status of women in English society but also as a means of representing and working through major class and economic transformations in England of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12 Similarly, in the nineteenth-century American sentimental novel, women’s intimate relationships stood in for various political struggles on the national stage. In both cases, women’s narrative forms offered convenient allegories for problems in the nation at large. One of the central arguments of this book is that this allegorical function did not disappear with the start of second-wave feminism—rather the reverse. As the parallel with the domestic novel should suggest, I’m not arguing that popular feminist novels were consciously produced to serve this allegorical purpose or that readers of these novels consciously consumed them as allegories of national time any more than readers of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century courtship novels necessarily perceived themselves to be reading allegories of the rise of the middle class. In other words, these novels can’t be classed with what Northrop Frye calls 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


INTRODUCTION


“continuous allegor[ies],” or texts in which the writer “explicitly indicates the relationship of his images to examples and precepts, and so tries to indicate how a commentary on him should proceed.”13 Popular feminist novels can only be viewed as continuous allegories if we focus on the way in which the heroine of the feminist novel stands in for the situation of women under patriarchy—that is, if we read for the feminist meaning that we assume was intended by the novelists in question. However, as countless analyses of popular culture have taught us, allegorical meanings do not have to become explicit in either production or reception in order to be operative in the consumption of popular culture texts: popular culture’s ability to work through national anxieties and fantasies arises in large part because of its ability to do so covertly and in a register that offers imaginative possibilities outside those of the national news and the voting booth.14 The danger of such readings is, of course, that they may render every text equally allegorical so that the term comes to be almost meaningless. However, a more specific link exists between the operations of allegory and the particular dilemma of time and totalization I have been describing. As Fredric Jameson puts it, allegory “arises from a crisis in representation (a historical and specific crisis, it should be understood, and not some timeless and eternal one).”15 The process of narrativization associated with allegory, its position as an “extended metaphor,”16 arises because of the need to respond to this crisis: in Jameson’s terms, “[a]llegory is a narrative process precisely because it needs to tell the narrative of the solution to its representational dilemma. . . . [I]n allegory the crisis of representation and of meaning is conceived precisely as a dramatic situation that the allegorist is called upon to resolve in some way.”17 Thus, for Jameson, allegory amounts to “the expression and the result of a crisis in representation on the one hand, and of narrative on the other.”18 It is much the same combination, I will suggest, that accompanies the breakdown of teleological futurity I have been describing. As I will argue at length in Chapter 1, this breakdown is closely linked to a conception of epistemological closure that has profound and destabilizing effects on the politics of representation, generating a crisis of the sort that Jameson describes. Even more crucially, the connections between narrative progression and teleological futurity inevitably inveigle the process of narrative itself in this dynamic: on the one hand, narrative progression seems to be required as a solution to static time, while on the other hand, narrative results in static time through the experience of closure associated with narrative telos. Thus, as in Jameson’s description, the feminist allegory of static time “designates difficulties, if not outright impossibilities, in meaning and representation, and also designates its own 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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peculiar structure as a failure to mean and to represent in the conventional way.”19 Feminism’s own position as a seemingly new discourse, one that was both involved in but perceived to follow the political cataclysms of the 1960s, allows it both to represent political difficulties it is assumed to share and to offer the seemingly fresh and more fruitful ground signified by its perceived difference from the political movements that had come before. To put it another way, the problem of static time was a problem ripe for allegorization, and popular feminist discourse was positioned in a way that made it ripe for the production of such an allegorical register. As I have already indicated, this approach resonates with readings of third-world feminist discourse as what Jameson infamously termed a “national allegor[y],” or a text that allegorizes the state of the nation as a whole.20 However, for Jameson, the totality of the national allegory, its ability to sweep the entirety of the national situation into its net, is a definitive element. In contrast, the popular feminist discourse I analyze fixates on one specific aspect of the national situation: the conjoined temporal, political, and representational problems generated by an apparent loss of teleological futurity. While critics have found ample evidence of anxieties about this loss in popular culture, the particular temporal and epistemological problems created by the breakdown of teleological history have largely been considered the purview of academic debates, especially those between poststructuralists and Marxists over the concept of totalization and the “end of history.” 21 In general, critics and theorists associated with poststructuralism rejected the totalizing concept of History with a capital H, instead promoting an experience of time marked by heterogeneity, aporia, and incoherence.22 Wendy Brown, for example, finds new access to futurity in this version of “politics out of history,” arguing that “out of the breakup of this seamless historiography and ground of settled principles, new political and epistemological possibilities emerge.”23 For thinkers in the opposed camp, most often exemplified by Marxist theorists such as Jameson and David Harvey, Left totalization is by contrast a deeply desired but seemingly unachievable goal in the wake of the 1960s. For such thinkers, the prominence of end-of-history theories in this period arises from the global permeation of capital, a “situation that blocks our imagination of the future” because “the entire world is suddenly sewn up into a total system from which no one can secede.”24 Without the ability to generate Marxist totalization that might counter the political and epistemological closure of global capital, time becomes heavy and useless—merely a marker of our inability to create genuine transformation; even the accelerated and fragmented time associated with postmodernity does not disturb this all-pervasive system.25 Thus, despite their different ways of approaching 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


INTRODUCTION


this situation, both camps explore the experience of politics in the absence of historical teleology and the linked epistemological and temporal aspects of that experience. In the following chapters, I argue that popular feminist fiction’s stories of static time offer a means of representing and negotiating such complex perceptions regarding the end of teleological history and the struggle to retrieve the belief in positive political futurity. Yet, I will argue, in allegorizing the various elements of this dilemma, popular feminist discourse did not so much rehearse Left academic debate as offer a parallel, contemporaneous negotiation of an ideological nexus in which the academic Left participated but it did not produce. In other words, we might say that both discourses explored the same problem in different ways, for different audiences, and with different results. In particular, I will argue, in popular feminism fiction, certain views regarding time and totalization that have usually been opposed in academic discourse—such as the desire to escape teleological history on the one hand and the longing for it on the other—could be fused into a single narrative form. This ability to bring seemingly contradictory perspectives together into a coherent narrative trajectory enables popular feminism to negotiate those perspectives in different ways and ultimately to offer different solutions than those found within Left academic debate.26 In order to make this relationship clear, however, the usual assessment of the links between historical teleology, postmodern time, and the literary aesthetics of postmodernity must be reimagined. In general, literary criticism of the novel in postmodernity has focused on only one version of the perceived breakdown of historical teleology: the release of time from the unifying, homogeneous properties of history. As Brown’s argument in favor of “politics out of history” suggests, when history is itself an unacceptable form of totalization, then time after history can be seen as roughly equivalent to what might be called “detotalized time,” or a heterogeneous time of incommensurate and unstructured temporalities.27 This assumption that contemporary time equals detotalized time has been reproduced in the most influential criticism of the relationship between postmodern literature and postmodern time, which has largely focused on the literary depiction of time freed from the totalizing exigencies of history—for example, through the early focus on “historiographic metafiction” in defining the postmodern literary impulse.28 Given this equation, it is not surprising that poststructuralist theory has appeared to offer the best vocabulary for describing the literary representation of postmodern time. Poststructuralism is often perceived to “wage a war on totality,” in Jean François Lyotard’s infamous and much-cited phrase; defining 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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postmodern time as detotalized time thus suggests that representations of postmodern time will be in keeping with poststructuralist epistemological and aesthetic principles.29 In particular, because narrative’s organizing teleology may itself be perceived as a mode of totalization, the poststructuralist aesthetic usually valorizes that which falls out of or opposes narrative’s powers of organization and coalescence. Thus, the representation of postmodern time in contemporary novels has usually been keyed to literary forms that thwart narrative coherence and control.30 For example, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth extols avant-garde novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Vladimir Nabokov for their ability to “subver[t] . . . historical time” and escape the linear, unified representation of narrative temporality.31 Ermarth views postmodern fiction as “restoring powers that have been suppressed” by history, an assessment that is deeply indebted to Lyotard’s vision of the postmodern as the unrepresentable within the modern itself.32 The “reader events” Ermarth finds in postmodern fiction thus encapsulate temporalities that evade the controlling illusions of linear narrative and history. While such approaches have often been deployed in readings of the first generation of postmodern novels, including those of Nabokov and John Barth, they persist in the criticism of novels associated with the second generation of postmodern fiction as well, which is more often linked to the boom in the production and consumption of minority literatures.33 To take one particularly well-known example, the veritable industry of criticism surrounding Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the 1990s foregrounded the novel’s engagement with a past at odds with representation itself, a series of events so traumatic that they have not been and perhaps should not be merely subsumed in teleological narratives of American history.34 While there is no doubt that this thematic nexus is at the heart of the novel itself, it is also clear that the epistemological signature of the traumatic past—its position as both ethical demand and unrepresentable experience— resonated with overarching commitments to the unrepresentable within the fields of both poststructuralism and postmodern literary criticism in the 1980s and 1990s. Later work in postmodern literature and history, perhaps best exemplified by Amy Elias’s Sublime Desire: History and Post1960s Fiction (2001), opened up this conversation in new directions by acknowledging that postmodern fiction retains a longing for what Elias identifies as a “secular-sacred ontology that is History.”35 Elias’s approach is particularly subtle, foregrounding the way in which postmodern fiction not only “subverts” history but also engages in a sustained consideration of what has been lost in this subversion and what, if anything, can be substituted for the reassuring narrative of history. While Elias tracks a desire for history and total representation that was not acknowledged in 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


INTRODUCTION


previous work on the novels she examines, her focus on the “historical sublime” foregrounds an aesthetics of the unrepresentable that resonates with poststructuralist approaches to time. For Elias, history is “the site of the recognition that there is something that cannot be said,” a Lyotardian reading that privileges the aporias and paradoxes of attempts at totalization.36 Although readings of this type have proven a remarkably potent interpretive lens for the work of many eminent postmodern novelists, they also reflect and reinscribe an understanding of postmodern time deeply influenced by one version of the perceived breakdown of historical teleology—that which reads the end of history as releasing time from totalization.37 In particular, conceiving of time in postmodernity as detotalized time has led to the assumption that formal experiments that disrupt narrative totalization are the key means of representing time in postmodernity. From this perspective, realist and other popular forms often adopted by bestselling feminist authors seem inevitably to reflect an outdated vision of teleological historical time as a still functional and powerful entity. Even feminist critics who defended the recourse to realism during the feminist aesthetic debates of the 1980s shared this assumption; for such critics, realism and other less experimental forms were thought to enable feminist progress precisely because they had not fallen prey to poststructuralist critiques of teleology.38 However, simply because realism cannot depict detotalized time does not mean that it is incapable of engaging with the temporal crisis I have been describing. In fact, as I will argue in Chapter 2, realism’s associations with epistemological mastery and closure make it particularly suited to exploring the version of the end of history lamented by critics like Jameson: the version in which the failure of Left totalization has generated a horrific world of totalized oppression against which every form of resistance seems always already defeated. By thus driving a wedge between the aesthetics of poststructuralism and the representation of time in postmodernity, Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory reveals the way in which popular novels of various types, from the realist to the picaresque to the sentimental, deploy the formal characteristics of their respective genres to represent and to attempt to resolve the crisis in time and totalization that characterizes postmodernity.39 Uncovering feminism’s answer to this dilemma requires reading popular feminist fiction aslant in order to see how the conventions of these novels resonate with issues surrounding the decline of historical teleology. Several of these conventions have already been identified in the key feminist literary studies of twentieth-century women’s literature, which defined and explored most of the types of novels that I examine here, 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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including the feminist picaresque, the mother/daughter or generational novel, and what Susan Rosowski terms the female “novel of awakening.”40 While my work draws on these key studies, I shift my approach not only by reading these novels allegorically but also by intensifying attention to the popular.41 Because the goal of this book is to explore a particular role played by feminist discourse in negotiating a widespread cultural concern, it aims not to define which novels might constitute genuinely feminist fiction, but rather to examine those novels that have been perceived as tied to feminism in popular culture. This association might be made, for example, through repeated references to feminism as an explicit political entity within a popular novel, the profile of the author, marketing or packaging, and so on. While it is true, for example, that novels like Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club do not have much in common in terms of form or content, all three novels have been tied to feminist issues in the public imagination, providing a flashpoint for debates and conversations about the conditions governing women’s lives. Moreover, these novels were perceived to speak in a way sympathetic to feminism, to promote rather than critique a feminist way of understanding women’s current state and past history; in this way, their profile differs dramatically from backlash novels that have been perceived to depict feminist issues or that have sparked debate regarding gender roles, such as John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick or Michael Crichton’s Disclosure.42 This focus on the popular means that I don’t attend to some of the most celebrated examples of late twentieth-century American feminist narrative—for example, Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) or Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975)—but this approach also reduces some of the problems with definition that so plagued feminist fiction studies of the 1980s. For what might be called the first generation of criticism of second-wave feminist novels, this problem became a debate between warring camps of feminist critics and theorists over what constituted a truly feminist aesthetic.43 As Felski notes in her review of these debates, some feminist literary critics disparaged realist and other popular novels for retaining modern notions of coherent subjectivity and transparent representation, while others critiqued avant-garde forms for a frivolous and apolitical embrace of the latest theoretical fashions; in both cases, delimiting the body of feminist fiction had everything to do with the individual critic’s position on contemporaneous controversies over epistemology and aesthetics.44 These debates made it clear that approaches to feminist literature as a genre tended to beg questions that only produced more contention among critics. Because genre 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


INTRODUCTION


studies both evolve a definition of a genre from a given set of texts and use that definition to select the texts that define the set, they inevitably rest on circular reasoning.45 Yet this inevitable problem is magnified in studies of the feminist novel genre, which must begin by defining the highly contested political entity “second-wave feminism” rather than a set of literary conventions such as those governing the picaresque or the bildungsroman.46 I don’t mean to suggest that this dilemma can be avoided entirely: in order to create a grouping of “feminist fiction,” some definition of feminism must be employed and someone, most likely the critic in question, must choose it. However, rather than finding novels that match a preset definition of feminism, this book focuses instead on examining prominent novels that have been received as feminist in the most general sense, even if the definitions of feminism employed by those doing the receiving are widely divergent, the result of clever marketing, repugnant to important feminists, or even created by men. This approach allows me to consider what purposes an association between feminism and a popular novel might serve for the culture at large. In choosing the novels that make up my archive from among the many possible texts, I select both works by the most well-known authors associated with feminism— for example, Marge Piercy, Marilyn French, and Alice Walker—and novels like The Stepford Wives and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996), which have seemed to operate as symbols of feminism in the popular imagination, whether or not the authors have been associated with feminism or have written other well-known novels. This group includes some novels with dubious claims to feminist politics, and many such novels have fallen outside the critical purview of studies that begin from a preconstituted definition of feminism. In other words, the more problematic the portrayal of feminism at work in these novels, the less critical attention we have usually devoted to them. In contrast, this project explores the different ways of imagining feminist transformation that captured the popular imagination during the last thirty years and makes it possible to speculate on what the popularity of these conceptions might mean. Using this rubric for delimiting my archive, however, means that the archive reflects the racial myopias of popular literary culture. As most of the monographs on the women’s liberation novel make clear, popular feminist fiction of the 1970s was largely written by and concerned with white women, and most readings of women’s liberation fiction as a genre have historically been readings of white women’s fiction, though sustained engagement with Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) is evident in more recent work on 1970s feminist novels.47 This focus on Walker’s early work clearly 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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reflects a laudable desire to both acknowledge and retroactively correct the white focus of much 1970s feminist discourse rather than merely reproducing it in yet another critical volume. In contrast, my concentration on the popular necessarily prohibits such a corrective approach, instead following in the tracks of mainstream literary consumption as it moved from the white women’s liberation novels that defined popular feminist literature in the 1970s to the blockbuster novels by women of color that took center stage in the 1980s and 1990s. The trajectory of popular consumption falls in line with the commonplace story of feminist phases, in which the white feminism of the 1970s is replaced by the feminism of women of color in the 1980s and 1990s. As many critics have pointed out in various ways, this story of feminist phases produces a “denial of coevalness,” or a form of temporal distancing, that positions the feminism of women of color as coming after and necessarily either adopting or critiquing a pre-existing white feminism.48 Certainly this narrative overlooks the large corpus of literature by women of color from the 1970s, including now-canonical texts such as Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975) and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). However, foregrounding the trajectory of popular feminist fiction enables us to ask key questions regarding how and why feminism was characterized in certain ways at certain points in time. For example, while the whiteness of popular feminist fiction in the 1970s has seemed to need remediation, it has not seemed to require explanation: given both the racial failings of second-wave feminism at the time and the racism of the country as a whole, the popular focus on white feminism in the 1970s has appeared only too predictable. The problem with such reasoning, however, becomes clear when we consider the voracious consumption of novels of joint gender and racial oppression like Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Tan’s The Joy Luck Club just a few years later. While a similar shift toward the fiction of women of color took place in the academy during the same period, this trend was usually understood as a part of an ongoing response to the critiques of white feminism by women of color—an ethical shift that it would be difficult to attribute to the culture as a whole. Instead, the mainstream reception of Walker and Tan has taken place without significant positive alterations in American racial politics. If changing tastes in heroines can’t be assumed to result from improved American attitudes to race, it becomes necessary to consider what has caused these different versions of feminist fiction to take center stage in the public view when and how they did. Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory argues that one way of understanding these transformations is by attending to the 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


INTRODUCTION


different negotiations of time they enabled. In particular, white women’s liberation narratives were largely uninterested in the past, either familial or historical, which they saw as merely providing more evidence of the continuing oppression of women; therefore, their emphasis was largely on escaping the ongoing stasis of the present for a different, more open future. In contrast, the discourse of popular, multicultural feminism that followed reflected the interest in the past associated with the development of identity politics: the novels by and about women of color that became popular in the 1980s and 1990s returned to shaping events in history, including slavery, segregation, immigration, the Chinese revolution, and so on. While such a fixation on the traumas of history might seem to offer even less of an escape from the breakdown of historical progress than women’s liberation narratives did, I demonstrate that the turn to the past encoded in stories of joint racial and gender oppression experienced by women of color provided a means to rethink and eventually sidestep the trap of static time. In particular, I suggest that the imagination of the woman of color as wracked by divided loyalties to an ethnic past and a feminist future offered a new means of representing the simultaneous dangers of and desire for totalization, a transformation that allowed for the development of new solutions to this double bind.49 In order to track this evolving set of narrative strategies, I begin with a chapter that explores the historical and theoretical background of popular feminist literature’s struggle with the postmodern crisis of time and totalization. Returning to the moment in which this crisis emerged, the end of the 1960s, I demonstrate that the linked conceptions of time, totalization, and immediacy lock the narrative of the 1960s into a seemingly inevitable implosion of Left political energy. In particular, I examine the way in which important and influential historical narratives of the late 1960s depict the conclusion of the decade as a dead end past which it was impossible to progress, generating an experience of static time that permeated beyond the confines of the radical movements associated with the decade. As I move into Part II, I explore the way in which popular feminism perceived itself to have inherited the problem of stasis that haunted the end of the 1960s. In Chapter 2, this haunting takes almost literal form in Marge Piercy’s Vida (1979), which tells the story of a white female revolutionary who has been on the run since the late 1960s for crimes against the state. By comparing Vida’s futile, phantom-like existence to that of her sister, a feminist radical, the novel struggles to hold out the hope that feminism can avoid the dead-end fate of 1960s radicalism. Turning to French’s The Women’s Room, I demonstrate that its struggles with a vision of complete patriarchal domination lead 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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to much the same experience of static time. French’s novel enables and illuminates the parallel between a feminist awakening to overriding patriarchal domination and the post-1960s awakening to the failure of historical progress. Like post-1960s radicals, the narrator of the novel engages in a pitched battle against her own perception of totalized domination, fighting to gain access to a positive futurity that her own analysis places offstage and out of reach. Both novels, I argue, allegorize the double bind created by the implosion of 1960s politics: they are caught between the rejection of totalization as a form of overriding domination and the desperate need to recover totalization if change is to be possible once more. As the two perceptions collapse into one another, the novels sink into a miasma of static time with profound resonance for the culture at large. In Chapter 3, I shift my focus to the different ways that static time appears in more mainstream, liberal feminist vehicles, taking as my example the iconic popular feminist tale of the 1970s, Levin’s 1972 novel The Stepford Wives. Analyzing this gothic tale of brainwashed robot-wives literally “programmed” by patriarchy, I argue that the novel draws on the image of the doppelganger to offer a chilling picture of domestic labor as itself uncanny. I demonstrate the way that the novel works to conflate the horror of uncanny repetition, which Sigmund Freud associates with both the double and the repetition compulsion, with the recurring tasks of suburban housewifery. Although the novel has often been viewed as a cynical attempt to “rip-off ” the women’s movement, this vision of the horror of domestic repetition was strikingly faithful to the critique of suburban domesticity offered by white liberal feminist treatises like Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique (1963). For Friedan, the central problem for housewives was that their lives possessed no future goal to organize their lives after marriage—no more plot to give shape to their time. I argue that both The Feminist Mystique and The Stepford Wives depict women’s oppression as intrinsically connected to the dead-end experience of time without hope of further transformation—that is, to an experience of static time much like the one that follows history’s end. Unlike The Women’s Room, however, The Stepford Wives offers a potential solution to this dead end: the exit of the suburban housewife from domestic repetition into the supposedly future-oriented world of the career woman. Once the static time of the housewife becomes an analogue for the static time of the nation, releasing her into a public, teleological career narrative seems to offer a means of releasing the nation as well. I analyze attempts to employ this strategy in Chapter 4, focusing on classic popular feminist novels of artistic striving: Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1974). Both 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


INTRODUCTION


novels depict heroines diametrically opposed to the Stepford wife: fiercely ambitious, sexually adventurous, and above all else mobile, these women seem not to have seen the inside of a kitchen, much less been trapped in one. However, these heroines encounter a problem not envisioned by novels like The Women’s Room and The Stepford Wives: they find that they must constantly struggle against narratives of development and maturation that would confine rather than liberate them. From this perspective, I suggest, both heroines’ embrace of promiscuity reads as a resistance to plot as well as a resistance to conservative sexual mores: the episodic, self-contained character of the casual sexual encounter derails the courtship narrative, which attempts to place each romantic encounter in the service of some final, culminating union. The picaresque genre employed by both novels, I argue, perfectly encodes this resistance on the level of form: serial rather than teleological, the picaresque depicts its hero or heroine as continually moving through new places and situations without being transformed by any of them. Yet this war against plot cannot really succeed, since both heroines find themselves unable to abandon the desire for artistic development, which requires precisely the sort of incremental progression they resist. In a fashion familiar from post-Marxist debates, these novels find themselves unable to choose between the prison of teleological progress and the prison of its lack—a trap that ultimately creates an even more tenacious version of static time. In Part III, I examine the way that feminism’s role as an allegory for national time transforms as the white women’s liberation novel comes to be replaced by the multicultural popular feminist text. The attempt to use career narratives as a solution to static time explicitly relied on the whiteness of the women’s liberation movement, leveraging the class mobility that comes with whiteness to mitigate the gender oppression of otherwise privileged women. When The Color Purple became a bestseller in 1982, however, it initiated a shift in popular U.S. feminism from white women’s liberation discourse to the ethnic popular feminism of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, rather than being hampered by its lack of access to class mobility, The Color Purple instead escapes the dead end that plagued women’s liberation novels for ten years: it depicts a heroine who overcomes totalized oppression to achieve a dazzling triumph of futurity and fulfillment. In Chapter 5, I analyze the way in which The Color Purple avoids the trap of static time. Examining The Color Purple as a response to Walker’s 1975 novel, Meridian, I argue that both these texts create a relation of debt and obligation between past and future. The problem here is not that women can’t change but rather that embracing feminist transformation means escaping and thus failing to honor the suffering of earlier generations. Because it arises from unpaid 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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debts, feminism signals a futurity that is available but is inauthentic and illicit. In order to cancel this debt, The Color Purple literally rewrites the past: it describes a woman of an earlier generation gradually accruing all the benefits that we associate with contemporary feminism. By undoing the oppression of the past in this fashion, the novel voids the unpaid debt caused by the suffering of previous generations. However, this process also eradicates newness and difference: change in the present is acceptable in the novel precisely because it is no longer change—because a balance between past and present has been restored. Ultimately, I suggest, this approach produces change only by making change and stasis almost indistinguishable. I investigate the further development of this perception of feminist futurity in Chapter 6, examining two bestselling mother/daughter novels from the 1980s and 1990s. These novels complete a turn to previous history begun in the work of Walker by creating a retrospective form in which mother and daughter have become locked in static time as a result of their shared past. Whereas women’s liberation novels struggled to find even the smallest evidence of feminist transformation, the particular profile of the mothers in these novels—for example, first-generation Chinese immigrant women in The Joy Luck Club—seems to provide clear evidence of difference over time: in the context of these mothers’ suffering, contemporary women seem not so much trapped in as liberated by history, born after the worst of women’s suffering had passed. Yet the suffering undergone by the mother filters through to the daughter through their relationship: damaged and stunted herself, the mother cannot help but damage and stunt her daughter, making the daughter incapable of enjoying the advantages bestowed by her place in history. Exploring the relationship between these novels and pop-feminist mother/daughter discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, I argue that the mother comes to symbolize the weight of a painful but authentic past, while the daughter symbolizes a futurity that is seemingly available but so insubstantial that it cannot actually be grasped and inhabited. I compare this vision of the relationship between past and future to that in contemporary theory, especially the familiar conception of postmodern futurity as ephemeral and insubstantial—a flimsy postmodern copy of a weighty modern original. Exploring the way in which such visions interact with the temporal imagination of identity politics in particular, I argue that these novels draw on the longstanding power of sentimental narratives to generate a mother/daughter reconciliation that offers feminism’s most potent solution to the problems of static time—a solution, however, that involves the eradication of time itself. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


INTRODUCTION


Finally, in a brief Coda, I reverse the interpretive lens used throughout the book in order to consider the effect that feminism’s allegorical association with temporal problematics has had on the perception of feminist politics rather than on the perception of national time. Turning to backlash texts like Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003), I demonstrate that they rely on the association between feminism and the breakdown of progressive time to suggest that feminism is locked in a losing battle against the clock: by turning women’s struggle for progress into the working woman’s futile struggle to meet the temporal demands placed on her, these novels insist that feminism has taken on a force it can never best—the passage of time itself. More generally, I consider the way in which feminist politics may have been shaped by feminism’s position close to the heart of the national imagination after the 1960s and by its displacement from this central position after 2001. If feminist politics drew some of its energy from the intense national cathexis to stories of women and static time after the 1960s, then it may be that the turn to different types of stories after the attacks on the World Trade Center has exerted a similar influence, in this case draining away the sense that feminist concerns are significant and vital in this transformed political milieu. Understanding the extent to which feminism’s allegorical function has caused feminism to acquire and lose urgency in different political climates may make it possible to denaturalize the contemporary sense that only certain types of stories now matter, enabling us to ask new questions not only about the role of feminism in the present political moment, but also about the stories we are currently using to make sense of our national landscape.



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The Problem of StaticTime Totalization, the End of History, and the End of the 1960s

I

n the 1980s and 1990s, the perception of failed futurity in America was registered by “end-of-history” discourses from across the political spectrum. In 1992, the neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama argued that, with the demise of communism, American-style capitalist democracy had finally triumphed and was gradually remaking the entire world in its own image. Despite the fact that he relished capital’s permeation, Fukuyama nevertheless found that this version of the end of history still resulted in empty and meaningless time: without the need or desire to improve upon this best of all possible worlds, humanity would inevitably become lost and aimless. Arguing from across the aisle, Wendy Brown suggested that the sensation of blocked futures on the part of the contemporary Left stemmed not only from a sense of lost Marxist unity but also from a failure to recognize the futurity inherent in new political forms—for example, identity-politics approaches that have often been perceived as a threat to Marxist analysis; without a Marxist conception of historical teleology, it seemed to such thinkers that history itself had ended.1 As both Brown’s and Fukuyama’s arguments imply, there can be something noticeably wishful about this perception that history has come to an end: Fukuyama predicts the total, permanent, and inevitable triumph of the politico-economic system he endorses, while Brown suggests that Marxists refuse to believe that Left history can continue if it abandons Marxist principles.2 In a similar vein, Lutz Niethammer argues that posthistoire discourses that conflate the end of history with the “end of Europe” must be read as expressions of dismay regarding the demise of white centrality, while Hazel Carby views contemporary American discourses of apocalyptic “national crisis” as an expression of the fear that white superiority is under threat.3 As Brown implies, what is at an end in many of these discourses is less history or 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Chapter 1


the world than the ascendancy of the political body to which the group in question belongs.4 Brown’s argument suggests that we may understand the ubiquity of end-of-history discourses as a sign of a shift in priorities such that those who no are no longer at the center of history feel that history itself has come to an end. Yet this argument cannot explain why groups positioned as the new protagonists of history find themselves equally plagued by this sense of failed futurity. As I argue at length in the remaining chapters, a perception of joint temporal and epistemological closure constituted one of the primary political inheritances of late twentiethcentury popular American feminism—a movement usually associated with the desire to bring women into public history for the first time. If we read the sensation of blocked futurity as arising primarily from the resentment of those who feel themselves to have been dethroned from their former place at the center of history, it is difficult to comprehend why feminism would become party to such perceptions; after all, feminism was one of the key forms of the new identity politics that some Marxist theorists felt had staged a coup against traditional class analysis. Nor can we expect feminism to share in Fukuyama’s triumphalist imagination of history’s end, since the feminist movement certainly hasn’t achieved the sort of world domination that would make any further striving beside the point. Instead, I argue that this perception of blocked futurity came to be shared across political movements because the internal logic of end-ofhistory discourse resonates with deep-seated ideas linking time, narrative totalization, and human agency that were in crisis in the American political imagination after the 1960s. On the one hand, the ubiquity of this logic meant that feminism inevitably became entangled in this crisis; on the other, feminism’s tendency to position women as belated subjects of history gave it a means of negotiating this narrative logic that were not available to other political discourses. In general, the elements that make up this logic can be isolated by attending to the shared features that characterize end-of-history theories, which describe a state in which the world outlasts the human capacity to transform it.5 Such theories depict the end of history as a temporal mode that transgresses the most basic and commonsensical perceptions of time: the conviction that with time comes change and that the future is more open and less fixed than the present or the past. Not only does significant change appear to cease after the end of history, resulting in a predetermined future, but also this temporal experience seems inevitably to be accompanied by a vision of the world as “crystalliz[ed]” and “isomorphic”6 and the “last men” of history as bored and aimless—so devoid of heroic striving that their rote functioning is often compared 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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to that of insects or animals.7 In part, the insistent repetition of these features of end-of-history discourses, even in seemingly positive visions of the end of history such as Fukuyama’s, is self-explanatory: if the world will no longer change significantly, then human action will most likely appear foreclosed, or at least beside the point. Other aspects of this vision, however, seem less self-evident: philosophical hypotheses indicate that it is at least possible to imagine a world that is both frozen and variegated,8 but end-of-history theories seem instead to assume that stillness and sameness necessarily go hand in hand. The particular and unspoken logic of the end of history, in other words, creates an apparently inexorable concatenation of temporal stasis, epistemological uniformity, and the demise of human agency. As myriad fictionalizations of nightmare totalitarian futures make clear, the association of a fully “administered” world with an increasingly uniform and stagnant population resonates far beyond theorists associated with the end of history, forming a persistent ideologeme within the Western cultural imagination at large. I use the term static time to refer to this temporal mode in its various contemporary manifestations, some of which may at first glance seem far removed from well-known end-of-history debates. While leaving aside the question of whether this delineation must in a strict philosophical interpretation be considered a contradiction in terms, my terminology attempts to encode the perception of negation that accompanies time in such totalized and permanent political landscapes. Static time refers less to a philosophical precept than to what Raymond Williams calls a structure of feeling; it gestures toward a set of perceptions and emotions that arises from the logic linking epistemological uniformity and temporal inertia.9 In what follows, I argue that this sense of static time has had crucial links to received wisdom regarding the trajectory of 1960s radicalism since the end of that decade. While the actual foreclosure of American possibilities arguably has everything to do with the sort of economic shifts that Williams associates with changes in a dominant structure of feeling, one of the central ways of understanding this sense of stasis in American culture has been through readings of the last moment when teleological history seemed to be a given in the United States: the 1960s.10 From Right arguments that America lost its way in the late 1960s to the Left perception that 1960s revolutionary aspirations came to a dead end, the story of 1960s radicalism has served as a kind of cautionary tale across the political spectrum.11 In general, for the last three decades of the twentieth century, national conceptions regarding the pleasures and dangers of American progress were given shape by the most commonplace 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


THE PROBLEM OF STATIC TIME


reading of the politics of the 1960s, which in turn has been structured by the logic of time and totalization I have been describing.12 As I will suggest, the moral of this story has usually been understood to be this: the revolutionary impulse both cannot and should not animate American politics. Because this interpretation rests on deeply held ideas of how political time operates, it often seems an inarguable, indelible one. While the meaning of this realization is certainly dire for the Left, it has crucial effects on the Right’s imagination of political change as well, as Fukuyama’s ambivalent description of history’s end implies. While the defeat of 1960s radicalism is, from an economic perspective, not the determinant cause of this sense of stasis, my point is that it has served as an explanation of and an alibi for certain perceptions in American culture—a means of describing why large-scale attempts at instituting political progress will and even should fail.13 In this sense, the inexorable logic of time and totalization that shapes the narrative of the 1960s serves as a means of registering the seemingly inexorable demise of positive American futurity in ways that greatly undermine the conviction that something might be done about that demise. In general, this book argues that the understanding of static time inscribed in these narratives of 1960s radicalism becomes configured and reconfigured through popular feminist discourse, which then functions as a key means of attempting to retrieve access to positive political transformation. In order to uncover these relationships, I analyze the way in which the logic of static time has undergirded what historians have referred to as the declension narrative of American 1960s radicalism, which influenced most historical scholarship on the decade through the end of the twentieth century.14 In historian Van Gosse’s words, “In this scenario, the Sixties failed in their millenarian purpose and now Americans have stepped outside their own history, lost their groove, and forgotten what Todd Gitlin called their ‘common dreams.’”15 Put more generally, this narrative falls into a basic three-act structure: the good (or at least less bad) middle years of the 1960s, symbolized by the civil rights movement and the early Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), come to be supplanted by the bad Black Power movement and the bad late SDS, and this transformation then leads to the futility, despair, and stasis with which our story ends. While there are many stories one could tell about the 1960s from many perspectives, the story of American 1960s radicalism was most frequently organized and judged according to this particular narrative structure through the end of the 1990s.16 For example, in 1989 Maurice Isserman noted that “what one might have expected to be the ‘Dark and Bloody ground’ of the historiography on the 1960s remains thus far remarkably uncontested terrain,” resulting in “near unanimity” among histories 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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of 1960s radicalism.17 Not only did historians often present a very similar negative trajectory for 1960s radicalism but also this narrative mirrored popular readings of the decade that began to circulate almost immediately upon its conclusion: as Kevin Boyle has argued, most histories of the decade reflect the same “powerful narrative” sketched out in the Time-Life volume on the 1960s published in 1970.18 While the sense of inevitable failure that marks the declension narrative is even clearer in Right narratives that vilify 1960s radicalism and suggest that efforts at transformation should never have been made in the first place, I draw instead on less critical Left, liberal, and centrist general histories of the decade to show how even the most positive accounts of the 1960s find themselves caught up in a logic of tragic inevitability that appears to lead unswervingly to static time.19 In so doing, my goal is not to dispute the events emplotted by historiography of 1960s radicalism or to provide an alternate explanation of those events.20 The task of documenting the tendentious nature of the declension narrative is being undertaken by an increasing number of historians of the 1960s. Rather, my focus is on isolating the temporal operations of the three-phase structure of 1960s radicalism, as it has been most often described, in order to show how the sense of possibility that characterizes much of the 1960s became bound to the logic of static time, such that the perception of positive futurity transformed into its polar opposite by the narrative’s conclusion. In order to elucidate this operation in the declension narrative of the 1960s, I first offer an account of this temporal logic in its abstract form, laying out the steps by which a temporal progression toward freedom seems inevitably to collapse into a narrative of totalized epistemological and temporal closure. While such an account necessarily touches on the approaches to political time embedded in various disciplines, particularly philosophy and political theory, my goal here is not to provide a philosophical genealogy of static time but rather to attempt to make explicit our apparent conception of how static time works—and why it works the same way over and over again. I thus approach static time as a component of what Charles Taylor has called the “social imaginary” of Western modernity and postmodernity.21 Unlike political philosophy, which “is often the possession of a small minority,” the social imaginary contains unspoken, axiomatic beliefs shared by large social groups, “something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode.”22 Yet, as Taylor points out, “[i]t often happens that what start off as theories held by a few people come to infiltrate the social imaginary, first of elites, perhaps, and then of the whole society.23 Thus, while the work of key thinkers in the philosophy of history 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Alexandre Kojève undergirds some of the logics I uncover, what concerns me here is not the original philosophies in all their subtlety but rather the particular and even bastardized versions of key concepts that forged the operation of static time in the twentieth-century social imaginary. Charting this logic involves a level of abstraction that has, in recent decades, been almost entirely the purview of “theory” or certain strains of late twentieth-century continental philosophy. However, theory tends to write against the social imaginary, challenging rather than charting our most commonplace ways of thinking about gender, sexuality, time, representation, and so on. My goal is to track the logic that underlies those accepted ways of thinking, the often unspoken but pervasive truisms that structure the linked imagination of time, totalization, and agency. More importantly, as I will argue at the conclusion of this chapter, contemporary theory takes shape in a period of profound reaction against the logic of static time and functions more as an attempt to thwart static time than as a description of the way static time operates. Therefore, with a few exceptions, I draw on narrative and political theory that largely predates poststructuralism but still provides usefully schematic and generalized accounts of the concepts linked to static time. My point is not that the work of the thinkers to whom I do turn—for example, Karl Mannheim, Hannah Arendt, and Frank Kermode—is somehow innocent of or removed from this logic of time and totalization in a way that theory is not. In fact, Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, published in 1967, could be read as a primary as well as a secondary text within my argument, given that it exemplifies as well as elucidates the perception of static time that accompanied the late 1960s. Yet that is precisely its utility: these thinkers inscribe the logic of static time rather than seek its fissures and failures in the way I suggest poststructuralism does, and they are thus essential to tracing its parameters. Having offered a way to think through static time, I then trace the way this logic shapes the imagination of the end of the 1960s, particularly the trajectory that has been most commonly assigned to 1960s radicalism. How Freedom Becomes Unfreedom: The Logical Juggernaut of Static Time Elucidations of the end of history commonly begin with Hegel, or at least with an assumed version or heir of Hegel—though such readings are often more symptomatic than faithful. In his review of the various “ends” of history, Perry Anderson argues that, contrary to commonly held notions, 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Hegel referred to history’s end only in the sense of its aim or target, not in the sense of its conclusion, since in German no single word carries the dual meanings of terminus and goal in the way the English word “end” does.24 Thus, while Hegel did posit freedom as the goal of human history, he did not necessarily equate the achievement of this aim with the cessation of history. Yet, as Peter Osborne, suggests, the “internal relations between the ideas of temporalization, totalisation, and narrativity” make this conflation inevitable once history becomes conceived of as a narrative with an overriding, distant goal.25 On its most basic level, narrative time—that is, the temporal slice defined by the interior stretch between the beginning and end of the story—concludes when the goal of the narrative has been reached or, in the case of the unhappy ending, when it becomes clear that it will not be reached. When history comes to be defined as a narrative whose goal is freedom, history as a narrative will conclude when its goal is reached; if it does not, this narrative-based definition of history would be retroactively nullified, since it is the coalescence of goal and conclusion that creates the temporal form of narrative. Thus, the narrative time of history must cease when we reach the goal of that narrative. Once we arrive at that goal, we are no longer within the temporal organization that defines the parameters of the story that is history; time may continue, but history has concluded. To the extent that we accept a narrative definition of history as a story with a stated and achievable goal, the conflation of the two meanings of “end” indeed appears inevitable. As Kermode famously described in The Sense of an Ending, this doubling of end and aim creates a pattern that unifies the whole, creating coherence between the parts of the narrative. The “sense of an ending,” the perception that the narrative will conclude, “bundl[es] together perception of the present, memory of the past and expectation of the future, in a common organization.”26 Through this bundling activity, narrative “bestow[s] upon the whole duration and meaning.”27 According to Kermode’s narrative theory, then, narrative executes two crucial and coincident functions: it performs an act of “temporal integration” that unifies a segment of time, and it provides that segment of time with meaning bestowed by the end.28 Structurally, narrative resolution creates an epistemologically determining force that runs back along the narrative chain, aligning all of its constituent events with the meaning established by the arrival of the end. Not only, then, does this process create a totality or unit out of the narrative itself but it also totalizes the narrative, in the sense of making an epistemologically fused and coherent mass out of the narrative’s formerly discordant parts.29 While this process may be innocent enough within the realms of fiction, Kermode argues that it is a dangerous error to apply this narrative 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




logic to the world at large, since it tends to generate a partial, structured, and uniform view of what would otherwise be an organic and chaotic whole. Thus, for Kermode, even narratives of justice become suspect if we attempt to reorder human reality in their shape: “[r]eality is . . . the sense we have of a world irreducible to human plot and human desire for order; justice is the human order we impose upon it.”30 If we lose our sense of the difference between plot and reality, if we attempt to remake the world in the shape of justice, Kermode warns, “we are yielding to irrationalism; we are committing an error against which the intellectual history of our century should certainly have warned us. Its ideological expression is fascism; its practical consequence the Final Solution.”31 The widespread conviction that there is a short and precipitous path from narrative consonance to genocide, from totality to totalitarianism, is a familiar characteristic of the cold war intellectual culture in which Kermode was writing. Such arguments tend to promote the salutary chaos of human life (read: capitalism) over and against the unification and control associated with social planning (read: communism). Although the political valences were different, a similar argument about the connection between conceptual and social uniformity became a flashpoint both among Marxists and between Marxists and poststructuralists in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, Marxists tended to argue that there was a difference between a benign, speculative, conceptual unity required for political thought and a uniformity produced through “power and control,” while poststructuralists tended to see no difference between the two.32 While I will discuss the relationship of static time to these debates below, for now I want to point out that, however historically bounded or ideologically fraught the conflation of unity and uniformity may be, it does unfold with a seemingly inexorable logic for those within its grasp. For thinkers who accept the above assumptions regarding the epistemological function of narrative temporality, terminus, unity, and uniformity will indeed appear to arrive hand in hand; completion will equal totality, which in turn will equal totalization. Furthermore, if we accept that such functions apply to the narrativization of history, we must also assume that as time passes, we are drawn ever closer to the narrative end of freedom, and that this freedom will itself produce a totalization of meaning. In the terms of this logic, society may be free in terms of having reached its ideal goal, but its meanings will be totalized and uniformly rendered in the shape of freedom. From this perspective, it is difficult for any sort of progressive imagination to present its discourse as epistemologically free (in the sense of neutral, open, and untrammeled) no matter how politically free a society it envisions and attempts to produce. As in Kermode’s warning about imposing the “plot” of justice on human reality, the narrative of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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freedom will result in a society whose meanings are inevitably totalized and rendered unfree precisely by their rote, unvarying reflection of an idea of “freedom.” Such perceptions are familiar from arguments against utopian thinking, which often assume that utopia is merely a code word for totalitarianism. From this perspective, the creation of utopia through the achievement of freedom would lead directly to the creation of dystopia, or the achievement of freedom as the single, determinate meaning of society; in fact, there is almost no difference between utopia and dystopia.33 This perspective is reflected in the countless fictions that depict the horrific result of utopian designs for human society, which seem inevitably to result in a rigid, regimented society in which the release from want has required the rejection of independent thought. That is, the attempt to produce an experience of justice and freedom has led inescapably to epistemological closure. For those in the grip of such logic, Raymond Williams’s argument that a successful socialist society would require tremendous complexity rather than brute uniformity appears ludicrous, since the narrative logic of progressive discourse will always seem to lead to forcible homogeneity.34 According to this logic, both utopia and dystopia engender the joint experience of temporal and epistemological closure that I term static time. This threat of closure is both mirrored in and intensified by the temporalization of freedom in liberal discourse. According to Mannheim, for liberalism the idea of freedom possesses a specific (anti)temporal valence associated with eternity: it is characterized by the “remoteness from space and time of what is merely rationally correct and valid.”35 The distance from the social realm that characterizes freedom is a distance from the very time and space in which the social realm exists—something like the gap between a mathematical formula and a building constructed by virtue of that formula. According to this logic, the Enlightenment idea of freedom must be understood as by nature unachievable, since freedom exists within a zone of principle at which the social realm cannot actually arrive. Within the concrete realm of human chronology, then, we may create solid effects in the world; however, because freedom is by definition opposed to that realm, the one effect we are not able to create is that of freedom. Freedom is our goad to action and the one thing we cannot enact, the goal our narrative can never reach. In that sense, freedom and human agency are fundamentally opposed to each other in this schema: where one exists, the other may not. However, if freedom is categorically out of reach, part of an eternal realm that is opposed to the mundane temporality of human affairs, our agency as the subjects of history is fundamentally attenuated, unfolding 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




in and through a temporal medium that can never lead to our goal. As Giorgio Agamben argues, “Eternity, the regime of divinity, with its static circle, tends to negate the human experience of time. The discrete, fleeting instant becomes the point where time intercepts the wheel of eternity.”36 In comparison with the static perfection of eternity, the realm of principle and idea, the human experience of time becomes “negated,” as Agamben puts it—signified by its nonpresence, ephemerality, and deficiency.37 Each “fleeting instan[t]” of this linear continuum contains our struggle against that deficiency or lack, our attempt to approach and enter the eternal time of freedom from which we are split.38 In this paradigm, chronological distance mirrors the asymptotic temporality of desire familiar from psychoanalysis; it serves as and signifies our social lack and our continuing (impossible) attempt to overcome that lack, to accomplish the “negation of negation,” in Agamben’s words.39 Conversely, our ability to create the effects that we desire appears fundamentally counteracted in this schema by the inadequacy of time itself, the medium in which we act, much as Lacanian psychoanalysis argues that both meaning and desire are deflected through the medium of the signifying chain. If the impossible approach of progress to freedom resembles the structure of deferral and desire described by psychoanalysis, then the supposedly concrete, quantifiable, chronological time of the social, the vehicle through which progress operates, functions as a sort of channel for our social lack—and hence our social desire; it acts as a marker of the distance between our political aim and our political effects—between what we can actually create and what we aim to achieve. In order to have our desires fulfilled, we must find a way to thwart this deferral: we must supersede the time that separates us from our goals, our words from their meanings, and our actions from their desired effects. Crucially, when the subject believes that she or he is approaching the end of the narrative of history, this sort of immediacy appears increasingly possible. If a political group such as the 1960s Left thinks it is drawing closer to the goal of freedom, its members will perceive themselves to gain an increase in their ability to control events as well. Because chronological temporality is the vehicle through which our actions seem to be diffused, this diffusion will decrease as temporal distance between the social realm and the goal of freedom decreases, making the relationship between aim and effect increasingly immediate. When our desire becomes potentially fulfilled through the approach of freedom into the temporal realm, we will experience ourselves as possessing an increasing ability to render our actions more directly, to eradicate the distance and deflection that customarily affects our words 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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and meanings. Thus, the closer we are to the end of history, the more able we will feel to achieve that end. While the last men wind up with no agency at all, the second-to-last men seem to have rather more than the usual share. This joint movement toward totalization and immediacy is complicated by their mutual influence on one another, which only grows as the end of history appears to near. On the one hand, as the goal of freedom approaches and the conclusion of the narrative draws closer, meanings become increasingly unified and rendered indistinguishable from one another, producing a growing perception of totalization and closure. On the other hand, however, the approach of freedom to the present tends to lead to an increase in human agency since, as the temporal distance of desire decreases, the deflection of human effect through time lessens as well, thereby increasing our power over both action and meaning. As Arendt’s description of this process suggests, the interaction between the vectors of freedom and immediacy in this second phase creates a self-accelerating process: Truth [as conceived by Vico and Hegel was] revealed to the contemplative, backward-directed glance of the historian, who [is] able to see the process as a whole. . . . Marx, on the other hand, combined this notion of history with . . . teleological political philosophies . . . so that in his thought the “higher aims”—which according to the philosophers of history revealed themselves only to the backward glance of the historian and philosopher— could become the intended aims of political action. . . . By the same token, the age-old identification of action with making and fabricating was supplemented and perfected, as it were, through identifying the contemplative gaze of the historian with the contemplation of the model . . . that guides the craftsmen and precedes all making. . . . The danger of transforming the unknown and unknowable “higher aims” into planned and willed intentions was that meaning and meaningfulness were transformed into ends—which is what happened when Marx took the Hegelian meaning of all history—the progressive unfolding and actualization of the idea of Freedom—to be an end of human action, and when he furthermore, in accordance with tradition, viewed this ultimate “end” as the end-product of a manufacturing process.40

In Arendt’s analysis, Marx transforms the retroactive narrator’s totalization associated with the moment of narrative closure into a futureoriented, proactive drive toward the creation of this desired end. Yet, because freedom is a goal of the narrative of history, understanding freedom as a product of human action also makes the achievement of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




narrative totalization, or meaning itself, an end or outcome of human action. In Arendt’s formulation, immediacy now creates both action without deflection and totalized meaning without discrepancy. Moreover, to the extent that the outcome created by immediacy is narrative totalization, these processes have a dizzyingly synergistic effect: totalization creates an end that retroactively creates the meaning of actions, but those actions are also taken in order to create the end. And since the decrease of temporal distance from the object of desire increases immediacy, these mutually reinforcing effects will only be intensified with the passage of time. While this process might seem at first to promise a welcome increase in human agency, there is a darker side to this relationship between totalization and immediacy, which Arendt also highlights. Since the meaning of events in the narrative is ultimately bestowed by the arrival of narrative closure, each event has an underlying meaning that is not evident at the time of its unfolding. In other words, the actions of men must in this view be proleptically determined by the underlying, imperceptible drive to narrative totalization: as Arendt argues, “the very idea of history as a process suggests that in their actions men are led by something of which they are not necessarily conscious and which finds no direct expression in the action itself.”41 Similarly, in a much more recent version of this observation, Sylvianne Agacinski points out that Hegelian universal history eliminates “contingency in human affairs [since] the final end of the world gives meanings to this history of which men themselves are not yet conscious but toward which they advance.”42 This perception of underlying totalization further elucidates the counterintuitive tendency to associate the arrival of the narrative end of freedom with the eradication of the human will: through the joint operations of totalization and immediacy, we gain an increasing ability to produce effects in the world as the narrative unfolds, but those effects will necessarily be in keeping with the ultimate meaning of the narrative end. During this process, we can direct events to an unusual degree, but we will also perceive that this ability is part and parcel of an underlying narrative trajectory, which directs our action. In conclusion, then, the logic structuring temporal forms associated with the end of history can be summarized as follows: as the end of the narrative of history approaches, both totalization and immediacy increase in a synergistic fashion, each producing and intensifying the other. Because of the epistemological determination associated with this process, the end moment is perceived as one in which freedom understood as lack of determination is replaced by freedom as an end that totalizes 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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and determines the time process and ourselves as beings trapped within it. The perceived increase in immediacy and effectivity that accompanies the final moments in such narratives thus only gives us more and more of an ability to create our own subsequent unfreedom. While we need not adopt this logic, it is crucial to note that, to the extent that political forms equate the distance of freedom with a temporal remove from a satisfaction that is also a narrative endpoint, they become vulnerable to interpolation in the logical juggernaut I have been describing. And, read through the logic that links totalization, immediacy, and temporalization, such political forms will appear to place us on a metanarrative path in which our own drive to produce freedom appears eventually and inexorably to render us unfree, trapped in a homogeneous world at odds with both change and human agency. The road to freedom, it seems, arrives inevitably at static time. The Declension Narrative and the End of the 1960s In the first phase of the declension narrative of 1960s historiography, the movement toward freedom is depicted as occurring in tandem with an increase in immediacy in the way I have just related. From direct action to participatory democracy, the early civil rights movement and SDS are depicted as attempting to do away with the distance between political desire and political enactment. These “prefigurative” political actions, as Wini Breines has termed them, usually appear as a way of finding a shortcut to the future, of acting out the hoped-for new society in the present.43 For example, the Beloved Community associated with the civil rights movement both represented and enacted in miniature the society the movement wanted to create in the nation at large: “sit-ins and other assaults on segregation were not merely a means to an end. . . . They were at once means and end: the instant that black and white demonstrators sat together at a lunch counter, the counter was integrated.”44 When 1960s radicals are presented as uniting the moment of political vision with the future moment when that vision might be fulfilled, they proceed as if the temporal distance placed between those two instants on the linear timeline of modernity either had no meaning or did not exist at all—as if time might be folded or pleated to unite those two distant moments.45 As we have seen, this perceived erasure of the futurity of desire will necessarily be accompanied by a perceived increase in effective and epistemological immediacy. Indeed, these two effects are so fused to each other in these accounts that each generates the other in a chicken-andegg confusion of causality: radicals’ ability to eradicate temporal distance appears to be a sign of their unusual degree of effective immediacy, but 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




the eradication of temporal distance also seems to be what leads to that immediacy. For example, David Burner mirrors such a doubled perception when he states that “[t]he movement seemed to prove the efficacy of interjecting conscience directly into the public realm without the usual political bargains and compromises.”46 Burner’s account suggests how the first phase of 1960s radicalism blends temporal and effective immediacy: if the realization of desire can be made instant through an act of prefiguration, there will appear to be no degradation of the signal during the time it takes for transmission—no lag enforcing the distance and difference between vision and object, aim and effect.47 Given the synergistic relationship between chronological advancement, immediacy, and totalization, it is only a matter of time—in every sense—before this story of freedom takes possession of the radicals rather than the other way around. As the force of narrative totalization comes to the fore, radicals’ celebrated ability to create immediate meanings seemingly transforms into a dangerous tendency to be led by an underlying, determining process in a fashion reminiscent of Arendt’s account. As their immediacy draws them ever nearer to the end of freedom, this end appears to guide them retroactively, rendering their actions inevitable and hence no longer under their control. At first, the declension narrative of the 1960s represents this subterranean pattern as intoxicating rather than imprisoning: in Paul Berman’s account, “the tide swept forward, unstoppable, all-powerful. It was the new society coming into being. That was the source of our exhilaration.”48 However, as the declension narrative enters its second phase, this sense of inevitability swiftly becomes colored by the perception of totalization and determination. Rather than radicals being swept forward on a tide of unstoppable positive change, they are depicted as in thrall to an inexorably increasing extremism and militancy: Gitlin argues that “in all the excitement, the rush of events, the multiple paranoia and hysteria, the mad overlap of millenarian hopes, profound tensions were obscured. . . . There are moments in history when the sense of extremity takes on a life of its own.”49 This sense of overriding, unstoppable motion has so characterized 1960s histories that one reviewer has described them as possessing a “sense of causality that borders on predestination.”50 From this perspective, it seems, radicals are making history because history is making them. Because it is associated with ideological closure and political conformity, revolutionary militancy offers a perfect symptom of the growing influence of underlying totalization. Demonstrating the way immediacy and totalization become synergistically intertwined, radicals are depicted as becoming increasingly impatient and committed to 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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violent intervention at the same time as they are shown to be ever more devoted to an inflexible and single-minded revolutionary rhetoric: transformation must be immediate and total, and its effects must be unified to fit a predetermined revolutionary vision. As the positive experience of freedom gives way to its negative incarnation as narrative totalization, radicals likewise appear to be displacing a “free,” neutral, and unorganized reality in favor of a univocal and universalizing “extreme” and “militant” discourse.51 This approach is even more apparent in descriptions of the turn to Black Power—for instance, Burner’s chapter on the shift from the civil rights to the Black Power phase of African American radicalism, tellingly entitled “Killers of the Dream,” carries the unabashedly moralizing head note “Sin is Separation.”52 While this horror of separation or partiality appears at odds with the horror of a universalizing and forced conformity, the epistemological problem of fanaticism can in fact be seen to undergird both of these fears: black “totalitarian radicalism,” to borrow Burner’s phrasing, substitutes what liberals perceive as a false, totalized black community for the true, whole, uninflected and unorganized “reality” of liberal universals.53 As they seemingly fall prey to fanaticism, both black and white radicals are depicted as “los[ing] their grip on the political, social and global realities,” isolated from the “everyday realities” of the masses in whose name they acted.54 In order to describe the disjuncture between this totalized revolutionary rhetoric and the reality of America, the declension narrative relies on apocalyptic discourse.55 Historians condemn the “apocalyptic” actions of the Weather Underground and the “millenarian visions” of the Black Power movement,56 and in general they deploy the rhetoric of apocalypse to describe these final years: according to Isserman, “people felt that history was accelerating, time was running out, great issues were reaching a point of final decision.”57 While historical transmission of the apocalyptic framework is usually blamed for its continued reproduction in moments of social transformation,58 I want to suggest that the conflation of revolutionary and apocalyptic discourse arises because both draw on the logic of narrative advancement I have been describing—and the conviction that the narrative in question is reaching its end. In particular, apocalyptic discourse enables the perception that narrative totalization is imminent even when the surface meaning of events is at odds with the predicted end. Through symbolic interpretation, even events that seem to be drawing us away from the desired narrative telos can be seen as having an underlying meaning in keeping with the arrival of the end. Located within an apocalyptic story line, then, we work to establish concordance between the underlying apocalyptic narrative 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




and the mundane reality around us, locating signs of the former hidden in the latter.59 Because it locates fulfillment in the narrative key rather than the mundane world we inhabit, apocalyptic narrative produces a deep division between the experiences in our fallen present and those that unfold within the underlying narrative. Moreover, as the sense grows that narrative closure is looming, the perception of underlying totalization increases, widening the split between “superficial” events that make up reality and the underlying import of the narrative key: as each narrative register draws closer to the final, defining moment, it will as a result appear increasingly totalized, boundaried, unified in its own right. For that reason, the time of apocalypse is first and foremost the time of the cataclysm and the watershed, the crisis moment when the apocalyptic narrative of ultimate fulfillment completely eradicates and replaces the mundane narrative of everyday experience. What Norman Cohn calls the “central fantasy of revolutionary eschatology” arises from this conception of an underlying binary split between narrative levels: like many historians of apocalyptic discourse, Cohn argues that apocalyptic narrative is characterized by the idea that “tyranny . . . will become more and more outrageous and sufferings . . . more and more intolerable—until suddenly the hour will strike” when it can be overthrown and replaced by its own paradisiacal mirror opposite.60 In depictions of 1960s radicals, this polarization creates a world divided into absolute oppression and absolute resistance—what Howard Brick describes as a “Manichean vision” of a “culture of life against a culture of death.”61 America comes to be perceived as a seething hell of racism, poverty, and soulless exploitation, a locus of total domination from which nothing can or should be saved— and for which total, apocalyptic transformation is the only solution.62 As Gitlin puts it, “By the late Sixties many of us had concluded the problem wasn’t simply bad policy, but a wrongheaded social system, even a civilization. The weight of decades, or centuries, even millennia had to be thrown off overnight—because it was necessary.”63 Thus, the absolute, binary split created by the imminence of underlying narrative totalization produces a world that can only exist in two mutually exclusive versions: lack and fulfillment, dystopia and utopia, sin and salvation, election and damnation. The moment of the cataclysm operates as a form of binary repolarization, a moment when all the ones and zeroes are reversed. In apocalyptic narratives of radical politics, this division means that there is no middle ground in which freedom is partially or intermittently felt in the present. Our fallen world can offer signs of impending fulfillment but not incremental experiences of that fulfillment, since fulfillment belongs to the moment of narrative telos 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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alone. Apocalyptic discourse is thus perfectly suited to describe the perception that total freedom is just around the corner when by most indicators freedom is not increasing in the least. Believers are able to perceive through signs that they are drawing ever nearer to fulfillment, even when their lot doesn’t improve day by day to reflect that imminence.64 At any moment, apocalyptic rhetoric insists, the narrative end will arrive and the force of epistemological determination will run back along the narrative chain, revealing the true meaning of various details and excising all others from the story. And, in anticipation of this creation of consonance, the dissonant can be preemptively disregarded. This sense of an absolute split between underlying narrative and lived historical detail haunts depictions of the second phase of 1960s radicalism, in which radicals are described as gradually adopting means and espousing beliefs that, to most historians, seem bewilderingly counterproductive.65 Radicals are depicted as increasingly convinced the revolution is inevitable and imminent, even as the majority of the country is turning against militancy and radical violence. In contrasting what seem to be obviously unfounded revolutionary hopes with the actual state of America in the late 1960s, such accounts depict late 1960s militants as possessed by the specific interpretive mode encouraged by apocalyptic discourse.66 In particular, Kermode points out the “extraordinary resilience” of the historical prophecies associated with the apocalyptic form, which “can be disconfirmed without being discredited.”67 Although the passage of time may render a predication untrue from the perspective of the nonbeliever, for those inside the group, “a mistaken prediction can be attributed to an error of calculation, either in arithmetic or allegory.”68 The prophecy remains true, and a new consonance is produced from the surrounding world whenever the expected events fail to come to pass; the horsemen of the apocalypse can always be located around the next bend in the road. In this sense, the danger of apocalyptic discourse is not so much that it espouses a story that is not true, but that it espouses a story that is so very difficult to disprove. While 1960s radicals are described as initially buoyed by this interpretive power, they are eventually portrayed as falling prey to problems produced by the apocalyptic conception of agency. In general, one of the primary comforts of apocalyptic discourse is that the moment of binary transformation is fundamentally out of our hands: as Cohn points out, apocalyptic discourse is by definition “miraculous, in the sense that it is to be accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agents.”69 In contrast, revolutionaries may seek signs and symbols of the 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




impending transformation of society in the fashion of apocalyptics, but revolutionary narratives do not suggest that the radical’s only role is to await the revolution in the way that the faithful may await God’s will. Rather, in the words of a Leftist slogan that was popular during the late 1960s, “the duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution.”70 As I have argued, progressive narratives of history produce a sense of increased human agency that makes this duty seem within revolutionaries’ grasp; however, the fulfillment of social desire in apocalyptic discourse is sudden and complete, preceded by no synergistic halfway measures that intensify human potency and power in this fashion. Revolutionaries feel they must facilitate the approach of the end-time, but they have not experienced any increase in agency that would allow them to achieve this goal. For this reason, the usually reassuring perception that agency resides on the level of the apocalyptic narrative backfires when applied to revolutionary discourse, placing the advancement of freedom out of reach, in the inaccessible realm of the narrative key. The problem of locating agency in such a system structures the confused assessment of the street violence and antistate militarism adopted by some late 1960s radicals. While some historians attempt to characterize late-1960s violence as part of a movement from prefigurative to “strategic” or “instrumental” politics, others insistently point out the counterproductive nature of such violence, given that it alienated the general population without having discernible positive effect.71 The conflation of means and ends here, the inability to decide whether the violence of 1960s radicals was too direct or not direct enough, draws upon the peculiar positioning of agency associated with the split between narrative registers that occurs in apocalyptic discourse. If violent street battles presage the revolution, then taking part in those battles can be interpreted as a means of accelerating the signs of revolution, even if that provocation is not a strategic act in the sense of winning people to the cause or disempowering the enemy. Radicals can be depicted as attempting to achieve control over the arrival of the narrative end by accelerating the consumption of the narrative as a whole, struggling to bring the predestined events between themselves and freedom raining down ever more quickly.72 Yet the declension narrative’s emphasis on the historical events that contradicted these efforts makes the turn to violence appear ever more misguided and groundless—a fevered and ultimately fruitless attempt to make the revolution pull itself up by its own bootstraps. As the narrative of the 1960s arcs toward its implosive conclusion, this problem of agency comes to dominate the story. The split between underlying revolutionary destiny and the surrounding incongruent details 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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grows, leaving radicals no choice but to experience a grim awakening to their true lack of agency over the shape of society. In this story, the 1960s conclude not so much when radicals are defeated as when they finally perceive their defeat—when they realize that the future promised in the narrative key can no longer be located around the next corner. The underlying narrative level becomes, as it were, falsified by the failure of historical detail to achieve consonance, by the dissonance between the promised future and the one which came to pass.73 Most importantly, this narrative of defeat and disappointment strands Left radicals in a realm that, from their perspective, contains all the drawbacks and none of the virtues of totalization. The apocalyptic perception of a totalized war between the culture of life and the culture of death could be galvanizing when revolutionary destiny still seemed assured: the all-encompassing, totalized dominance of “the system” appeared only temporary, soon to be swept away by an equally total transformation of society. However, such visions of total oppression and total transformation take on a new, troubling cast once revolutionary expectations have died. For example, Herbert Marcuse’s depiction of postwar America as a state of “total administration” only functions as a cry to arms if the “Great Refusal” he described seems capable of displacing that state; if not, his vision of sweeping, ubiquitous domination appears not a goad to but a nullification of resistance.74 Without the equal and opposing force of underlying revolutionary destiny, there is no lever with which to shift this perception of overriding determination. Given this static future, the revolutionary phase of 1960s radical narrative associated with the Black Power movement and SDS simply has nowhere left to go. James Miller, for example, concludes the final chapter of his history of SDS, focalized in large part through Tom Hayden, with an image of Hayden simply fading into silence and from sight: “Putting down the bullhorn, he stole back into the night. He had nothing more to say.”75 In keeping with the higher costs for black militancy, accounts of the Black Power movement end with leaders’ eradication rather than their self-erasure: in an even more convincing portrayal of the criminal nature of America, these narratives peter out with leaders almost uniformly jailed or killed by their own government. Perhaps most crucially, the failure of revolutionary transformation reveals totalization to be a weapon of the enemy, not of the Left: the positive totalization of revolution destiny has failed, but the negative totalization of oppression remains intact, placing this powerful weapon in the hands of “the system” itself. Although history has not reached its “end” in terms of either its goal or its conclusion in this version, it grinds to a halt nonetheless: time may pass, but, from a Left perspective, meaningful change cannot 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




occur—from whence would it come? A binary system does not allow for halfway measures, and, in any case, where in this totalized mass of domination could such incremental resistance be lodged? For those in the grip of such perceptions, temporality still unfolds, but without palpable difference it becomes static: a time without change leading to a future where things cannot be otherwise. Instead of the anticipated imminent totalization associated with narrative fulfillment, post-1960s radicalism inherits the extended pilogue-space of static time, a realm of immanent totalization and perpetual unfreedom.76 Static Time and the Post-1960s Ends of History The narrative of 1960s radicalism thus ends in a place that is profoundly static: not only did the narrative push to freedom fail to produce genuine revolutionary agency, but it also left radicals in a world defined by totalized forces of control. And, because totalization failed as a revolutionary mechanism but succeeded as a means of oppression, it became a suspect weapon in its own right. Having learned from the narrative of the 1960s that grand plans make grand inquisitors, radicals were left in a totalized world of unopposed American capitalism much like that with which they began; the major difference was that now radicals had their own reasons for adopting a discourse of the “end of utopia,” to borrow Andreas Huyssen’s phrase.77 The legacies of this narrative conclusion persist in the central strains of the post-1960s political imagination of the academic Left, most obviously in American adoption of discourses of French poststructuralism. Given that French thinkers on the Left were profoundly influenced by France’s own experience of 1960s revolutionary impasse after the events associated with May 1968, poststructuralism’s connection to the declension narrative is not surprising. In a particularly negative account of this connection, Marshall Berman argues that it is this congruence that made French poststructuralism so attractive to America Left academics: “[Michel] Foucault offers a generation of refugees from the 1960s a world-historical alibi for the sense of passivity and helplessness that gripped so many of us in the 1970s. There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however, once we grasp the total futility of it all, at least we can relax.”78 Berman reasons that the post-1960s sense of futility and stasis offers an escape-hatch from the difficult business of political action, which both Foucault and his American counterparts required. Although it is easy to refute the more 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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polemic aspects of Berman’s assertions—certainly Foucault’s political engagement and activism are well known—his statement does highlight the way in which some aspects of poststructuralism mirror the sense of closure and impasse associated with the end of the 1960s. In a similar if less dismissive reading of L’après-Mai, the long intellectual fall-out of 1960s radicalism in France, Peter Starr argues that French theory has been haunted by what he calls “logics of failed revolt,” a set of propositions that insist that revolutionary efforts are necessarily doomed.79 What binds these different logics together is the conviction that revolutions inevitably recreate that which they oppose, so that every such effort ends in establishing yet another totalizing system, replacing one Master with another.80 In a fashion reminiscent of Niethammer, Starr argues that such readings “served as argumentative pretexts, allowing [Roland] Barthes, [Julia] Kristeva, [Hélène] Cixous, and others to construct the existing political field as an impasse in order to justify significant displacements of political energies (including a politicization of the literary text).”81 For Starr, the “tactical usefulness of [this] revolutionary double-bind” lies in its ability to absolve the thinker of engaging in political action rather than literary study.82 Yet the very existence of this link between contemporary theory and the experience of static time I have been tracing indicates that the adoption of logics of failed revolt may not be as voluntarist as arguments like Starr’s and Berman’s would suggest. As I have suggested, the narrative process linking time, totalization and immediacy straitjackets the trajectory of 1960s radicalism. This narrative offers a vision of political action that leads inexorably to a final battle that, against all expectations, was lost, leaving radicals trapped in a world in which domination is total and there seems to be no adequate ground for resistance. Moreover, as radicals find themselves facing a world in which every meaning is totalized in the shape of inescapable domination, the centrality of narrative and totalization to revolutionary politics becomes a problem in its own right: at issue is not simply that the revolution failed to come to pass but also that revolutionary discourse shares rather too many characteristics with the totalized landscape of oppression around us. Even if the revolutionaries won, their own reliance on the narrative logic of history seems a sign that they would only have replaced one totalized system with another. From this perspective, the only hope lies in finding a way to imagine political action and resistance that does not inevitably reproduce the narrative juggernaut connecting temporal progression, totalization and immediacy. And, for this reason, all the elements that contribute to the narrative logic I have been describing—totality, 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




immediacy, narrative itself—not surprisingly come to seem treacherous concepts to be avoided in their own right. Given this reading, the post-1960s ascendancy of theories of pervasive oppression and revolutionary impasse might be understood to arise less from the need for to excuse political apathy than from the seemingly watertight and inescapable logic of time and totalization itself. Moreover, for those in the grip of this logic, attempts to shift us past the impasse that Berman and Starr describe will only appear perilously and willfully naïve. Although from this vantage point we may not be able to imagine a lever that could shift the totalized world we have inherited, to pretend that this is not our world, or that revolutionary narratives can offer a better one, would require closing one’s eyes to the true extent of the problem—a potentially disastrous act of cowardice and complicity. Images of a world of total domination may not be appealing, but from this perspective such images at least provide the small consolation that one has done the ethical thing in facing the grim truth. The narrative legacies of the 1960s for the Left thus include not only the story of static time but also a deep suspicion of every story but that one. For critics in the grip of this suspicion, the sense that we have arrived at “politics out of history,” in Wendy Brown’s phrase, is a conclusion to be welcomed, even if this realization also places us in a disorienting and confusing space.83 Yet even attempts to locate the radical in the aporias of totalizing systems still belong to the ideological grouping that links temporal development, totalization and immediacy. That is, such theories don’t dispute that totalization, temporalization and immediacy operate according to the synergistic logic I have described— quite the contrary: they foreground the dangers that accompany that logic, in particular its inexorable push toward epistemological and temporal closure. Such approaches resist adopting any totalizing structures because the logic structuring temporal development, totalization, and immediacy seems so seductive, potent and ubiquitous. The attempt to thwart epistemological and temporal closure, to privilege the unconceptualized event over the diachronic determination of narrative, indicates a desire to escape or confound the logic of narrative totalization rather than the belief that such logic is illusory, impotent, or inconsequential. Jacques Derrida offers a particularly indicative version of this approach in Spectres of Marx and his follow-up essay, “Marx and Sons.” Derrida critiques what he terms Walter Benjamin’s messianism for falling into the trap of attributing a specific (religious) content to the promise of the messianic, predetermining its shape and thus diluting the justice the messianic might provide. Instead, Derrida privileges a messianic event that 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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is “necessarily undetermined, empty, [and] abstract,” and “must exceed and surprise every determinant anticipation.”84 Whether or not Derrida’s messianic truly diverges from Benjamin’s “weak messianic power” can obviously be debated—and contradictory readings of Benjamin’s notoriously dense and illusive “Theses” certainly abound.85 However, Derrida’s critique is telling in itself in that it links temporalized epistemological indeterminacy with positive social transformation (“justice” and “revolution” in Derrida’s terminology). As its affiliation with “surprise” suggests, the Derridean messianic escapes the problem of narrative totalization associated with religious and revolutionary fulfillment by deleting the narrative altogether: if we don’t know what will happen or when, there can be no narrative leading up to that event, no chance for the coalescence of meaning that shapes narrative. Although the same might be said for Benjamin’s description, Derrida goes one step further by deleting foreknowledge not only of when the messianic will occur but also of what it will be. By rendering the event free from content, the Derridean messianic breaks completely the link between future event and epistemological closure on which narrative totalization relies. We cannot produce a totalizing narrative leading to a goal if we do not know the content of the goal, since there is no meaning available for the narrative to encode. Yet, in so doing, Derrida ratifies the logic of time and totalization that presents any attempt to achieve a future political aim as inevitably creating an epistemological determination equivalent to unfreedom: he tries to impede the working of this logic, but he does not dispute it. This drive to resist totalizing universals has also been associated with the other major form of late twentieth-century political discourse on the academic Left—that of identity politics. Because the Hegelian model of history functions by engaging and subsuming differences into its own totalizing and teleological narrative, the production of identity politics operates as a key sign of the eradication of narrative totalization on the Left, resulting in a world in which “[d]ifference has turned against development,” as Osborne puts it.86 Such readings tend to position identity politics as a beneficiary and celebrant of the failure of totalization as a mode of Left politics, which in its Marxist variant is often assumed to have erased other forms of difference in favor of a falsely universalizing class identity. From this perspective, the loss of the potential for totalizing transformation is not seen as a loss per se for radicals of color, who are assumed to have been always already aligned with the breakdown of such universals.87 As Madhu Dubey argues in her analysis of the role of African Americans in postmodern theory, minorities thus function as “prized carriers of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




epistemological or cultural difference” in a way that can overlook more complex forms of historical interpolation and political affiliation.88 In particular, such readings of minorities as symbols of an antitotalizing epistemology erase the affiliation of black radicals in the 1960s with universalizing discourses of revolutionary transformation. For example, while critiques of universals are certainly commonplace in Black Power discourse,89 they exist alongside more total desires for social change both during and after the 1960s. As Marianne DeKoven argues in her analysis of 1960s black radical writing, For Fanon, as for theorists of Civil Rights and Black Power in the US context, the revolutionary decolonization movements of third world liberation would at once aim toward particular goals of the group . . . and also, at the same time, serve as harbinger or advance guard or agent of a universal, revolutionary, utopian transformation of all society worldwide. In the postmodern aftermath of these movements, the universal revolutionary agenda, taken for granted by everyone politically active in the sixties, either fell away or was repudiated as antithetical to each movement’s particularistic goals, defined by what has become identity politics, in which the metanarratives of universalism are revealed as inherently exclusionary, hierarchical, and founded on the interests of the white European male, and therefore hostile to the local, specific agendas of separate, distinct nonhegemonic groups.90

During the 1960s, black radicalism combined a particularist agenda with one for world transformation. However, after such avenues of total transformation are both foreclosed and rendered suspect by the implosive end of the 1960s, the new, universal world associated with the revolutionary future is erased as well, leaving only the local, discrete, and partial as an avenue of identification. To ignore the earlier investment in revolutionary totalization is to perceive black radicalism as somehow untouched by the declension narrative—an especially problematic assumption given that black radicals were narrated as constituting the frontline in both the hopes for total world transformation during in the 1960s and the violent eradication of those hopes by the decade’s end. To put it another way, when we read black radicalism in the 1960s solely as signaling the emergence of new post-1960s minority politics, we read it as epiphenomenal in the much the way Dubey critiques—as a byproduct of rather than a participant in the experience of revolutionary impasse associated with the end of the 1960s. If instead we displace these assumptions, it becomes possible to discern the ways in which static time haunts the discourse of identity politics, perhaps most obviously in debates over the ideological signature of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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trauma and melancholia in the 1980s and 1990s. When identity is equated with a traumatic past of historical injustice, working through or eradicating that trauma can appear to reinforce teleological narratives of historical development that are perceived to be complicit in the production of the trauma in the first place.91 As Dominick LaCapra has argued in his reading of trauma studies, “[w]hat is not theorized in this frame of reference is the possibility of working-through [painful memories] in which totalization (as well as redemption— whether putatively successful or failed) is actively resisted.”92 In other words, such theories posit that there is no way to work through the trauma that is not also a means of acceding to a totalizing narrative of historical progression. Yet this approach makes the refusal of totalization dependent on the refusal to relinquish the trauma in question, requiring that the subject hold onto pain if he or she is to resist assimilation into a falsely homogeneous futurity. This logic inscribes a vicious circle at the heart of identity politics: if the identity is predicated on past injustices, then to be healed of the effects of those injustices is in a sense to be cured of the identity itself—to be reabsorbed into liberalism’s totalizing conception of abstract citizenship.93 Once again, narrative progression is both necessary for political transformation and ineradicably tainted by its totalizing operations, leaving radicals to choose between a false, imprisoning futurity and a present defined by oppression. And, as in Derrida’s response, the turn to trauma attempts to thwart but does not actually invalidate the narrative logic linking totalization, futurity, and domination—that is, the narrative logic that produces static time. Locating a true horizon for static time—moving beyond the struggle between the narrative of freedom and the freedom from narrative— would require nullifying or superceding at least one of the fundamental assumptions linking immediacy, totalization, and futurity: for example, the equation of epistemological closure and temporal proximity or the equation of epistemological uniformity and social unfreedom. Through their very circularity and contentiousness, Left academic struggles with these issues in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated both the extreme difficulty of locating an escape from this logic and the high political stakes and intense investments that accompanied the attempt. As the chapters that follow argue in detail, feminism’s participation in and emergence from 1960s radicalism inevitably entangled it in these attempts. While historians have presented feminism as both the death knell and the primary successor of 1960s radicalism,94 I will suggest that the particular potency of feminist discourse lay in its ability to play both of these roles simultaneously: on the one hand, second-wave feminism was steeped in the logics of political progress I have been describing, while on the other, it offered a 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




new and compelling symbolic register and thus new opportunities for thinking through problems in the temporalization of politics. Despite the potency and popularity of this symbolic register, however, feminist discourse faced a Herculean task with regard to the reimagination of politics after the 1960s: given its affiliations with 1960s radicalism, feminism inherited not only the imprisoning logic of time, totalization, and immediacy that structured the three phases of 1960s narratives but also the ethical imperative to face the seemingly true extent of totalized epistemological violence that accompanies the 1960s’ conclusion. To the extent that feminist discourse wished to picture a world in which positive transformation could be imagined, it had to somehow escape this devil’s choice between the apparent truth that the world could not be changed and the criminal blindness implied in simply ignoring that truth.



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Feminism as Static Time



Part II




Heir Apparent Legacies of the 1960s in The Women’s Room and Vida Down with capitalism and the fucking military-industrial complex. KILL ALL FASCIST PIGS! You simplify too much. New ways must be found to kill pigs: out of their death new pigs spring. . . . The way is slow and hard. Those who are not with us are against us. Anyone who supports the status quo is part of the problem. THERE IS NO TIME. THE REVOLUTION IS HERE! KILL PIGS! Those who live by the sword die by the sword. THERE IS ONLY POWER! POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE POOR! WE ARE DYING BY THE SWORD NOW! —Marilyn French, The Women’s Room

T

hese statements, written in graffiti on a bathroom wall in 1968, form the center of the two-page section that begins Marilyn French’s 1977 novel The Women’s Room. Although the novel has been considered a flagship text of the women’s liberation genre and certainly provides a relentless inscription of the oppression of women, the presence of this debate in the novel’s first, emblematic scene signals its simultaneous investment in another, related set of issues: the vexed relationship between time and politics that, I argue, characterizes the end of the 1960s. In particular, the all-caps side of the argument evokes what historians have referred to as the “politics of extremity,” the late-1960s vision of an oppression so totalized that only an equally totalized and violent resistance could achieve justice.1 In this totalized and polarized political landscape, there can be no middle ground, no unmarked territory: “those who are not with us are against us.” As this debate also 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Chapter 2


makes apparent, this conviction of absolutes has a crucial temporal valence as well. To insist that “THERE IS NO TIME. THE REVOLUTION IS HERE!” and “WE ARE DYING BY THE SWORD NOW!” suggests that the current level of injustice is so extreme as to require immediate resistance, that complete revolution must and will happen “now” because it is the only possible response to complete oppression. However, as I argued in Chapter 1, once oppression is seen as so total that there is no foothold for incremental resistance within the system, revolutionaries may find themselves marooned in their own conviction of totalized and inescapable domination should the revolution fail to arrive: if the expected systemic sweep does not come to pass, radicals fall prey to a logical cul-de-sac in which eradicating the total system of oppression is as impossible as it is imperative. Yet the passage also offers something of an external perspective on this landscape: the reader views this debate about revolutionary politics through the eyes of the novel’s heroine, Mira. An older student who has just begun graduate school, Mira finds her fellow students intimidating, and she has taken refuge in the bathroom stall in order to kill time between classes out of sight; as she loiters, she examines the graffiti with a puzzled, almost ethnographic interest. While feminist politics might be expected to be identified more with the “slow and hard” measures suggested by one graffiti writer than with the revolutionary aspirant’s admonition to “kill pigs,” Mira appears equally unmoved by both sides of this argument. Instead, when she has finished reading the debate, Mira notices another scrawled statement that captures her attention in a much more visceral way: “It looked as if it had been written in blood. SOME DEATHS TAKE FOREVER, it read. She drew her breath in sharply and left the booth. It was 1968.”2 Mira’s recoil from this bit of graffiti, clearly at odds with her mild “interest” in the overtly political conversation quoted above, suggests an identification too painful to be withstood. If Mira’s death takes “forever,” then she can never die, but death seems to be the only experience referenced on the walls with which she identifies. Mira thus becomes cast in a kind of temporal catch-22 in which death, the ultimate watershed, becomes permanent and static. In light of this vision, Mira’s position in the bathroom stall, which she occupies but does not use, becomes a vivid metaphor for her situation: killing time is the only option when life feels as changeless as death. Given the abrupt reference to 1968 that concludes the passage, the graffiti debate might be included primarily as a point of contrast with women’s impotent, unchanging experience of time. This scene would thus appear to be making a familiar argument about the difference between public narratives of historical fulfillment and women’s private, static, 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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and useless experience of time.3 However, the layers of temporal strata in this passage produce a more complex picture. The reader of The Women’s Room must of necessity view this graffiti from a position of belatedness marked by considerable dramatic irony: that revolution was not in any sense of the word “HERE” in 1968 had become supremely obvious by the time The Women’s Room was published in 1977. Therefore, the graffiti evokes not only the historical urgency of the late 1960s but also the experience of static time I have suggested accompanies the aftermath of the 1960s—a temporality that for many was constituted by disproven expectation, by the static time that followed a revolution that never took place. However, as this passage makes clear, sixties-generation would-be revolutionaries had not yet caught up to this perception at the moment this scene describes; rather, it is Mira—the feminist rather than the 1960s radical—who experiences 1968 as bleak and static; it is Mira who feels herself marooned in a time in which transformation appears impossible. In that sense, Mira’s bewildered and belated temporal position as an ex-housewife and older student both prefigures and displaces the post-1960s realization that historical destiny belongs to an earlier age. Preempting 1960s radicals’ eventual sense of temporal stasis, this passage insists that, well before 1960s revolutionary politics reached its stalemate, ordinary women were already stalled. Through this introductory passage, the novel both evokes the problem of static time associated with the failure of 1960s revolutionary hopes and begins to associate that temporal experience with feminism’s own lexicon of images, narratives, and tropes. In what follows, I will argue that this exploration of static time as both a product of the 1960s and a problem for 1970s feminism marks The Women’s Room and Marge Piercy’s Vida, published in 1979.4 While Piercy and French are arguably the authors most consistently associated with the “women’s liberation novel,” both of these late-1970s novels locate more recognizable modes of white women’s liberation discourse against a backdrop of vanquished 1960s radical hopes and foreclosed temporal progression.5 While the harsh picture of women’s total oppression offered by The Women’s Room in particular has been viewed as deliberate feminist propaganda, I suggest that this imagination of perpetual and complete domination arises from the same political logic that structured the conclusion of the 1960s: the view in which domination is so sweeping that radicals can find no grounds on which to resist it, and change therefore appears foreclosed.6 Thus, I posit that the grim and relentless visions of oppression offered by these novels were literary sites of struggle with a way of viewing the world that was perceived as deathly but also tragically accurate—a struggle that marked the conclusion of the 1960s and came to permeate feminist discourse in 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


HEIR APPARENT


various ways. Ultimately, I suggest that because 1970s feminism could reconfigure this struggle by presenting the white woman as the new protagonist of politics, it was able to generate an intermittently successful but extremely problematic means of setting aside if not winning this battle against static time, offering a new narrative of historical transformation in the aftermath of the 1960s. In refiguring the blocked temporality of post-1960s politics through the ideologies of feminism, this discursive form leverages narratives of white women’s oppression in an attempt to recreate imaginative access to the future. Ghost in the Machine: Vida, Static Time, and the Dead-End of History Unlike the other 1970s novels for which she is better known, Piercy’s Vida does not focus on charting the growth of the women’s liberation movement. Rather, it oscillates between an obsessive rendering of the history of the New Left—one that contains a careful inscription of the transformations of each turn of movement politics—and of the present-day wanderings of Vida, a white woman who becomes a political fugitive after an attempt to plant a bomb in a war profiteer’s corporate headquarters. Although the novel is not a roman à clef per se, the revolutionary group to which Vida belongs, the Network, is clearly modeled on the Weather Underground, reinforcing the novel’s commitment to recounting actual New Left history. This history is embodied in particular by Vida, whose changing political positions and rhetoric reflect the evolving political mindset associated with each phase of the decade. In 1967, for example, Vida mirrors classic New Left rhetoric by insisting, “We’re making history”—history being defined “as a sense of urgency, a rush . . . to push with her whole life on what was.”7 By 1970, Vida experiences the world as a zone of completely totalized oppression and resistance that is typical of the movement of that time period, to which she can only respond with a totalization of her own efforts: Everything was empty palaver that was not about liberation, not about imperialism or racism or Third World struggles, about the war, the war, the war. If she went to the country, it was . . . for target practice. When she ran into an old friend, she could think only what skills or contacts they had that were needed. . . . Yet she had no feeling of accomplishment, because . . . every evening on television, the war was stronger, and she was closer to exhaustion. . . . [T]hey had not fought hard enough, . . . because the proof was before her every morning and every evening the war went on. It was raining blood outside whether she looked out the window 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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The focus of Vida’s every waking moment and every personal experience on resistance escalates to combat the increasing violence around her. That Vida knows the blood rains down even if she fails to look outside suggests that her sensation of apocalyptic violence has become so uniform and complete that there is no longer any way to avert her gaze from it. The hyperinstrumentality of her actions, mirroring the very instrumental rationality against which the 1960s student movement originally struggled, appears to arise from this totalization. In a closed and unified system, nothing can be superfluous or extraneous, and hallmarks of play like vacation and friendship become transformed into work against the war. While the novel suggests that Vida and her comrades instrumentalize all their actions in the hope of achieving some sort of agency in their battle against the state, this creation of a uniform meaning and direction of their every action makes their analysis appear more imprisoning than freeing. This hyperinstrumentalization culminates when Vida becomes a fugitive, a process that effectively erases any residual openness in her life: as one of her fellow fugitives puts it, “We’re only weapons now,” that is, only totally instrumentalized tools of antistate violence (Piercy 264). Through the narrative temporalities it develops, Vida suggests the end result of this structure was the eradication of a certain experience of time itself. Just as she has been unable to replace her “good” watch, for example, which stopped during a bombing action in 1973, Vida has not progressed past the 1960s in the mode of those around her (Piercy 14). However, Vida signifies not only a different chronological period but also a different temporal mode. The sections set in the contemporary moment of the novel are titled only by months and the words “The Present,” while flashback sections describing Vida’s experience within the 1960s are titled with relatively precise historical dates—“May 1970,” for example (Piercy 215). This end to historical progression applies to all the characters in the novel, but Vida figures a particular and telling relationship to this undifferentiated present. While other characters have the option of rejoining the mundane experience of the everyday, of changing to fit less cataclysmic times, Vida’s fugitive status has stranded her within her own failed conviction of “making history,” discrediting the avenue of historical destiny while barring her from finding another mode of being. Left treading water in the wake of the historical propulsion that had characterized 1960s radicalism, Vida is in effect a character who has outlived the destruction of her own narrative arc. Through Vida’s fugitive flight, the novel describes 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


or not; the blood was splattering down, and the hot wind that blew across the city smelled of ashes, of burning flesh. (Piercy 217–18)


this post-1960s experience of time as a static nontemporality that is close to death itself: crisscrossing the landscape endlessly in her attempt to avoid capture, Vida signifies spatial mobility without temporal change and stagnation without the hope of rest—a death-in-life experience that the novel foregrounds through Vida’s consistent sensation of being a “ghos[t]” and a “phantom” who haunts her nonfugitive connections (Piercy 290, 314). Given that Vida embodies the narrative of historical transformation itself, her phantom existence can be understood to metaphorize the post-1960s experience of politics after history: she is the ghost of historical destiny past, haunting a present that has not yet found a new way to imagine political change. In this way, the novel not only foregrounds chronology but also describes a change in our experience of time: the perception of a frozen, perpetual present that I term static time. While Vida’s temporal experience is linked to the overarching perception of the waning of historical agency that has often been associated with post-1960s culture,8 the novel isolates this experience, attaching it to her character alone and attenuating her connections with others. For example, Vida’s fugitive status and sense of danger isolates her within the present, in which she can take nothing “for granted except the need for vigilance” (Piercy 155). In the formless present, Vida’s primary relationship is now with the very structures of domination she began by fighting, and her fugitive status thus suggests that the perception of totalization ultimately results in a world in which the only true mode of connectivity is to “the system” itself. Vida herself refers to this constant awareness of the presence of the system as “paranoia,” and Maria Lauret has suggested that the novel as a whole functions as a “paranoid text.”9 In Lacanian terms, paranoia is a symptomatic response to the horrible and vertiginous experience of the “senseless contingency” of the symbolic order, the perception of its lack of intention and organization.10 As Slavoj Žižek puts it, a paranoid construction is not an illness, but rather “an attempt to heal ourselves” from the sickness produced by that sense of overwhelming contingency.11 Paranoia thus creates an interpretive structure in which, in Timothy Melley’s words, “everything is connected, intended and meaningful,” displacing the more disturbing perception of randomness, chaos, and disconnection.12 Despite the darkness of paranoid visions, paranoiacs prefer the conviction of underlying ideological manipulation by an outside, malevolent force to the chaos and confusion of a random universe; thus, paranoia has been read as a signature response to the dispersal of individual agency associated with the postmodern cultural terrain.13 Given this analysis, we might understand paranoia as a particular experience of totalization, in the way I have been using 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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the term. Paranoid constructions engage in an act of totalization of their own, pulling everything into their own interpretive net until they produce a universal coherent system. And more crucially, paranoid constructions often view the world as itself totalized, producing social control through the creation of epistemological unity and the erasure of difference. Read from this perspective, the post-1960s perception of totalization appears as itself a compensatory paranoid construction specifically focused on the historical and political process. Given that 1960s revolutionary narratives relied on a conviction of historical destiny, the failure of that destiny to manifest itself could be expected to produce a shocking, disabling perception of history as chaotic and contingent. By attributing an attempt to manipulate the individual to an overriding system, the paranoid perception of underlying ideological control restores meaning and intention, however sinister, to the chaos of history. In conflating Vida’s perception of pursuit and state surveillance with paranoia, the novel gestures toward this sort of dismissal of totalization, in a sense psychologizing the perception of total ideological manipulation associated with late-1960s politics—as if totalization were only in the eye of the beholder. This assessment is complicated, however, by the novel’s insistence that we look through Vida’s eyes, that we share her paranoid view, which, the novel reminds us, has considerable grounding in historical reality.14 Focalized through Vida to an almost claustrophobic degree, the novel allows the narrator and reader no information that Vida does not possess, no scenes in which she is not present. Even when distancing the reader from Vida’s misguided gender politics, the novel insists that we partake of her isolated, death-in-life experience, associating us with the ghost rather than the haunted: Vida may be a character who has outlived her narrative arc, but she is nonetheless the center of the story we are reading. And the novel ultimately verifies this story, even in its most paranoid incarnations, when Vida’s lover, Joel, is arrested and only Vida’s fugitive sixth sense keeps her from being caught in the same trap: “She could not cross; she could not enter. A strong magnetic wind blew against her. She could feel something wrong and she could not approach” (Piercy 474). This paranoid awareness of surveillance, of the “magnetic wind” of malevolent intent, may be an unpleasant mode of experiencing the world, but Joel’s capture suggests that it is a completely justified one. This perception is further ratified when Kevin, a figure who in general embodies all the misguided machismo of the politics of extremity at its height, turns out to have “bid[ed] his time” rather than selling out his old comrades and dies in a shoot-out with police in a final act of resistance (Piercy 467). In light of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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these concluding passages, we might understand the novel’s intense focalization through Vida as, in part, a way to suggest that the 1960s vision of totalization, even at its most seemingly paranoid, may be, like Kevin, “bitter and hard” but nonetheless “true” (Piercy 467). This ratification of Vida’s seemingly paranoid visions echoes the inability to move past the late-1960s totalized perceptions with which I began. When the revolution does not take place, Vida’s perception of total oppression becomes both permanent and deathly; the only option would seem to be to disavow that perception. The novel thus finds itself stuck in a logical bind in which Vida’s totalized view appears simultaneously paranoid, fatal, and absolutely accurate. This continued engagement with Vida and the Left history she represents differs from what Wendy Brown, after Walter Benjamin, has called “Left melancholia”; unlike the theorists Brown describes, the novel is fixated on the 1960s radical past not because it desires to disavow the loss of Marxist totality but rather because totalized visions of violence and resistance were both correct and a fatal mistake.15 And, because the novel does not wish to ratify but cannot discredit Vida’s analysis, she can neither be resurrected nor interred; instead, she remains the walking but unburied dead, and the text itself become stuck—frozen between two equally untenable positions. The novel works to resolve this struggle between the deathly nature and inescapable veracity of 1960s-style revolutionary discourse by subtly turning its strategy of extreme focalization against Vida and what she represents. Because the novel metaphorizes totalized politics through Vida’s fugitive experience of surveillance and pursuit, it associates the experience of a locked-down and totalized political world with a character who never stops moving—in effect conflating the field or ground of totalized domination with an extremely mobile figure. Although the ghostly presence of Vida’s character suggests that there can be no temporal progress that leaves a totalized ideological universe behind, her isolated mobility spatializes that temporal experience: as Vida wanders through the outskirts of the post-1960s world, her perceptions are associated not with a totally sweeping world system that defines the lives of all the characters, but rather with a solitary figure relegated to the fringes of contemporaneous reality. By containing and mapping Vida’s views in this way, the novel indicates that it might be possible to locate oneself outside of her analysis, if not after it. Through its focalization of the totalized vision of politics, the novel in effect attenuates and mobilizes that perception, producing the possibility that, contiguous with totalization and temporal inertia, there may exist another zone of potential openness and temporal development. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Unfolding on the margins of the text, this zone of possibility appears primarily through a temporality associated with the everyday, but it is a temporality freed from the aimlessness and apathy of most ex-radicals Vida encounters. While Vida’s Leftist husband can symbolically abandon the 1960s by asking her for a divorce, his progression only indicates that he has found a way to reembrace the incremental temporality of the everyday; the form of futurity symbolized by taking a new (and much younger) wife is quite distinct from the sweeping societal transformation that characterized radical hopes in the 1960s. In contrast, Vida’s sister, Natalie, who is a single mother and a lesbian, lives the life of a professional feminist activist in the present of the novel, the only full-time activist character in the novel who is not simultaneously a fugitive. In general, the relationship between Natalie and Vida figures as a kind of transitional space between the politics of the New Left and feminism. As Vida’s lover, Joel, remarks, Vida and Natalie “aren’t real sisters” but stepsisters: Natalie’s father and Vida’s mother married after both girls were born, and the two women have no blood relationship (Piercy 168). However, Vida insists that “nothing’s more real” than their sisterhood, affirming a connection between the two women that she later describes as a “myth made flesh”: “one blood, one life, one work” (Piercy 168, 455). Because it is the shared history and experiences of the two women that has made them “one blood,” however, their relationship is constructed and historical rather than originary or inherited. While many histories of feminism’s relationship to the New Left describe a kind of embattled divorce between the “male” movement and its female offshoot, Vida thus figures the relationship as one of constructed sisterhood: on the one hand, the shared gender of the two women and their insistence on their connection underscores the overlap between the movements, while on the other, their status as stepsisters diffuses the link and refuses any essential connection between them.16 This complex dynamic enables Natalie to be positioned as sharing, and thus carrying on, parts of the New Left at the same time that her difference from Vida and that movement offers new opportunities. Crucially, this transition from the New Left to feminism appears only on the edges of the novel itself. The novel insinuates Natalie’s feminist analyses into its version of New Left history by describing the (usually unwanted) intrusion of the women’s liberation movement into Vida’s late-1960s political landscape, both through the feminist arguments Natalie occasionally presents to her sister and by ironizing Vida’s discourse in a way that relies on the reader’s own raised consciousness—for example, the cringe-worthy moment when Vida compares Natalie’s pamphlet on rape to an attempt to politicize a toothache (Piercy 227). But 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Vida’s need for a reeducation about rape and other key feminist issues, however necessary, does not lead to the sort of sustained depiction of consciousness-raising groups or women’s shelters that would help Vida understand the importance of Natalie’s politics. Rather, Vida consistently contrasts the two sisters’ approaches to gender issues while simultaneously displacing the very approach the novel endorses, skirting Natalie and her activism in favor of its fixation on Vida. Natalie herself suggests a way to comprehend this odd marginalization in her resistance to Vida’s 1967 conviction of “making history”: “History’s a myth. A million and a half things happen in every moment. Each historian selects certain to stress. The stock market. A cholera epidemic. Wars. The changing status of women. The baby boom. The inflation rate. The rise of soybean production. The thawing of the Antarctic ice cap. . . . The War in Vietnam obsesses us, and for good reason, but a historian in the superpower of Togoland in 2067 might ignore . . . North America altogether” (Piercy 125–26). In Natalie’s conception, the sense of primacy or priority associated with the 1960s version of historical destiny is simply a “myth.” It is not just that Vida is wrong to regard their generation as the center of the historical process; rather, she is wrong in thinking the historical process can or should be unified into a single narrative with a single center. Given Natalie’s argument, we might understand the novel’s avoidance of women’s liberation history as reproducing formally the sort of dispersed and nontotalized account that Natalie describes; through its relegation of Natalie to the edges of the novel, the text positions her feminism as a kind of absent center that escapes being graphed even against the sympathetic grid of the novel itself. In contrast, the novel’s insistent focalization through Vida reproduces the claustrophobic legacy of a totalized conception of “History” with a capital H: a fully mapped discursive universe in which the entire world is locked in a grid of ideological forces and no resistance goes unseen or unpunished. Through this structural argumentation, Vida indicates that the new political life offered by feminism occurs less through the substitution of gender for other axes of analysis than through feminism’s ability to envision a new political temporality that can skirt the apparent “truth” of totalization. Through this complex formal deployment of focalized grids and marginalized alternatives, Vida both insists that the reader feel the validity of the perception of totalization and suggests that even a totalized system of oppression might paradoxically possess a margin or outer limit. Yet, as the novel implies in its final pages, the narrative transition between the New Left and the women’s liberation movement endorsed by the novel requires not only the shared gender but also the shared whiteness of its protagonists. The novel’s only central nonwhite 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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character, Cuban-American Network member Lohania, is presented as a central threat to the network throughout most of the present of the novel. Having become a heroin addict while serving time for the same crime that sent Vida on the run, Lohania finds herself at the mercy of Randy, a government infiltrator of the network who is now her only legal source of methadone, and network members suspect her of having betrayed her comrades to him (Piercy 291, 450). Although the narrative expresses considerable sympathy for Lohania’s plight, especially since it assigns a sexual motivation to Randy’s actions, it nonetheless depicts her as a problematic source of potential weakness, complicity, and betrayal. While Lohania is vindicated by her role in assisting Kevin in his final political act, even there she only proves herself “true to Kevin”: “She had thrown over whatever life she had built with bricks of pain in the intervening years to help him escape” (Piercy 467). Although Lohania “proved [herself] ultimately incorruptible” through this act, undoing her earlier characterization as a traitor, the novel can thus only imagine her politics as they manifest themselves in her relationship choices: either she betrays the revolution through her sexual activities or she stands by her man (Piercy 467).17 The novel’s location of Lohania’s political function in her relationships with men echoes the women’s liberation movement’s often problematic approach to race.18 For example, Vida suggests that her relationship with Kevin failed because they “had needed Lohania to complete their family,” since without her as intermediary they “had turned their anger and frustration . . . on each other” (Piercy 467). Although describing Lohania as necessary to the “family” renders her a part of the political nexus of the novel, it also suggests that her central political function is to serve as a kind of liaison or translator between different political spheres—exactly the sort of assumption that feminists of color critiqued in the 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back.19 Moreover, her status as an intermediary reinforces the putative indeterminacy and impurity of Lohania’s motivations, a quality symbolized by the wildcard factor of her heroin addiction. In contrast to Vida’s totalized and Manichean vision of absolute domination and to-the-death resistance, Lohania is neither in nor out, neither here nor there; even her final gesture of pure commitment indicates not the rigor of an absolute analysis but the fallibility of private love and devotion. In that sense, the novel deploys a racialized contrast between Lohania’s and Vida’s fates in order to suggest that, although totalization may be dangerous, adulteration may lead us even further astray: Natalie is Vida’s sister rather than Lohania’s, after all. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Despite its overt use of race to develop this contrast, the difference between Vida and Lohania is also diminished by the novel’s own tendency to find every outcome of 1960s radicalism equally bleak: ultimately, neither Lohania’s conflicted loyalties nor Vida’s absolute commitment present a viable alternative, since both fail to offer a future beyond the triumph of the system that 1960s revolutionaries tried to dismantle. In that sense, the novel’s deployment of Lohania foreshadows the use of the figure of the woman of color as a marker for static time that I explore in Chapter 5 in particular; although the fixation on divided loyalties provides a different means of creating static time, the sense of epistemological and temporal closure plagues both Vida and Lohania. The novel underscores the collapse of these seeming alternatives in its final pages as Vida walks the street after reading the account of Kevin’s death and Lohania’s arrest: “Muerte en Sangre Fría [Dead in Cold Blood] was playing at the local movie house. Better a death chosen than a wasted life—right, Vida?” (Piercy 468). The pointed insistence of the question at the end of the sentence, ironized through free indirect discourse, casts doubt on whether or not Vida is in fact right about her various alternatives. Rather than “dead in cold blood,” the novel positions Vida as dead while still warm, living, and breathing. The novel thus concludes by questioning the difference, temporal or otherwise, between Kevin’s death in cold blood, the “bad time” that Lohania will do in a maximum-security prison, and the afterlife of Vida’s fugitive existence; even the movie title’s appearance in Spanish evokes Lohania, suggesting that Vida’s freedom and Lohania’s imprisonment might amount to much the same thing (Piercy, 468). In that sense, the novel envisions both Lohania’s complex allegiances and Vida’s totalized perceptions as resulting in static time; from these political opposites, the novel offers the same dead end, both literally and figuratively. While Vida does suggest that there is new political life to be found in Natalie’s role as a feminist activist, the novel can only unfold its own ambivalent and partial displacement of totalization, its need to repudiate both uniformity and complexity, by leaving the details of Natalie’s politics to the reader’s imagination. Totalization = Death: Killing Time and Enduring Stasis in The Women’s Room This imagination forms the center of French’s The Women’s Room, and it results in exactly the sort of reproduction of totalization that Vida struggles to skirt. In particular, the novel’s opening passage encapsulates 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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the very possibility side-stepped by Vida: that the new politics offered by the women’s liberation movement may only reenact Vida’s devil’s choice between evils—between the 1960s’ temporal immediacy of death by the sword and the temporal perpetuity of a death that never ends. The Women’s Room explores this question of feminism’s own relationship to temporal inertia and totalization primarily through the novel’s central radical character, Val. The novel traces heroine Mira’s life from early childhood to middle age, returning again and again to the years she spent in the late 1960s as an English graduate student at Harvard; Val, also an older student, is Mira’s best friend during these years and the acknowledged center of their group of women friends. As the 1960s turn into the 1970s, Val alters in ways clearly associated with the politics of extremity: “She was agitated and more and more single-minded: the situation in Southeast Asia became more intolerable to her as the bombings were increased, American forces increased” (French 398). Running from political meeting to meeting and neglecting her schoolwork, Val attempts to increase her own instrumentality and effectiveness to meet the increase in American violence being perpetrated in Southeast Asia. This perception comes to a head a few days after the Kent State shootings, when one of Mira’s group of friends points out that authorizing the shootings had actually increased the Ohio governor’s popularity. In this moment, we can see the actual historical occurrence of the stalemate that was rendered rhetorically on the walls of Mira’s bathroom stall. In light of this blithe acceptance of a government that “kill[s] our children,” there is no longer any hope that the single-minded instrumentality of Val and those like her can match, much less disrupt, the instrumental violence of the state (French 434). At the conclusion of this passage, Val receives a call from her daughter, who is away at college, and her daughter’s voice carries through the phone to the group that has gathered to watch their protest march on the news: “‘MOMMY!’ Chris’s voice screamed. ‘I’ve been raped’” (French 437). With this statement, the section on Kent State concludes both literally and figuratively, creating a kind of sleight-of-hand substitution of radical feminist issues for New Left issues at the very moment when the New Left reaches a dead end. Indeed, in the account of the rape and its aftermath, Val transforms from a totalized New Left radical to a totalized feminist radical. She later recounts her position to Mira, saying, “[I]t became an absolute truth for me. Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are” (French 462). That Chris’s 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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rapist is African American serves as another and particularly disturbing indication of Val’s new absolutism. While Val had sympathized with the young black men waiting in police custody before the trial of her daughter’s rapist, she realizes after the trial “that such sympathy was gone in her, and that it would never return. It didn’t matter if [men] were black or white, or yellow, or anything else for that matter. It was males against females, and the war was to the death” (French 455). This repudiation of solidarity between white women and nonwhite males comes after a more complex treatment of the same topic, in which Mira experiences a moment of intense identification with Chris’s African American boyfriend, Bart. Although this discussion, and to a lesser extent Chris’s previous interracial dating experiences, might have undercut the problematic racial dynamics of the ensuing passages (though probably not), Val’s insistent rejection of the oppression of men of color excises that possibility, especially since Bart has all but disappeared from the text by the time we reach the rape scene. The point of the blackness of Chris’s assailant is precisely this eradication of identification with oppressed men, which leads to a totalizing vision of the “absolute truth” of politics: “all men are rapists and that’s all they are.” While Mira resists Val’s new totalized vision, the form of the text in general and the position of the narrator in particular ratify it. During the middle section of the book, for example, when Mira and her other housewife friends begin to realize the extent of their oppression, the narrative shifts away from its focus on Mira’s life to tell story after story of unremitting cruelty and injustice that women in Mira’s circle of friends have suffered at the hands of men. As if acknowledging the effect of this relentless repetition on the reader, the narrator comments, “And for every story I’m telling you, I’m leaving out three. For instance, I didn’t tell you all of what happened to Doris and Roger, or Paula and Brett, or Sandra and Tom, or poor Geraldine. I know, but I’m not telling. There’s no point in telling, it is all just more of the same” (French 209). Although we are saved from reading the stories themselves, the narrator leaves us in no doubt that they would only serve to amplify our sense of patriarchal domination. This sense of inescapable repetition of women’s oppression in many ways forms the fundamental reading experience of the novel, driving even as sympathetic a critic as Lauret to point out its “relentless[ness],” “reductionism,” and “simplicity.”20 In this almost ad infinitum reproduction of stories of women’s oppression, the novel enacts an artistic strategy Susan Suleiman has called “redundancy”—a polemical form of representation that replicates bad characters and bad tendencies within those characters in order to make what she calls an “authoritarian” argument about the real.21 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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In contrast to realism, which Suleiman suggests allows for a chaos and contingency that authoritarian fictions lack, authoritarian fictions represent reality in the shape of the polemical arguments associated with a preexisting political platform. Of course, many arguments could be marshaled against the conception that proper realism is identifiably less ideological or more contingent than such authoritarian fictions. In particular, feminist critics have pointed out that accusations of “unrealistic” or “reductionist” presentations in feminist novels have often been based on a very convenient notion of what constitutes a realistic depiction of male behavior.22 The narrator acknowledges this matrix of representation, redundancy, and realism in a direct address to the reader, which appears immediately after the passage in which she meditates on the fate of the suburban housewives she knew: “Do you believe any of this? It is not the stuff of fiction. It has no shape, it hasn’t the balances so important in art. You know, if one line goes this way, another must go that way. All these lines are the same. These lives are like threads that get woven into a carpet and when it’s done the weaver is surprised that the colors all blend: shades of blood, shades of tears. . . . Even the lives that don’t fit, fit” (French 209–10). In her recognition that this account lacks the “balances” so important in art, the narrator points to exactly the measure that Suleiman uses to distinguish between redundant, authoritarian fictions and true realism: in opposition to the ambiguity and complexity of realist novels, authoritarian fiction relies on an “unambiguous, dualist system of values” that paradoxically “weakens its own credibility as a representation of the real” even as it attempts to persuade.23 Yet for the narrator of The Women’s Room, the problem is not that her discourse is totalized in contrast to a more complex reality but that her reality itself is totalized—a trap that is much harder to spring. While the narrator, much like Suleiman, finds such redundancy unpleasant, distasteful, and surreal, she has no recourse to the more “ambiguous” universe of proper realism. In that sense, The Women’s Room records the thoughts of a narrator who knows she is trapped in a redundant universe, and it offers an account of her ongoing attempt to come to grips with this fact. The conventional defense of such passages is that they serve to challenge the reader’s acceptance of ideological fictions they have accepted as truth, leading them to accept the genuine and much bleaker truth that underlies them.24 While I would not dispute the serious political commitment of The Women’s Room or its insistence on the accuracy of its vision, it seems to me that such readings overlook the novel’s obsessive rehearsal of the high cost of a feminist worldview. As the narrator says about her hatred of men, “I wish it were prejudice. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Then, perhaps, I could unlearn it” (French 209). While the narrator has undergone the process of awakening associated with the feminist novel of development, she presents her own raised consciousness as something of a curse.25 What she has awoken to is a world so structured in domination that her awakening seems to her to serve no purpose: the system of oppression is so unified that resistance appears impossible. In other words, The Women’s Room depicts the process of consciousnessraising, of coming to realize the truth of women’s oppression as itself a dead end, leading to a realization the narrator would rather not have but for which there is no valid alternative. From this perspective, The Women’s Room does not so much wield its totalized vision as a canny consciousness-raising lever as use it to calculate the costs of such visions—and the problem of dislodging them when they nonetheless appear accurate. Like Left radicals at the end of the 1960s, the narrator of The Women’s Room is left pondering her options in the face of a world that is horrific and unchangeable in equal measure. Because the production of a totalized world is not only its mode of narration but also its thematic content, The Women’s Room has recourse to an internal dialogue regarding the impossibility of either avoiding or living with such totalized visions, thereby escaping the “monologic” quality Suleiman associates with authoritarian fictions.26 In particular, I want to suggest that the partial conflation of the heroine Mira and the first-person narrator works to create precisely this dialogic quality. Although we are given many clues that Mira and the narrator are one and the same person, the novel never confirms what it has hinted, and one of the central, persistent differences between the heroine and the narrator is their degree of acceptance of a totalized vision of female oppression. While Mira consistently resists the path that Val has taken, the narrator thinks she has “gone over the line, like . . . Val, and can no longer speak anything but truth” (French 502). Through this simultaneous identification and dis-identification between heroine and narrator, the novel hovers between insisting on its totalized version of reality and allowing the readers to refute it: if Mira and the narrator are the same person, then even reluctant Mira has adopted the narrator’s bleak vision, and the world within the novel has indeed been totalized. If they are not the same person, then Mira may have exited from a door that we, the readers, may flee through as well. Whether or not this exit exists becomes the central question of the novel as it progresses, and by refusing to ratify our sense of Mira and the narrator’s identity, the novel simultaneously refuses to resolve the question of this exit in a final manner—though it certainly suggests that finding this door is unlikely. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Although it refuses to settle this question decisively, The Women’s Room simultaneously suggests that finding an answer is of the utmost urgency because totalized feminist politics lead to a “death culture” in much the same way that the late-1960s politics of extremity did. Not only does Val actually wind up dying in a shoot-out with police but also when Val’s group of friends meets for the last time after her funeral, one member proposes a toast to Val, saying, “She died for truth, and she died of it. Some truths are mortal illnesses” (French 497). Another member amends this statement, asserting “All truths are mortal illness,” and, after the group toasts, the section on Val’s funeral concludes, positioning the toast as her epitaph (French 497). If not just some but all truths are mortal illness, then Val’s death figures not only absolute patriarchal power but also the selfimposed mortal illness of seeing the world in the shape of any single truth—of accepting any world view in which every event has the same meaning. Whereas Vida positioned feminism as an alternative to such visions of static time—one that might persist at the margins of the system—here feminist analysis itself becomes not simply one totalized vision but rather the fatal truth that stands in for all other fatal truths. Afterlife: Futurity and Problems of Narrative Resistance Once feminist discourse becomes a force of totalization in its own right, narrative’s own relationship to totalization becomes even more of a pressing problem for feminist novels. Of course, women novelists throughout the twentieth century struggled against the ideological closure produced by narratives such as the romance plot, seeking a means of “writing beyond the ending” of these standard plots, in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s classic formulation.27 But the task for novels like The Women’s Room and Vida is rather more difficult than that described by DuPlessis: in order to create feminist futures, for example, The Women’s Room must somehow find an alternative not only to the ideological form of the romance plot, which ends in either marriage or death, but also to the feminist consciousness-raising plot itself, which in The Women’s Room leads to an equally fixed and deathly outcome.28 From Vida’s attempt to avoid representing Natalie’s feminist politics to The Women’s Room’s meditation on the relationship between truth and totalization, these novels consistently register a fear that their own modes of analysis and representation may be totalizing—that to impose the “order” of narrative (or “history,” in Natalie’s terms) on the chaos of life is itself to transform life into a kind of death. The threat of totalization thus lies not only in the stasis of the conventional ending 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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but also in operations narrative as a whole: political totalization becomes conflated with narrative totalization, which becomes conflated with narrative itself. As I argued in Chapter 1, this concatenation is familiar from many forms of poststructuralist theory, which tend to privilege that which thwarts narrative and other forms of epistemological closure—for example, the aporetic, the paradoxical, and the unrepresentable.29 It was often just this sort of perspective that led feminist critics to favor more experimental literary forms over realism, which was perceived to intensify narrative’s pulse toward conceptual mastery. As I suggest in my reading of Vida, popular feminist novels undergo their own struggle with the limited, self-canceling choices left in the wake of static time: they are trapped between the drive for transformation and the conviction that narratives of transformation will themselves become forms of epistemological closure. In the face of this dilemma, The Women’s Room must either displace its resistance into the realm of the nonnarrative, as Vida does, or produce a narrative that seems destined to operate as a repetitive inscription of inevitable domination. In keeping with its doubled perception that feminist consciousness can be neither disproven nor endured, The Women’s Room ultimately chooses both of these options, both rejecting and pursuing the futurity of feminist narrative. While its resistance to the courtship narrative is clear from its celebration of nonmonogamous lesbian sexuality (an avenue I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 4), The Women’s Room promotes the antinarrative impulse most strongly in its depiction of Mira’s community in Cambridge, which represents the most idealized space of human interaction in the novel. For this group, the utopian moment of “dilation” when “everything opened up, anything seemed possible” exists not in the historical, chronological community actions associated with the 1960s—the Harvard strike, for example, is dismissed as “end[ing] as it began, in words”—but in the private realm of personal connection (French 492, 341). Although some of the men, most notably Mira’s and Val’s lovers, are leaders in New Left circles, the apex of this community experience happens not at a march or sit-in but at a 1970 New Year’s Eve party, when the women and men in the group begin dancing in a line: They weaved and wound, and everybody glowed with love toward everybody else, and clasped hands and felt clasped . . . and the room whirled, the green plants, the red hangings, the blue cushions, the blue and green chair, red, green, blue . . . red, the whole world was color and motion and love. . . . 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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In direct contrast to the relentless verbalization of women’s oppression that characterizes the rest of the novel—and the useless verbiage of the Harvard strike—this scene is almost wordless, the only sound the music to which the group dances and Mira’s final summary comment. In place of the redundant, invariant strands in the weaving of oppression the narrator describes above, this passage runs with colors, motion, and variety. As Val describes it afterward, “It was a vision of community. Of the possible. Of the person merged with the group, yet still separate. Of harmony. Not order” (French 391). Although Val follows up her analysis with an extended prescription for an ideal community that she admits borrows from Walden Two, Mira concludes that “such grace could not be arranged or forced or even hoped for; there was no structure capable of creating it. Val would try. . . . but it was hopeless” (French 398).30 What is especially striking about this passage is how different the vision of “possibility” proposed here is from the conviction of historical destiny that marked the 1960s sense of revolutionary possibility. Perhaps most tellingly, the group’s New Year’s Eve party happens, not on December 31, but several days later, emphasizing the way that this community exists in a time split off from public clocks and calendars. If 1960s radicalism drew its sense of possibility and futurity from a synchronized, generational historical destiny, we have arrived here at something almost exactly opposite: an untimely experience of possibility, harmony, and grace that erupts for a single moment within the vast disciplinary, totalizing order. This brief, charged experience of connectivity doesn’t degrade in quality over time, but instead persists as a “transcend[ent] . . . image” after which “they would never be quite the same” (French 398). Because of its simultaneously ephemeral and ideal qualities, this image does not belong to the ordinary flow of experience; it exists in a sense between the points on the face of the clock, a perception of possibility that takes its meaning outside of the temporalized progress narratives of modernity. In opposition to the historical agency of the New Left, The Women’s Room offers only a nonchronological vision of harmony that is both transcendent and ephemeral, both momentary and timeless.31 In direct contrast to the futurity of the 1960s, it is structurally impossible for these momentary dilations to give form to a new future and still retain their status as a positive experience, since if they are systematized they will only become 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


The group was silent in the car going home. Only Mira, midway there, suddenly said, “I think that was the most beautiful night of my life.” (French 391)


a new death-like totalization themselves. In place of the New Left’s hyperinstrumentalized attempt to reinvent progress in its own image, The Women’s Room posits the present order as nevertheless containing the possibility of momentary experiences of beauty, harmony, and community—but this is a possibility that now seems defined by its discrete nature, its inability to contribute to a future greater than itself. That such moments cannot be considered a solution to the novel’s vision of total domination is made clear through the fate of the narrator: the final sentences of the novel leave her still stuck in static time, frozen between the deathly truth of her totalized vision and “lēthē [oblivion]: the opposite of truth,” a choice for which she has found no solution (French 503). Tellingly, however, the final passage of The Women’s Room also includes a description of the success enjoyed by the narrator’s younger friends, former fellow graduate students who are now achieving success in various politicized yet upwardly mobile fields—law, academia, public television. Tellingly, the narrator envisions her future reunion with each of these characters as simultaneously a sign of feminist transformation: for example, her friend Clarissa, the TV executive, will “come flying through [the narrator’s] TV screen like Superwoman, holding in her hand a list of candidates for President, all women” (French 497). The Women’s Room thus suggests that the future represented by these younger women may someday pose an alternative to the deadly stalemate between the truth of totalization and the oblivion required to avoid that truth. At that future moment, the novel suggests, it will be safe to tell stories of female achievement, since the deadly weight of combined oppression and representation will somehow have been lifted. Relying on a kind of imaginative prolepsis, The Women’s Room works to suggest that the very fact of such female achievements will prove that this weight has been lifted: according to this chicken-and-egg logic, if the oppression of women represents unbearable and permanent totalization, then their opportunities and achievements signal openness, making narrative representation viable once again. Through such negotiations, The Women’s Room attempts to produce a mode of futurity that avoids both the reproduction of static totalization and recourse to the unrepresentable: a popular story of futurity that seems as if it could safely be told. Tellingly, the association of these options with educated upward mobility for young white women relies on much the same racialized modes of argumentation as Vida’s own struggle toward futurity. Val dies in her attempt to save Anita (the novel’s only nonwhite female character) from prison after Anita kills a man who was trying to rape her. Because Anita is African American, was raped near a university, and 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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presents herself as a student, “the major issue of [her] trial [became] whether or not Anita was educable. If she was attending school simply to find more trade, then she was a prostitute, and prostitutes can’t be raped,” according to the prosecutor (French 492–93). In declaring bitterly that “Anita Morrow was found guilty of murder on the grounds of illiteracy,” the novel thus intertwines race, rape, and narratives of upward mobility associated with educational ambitions (French 493). While this characterization is obviously intended as a politicized comment about the position of women of color vis-à-vis both male violence and class mobility, the result is that the only potential exit from oppression in the novel is depicted as expressly closed to women of color. Moreover, Anita’s association with Val’s own totalized politics and deathly fate indicates that the position of women of color serves as a kind of talisman of totalization within the novel, a sign of the absence of futurity and possibility. Although both Vida and The Women’s Room concentrate on their central character’s deathly temporal stasis rather than more marginal characters’ fulfillment and futurity, both novels thus indicate that an exit from the temporal impasse of the late 1960s might be imagined through the limited futurity of narratives of white women’s upward mobility. These fleeting visions of escape from static time offer a version in miniature of the approaches taken in 1970s popular feminist fiction at large. As I suggest in Chapter 3, novels such as The Stepford Wives elaborate and exploit an opposition between the static time of the white suburban housewife and the progressive, future-oriented time of career narratives, attempting to align all the negative properties of narrative itself with the former and all the positive properties with the latter. If we release the housewife from her life of repetitive stasis, such texts insist, we can reclaim the forward momentum of narrative propulsion with impunity. Despite the prominence of this approach, the antinarrative drive suggested by Mira’s brief experience of harmony remains a persistent avenue of exploration as well, as I argue in my analysis of Fear of Flying and Rubyfruit Jungle in Chapter 4. Both novels depict white female artists who pursue casual sexual encounters as an ideal form of antinarrative activity—a momentary, wordless conjunction that dissolves the drive to teleological development. As even the brief description perhaps makes clear, both of these strategies can only operate through disavowal of their own internal contradictions, and this persistent desire to have their narrative cake and eat it too renders their solutions partial and unstable. It is not until the turn to the multicultural pop feminist novel in the 1990s that a more resilient answer to the problem of static time is finally produced. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Dead-End Job The Stepford Wives, Domestic Labor, and the End of History Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present. . . . [T]he years no longer rise up toward heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won. —Simone de Beauvoir

A

lthough Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives (1972) possessed none of the movement credentials associated with the work of novelists like Marilyn French and Marge Piercy, it arguably generated the most widely known and lasting metaphor for second-wave feminist analysis in the popular imagination: the vision of the happy housewife as an unnatural automaton.1 Yet the decidedly mainstream Stepford Wives took obvious pains to present itself as an authentic window onto the controversial discourse of second-wave feminism: author Ira Levin included a quote from de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as an epigraph in the novel, Betty Friedan and Kate Millet are mentioned by name in it, and one of the first things we learn about the heroine, Joanna, is that both she and her husband are very interested in the women’s liberation movement.2 The producers of the 1976 film version even organized a special screening for feminist “opinion makers” in an attempt to garner their support for the film.3 The attempt was not a success, to put it mildly; the New York Times summarized the event in the headline “Feminists Recoil at Film Designed to Relate to Them.”4 While the article doesn’t go into great detail regarding the critique the women offered of the film, Friedan is quoted as calling the film a “rip off ” of the women’s movement, 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Chapter 3


suggesting that her critique relies on the distinction between authentic activist feminist politics and adulterated pop feminist discourse.5 In fact, The Stepford Wives’ view of housewifery closely echoes critiques offered a decade earlier in bestsellers by de Beauvoir and by Friedan herself, in which housewives are seen as trapped in a nightmarish life of pointless repetition. While radical activist feminism had by 1975 showed little signs of this fixation, focusing increasingly on issues like rape, domestic violence, and pornography, this understanding of the housewife persisted in the popular imagination, becoming so embedded a feature that it has even been spoofed on The Simpsons: satirizing the opening of long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives, The Simpsons’ soap begins by intoning, “Like the cleaning of the house, It Never Ends.”6 This brief phrase encapsulates not only the feminist critique of housework’s repetitive nature but also the cultural studies insight that serialized forms like the soap opera mirror the housewife’s Sisyphean life, offering her entertainment that is no more teleological or finite than her daily labors.7 While this critique of housewifery appears in The Women’s Room as well, it is only one part of the larger trajectory of its heroine’s life. In The Stepford Wives, it is housework and housewifery that take center stage. Of course, this understanding of 1970s feminism as primarily an antidote to the dreary life of the white suburban housewife is a view that has increasingly been questioned by various thinkers, especially because it tends to present the feminism of women of color as coming after white feminism.8 Yet if 1970s feminism was never as limited to white, middle-class women as some accounts assume, it becomes all the more imperative to consider how and why the vision of feminism offered by texts like The Stepford Wives came to substitute for this more complex history in the popular imagination.9 In particular, I want to argue that the prominence of this strain of popular feminism must be understood not only in terms of the often painful failures of feminist politics but also in terms of its ability to figure simultaneously the horrific nature of static time and a potential solution to that experience. Uncanny Unfreedom Despite accusations that it represented a cynical attempt to cash in on feminism’s currency, The Stepford Wives was more faithful to the feminist discourse of its day than its critics were willing accept to at the time.10 Even the seemingly outlandish image of patriarchally brainwashed women as automatons finds echoes in Mary Daly’s description of such 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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nonfeminist women as “fembots” and “puppets of papa.”11 However, these ideas and images are repackaged by both the novel and the film in a way that affects their meaning. Most crucially, through its materialization of feminist imagery, The Stepford Wives turns on the idea that the women of Stepford are literally female robots who have been physically “programmed” by patriarchy’s avatar, the genericallytermed “Men’s Association” of Stepford. While explicitly invoking what was by the early 1970s a sophisticated second-wave discourse on gender ideology and methods for raising consciousness out of that ideology, The Stepford Wives re-presents this critique through a dark fantasia of bosomy robot housewives and the rich white men who secretly build them. In other words, as Friedan’s own reference to it as a “rip off ” suggests, The Stepford Wives operates by simultaneously referencing and reinscribing “women’s lib” discourse in a much more gothic register. Fittingly enough, The Stepford Wives generates its horror-story double of women’s lib politics primarily through suggestive use of the uncanny. When heroine Joanna moves with her family from New York City to the suburb of Stepford, a certain eerie sameness suggests to her that something is rotten in the state of Stepford. While a quick glance at any heterosexual men’s magazine would seem to indicate that a patriarchal paradise would be inhabited by a variety of “fembot” types—from fluffy Playboy bunnies to whip-cracking dominatrices—the most striking feature of the Stepford women is their unremitting uniformity. Not only are they all alike in their housework obsession, soft-spoken docility and voluptuous figures, but they are also self-identical to an extreme degree, unvaryingly recounting their worries about the state of their floor wax and their husbands’ happiness and comfort. Although Joanna does find a few women to befriend who at least for a time seem to have escaped the Stepford dynamic, she is baffled and eventually truly frightened by the Stepford women’s complete conformity to gender norms and overwhelming resemblance to one another. When The Stepford Wives deploys such unremitting uniformity to raise our hackles in this fashion, it assumes its readers and viewers will recognize and react to the uncanny status of such creepy resemblance; in so doing, the novel works on our implicit understanding that things do and should differ from each other if left to themselves—and that their failure to do so indicates that we have entered a zone where the usual rules of reality have been broken. The rules that do apply, as Joanna gradually learns, are those of the ubiquitous Men’s Association, whose machinations have produced this uncanny uniformity, and Joanna’s growing awareness of their conspiracy leads to a sense of paranoia that simultaneously radicalizes her and makes 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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her doubt her sanity. In this pointed recourse to conspiracy and paranoia as metaphors for male domination and feminist critique, The Stepford Wives continues the approach familiar from cold-war films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which use conspiracy plots to express what Vivian Sobchack calls “collective anxiety about the loss of individual identity, subliminal mind-bending, or downright scientific/political brainwashing.”12 In contrast to paranoia, however, the uncanny has received little notice as a symbol for such fears regarding ideology and social control. Instead, its political valences have more often been located in questions of self-other relationships, boundary formation, the repression and return of traumatic history, and questions of national and community belonging.13 While this focus on self-other relationships tallies with Freudian definitions of the uncanny, the Lacanian reading suggests other valences as well. In Lacanian terms, the uncanny arises when the distance between the objet a and the subject is lessened, thereby threatening to undo the castration that undergirds the subject and the symbolic order, restoring a plentitude that is both longed for and apocalyptic. For this reason, Mladen Dolar argues, the uncanny double can be understood as “that mirror image in which the objet a is included”—a vision of the subject in which the negation of the objet has been negated.14 Because the loss of the objet a castrates or limits the subject in bodily boundaries, its threatened return creates a confusion between inside and outside, self and other, alien and familiar. Yet the Lacanian account suggests that castration creates a boundary between inside and out that is related specifically to the subject’s experience of his (and I use the term advisedly) relative potency and power in the world. For this reason, uncanny transgression of this limit may bring not only a confusion regarding the difference between subjects (or a subject and an object) but more particularly a confusion about the differing powers of these two subjects. Freud’s own classic examples of the uncanny—dismembered body parts that move, mirror-reflections with their own agendas, the reanimation of the dead, thoughts that appear to create material effects in the world, the evil eye—bear out this reading in that they all refer to situations in which an object has the power to act when it would ordinarily have none.15 At the conclusion of the E. T. A. Hoffman story “The Sandman,” through which Freud famously works out his theory of the uncanny, it is this confusion of animate and inanimate that sparks the haunted Nathanael’s suicidal flight: his eye is drawn to the malevolent Sandman after his fiancée, Klara, points out a “strange little grey bush” that “really seems to be striding out toward us.”16 This observation, which comes as the lovers are viewing a landscape from a tower, suggests a quintessential confusion of figure and 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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ground, with the supposedly inert ground springing to life and moving toward the figure in a fashion that is cast as inherently threatening. When Klara, in an earlier passage, reasons with Nathanael about his fears regarding the Sandman, she provides a telling assessment of such moments: the problem, she argues, is that the “malignant power” Nathanael fears must be inside him rather than out (“it must become part of us, part of our own self ”) and therefore must be one he could control if he wished. Because he cannot tell inside from outside, Nathanael also cannot distinguish active from pasive, manipulator from manipulated.17 It is this confusion regarding who or what is making things happen that allows Nathanael to attribute to the automaton Olympia thoughts that she cannot possess—thoughts that he has, in fact, thought himself and imputed to her. If the epistemological signature of the uncanny is undecidability, these examples suggest the extent to which this undecidability consistently concerns the distribution of power and control between the subject and the other. In Freud’s examples of the evil eye and so on, uncanny power is associated with the perceived presence of the supernatural—or, to argue from the opposite direction, we might say that occurrences or beings are often viewed as “supernatural” if they violate our sense of what should be inanimate and passive rather than animate and active. But this notion of the uncanny is not eradicated by rationality; instead, Terry Castle has argued, stories and images of the uncanny can be understood as a kind of “toxic side effect” of the development of the Enlightenment.18 And, as Joan Copjec points out, the uncanny double was linked in particular to the conception of individual and social freedom offered by the Enlightenment social contract: [T]he eighteenth century detached a double of the subject which it made inaccessible to annihilation; this double, unlike older notions of the immortal soul, allowed the subject to become detached from the world without becoming attached to some other-worldly principle. . . . Rather than as another principle, the Enlightenment double was conceived as nothing, nothing but the negation of the subject’s attachment to the world. This double, then, guaranteed the autonomy of the subject, its freedom from a pathetic existence in which it could be manipulated by other things, persons or traditions.19

In her opposition of the Enlightenment double’s extraworldly “autonomy” to the subject’s “pathetic” availability for “manipulation,” Copjec gestures toward the twin binaries of activity and passivity that shadow the uncanny. Lodged within the world, the subject is both active and 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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manipulated, instrumental and an instrument. Representing the subject in the “detached” zone of “freedom,” the double, on the other hand, is both free and free of effect; as a mere limit to the subject’s insertion in and manipulation of the world, the double is undetermined but by nature undetermining. While the double possesses the freedom to control his or her own actions but lacks a world in which to act, the subject has the ability to produce effects in the world but not the freedom to be the sole determinant of those actions. As I argue with regard to liberal progress narratives in Chapter 1, freedom and efficacy both require each other and are fundamentally opposed in this vision of the social. According to Copjec, the eighteenth-century fixation with the uncanny double is a symptom of cultural dis-ease with precisely this foundational opposition between freedom and agency. When the uncanny double appears in gothic fiction, for example, he or she possesses both a freedom to act that the subject lacks (usually symbolized by supernatural powers of some sort) and the ability to act in “our” world rather than the “mirror” world. At the same time, the actions of this empowered double are inevitably so disastrous for the subject—even and especially when the double carries out the subject’s unconscious wishes—that the fantasy inevitably transforms into a nightmare. The uncanny thus encodes a dangerous deformation of what is felt to be the proper relationship between domination and freedom, determination and self-determination—a deformation that is ultimately always at the expense of the subject. In its suggestion that robot doubles are being built to take the place of their originals, The Stepford Wives draws on this uncanny nexus to depict patriarchal domination as transgressing our most deep-seated understanding of the necessary balance between individual and social power. In so doing, it shifts the preexisting sexual politics of the uncanny significantly: for Freud, the uncanny reflects castration fears and thus, in Nathaneal’s specific case, “the automatic doll can be nothing else than a personification of [his] feminine attitude toward his father in infancy.”20 Theorists like Hélène Cixous have resisted this reading by refusing to allow women to remain the passive inscription of male fears of castration, asking: “what if the doll became a woman? What if she were alive?”21 Yet The Stepford Wives doesn’t do away with the automaton in favor of the living woman; instead it uses the automatized figure to emphasize the distinction between the two. As Rey Chow argues in another context, automatons can in this way serve to highlight the supposed autonomy of the individual, who in contrast appears immune to the sort of ideological manipulations figured by the automatized other.22 Rather than deploying the female automaton either as the site of the castration 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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complex for the male subject or as a new feminist subject come to life, The Stepford Wives thus uses it to figure a gendered threat to the autonomy of women in particular. If the malevolent gothic double keeps his or her own freedom from determination while robbing the subject’s ability to create effects in the world, robots or automatons such as those in The Stepford Wives thus organize these effects in a slightly different way: while the Stepford women do seem to possess something like superhuman powers—their freakish ability to scrub without rest and their perfect, seamless femininity—this increased potency arises directly from their lack of freedom, from their reflection of an outside entity that has programmed them into these unstinting labors. Moreover, rather than being programmed agents of the patriarchy they represent, the Stepford men have apparently freely chosen to remake their world in a more conservative image. Even if we might perceive Joanna’s husband’s unprofessed desire for a compliant and buxom wife as a predictable and highly unoriginal outcome of male socialization, this desire is not depicted by the novel as a form of witless, robotic fixity but rather as a choice arising from the free will of the Enlightenment subject. The automaton takes on all the negative aspects of being determined by the social order, while those who program the automaton become immune to such effects, taking on the unusual abilities to manipulate the world around them. As Chow argues, “being ‘automatized’” in an uncanny fashion “means being subjected to social exploitation whose origins are beyond one’s individual grasp.”23 The uncanny automaton therefore exists not only at the boundary between self and other but also at the boundary between autonomy and automatization; in comparison with the automaton, our own freedom from the manipulations of ideology appears enhanced. For Joanna, who is balanced between the automatization of the wives and the hyperautonomy of the husbands, the Stepford wives both symbolize the threat that patriarchal ideology makes to her perceived capacity for self-determination and provide the false reassurance that, unless and until she is physically automatized, her immunity to patriarchy’s manipulations remains intact. “The Town That Time Forgot”: Static Time, Housework, and the End of History If The Stepford Wives portrays patriarchy as possessing transgressive powers, it suggests that the effects of this power appear primarily through the manipulation of time, trapping Stepford in a kind of uncanny 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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microtemporality at odds with the world around it. When Joanna and her family arrive in Stepford, the novel draws on the classic regionalist conventions in which the city dweller explores an unfamiliar pastoral landscape. In the regionalist chronotope, the remote country locale is customarily marked as an idyllic temporal backwater—both a throwback to an earlier time and a zone where the pace of everyday life seems comparatively slow.24 However, the novel quickly indicates that there is something sinister about Stepford’s status as “The Town That Time Forgot,” as Joanna’s friend Bobbie puts it (Levin 42).25 This characterization appears in part through references to the local newspaper, the print form Benedict Anderson has argued has special potency in constituting community through time: in particular, Joanna and Bobbie have a running joke that, given the lack of change in the town, the Stepford Chronicle should really be called the Chronic Ill (Levin 34).26 In the play between “chronicle” and “chronic,” the novel indicates that in Stepford the passage of time does not produce change or even generate events that should be recorded; rather, time in Stepford is a marker of an inability to change—of a perpetual and unhealthy condition. Not only are the Stepford women seemingly throwbacks to an earlier, prefeminist moment, but they are also presented as bizarrely unchanging even within the terms of that moment. In addition to being almost indistinguishable from one another, they are also self-identical to an extreme degree, perpetually expressing themselves “pleased with detergent and floor wax, with cleaners, shampoos, and deodorants” (Levin 71). As this quotation suggests, The Stepford Wives consistently associates this experience of time without change with housework. At a fundamental level, the novel argues that the temporality of housework is by nature a form of static time. The repetitive quality of domestic labor, which presents the housewife with the same tasks over and over again, echoes the malignant and “chronic” status of the town itself—especially given that the Stepford women seem to labor perpetually, having neither leisure time nor the desire for it. Joanna is particularly astonished to learn that the women of the town labor well into the evening, cleaning their floors while the Stepford men relax over highballs at the Men’s Association clubhouse, and when Joanna sees a Stepford wife polishing a trophy with a “steady mechanical movement,” she finds herself remarking, “They never stop these Stepford Wives. . . . They work like robots all their lives” (Levin 102). The singsong quality of Joanna’s chant mirrors the perpetual motion of the Stepford women, attributing to their actions all the rhythmic compulsion of a nursery rhyme. Although the uncanny has been connected to time primarily through the idea of haunting and memory, The Stepford Wives constructs a 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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persistent link between the uncanny nature of the robot doubles and their tendency toward repetitive, unvarying motions and meanings. In its implication that something spooky and abnormal is at work when the Stepford wives cannot for a second deviate from their housework and marital obsessions, the novel gestures toward what might be called the other half of the compulsion to repeat—not the return of the seemingly unfamiliar, but what Freud calls the “daemonic” nature of such repetition and its hint that the return is somehow always beyond the subject’s control. Repetition is uncanny not only when something recurs that it is simultaneously familiar and strange to us but also when the subject’s repetition signals a lack of self-control—the creepy suggestion of an invisible force at work that has much in common with Nathanael’s “sinister power.”27 From this perspective, the “compulsion to repeat” is almost a redundant phrase, since such repetition seems both to require and display compulsion, providing a perfect encapsulation of what Rita Felski has called modernity’s tendency to “equate repetition with domination and innovation with agency and resistance.”28 A too-perfect recurrence of the same actions or events over time offers de facto evidence that the supposedly free subject has been “automatized” or “programmed” by the forces of social control; when repetition is too exact, some uncommon force or control appears to be at work. To take a more recent example, The Matrix (1999) relies on much the same set of associations when its hero learns that déjà vu functions as a sign that the evil computer conspiracy has been at work, manipulating reality to its own benefit.29 In depicting the Stepford women as prey to robotic repetition, The Stepford Wives depends on just this sort of representational strategy: it uses our visceral recoil from the uncanny to make the unjust take on all the connotations of the unnatural. And what is both unjust and unnatural, this scene suggests, is patriarchy’s ability to force the subject into the horror of time without change; through its deployment of the uncanny, The Stepford Wives suggests that the experience of time without change is, by definition, a form of horrific domination. In its critique of housework’s endless and repetitive qualities, The Stepford Wives is uncannily faithful to the popular feminist discourse from which it draws its major ideas and images. As de Beauvoir points out in the passage I have used as my epigraph, there is something distinctly Sisyphean about housework when viewed from a critical perspective.30 This key tenet of existential feminism was elaborated and further popularized for the American public in Friedan’s 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique, which includes a chapter entitled “Housework Expands to Fill the Time Available.” In case we might have missed the parallel, the novel references Friedan’s critique by name: Joanna discovers through 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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The housewives who suffer the terror of the problem that has no name are victims of this same deadly “dailyness.” As one of them told me, “I can take the real problems; it’s the endless boring days that make me desperate.” Housewives who live according to the feminine mystique do not have a personal purpose stretching into the future. But without such a purpose to evoke their full abilities, they cannot grow to self-realization. Without such a purpose, they lose the sense of who they are, for it is purpose which gives the human pattern to one’s days.31

Stuck in the same repetitive drudgery, these women trudge through the “endless boring days” that constitute static time. Yet this “deadly dailyness,” which would seem to constitute a pattern if ever there was one, still doesn’t count as a “human pattern” in Friedan’s eyes; for Friedan, human patterns require “an idea, a vision” that is used to “shap[e] a future different from [the] past”—in other words, the meaningful organization of difference over time that we usually refer to as plot.32 Rather than an ongoing plot, the “deadly dailyness” that constitutes the static time of the housewife seems to have more in common with the state that follows a plot’s conclusion. As narrative theory suggests, the achievement of narrative telos brings about a simultaneous epistemological and temporal closure; to the extent that we understand plot as the meaningful organization of events over time, events after the telos will not produce any new meaning but will merely echo ad infinitum the meaning determined by the narrative end. Given that the acceptance of a marriage proposal or exchange of vows conventionally culminated the heroine’s plot, for the housewife this echo boils down to married, married, married. In the 1980s, feminist literary critics frequently made a similar point in their critiques of the marriage plot, pointing out that the lives of female characters only possessed a trajectory until marriage, after which nothing of interest—no meaningful change, in other words—was expected to occur. But feminist literary critics who discussed the marriage plot were by and large investigating the ways that this plot constrained women authors when they attempted to narrate the lives of female characters and the ingenious and/or ambivalent ways they dealt with this impasse.33 Popular feminist theorists like Friedan, on the other hand, were talking about the static time that follows teleological 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


an old newspaper clipping that, shortly after Mystique was published, Friedan visited Stepford and “[o]ver fifty women applauded [her] as she cited the inequities and frustrations besetting the modern-day housewife” (Levin 62–63). For Friedan, central among these frustrations was the housewife’s entrapment in a life that lacked clear and important goals:

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closure as the way American middle-class white suburban women lived their lives in the 1960s and 1970s. The problem that has no name turns out to be caused by the life that has no more plot—the life stuck in the permanent epilogue space that follows the plot’s conclusion. As I illustrate in Chapter 1, this is precisely the state that is registered by end-of-history theories. These theories describe the way in which the achievement of narrative telos, far from being fulfilling, creates an ongoing and seemingly permanent uniformity that is presented as necessarily unpleasant. In particular, both the pop-feminist critique of housewifery and end-of-history theories elaborate the conviction that the tasks one performs amount to nothing if they do not lead to the ability to create a different future, as well as the belief that to live without such an ability is to sink below the level of human functionality—to lack a “human pattern” in Friedan’s words or be forced into “reanimalization” in Lutz Niethammer’s.34 Finally, and most importantly, both discourses obsessively inscribe the simultaneous emptiness and weightiness of time in this situation, the way temporal experience becomes itself an index of oppression when the passage of time does not contain this signature “human” ability to plan for and create a different future. Uncannily enough, the position of humanity after history’s end appears in each of these instances strikingly similar to that of the suburban housewife after her marriage. I have argued that the psychosocial structure of the uncanny automaton uniquely encapsulates the key features of static time: uniformity or the erasure of epistemological differences, repetition of this uniformity over time, and the perception that such a state results in a severe reduction in human freedom. I have also suggested that the use of this neat, widely understood shorthand makes feminism’s critique of women’s time translatable; it offers a means of conveying women’s oppression even if the reader or viewer doesn’t know or wouldn’t actually accept the major tenets of feminist analysis. The uncanny renders feminism comprehensible by presenting its critique as merely a variation on a freestanding social theme—the theme of a subject who has been automatized to match a uniform and permanent pattern at odds with both change and human agency. But the translatability of the uncanny works both ways: it both makes the problem of women’s time comprehensible and indicates that this problem is only a version of one with which we are already familiar. From this perspective, Friedan and others were astute in perceiving The Stepford Wives as somehow a flattening, or “rip-off,” of feminist analysis. The Stepford Wives pushes second-wave feminist discourse through the sieve of the uncanny, and what comes out the other side is, in essence, a “feminist” remake of a long-standing, highly familiar story 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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of social domination at the intersection of temporal and epistemological closure. Because of its location in this preexisting matrix, feminism’s experience with static time becomes, in a sense, generic: on the one hand, it is understandable to those who do not share feminist commitments, but on the other, it reads as merely one instance of a problem that we may expect to find in the social world at large. Popular feminism’s fixation on the housewife enabled this presentation of feminist discourse as a new incarnation of the experience of static time. To the extent that the end of history is conceived as the achievement of narrative desire—usually freedom or satisfaction, depending on the theorist—the animalistic inertia of history’s last men is the fate of humans who have had their desires satisfied but who, as a result, no longer have any direction or challenge in their lives.35 Humans after the end of history are in the position not only of having outlived their plot but also of having supposedly been fulfilled by their plot’s conclusion only to find this fulfillment strangely empty. This was much the same problem as that experienced by middle-class housewives, as defined by popular feminist theorists like Friedan. As she puts it, “Part of the strange newness of the problem [that has no name] is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. . . . It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness.”36 In her assumption that “desperate problems” on the material level foreclosed the problem that has no name, Friedan indicates that popular feminism did not focus incidentally on the white middle-class housewife; rather, it conceived of the defining mode of female oppression as something that only existed when women’s material needs were met. The aspect of 1970s pop feminism that has been more consistently critiqued than any other—its focus on women who were in many respects incredibly privileged—thus functions to direct our attention to the one thing these women didn’t have: a meaningful, positive trajectory from present to future. Thus, popular feminist analysis of the housewife conceived of gender oppression in a way that fixated our attention on the problems that arise when life outlasts the achievement of narrative fulfillment. In so doing, it distilled feminist discourse into a form that offered a close corollary for that other situation caused by the absence of narrative teleology and the presence of everything else: the problem of the end of history. Feminist critics have, of course, attended to the way in which this focus on plotlessness inveigles popular feminist discourse in a celebration of teleological time, which comes to be seen as the primary solution to 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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women’s oppression.37 This reading is underscored in the novel by the way in which both historical progression and women’s liberation are seen to exist outside of Stepford: not only is the extrasuburban world depicted as one in which women’s liberation has already made great strides but also the novel specifically associates the machinations of the Men’s Association with their attempt to eradicate any sense of Stepford’s own historical chronology. For example, the inhabitants consistently prevaricate whenever Joanna attempts to find out when exactly the town’s feminist groups disbanded, as if reinserting that moment into historical chronology will enable some sort of resistance that the Men’s Association fears. In fact, it is only when Joanna uses the library archives of the Stepford newspaper to trace out a chronology for the rise of the Men’s Association and the simultaneous disappearance of women’s liberation in the town—that is, only when she transforms the Chronic Ill back to the Chronicle—that she comes to accept that a conspiracy is at work in the town. In constructing this temporal backdrop, the novel conflates women’s liberation with progressive historical time in exactly the way that feminists have critiqued. Yet these critiques do not account for the fact that, as I have argued at length, the experience of progressive, goal-oriented historical time was felt to be in crisis after the 1960s. In fact, I am suggesting that the narrative of the plotless life of the housewife was so attractive precisely because it resonated with an experience of static time that haunted the culture at large. Moreover, by associating narrative closure with a woman who is assumed to have been excluded from public history, the popular feminist critique of housewifery allows us to imagine that, for the prefeminist woman at least, historical teleology lies in the future, not in the past. Seen from the perspective of the housewife, in other words, the experience of narrative closure associated with the end of history can also be experienced as a beginning: the life of the housewife may be one of static time, but for her, public history is the solution rather than the cause of the problem. Thus, when the last men of history are recast as last women in this fashion, the end of history becomes available for a feminist solution that, by releasing the housewife from her Sisyphean labors, seems to release and rejuvenate historical teleology itself. From this perspective, the popular feminist critique of housewifery did not so much adopt progressive teleological time as rescue it, offering a means by which progressive time could be experienced as a still viable and powerful entity.



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As my analysis of housework in The Stepford Wives suggests, it is through the trope of labor that the release of the housewife is imagined. In general, labor has a privileged connection to the problem of static time, as Marx’s own recourse to uncanny figures like the vampire and the werewolf in his description of “The Working Day” suggests.38 As Marx describes it, [A] bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere monetary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the worker’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose.39

The part of a person’s behavior that guarantees his or her freedom is the part that resides in the mind, in the “structure” raised in the “imagination”; as in the Enlightenment vision of the double, that is, freedom resides in a distanced zone of reflection—in the sense of both mirror image and thought activity. Yet the distance between the image and the outcome is not only one of kind but also one of time: the image of the worker preexists and shapes the eventual outcome, providing a meaningful “stead[y]” and “consonan[t]” organization of the time from beginning to end—a plot in miniature, in other words. Labor is the glue that holds this little plot together; by culminating in the object whose image began the journey, it makes the ending consonant with the beginning. However, without an image of our own envisioning that predates the product of our labor, we become like insects, trapped in work that does not express our will but rather expresses an inexorable pattern imposed from without. Like the Stepford women, like Friedan’s housewives who lack a human pattern, laborers without this preexisting mental image have sunk into the insect-like animality that haunts the theorists of posthistoire. For Marx, of course, capitalism eradicates the laborer’s ability to create the object that reflects his or her own vision, thereby contributing to capitalism’s reduction of labor to a rote, repetitive functionality akin 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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to animal instinct. In working within this system, the paid laborer loses freedom and increases effectivity to an uncanny degree, whether he or she performs robotic, repetitive factory work or not. In a striking contrast to this conception of work, however, The Stepford Wives instead attaches this animalistic, automatized relationship to labor to unpaid labor, as symbolized by the horror of housework, and assigns the human pattern of plot to paid labor outside the domestic sphere. Whereas theorists who analyzed the relationship between labor and time such as E. P. Thompson tend to valorize the untimed, seamless “task-oriented” labor that predated industrial capitalism and that still characterized women’s labor in the home, The Stepford Wives insists that the lack of “demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life’” that Thompson celebrates—in which “[s]ocial intercourse and labour are intermingled”—is, from the women’s perspective, a horrific, uncanny uniformity that simultaneously eradicates difference, change, and humanity.40 In keeping with this approach, the novel consistently equates Joanna’s self-possession (in the most literal sense of the term) with the temporal organization provided by the relationship between paid work and leisure: Joanna’s photography is carefully distinguished from amateur “Polaroids of the kids,” and on the fateful night when her husband joins the Men’s Association, Joanna demonstrates her independence by working on her photography rather than doing housework (Levin 37, 27–28). By contrasting this professionalism with its uncanny other of endless housework, The Stepford Wives constructs work outside the home as a guarantor of temporal differentiation: not only does work provide independence, but it supposedly “frees” time through capitalist labor practices, enforcing some hours as “leisure,” or noninstrumentalized time for the self. If domestic labor signifies static time—and the Men’s Association signifies a dark, careerist “progress” equivalent to social control—Joanna’s career seems to restore positive futurity to narratives of upward, career-oriented mobility. Because Joanna is not simply any worker but is a professional artist, the novel draws upon the connotations of this description to mark work as a zone of freedom and positive futurity. While art may also be assigned exchange value, one of its defining elements is its lack of pragmatic function; it may be exchanged, but it is often perceived as noninstrumental in and of itself.41 Because of such assumptions, The Stepford Wives can posit the labor of the professional artist as paid work that avoids the kind of hyper-instrumentality and loss of freedom Marx associated with paid labor. The novel’s deployment of its only African American character, Joanna’s acquaintance Ruthanne, relies on race to extend this version of futurity. Although she appears only briefly in its first two sections, the novel’s 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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third and last section is focalized through Ruthanne, and it is to her that Joanna reveals her Stepford self, declaring that she “doesn’t do much photography anymore” since “housework is enough for [her]” (Levin 187, 188). The final scene in the novel depicts Ruthanne asking her husband, Royal, to take care of dinner while she continues working on the children’s book she is writing. While Royal declares that he doesn’t mind, such declarations clearly place Ruthanne exactly where Joanna was at the beginning of the novel, a position thus suffused with dramatic irony: blithely convinced that her husband is enlightened and supportive, Ruthanne appears in our final glimpse of her as both unsuspecting and endangered, much like the classic horror-movie heroine directly before she is attacked by a monster only viewers know is there. On the one hand, the novel uses this African American couple to leave the reader with the eerie impression that the malevolent conspiracy is even more sweeping than originally imagined, since it includes nonwhite men. On the other hand, however, this overt and even insistent separation of the Men’s Association conspiracy into clear phases—first all the white women are replaced, then the African American women—relies on an integration narrative to continue its re-creation of historical progression. Just as the suburbs are represented as becoming gradually and marginally more integrated, the Men’s Association’s malevolent machinations become marginally integrated as well, sharing both upward mobility and misogyny across races. Conversely, though, this production of narrative phases suggests that, much as the American promise is imagined to gradually include more and more of the country’s citizens, the white women’s liberation movement’s potential for promoting futurity will come to work across races as well, moving forward not only in terms of progress but also in terms of sweep. Just as Ruthanne becomes a victim of the problem represented by the conspiracy, she becomes available for the putative solution offered by feminist futurity. The Stepford Wives ultimately deploys even its totalizing and horrific depictions of female self-abnegation as a counterintuitive marker of this sort of feminist progression. In the novel’s final scene, Joanna has apparently become the same sort of slave-wife automaton as the other women in the town—a conclusion that would seem to match The Women’s Room in its grim vision of inescapable patriarchal ideology. Yet if the Stepford women are in fact robot doubles of their feminist originals in the way we are encouraged to believe, the text must be understood to deploy its own uncanny metaphor to contradict implicitly the disturbing image of female self-abnegation on which it lavishes so much attention. By suggesting that Joanna has literally been replaced with a programmed robot-wife, the novel provides a way to keep 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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the automatized figure separate from and other to the subject in much the way Chow describes, reassuring us that the women who are not robots are actually free. Provided that we get women out of Stepford— which for the novel clearly requires extracting the housewife from the house—we will free ourselves from the conjunction of temporal stasis and ideological closure that characterizes both housework specifically and Stepford in general. In particular, the association of static time with the housewife tends to collapse the problem of narrative closure into the problem of narrative telos: whereas novels like The Women’s Room saw any system as imprisoning, even that of narrative, The Stepford Wives suggests that the problem with narrative lies only in the stasis that arrives with its conclusion. Once every negative effect of narrativity becomes conflated with the plotless life of the housewife in this fashion, teleological narrative appears safe again, purged of its own associations with totalization and stasis. While the life of the housewife perfectly metaphorizes the experience of life after plot, she can thus also be conceived as existing in the space before plot, before her entry into the public time of the workplace. The liberated woman seems a belated participant in the shared version of public time that is already in progress, but it is precisely her exit from the house that rejuvenates public time, giving us a new protagonist who has not already reached public history’s static end. Through its gendered metaphors, the novel indicates that static time can be held at bay, and historical development reclaimed, if we can liberate the Stepford wives



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Promiscuous Times Rubyfruit Jungle, Fear of Flying, and the Desire for the Event

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have argued in my reading of The Stepford Wives that the conception of the housewife trapped in repetitive labor offered a particularly rich ground for the imagination of static time. Because the housewife seemed to lack plot and progression above all else, the negative aspects of her situation could be associated with the absence of narrative, and her release into the historical time could be experienced as a movement toward freedom rather than ideological closure. Her liberation promised a rejuvenation of public narratives of historical progression, which from the perspective of the housewife represented motion and fulfillment rather than the stasis and impasse that had come to be associated with narrative totalization. Yet this was a vexed strategy because stories of the achievement-oriented female artist—the ultimate liberated woman according to The Stepford Wives—were not truly immune to the totalizing operations of narrative. In what follows, I argue that Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), two of the most well-known popular feminist novels of the 1970s, explore precisely this problem through their depiction of aspiring female artist heroines. This exploration unfolds on the formal level through the novels’ adoption of the picaresque genre, which thwarts narrative teleology, and on the level of content through an exploration of promiscuous sexual behavior. Although both novels associate romantic commitment with the sort of narrative closure that The Stepford Wives depicts so vividly, they don’t work toward a remade, feminist world that would allow them a life of public, progressive futurity. Instead, they seek access to that which escapes narrative coherence—a phenomenon they associate with the fleeting experiences of sexual intensity. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Chapter 4


This response, I argue, arises from much the same reasoning that fueled the turn to the event in poststructuralist theory, particularly the work of Jean-François Lyotard. For Lyotard, power works by channeling the momentary, immediate, and unspeakable event into stable, abstract, and conceptualized units; as he puts it in a particularly bald encapsulation, “idea-force is fascism.”1 As I will argue, for Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying, sexual desire serves as a marker of a similar understanding of the epistemological operations of power and a desire to escape those operations—to thwart a system of conceptualization and representation that shapes and hence controls every experience. For poststructuralist thinkers, of course, this task is particularly fraught with difficulty, since the desire for pure, immediate experience must itself be viewed as an ideological fantasy constructed by such systems of representation. Yet, as I will suggest later in this chapter, this ethical critique of the metaphysics of presence exists alongside an equally ethical and equally persistent desire to locate some realm, however vanishingly small or impossibly paradoxical, in which the powers of representation have not already closed down all sense of political possibility. It is this desire, I want to suggest, that Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying inscribe through their search for sexual liberation for women. The concept of sexuality as a zone of authentic experience that must be liberated from its repression by society has been thoroughly debunked from within the discourse of poststructuralism by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Volume One, which was originally published just a few years after Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying. In their insistence that improved access to sexual pleasure for women is the signal value of feminism, Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying not only echo the easy equation of sexual openness with liberation that Foucault critiqued but also fall prey to the assumption that there is an originary sexual experience to be reclaimed from the powers of disciplinary control.2 However, in their paradoxical struggle to represent sexual experience while thwarting the oppressive powers of the representational regime, these novels also echo key elements of Foucault’s critique. For Foucault, the “repression hypothesis” specifically concerns the relentless production of discourse around bodies and pleasures; he famously argues that the injunction to liberate or speak the truth of our sexuality actually functions as a crucial mechanism of individuation and control.3 In keeping with this insight, Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying experience the representation of sexuality as a means of domination, and they are constantly struggling with the knowledge that their own representational mechanisms contribute to this process of control. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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In making this comparison, my point is not that these novels should be considered part of poststructuralist discourse—an argument that would be very difficult to uphold. Instead, I want to suggest that the tension between narrative and event in Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying serves as an indication that the conflation of representation with domination was a widespread cultural response to the problems of time and totalization that arose after the 1960s—a response expressed but not exhausted by poststructuralist models. In other words, while it might be fair to say that Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying metaphorized what we usually understand as a poststructuralist critique of representation for a popular audience, it might be equally accurate to say that poststructuralism metaphorized those concerns for an academic audience. Moreover, in celebrating the event as an alternative to idea-force, Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying find themselves caught in a temporal dilemma much like that which haunts poststructuralist theory. These novels begin by resisting narrative development as a form of closure and stasis, but their emphasis on the untrammeled event traps them in a perpetual present that is itself a bar to transformation. In their celebration of the event, these novels adopt a form of a resistance that ends by reproducing static time. Serial Forms: Don Juan, Libertinage, and the Event Fear of Flying and Rubyfruit Jungle occupy a similar place in the pantheon of 1970s feminist fiction. Both are well known as popular novels of feminist consciousness: Fear of Flying in particular has been characterized as the best-selling women’s lib novel of the 1970s.4 Both are comic, avoiding the grim realism of Marge Piercy and Marilyn French in favor of a romp through the outlandish, ribald adventures of their iconoclastic heroines. In their exploration of female promiscuity, these novels seemed to some critics to fit all too easily into the 1970s media effort to domesticate women’s liberation by presenting it as merely a titillating increase in women’s sexual availability. Fear of Flying in particular often reads as determinedly outrageous, as if the book has been written to “pim[p] . . . for its author,” as heroine Isadora Wing puts it when describing her own literary efforts.5 Although Rubyfruit Jungle is much less sexually explicit, heroine Molly Bolt’s lesbianism was enough to make the novel seem defined by its sexual content for some. Even the echo of Ulysses’ Molly Bloom in the name Molly Bolt foregrounds the issue of sexually active female characters, substituting the provocatively phallic associations of “Bolt” for the romantic, passive connotations of “Bloom.” 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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In both novels, this search for freedom, sexual and otherwise, does not unite these heroines with other women but rather renders them exceptional; unlike bestsellers more frequently associated with the women’s liberation movement, neither of these novels is concerned with community. The barriers to achievement for Isadora and Molly may be structural, but their resistance is purely individual. Because of this tendency, feminist literary critics have often condemned these novels, viewing them as narcissistic, self-centered, and even selfish.6 While the individualism of these novels is not in keeping with ideals of feminist community, it is in keeping with another, perhaps equally feminist project undertaken by both novels: a regendering of the American picaresque that transforms its hero into a heroine. Conventionally, the picaresque novel centers on a rogue or delinquent outsider who has been ejected, usually unfairly, from his original home. While the picaro displays his protean nature by undergoing various transformations and masquerades in the service of various masters during his travels, these transformations have little in common with the sort of developmental character arc that we expect from the bildungsroman or künstlerroman.7 As Ulrich Wicks points out, the rhythm of the picaresque is not consecutive because causality holds only within each episode, not among the episodes that constitute the narrative as a whole.8 Given the lack of causal relationships between episodes, the chronotope of the picaresque is one of rapid transformation and continuous spatial movement but explicitly not one of development or progression over time. In Bakhtinian terms, the picaresque produces a chronotope in which spatial movement completely dominates over temporal development; as Bakhtin suggests, the implied lack of transformation at work in these narratives inevitably characterizes the sort of adventure novels with which the picaresque is affiliated: “This most abstract of all chronotopes is also the most static. . . . In it there is no potential for evolution, for growth, for change. As a result of the action described in the novel, nothing in its world is destroyed, remade, changed or created anew. What we get is a mere affirmation of the identity between what had been at the beginning and what is at the end. Adventure-time leaves no trace.”9 As other critics have observed, both Fear of Flying and Rubyfruit Jungle reflect these classic qualities of the picaresque form, most obviously through their valorization of geographical motion: as their last names make clear, Molly Bolt and Isadora Wing are both characters who are constantly on the move.10 Despite its title, Fear of Flying in fact begins on a plane, and it supplies a travelogue-style story of a heroine who never stops moving and whose travels, she insists, have neither teleology nor 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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plan. Similarly, while many critics have conceived of Rubyfruit Jungle as a failed bildungsroman or künstlerroman, the characterization of Molly Bolt places the novel squarely within the picaresque as well.11 In the fashion of a classic picara, heroine Molly is a bastard and an orphan, a perpetual outsider who suffers continual rejection by those around her such that most episodes in the novel end with her dismissal from whatever position inside polite society that she has briefly occupied. Moreover, Molly appears to the reader fully formed and alters little through her journeys, despite the negative reinforcement of continual rejection and the ease with which she briefly takes on various roles (for example, star student, homeless person, cocktail waitress, book editor). In traditional picaresque style, the very plasticity of Molly’s social roles suggests that none of them goes deep enough to signal genuine transformation; although she changes her place in society as easily as she changes clothes, what lies underneath remains inert and intact. In discussions of the traditional picaresque, this tendency toward character inertia has been read as a form of failed transformation, resulting in what Wicks has called a “Sisyphus rhythm” in picaresque texts.12 In a passage that echoes Simone de Beauvoir’s description of the housewife, Wicks references the Sisyphus myth as a comment on what he perceives as the ultimately despairing and impotent nature of effort in the picaresque form.13 Extending this sort of evaluation, Claudio Guillén argues that, because the only changes that the picaresque allows are those that don’t have permanent consequences, to the social order or the social individual, this genre is “formally open, so to speak, but ideologically closed.”14 However, there is serious disagreement regarding whether such ideological openness is to be found in temporal progression or in the lack thereof—whether stasis should be read as a form of oppression or resistance. For example, James Mandrell argues that Rubyfruit Jungle’s picaresque form is politically retrograde because by nature the picaresque cannot allow its heroine or her world to transform in an ameliorative fashion.15 Arguing from precisely the opposite perspective, Robert Butler reads Fear of Flying as Emersonian in its resistance to teleological development and its penchant for the “open journey.” He suggests that, in contrast to the European tradition, the American picaresque has tended to “equate placement with stagnation and open movement with new possibility.”16 Such “open journeying,” Butler argues, signals an ideological openness associated with an “ongoing process of becoming rather than a completed state of being,” making “movement in American literature . . . aggressively non-teleological.”17 Determining the ideological signature of the 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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picaresque genre, in other words, depends on whether we perceive narrative progression as a vehicle for development or for domination. As these debates suggest, the picaresque offers an especially suitable vehicle for exploring the political possibilities and problems of the antiteleological impulse. In classic feminist fashion, both Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying establish the problems of narrative teleology through their critique of romantic fidelity, which comes to be associated with stagnation in much the way Butler describes. For Isadora, who has been married for five years when the novel opens, marriage has not proven a barrier to having an artistic career; in fact, her husband’s financial support has allowed her to write and publish a book of poems. But Isadora still chafes against her relationship because of “those other longings which marriage stifled,” especially “longings to hit the open road” and to pursue her desires for other men (Jong 10). Molly expresses a similar resistance to lesbian monogamy, which she perceives as equally stifling and constricting: “That’s all I think I ever wanted, to go my own way and maybe find some love here and there. Love, but not the now and forever kind with chains around your vagina and a short circuit in your brain. I’d rather be alone.”18 Whereas homosexuality has been linked to stasis through its association with sameness and the narrative middle, Rubyfruit Jungle associates any telos, whether hetero- or homo-, with stasis and attempts to embrace the narrative middle as a place of constant, unfettered sexual exchange.19 Rather than presenting lesbian sexuality as the solution to the feminist narrative dilemma, then, Rubyfruit Jungle suggests that lesbian monogamy presents much the same problem of closure as that produced by heterosexual marriage. In their attempts to escape this perception of closure, both novels evoke classic narratives of promiscuity, particularly those associated with libertinage and the story of Don Juan—a debt that Fear of Flying acknowledges with an epigraph from Lord Byron’s Don Juan.20 As Shoshana Felman argues in her analysis of Molière’s Don Juan, “If every marriage is, of course, a promise, every promise is to a certain extent a promise of marriage—to the extent that every promise promises constancy above all, that is, promises consistency, continuity in time between the act of commitment and the future action.”21 Because marriage signals both the production of continuity and the giving of oneself to another, it perfectly metaphorizes the negative experience of narrative totalization, in which uniformity and the lack of freedom coincide. As a figure for constancy, romantic faithfulness is, from the Don Juanian perspective, “tantamount to an acceptance of the end, of death, whereas ‘falling in love’ . . . constitutes precisely a new birth.”22 In his flight from death, the ultimate figure of stasis, Don Juan 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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continually breaks his promises of fidelity, allowing him to begin and hence be reborn over and over again with an endless series of women. As Felman puts it, “The breach or break is, in reality, the structuring principle of the Don Juan myth” because “Don Juan is the one who does not stay . . . both in the spatial sense of remaining in one place, staying at home, inhabiting a place, and in the temporal sense of lasting, enduring, staying the course.”23 Because nothing is allowed to endure or develop and no cumulative relationship between events is produced, Don Juan’s narrative is necessarily episodic. There is a narrative sequence of sorts in Don Juan’s travels, but it is aggressively nonteleological: no romance builds to anything, since none lasts and each begins precisely where the previous one did—with Don Juan facing a new, captivating object of desire, whom he will soon leave behind. This serial structure is intensified by the operation of desire itself: as Jan Kott describes in his analysis of the theatrical structure of the Don Juan story, “[f]ulfilled desires are dead,” and hence “[d]esire always exists in the present, it does not acknowledge the past; once satiated, it passes into oblivion.”24 Because Don Juan moves from desire to desire, never occupying a position outside of it from which one would mourn its passing, he occupies a constantly renewed present in which no trace of the past is allowed to penetrate. Søren Kierkegaard argues that this affinity for “disappearance in time” means that Don Juan cannot even technically be considered a seducer, since “[h]e lacks the time to be a seducer, the time beforehand in which to lay his plan and the time afterward in which to become conscious of his act”; rather than any best-laid plans or shrewd machinations, Don Juan “needs no preparation, no plan, no time . . . he is always ready.”25 As Julia Kristeva puts it, Don Juan “is able to”; he overleaps the temporal gap that usually exists between wish and satisfaction, desire and completion.26 Cut off from narratives of either anticipation or recovery, Don Juan exists in a perpetual narrative present in which events are neither extended nor cumulative. What the picaresque supplies on the level of form, then, promiscuity supplies on the level of content: a fixation on seriality as that which evades the duration or cumulative properties required for narrative development. This characterization of promiscuity is particularly clear in the narrative analysis of the eighteenth-century libertinage, which defines it as “the enactment in writing of . . . affairs with no tomorrow.”27 In Fear of Flying, heroine Isadora pursues this escape from narrative teleology through her affair with Adrian, the man for whom she leaves her husband, Bennett. Although Isadora’s movement forward in time with Adrian would seem to undermine his utility as a hedge against 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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romantic constancy, Adrian continues to figure temporal immediacy through his connection to what he terms existentialism (though its connection to actual existentialism is certainly debatable). As Butler argues, Adrian personifies the picaresque “open journey” that Isadora desires: he insists that their trip together be an existential adventure in which, as Isadora puts it, it is “forbidden . . . to inquire what we would do tomorrow. Existentialists were not supposed to mention the word ‘tomorrow.’ It was to be banished from our vocabulary. We were forbidden to talk about the future or to act as if the future existed. The future did not exist” (Jong 177).28 Because he wrenches their affair outside the confines of a teleological relationship time—that is, the time of planning, commitment, and determined futures—Adrian remains a figure for the “affair with no tomorrow” despite the length of Isadora’s involvement with him. In so doing, Adrian seems to fit perfectly with Isadora’s long-standing fantasy of the “zipless fuck”—a phrase that became almost synonymous with the novel in the 1970s. According to Isadora, “The zipless fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff ” (Jong 11). Moreover, “[f]or the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never get to know the man very well,” so “another condition for the zipless fuck was brevity. And anonymity made it even better” (Jong 11). What Isadora finds most compelling about the zipless fuck is its untrammeled, present-tense immediacy: like the eighteenth-century libertines, she pursues the ultimate sexual “moment,” which Catherine Cusset defines as “a point in time when circumstances suddenly make you oblivious to any other reality but physical pleasure.”29 As in Don Juan’s seductions, the zipless fuck doesn’t have time to become anything else, since there is no extended buildup until clothes are removed, no troublesome aftermath in which consequences unfold.30 To extend the zipless fuck in time in this way would be to eradicate it, to violate its conditions of existence. Thus, the zipless fuck allows no time for reflection, in both senses: there is no thought about what is happening as it is happening and also no representing and hence categorizing the event in terms of existing narratives of sexual experience. As Isadora puts it, “there is no talk of her late husband or of his fiancée . . . because there is no talk at all. The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. . . . No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is” (Jong 14, emphasis in original). If, as Isadora declares elsewhere, “[a]ny system is a straightjacket,” then the zipless fuck is that which, by definition, cannot be systematized; it resists being captured 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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as knowledge, conceptualized, or incorporated into any regime of representation (Jong 128). As Cusset argues, it is this longing for the anticonceptual that renders libertinage of continuing interest in the late twentieth century: “[i]f our time implies a will to control systematically all representations,” she suggests, “libertinage is precisely that which escapes this control.”31 In the contemporary landscape, this resistance to conceptualization is perhaps most familiar from poststructuralist theory associated with the event. As Lyotard explains, the event arises from a particular experience of the present: “Because it is absolute, the presenting present cannot be grasped: it is not yet or no longer present. It is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event.”32 Because of this paradoxical quality, the presenting present “cannot be synthesized directly with other presents. The other presents with which it can be placed in relation are necessarily and immediately changed into presented presents, i.e., past.”33 As Lyotard’s emphasis on “presented presents” suggests, the transformation of the event into its opposite is linked not only to its extension in time but also to its re-presentation. As Bill Readings puts it, “the time of the event marks a figural incommensurability: that between eventhood and the meaning or signification of an event.”34 Lyotard himself presents this resistance as a defining one for poststructuralist theory: despite their differences, “Derrida’s problematic of deconstruction and différance and Deleuze’s principle of nomadism belong to this [event-centered] approach to time. In it, time remains uncontrolled, does not give rise to work.”35 Thus, the importance of the event is that it does not put its substance in the service of anything other than itself, that it occupies the vanishing instant between the presenting present and its signification. There is no way for narrative to offer this experience, since the event would, of course, be destroyed by its representation, but narrative can inscribe the yearning for such an event and its distinction from the narrative process itself. For example, in many versions of the Don Juan story, the distinction between the event-full life of Don Juan and the second-order life of representation is underscored by the appearance of a ghost or statue that proves to be Don Juan’s nemesis. This seemingly abrupt and incongruous recourse to the fantastic makes sense because the ghost is of necessity the quintessential enemy for Don Juan: as Kierkegaard argues, “[a] spirit, an apparition, is reproduction. . . . Don Juan is capable of everything, can withstand everything, except the reproduction for life, precisely because he is immediate, sensate life.”36 Similarly, Adrian can retain a zipless, event-like quality for Isadora because 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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he personifies the gap between immediate, sensate life and the realm of the concept in all of its forms. As he puts it, “When you finally do sit down to write about me, you won’t know whether I’m a hero or an anti-hero, a bastard or a saint. You won’t be able to categorize me” (Jong 90). In Rubyfruit Jungle, this resistance to representation renders even the dynamics of sexual fantasy suspect. As Mandrell points out, the novel creates a telling opposition between role-playing Polina and Paul, heterosexual lovers with whom Molly becomes briefly involved, and Molly’s own sexual proclivities. When Polina and Molly first have sex, Molly is horrified to learn that Polina wants them to act out a fantasy in which they are two men tricking in a bathroom. Instead of celebrating the brief, zipless nature of the imaginary encounter, Molly instead is horrified by Polina’s desire to engage in fantasizing during sex. When Polina asks how she can “make love without a fantasy,” Molly replies, “I’m sorry but I just like to make love. . . . You wouldn’t have to say a word” (Brown 203). Polina’s fantasy-ridden sexuality is contrasted with that of her daughter, who, Molly soon learns, “hadn’t one sexual quirk in her mind. She loved being touched and she loved touching back. . . . She was there, all there with no hang-ups, no stories to tell, just herself ” (Brown 210). As Mandrell argues in his astute reading of these passages, Rubyfruit thus conceives of fabulation as by nature a kind of perversion: as exemplified by the fantasies that Polina wants to share, storytelling appears here as a kind of immoral, transgressive distortion of the pure immediacy of sexual experience.37 For Molly, the problem with representation is so overriding that even fantasies of anonymous, casual encounters become themselves tainted by their status as stories. For both novels, this resistance to representation means that their own status as narratives comes to be something of an embarrassment. Isadora negotiates this fact by continually insisting that she knows and laments the difference between her own incessant storytelling and the raw life she craves. For example, after telling Adrian about her previous relationships, she meditates on the necessarily limited nature of her account: I knew that the way I described [my past relationships] was a betrayal of their complexity, their humanity, their confusion. Life has no plot. It is far more interesting than anything you can say about it because language, by its very nature, orders things and life really has no order. Even those writers who respect the beautiful anarchy of life and try to get it all into their books wind up making it seem much more ordered than it ever was and do not, finally, tell the truth. Because no writer can ever tell the truth about life, namely that it is much more interesting than any book. (Jong 184) 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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In her insistence that any language operates as an ordering device, imposing the straitjacket of “plot” on the “beautiful anarchy of life,” Isadora indicates that the resistance to representation must be complete, that any conceptualization of her experience will transgress it. Through a similar desire to thwart representation’s perverting effects, Molly subsumes her desire to make films into the myth of documentary realism, which presents the camera as a transparent medium for the transmission of experience. For example, when she makes her thesis film, a documentary about her adoptive mother, Carrie, Molly reassures Carrie that Carrie won’t need to act at all, since Molly’s movie is “No play. . . . All I want you to do is to talk to me while I film you” (Brown 226). In Molly’s view, this approach distinguishes her “real movies about real people and about the way the shit comes down” from those of her (male) film-school comrades, which, in one memorable example, record an extended gang rape on an alien planet (Brown 174). Such films encapsulate what for Molly are the characteristic features of representation: fabulation, perversion, and misogyny. In both cases, these novels struggle with what Readings calls the “figural incommensurability” between the event and any signification of it, aiming for an immediacy of experience that their own representational technologies always already destroy.38 “Nothing Is More Constant than Inconstancy Itself ”: Seriality and Static Time As we saw in the example of Don Juan’s serial seductions and Isadora’s fantasy of the zipless fuck, the event escapes conceptualization through its temporal immediacy: it doesn’t last long enough to become anything other than itself, and thus it cannot be either conceptualized or incorporated into a developing narrative sequence. Yet, to say that events cannot become other than they are is ultimately another way of saying that events cannot either change or contribute to change. At the heart of this most fleeting of entities, in other words, we find a strange intransigence. This intransigence is clearly thematized in Don Juan’s story through the Don’s blithe persistence in his chosen way of life despite the anger, outrage, and even violence his activities inspire in those around him. Don Juan continually changes partners, but the very perpetuity of this process indicates his profound and unshakeable self-consistency: he is always going about the business of seduction, which he repeats in much the same way over and over again. Thus, while Don Juan’s relationships with women may be fleeting, his experience of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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himself as a perpetual seducer is not. Romantic fidelity is the one thing that Don Juan abhors, but his unremitting abhorrence of this trait ends by rendering him self-consistent in another way. As Wicks puts it in his description of the picaro, “nothing is more constant than inconstancy itself.”39 Isadora’s and Molly’s drive to escape narrative totalization becomes subject to this same perilous reversibility. Like Don Juan, both heroines abhor the epistemological and temporal closure symbolized by the marriage plot, seeing it as the prime example of narrative’s propulsion toward a “now and forever” commitment to sameness, but their resistance to narrative teleology ends by lodging them in an equally pernicious experience of stasis (Brown 88). In Fear of Flying, this double bind is encapsulated in Isadora’s attitude toward her thirteen-year tenure in psychoanalysis. Most of her analysts, all of whom were male, take on exactly the sort of gender-policing role that made 1970s feminism see psychoanalysis as a prime enemy of women. Insisting that Isadora’s desire to be more than what she calls an “American slave-wife” is mere pathology, they try to cure her of her tendency to want achievements of her own, encouraging her to be content to live through her husband’s success instead (Jong 253). To thwart this horrific version of maturation, Isadora gleefully celebrates her own inability to change in the ways that her analysts have desired. Tellingly enough, in the novel’s first scene, we find Isadora on a plane full of analysts en route to a psychoanalytic convention and in the grip of the same fear of flying of which each of her analysts tried to cure her. As Isadora puts it, “God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks’ ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures” (Jong 3). She may be on board a plane going hundreds of miles an hour, but in terms of personal development she has not moved one inch, and the result is a “glorious” freedom from the imprisoning avenues of development psychoanalysis has offered her. In order to resist the negative pressures of narrative teleology, however, Isadora must cut herself off from transformation as a whole: what she holds on to is expressly a terror of movement. To put it in the terms of the novel’s central pun, Isadora’s literal fear of flying is only one expression of a larger resistance to narrative development that keeps her from spreading her wings in the more metaphoric sense required for feminist futurity. Rubyfruit Jungle presents Molly with a similar dilemma. Molly experiences the social pressures of homophobia and gender ideology primarily as an imperative that she change, that she fit in with the conception of her identity possessed by those around her. Because transforming becomes indistinguishable from conforming in the novel, 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Molly’s only defense is to refuse to change at all. For example, when Molly is a child, her adoptive mother, Carrie, angrily informs her that Molly is adopted, and a bastard to boot, in the hopes that this knowledge will make Molly more obedient and humble. As Carrie puts it, “You better straighten up girl, or I’ll throw you back where you came from—the gutter” (Brown 8). Instead, Molly refuses to let this new information make any difference or change her in the slightest: “I ran out the door and tore all the way over the wheat fields up to the woods. The sun had gone down, and there was one finger of rose left in the sky. . . . So what, so what I’m a bastard. I don’t care. She’s trying to scare me” (Brown 8). A similar perspective is offered when Molly meditates on the loneliness she feels in her middle-class high school. I longed to return to the potato patch and raise hell with kids who didn’t know the difference between Weejuns and Old Maine trotters. But those kids grew up and wore tons of eye-makeup, iridescent pink fingernail polish and scratched each other’s eyes out over the boy with the metalflake candy apple red ’55 Chevy with four on the floor. There was no place to go back to. No place to go to. College was going to be like high school, only worse. But I gotta go. I don’t get that degree and I’m another secretary. No thanks. I got to get it and head for a big city. Got to hang on. (Brown 109)

In each of these examples, Molly feels pressure to fit in with the roles provided for her. In the first, her adoptive mother has told Molly that being a bastard should make Molly more docile and self-effacing, while in the second Molly must choose between being alone and adopting one of two equally imprisoning models of behavior on offer: the middle-class demand for preppy uniformity or the working-class demand for virulent heterosexual gender asymmetry. Although the drive to get out and “head for a big city” implies a narrative of rising and upward mobility, what is underscored in the passage itself is the self-consistency required for such movement: in order to move either geographically or up the class ladder, Molly must “hang on” psychically, must persist in her single-minded commitments despite the pressures of those around her. The abrupt, awkward shifts to the present tense in these two passages suggest the intensity of this need for self-consistency, a need so overriding that it warps the narrative voice in these and other passages. In general, in first-person retrospective narratives like Rubyfruit Jungle, the narrator recounts events seen and experienced by the focalizer, the narrator’s earlier self, in the past.40 For example, the statement “College was going to be like high school, only worse” combines the consciousness of these two entities: 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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narrator-Molly, who uses the past tense to describe the perceptions of her earlier self, and focalizer-Molly, whose dire thoughts about college are being recounted. In contrast, the statement immediately following, “But I gotta go,” records the determination of focalizer-Molly in her voice alone, so that the retrospective narrator disappears entirely. Because it does not frame Molly’s defiant thoughts as past occurrences in typical fashion, Rubyfruit Jungle presents Molly’s resistance as self-consistent to an extreme degree; it’s as if this moment of defiance never ceased, was never superseded by a later self who might reflect on rather than experience those emotions. To put it another way, these clumsy shifts to the present tense, which read as oddly amateurish in the context of the fluent narration that surrounds them, register a desire to avoid distinguishing between the earlier Molly, who digs her heels in so admirably, and the Molly who is now telling us this story. Instead, recourse to the present tense makes this resistance immediate, selfidentical, and perpetual—a stance that has not changed from the moment she first experienced it to the present of our consumption of her narrative. Ultimately, Molly’s resistance to the pressures of conformity, of ideological closure and homogeneity, ends by producing its own version of static uniformity—a self locked in a perpetual present and at odds with change itself. Isadora’s character is so marked by indecision and changeability that she appears at first to possess little of Molly’s resoluteness. She offers an account of this problem when she describes an inability to choose between Bennett, her husband, and Adrian, her lover: “Bennett’s careful, compulsive, and boring steadfastness was my own panic about change, my fear of being alone, my need for security. Adrian’s antic manners and ass-grabbing was the part of me that wanted exuberance above all. I had never been able to make peace between the two halves of myself. All I had managed to do was suppress one half (for a while) at the expense of the other” (Jong 73). Fear of Flying contains dozens of such examples of Isadora’s seemingly inescapable ambivalence, so that at times the novel reads as little more than an endless catalogue of her competing desires. From another perspective, however, Isadora’s insistence on rehearsing her oscillating wishes ad nauseam functions as another example of her stubborn resistance to transformation. Just as Don Juan is perpetually seducing, unwilling to choose and be faithful to one woman, Isadora is perpetually ambivalent, unwilling to stick to any one path long enough to experience progress. Tellingly, the novel’s head note, taken from Byron’s Don Juan, suggests that the refusal to choose may be the only viable option for women given the paucity of their choices: “Few changes e’er can better their affairs, / Theirs being an unnatural 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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situation” (Jong xi). For Isadora, the “unnatural” quality of her situation means that she is faced with mutually exclusive choices, neither of which provide her with the fulfillment to which she should have access: “If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity . . . or you longed for domesticity in all your art” (Jong 157). Faced with choices that do not offer a genuine way forward, Isadora’s only recourse is to make no choice at all, to lodge her resistance in the refusal to commit to any developmental path. Through her irresolution, Isadora enacts one of the literal meanings of promiscuity: the tendency to indiscrimination, or the rendering equivalent of a heterogeneous group. If, as Felman argues, Don Juan functions by equivalency, by making all women equally desirable, then Isadora similarly functions by equivocation, by refusing to choose between options that are equally partial and incomplete. As I suggested, there is an ironic, self-canceling aspect to this approach: having begun by resisting the stasis of narrative teleology, these narratives find themselves struggling with a mode of stasis produced by that very resistance. This collapse of alternatives into one another echoes the problem of “structural repetition” that Peter Starr has isolated in poststructuralist responses to the implosive ending of the 1960s.41 As Starr points out, one of the signature arguments of poststructuralism is that representational politics lead to violent epistemological closure no matter what the political platform in question; therefore, any attempt to wield the technologies of representation in a conventional fashion will only render radicals indistinguishable from those they began by opposing.42 As the polar opposite of any system whatsoever, the event provides poststructuralism with the perfect avenue for avoiding the structural repetition that would arise from merely replacing one totalizing system with another. Instead, the event is that which will not become anything other than itself, which cannot be conceptualized or put in the service of any goal, however radical. As Paul Harris puts it in his critique of Lyotard’s approach to temporality, narrative for this reason “must remain serial and constantly disrupt its unfolding into an itinerary where the points along the linear progression form a neat diachronic line.”43 Considered in terms of the desire to escape static time, the turn to the event thus produces structural repetition with a vengeance: having begun by attempting to escape the closure and stasis of narrative totalization, this approach ends by enforcing the closure and stasis that arises from the lack of any recourse to transformation and development. Such complaints resemble the classic lament of Marxists regarding poststructuralist strategies: without synthesis, these arguments suggest, one has only an inert series that cannot become any 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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kind of radical impetus, that cannot be made to work toward change.44 To borrow Lyotard’s phrasing, the benefit of the event is that “it does not give rise to work,” but the disadvantage of the event is the same. Rubyfruit Jungle and Fear of Flying acknowledge this problem through their heroines’ realization that their pursuit of the event has not brought them any closer to their ultimate desires. For Isadora, this awakening occurs when she learns that her lover Adrian’s existential journey has contained a hidden destination all along. Near the conclusion of the novel, Isadora finds out that Adrian has planned all along to meet his girlfriend and his children for a vacation in France and hence must leave Isadora immediately if he is to arrive in time: “I stare at him, calmly consulting his watch. The enormity of his betrayal leaves me speechless. Here I am—drunk, unwashed, not even knowing what day it is—and he’s keeping track of an appointment he made over a month ago” (Jong 269). While requiring that Isadora set herself adrift in time in search of the untrammeled event, Adrian has been secretly clock-watching all along, linked up to the ongoing diachronic narrative of his own romantic and familial commitments. Moreover, when Isadora attempts to turn the tables on him, insisting that she will accompany him to meet his girlfriend (and therefore wreak the same havoc on his relationship that he has on hers), Adrian refuses, declaring that he won’t allow his children to be upset in that way. Given that Isadora has by this point become increasingly worried that she is pregnant, Adrian’s use of his children as a trump card is quite telling. For Adrian, who can leave his children with his girlfriend even though she is not their mother, being a parent gets him out of uncomfortable consequences of sexual adventure, while for Isadora being pregnant would itself be the ultimate consequence of her adventures, the dire transformation of her blithe sexual escapade into the long-term narrative of maternal servitude.45 The conclusion of Isadora’s romp with Adrian is thus the revelation that, given the patriarchal world in which she lives, the cards are stacked against her quest for the event. It’s not just that Isadora has been fiddling while Rome burns; it’s more that her fiddle itself has been on fire and she’s just now realized it. Obviously, this narrative turn offers a rather astute feminist commentary on the availability of the “open journey” for women. As Isadora puts it, “When I threw in my lot with Adrian Goodlove, I entered a world in which the rules we lived by were his rules—although, of course, he pretended there were no rules” (Jong 177, emphasis in original). The clandestine link between the supposedly free event and the patriarchal rules Adrian embodies becomes particularly clear when, after separating from Adrian, Isadora finds herself presented with the perfect opportunity for a zipless fuck (on a moving train, no less). 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Instead of being aroused, Isadora experiences the sexual advances of the train conductor as offensive and threatening; the zipless fuck, it turns out, can be very much like rape when viewed from another angle. From the feminist perspective, then, what Isadora learns is that sexual adventure is as steeped in patriarchal domination as every other aspect of her life—even more so. And this means that, in a sense, there is no event for her, since the event must be the opposite of every system, including that of patriarchy. As it draws to a close, Fear of Flying struggles to catapult Isadora from its own inexorable logic, to find a way to avoid a teleological narrative of development that doesn’t merely result in static time in the present. The novel’s infamous suspended ending leaves Isadora in much the same ambivalent state as that in which she began the novel: having traveled to London to find Bennett, Isadora takes a bath while waiting for him in his hotel room, but she insists that she hasn’t decided whether or not to continue the marriage. The reader is thus left with an image of her both literally and figuratively floating, suspended between the various paths before her. However, as Butler points out, the novel’s solution to Isadora’s dilemma lies not in her marriage but rather in her artistic calling as a writer and poet. Once she separates from Adrian in Paris, Isadora checks herself into a hotel and stems her growing panic by reading through her writer’s notebooks. As she does, she sees evidence that writing for her has been an ongoing form of commitment—the one place where she can see development and maturation as something other than soul-crushing conformity. As she concentrates on her writing, she becomes increasingly capable of seeing that other forms of maturation have also taken place in her life: It was . . . heartening to see how much I had changed in the past four years. I was able to send my work out now. I was not afraid to drive. . . . Terrified of flying as I was, I didn’t allow that fear to control me. Perhaps someday I’d lose it altogether. If some things could change, so could other things. What right had I to predict the future and predict it so nihilistically? As I got older I would probably change in hundreds of ways I couldn’t foresee. (Jong 288)

While we have been trapped in a serial narrative of obsessively recounted ambivalence, it seems that a genuine künstlerroman has been going on behind the scenes, in the pages of a set of notebooks that we have not been allowed to read. Because Fear of Flying does not so much chart Isadora’s incremental progression as switch channels to a plot that is already in progress, this approach can only read as abrupt and unconvincing, despite 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Isadora’s pointed insistence that there was no “Eureka,” that “no electric light bulb went on in [her] head” (Jong 288, emphasis in original). In fact, this Eureka moment is necessary if the novel is to appear to remain faithful to its own refusal of narrative progression. Crucially, by lodging Isadora’s development within a story hidden from its readers, Fear of Flying keeps her transformation from structuring the novel as a whole. Therefore, Isadora can still insist that, for her, “life has no plot,” since the plot of her life has been a secret, even from herself. And, precisely because it is so unexpected, this narrative of maturation retains peculiarly eventful qualities: it interrupts her ingrained self-perceptions, belying predictions and reminding Isadora and her readers of the possibility of further surprises and positive transformations. For Isadora, we are asked to believe, progress is itself an unexpected event. Yet Isadora also insists that her writing must be viewed as “a life-long commitment, a calling, a guiding passion”; that is, it retains all the comforting and sustaining aspects of a life that has a plot (Jong 300). In the last-minute substitution of the hidden plot of the writing notebooks for the plotless narrative we have been reading, Fear of Flying attempts to displace the fundamental contradictions between a lifelong calling and an untrammeled event, arguing against its own amassed evidence that artistic endeavor will allow women to have access to the event and development simultaneously. For Molly, finding a solution is perhaps even more difficult. While Fear of Flying psychologizes Isadora’s predicament, thereby leaving open the possibility that a mental transformation will be sufficient to remake her relationship to the world, Molly’s narrative is structured as a pitched battle between her single-minded will and a surrounding society that will not allow her to succeed. By the conclusion of the novel, she has been rejected by her adoptive mother, kicked out of school, kicked out of the house, abandoned by her best friend, fired from a job, and seriously mistreated at the New York University film school, where the all-male faculty and all-male student body connive to make the department as inhospitable as possible. Through it all, Molly demonstrates her resistance by refusing to knuckle under to the forces that constrain her, clinging to the goal of artistic achievement that she has set herself. Yet this form of resistance has serious limitations, as a fight she has with her sometime lover Holly makes clear. Holly, who is African American, finds Molly frighteningly naïve about the possibilities for success in the film world, no matter how worthy or persistent Molly is. Although she wishes it were not the case, Holly cannot help but predict that, much like Holly’s hardworking father, Molly will, in the end, be turned away 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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with “whatever lie it is they’re telling to Blacks and Puerto Ricans and women that day” (Brown 174). In fact, Holly’s bleak prophecy of Molly’s rejection by the film industry is ratified: after graduation the only film-related job Molly can find is, predictably, that of a secretary at a film production company. (The director of the alien-rape movie gets a job directing for a children’s programming company.) Even in the face of this evidence that persistence will not win the day, the novel once again reiterates Molly’s ability to stay her course despite any and all obstacles. In the last paragraphs of the novel, Molly confides, I kept hoping against hope that I’d be the bright exception, the talented token that smashed sex and class barriers. Hurrah for her. After all, I was the best in my class, didn’t that count for something? . . . My bitterness was reflected in the news, full of stories about people my own age raging down the streets in protest. But somehow I knew my rage wasn’t their rage and they’d have run me out of their movement for being lesbian anyway. I read somewhere too that women’s groups were starting but they’d trash me just the same. What the hell. . . . Damn, I wished the world would let me be myself. But I knew better on all counts. I wish I could make my films. That wish I could work for. One way or another I’ll make those movies. (Brown 245–46)

The negotiation of tense here is particularly telling. As in the passages I discussed earlier, Molly shifts abruptly to the present tense when giving evidence of her self-consistency, her commitment to her path up to the very moment in which we consume her narrative. Here, the shift serves to indicate that, despite the disappointments she has suffered, the wish to make her movies has not faded in the least, but what has remained is merely the wish, and as such this marker of consistency is itself problematic: unless one is speaking to a genie, stating that one wishes one could do something serves as an acknowledgement that, under present conditions, one’s wish cannot be fulfilled. In other words, encoded in Molly’s insistence that she hasn’t changed is her admission that nothing else has either. Thus, the declaration in the novel’s last sentences that she can work to transform this situation, that one day she will make her movies, gestures toward a future that everything else in the novel has indicated is impossible: Molly has already had it proven to her that self-consistency and merit will only triumph in the unlikely event—so to speak—that the film industry decides of its own accord to acknowledge her efforts. Much as Isadora does, Molly learns to her detriment that the event may be an alternative to the system, but that does not mean it dislodges that system—quite the opposite. Despite the fact 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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that her lesbianism saves her from the more horrific aspects of Isadora’s heterosexual pursuit of the sexual event, Molly’s optimistic declaration of eventual success in the novel’s final sentence still seems depressingly self-deluded. In a fashion similar to critiques of poststructuralism, Molly’s story thus indicates that the event produces an odd passivity; it allows her to resist the world as it is but not to attempt to change it as her 1960s cohorts aim to do. Ultimately, then, the ethics of the event won’t allow Isadora to tell the story of her artistic development, and the political limitations of the event keep Molly from developing in the first place. The narrative of female artistic achievement, positioned as a solution to totalization in novels such as The Women’s Room and The Stepford Wives, ends by rehearsing rather than resolving the problems that arise when the desire for transformation intersects with the suspicion of narrative progression. While their use of the picaresque form and promiscuous content inscribes their resistance to the stasis of narrative telos, both Fear of Flying and Rubyfruit Jungle cannot fully escape the knowledge that this resistance brings its own form of stasis. This acknowledgment, and the persistent desire for development that arises from it, registers in the confused and contradictory endings of both novels, which suddenly lurch in the direction of a form of progression that these novels can neither abandon nor bring themselves to depict. Yet Fear of Flying and Rubyfruit Jungle do contain seeds of another strategy that over time came to offer a more successful approach to these dilemmas: the mother/daughter narrative. Whereas for novels such as The Women’s Room and The Stepford Wives the mother is either incidental or does not appear at all, both Fear of Flying and Rubyfruit Jungle begin to suggest a causal relationship between their heroines’ desires, successes, and limitations and the mother/daughter relationship (or mother-figure, in Molly’s case). This connection becomes especially evident in Rubyfruit Jungle when Molly decides to make a documentary of her mother, Carrie, as she sits in her rocking chair and tells the story of her life: “Once over her initial fright she relaxed in her rocker and talked a blue streak. Whenever she’d get excited about anything she’d start pushing the rocker harder and harder until she’d be whizzing away and running her mouth as fast as the chair” (Brown 230). As Mandrell points out, Carrie is not in fact “advancing one inch,” which suggests a similarity between her situation and Molly’s.46 Much like the eponymous heroine of Sister Carrie, ensconced in her own ubiquitous rocking chair, Rubyfruit Jungle’s Carrie evokes the distinction between repetitive motion and genuine development inscribed by both Molly’s and Isadora’s narratives. However, there is an important difference between 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Carrie and Molly despite their seemingly shared stasis: in comparison to Carrie, Molly has most definitely moved; she is one who got away, one who has more opportunities than anyone in her poor, white family has ever had before. This suggestion prefigures the shift to the retrospective feminist form, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and peaked in the 1990s. This form deploys the mother/daughter nexus to figure a temporalized, historical difference between the lives of women under second-wave feminism and the lives of women before its inception.As I will explore in the next two chapters, this shift dramatically remade popular feminist fiction, offering a new solution to the post1960s problem of time and totalization by producing a new association between feminism and futurity.



PROMISCUOUS TIMES




Feminism as Futurity



Part III




Alice Walker’s Hindsight Meridian, The Color Purple, and the Production of Prolepsis

W

hen The Color Purple (1982) became a bestseller, it took part in a post-1960s boom in attention to the African American past in American culture. Key contemporary African American novelists increasingly devoted themselves to history rather than to exploration of the current state of African American life, and, with the huge success of the Roots miniseries in 1977, it became clear that this history had become a marketable commodity in its own right.1 As I argue in Chapter 1, this turn in attention to various histories of oppression is often read as a sign of the post-1960s rejection of universals associated with teleological futurity, particularly the critique of the abstract ideal of American citizenship as a falsely and forcibly homogeneous model that eradicates particular histories of oppression. Once we come to view “[i]dentities [as] the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past,” as Stuart Hall famously put it, then to leave behind that past can appear to involve leaving behind the identity itself.2 Analyzing the growth of identity politics, Wendy Brown similarly recounts that, [r]efusing to be neutralized, to render . . . differences inconsequential, to be depoliticized as “lifestyles,” “diversity,” or “persons like any other,” we have lately reformulated our historical exclusion as a matter of historically produced and politically rich alterity. Insisting that we are not merely positioned but fabricated by this history, we have at the same time insisted that our very production as marginal, deviant, or subhuman is itself constitutive of the centrality and legitimacy of the center, is itself what paves the center’s streets with semiotic, political and psychic gold.3

Brown’s description makes it clear that this conflict between an abstract ideal of universal citizenship and a particularized form of minority 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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identity is a temporalized one in which “alterity” is equated with past history and “neutralization” with the erasure of that history. With the rise of identity politics, the universal, abstract model of national belonging thus becomes associated with a form of totalizing futurity that violently excises the particularity of identities, covering over without healing the pain of the past. While most sympathetic approaches to identity politics depict the fragmentation of such universals as both inevitable and freeing, thereby creating new epistemological and political openness, the temporalization process inherent in this shift renders the situation more complex than such readings would suggest. When history as universal forward motion is eradicated, we seem to be left only with a history of suffering that cannot be shifted—unless one wants to accede to universals complicit in creating the suffering in the first place. As a result, Brown argues, “the presumed continuity of history is replaced with a sense of its violent, contingent, and ubiquitous force—history becomes that which has weight but no trajectory, mass but no coherence, force but no direction: it is war without ends or end.”4 Without universality, it seems that there can be no continuity and thus no futurity either, and so history becomes merely a register of ongoing oppression rather than an ongoing description of forward motion. To put it in the terms I have been using in this book, identity politics creates an impossible choice between acceding to totalization as a mode of futurity or accepting the reality of permanent oppression—that is, the reality of static time. Brown makes this parallel clear when she argues that “the loss of historical direction, and with it the loss of futurity characteristic of the late modern age, is . . . homologically refigured in the structure of desire of the dominant political expression of the age: identity politics.”5 Without accepting Brown’s negative reading of identity politics as merely symptomatic, we can understand this political form as one of a variety of discourses that offered a means of thinking through the vexed questions of time, totalization, and teleology that confronted the imagination of political transformation in the wake of the 1960s. As I suggest in Chapter 1, identity politics is not usually linked to the perception of blocked futurity that I have termed static time—except by critics who are disappointed that such particularized forms have displaced the form of Marxist futurity that they found more promising.6 However, I want to suggest that the simultaneous need for and rejection of totalizing futurity does structure one of the key tropes of identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s: the woman of color as a figure for



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doubled identity and divided loyalties. This perception of doubled identity came under intense scrutiny within academic feminism in the 1980s, particularly in the theoretical discourse of third world women’s feminism.7 One the one hand, this branch of feminist theory critiqued the cultural nationalism that required women of color to abandon their desire for feminist transformation in order to preserve a patriarchal ethnic past; on the other, it critiqued a falsely homogeneous mainstream feminism that could not accommodate loyalties to ethnic groups and the need to work against racism and sexism simultaneously. Different theorists evolved different responses to the dilemmas created by these demands for single, undivided loyalties—from rejecting cultural nationalism as a mode of oppression in its own right to demonstrating the way in which feminist principles were in keeping with the ethnic culture in the first place. But even when theorists rejected the seeming conflict between race and gender identities, insisting that they were mutually constituted and inextricable, the very amount of discourse produced to disprove claims of their mutual exclusivity indicates the extent to which putative conflict between these identities became something of an obsession within feminist theory. I want to suggest that this perception of a double bind created by the demands of ethnic and gender identity rendered the woman-of-color identity a crucial and powerful figure for the negotiation of static time, particularly within the popular literature of the 1980s and 1990s. Although the perception of blocked futurity associated with the rejection of totalization is not registered in many forms of identity politics discourse, the popular version of woman-of-color discourse foregrounds the double bind created when a desire for feminist transformation requires disloyalty to an equally important ethnic past. While academic explorations of the woman-ofcolor identity usually underscored how this conception of divided loyalties is itself an ideologically invested fantasy—one that participates in a longstanding tendency to see the woman of color as inevitably betraying her culture—the popular multicultural feminist novel explores this seeming conflict, both taking it seriously and attempting to displace it.8 In so doing, I argue, such novels offer another story of the struggle with totalization that followed the 1960s: in this version, totalization is required for feminist futurity, which will allow the woman of color to escape domination, but it alsocommits the unacceptable political and epistemological violence of eradicating the heterogeneity of the suffering ethnic past. As in the other texts I have examined, these heroines find that totalization is both necessary and impossible, and, faced with these self-canceling alternatives, they become trapped in static time.



ALICE WALKER’S HINDSIGHT


Yet, as I will argue in my analysis of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, this configuration of static time is also a reconfiguration: it contains key differences from the women’s liberation novel that allowed it to offer what was ultimately a more successful means of reclaiming feminist futurity. If bestsellers like Fear of Flying attempted to generate a vision of feminist futurity understood as individual transformation and fulfillment, The Color Purple, published less than ten years later, seems to enact that vision in the most developed form imaginable. As a result, the novel has been described by many critics as little more than a feminist fairy-tale that eventually grants its heroine, Celie, her every wish.9 Given this seeming excess of fulfillment, it is not surprising that many critics dismissed the novel’s second half as having violated the realist conventions they see as structuring its first half. However, given the pitched battle fought to achieve feminist futurity throughout the 1970s, the most pressing question for critical analysis would seem to be not why Walker’s novel fused grim realism and fairy-tale fulfillment but rather how it managed to do so. To answer this question, it is necessary first to attend to the cultural work that was in progress in Walker’s fiction in the 1970s—work taking place below the radar of a mainstream readership that had not yet become interested in consuming multicultural feminist fiction. In this earlier fiction, Walker was not yet able to produce the triumphant displacement of static time that I argue comes to fruition in The Color Purple. Ultimately, I will suggest, the turn to the woman of color as a figure for static time enabled a crucial and lasting intervention in the narrative relationship between static time and feminist futurity. In order to understand how this transfiguration could take place, I will turn first to the way Walker maps out the dilemma at hand in her previous novel, Meridian (1976), which focuses on the 1960s and their aftermath. Days of Obligation: Sacrifice and the Reproduction of the Past Engaging with civil rights history, feminism, and what Walker has called “the shakiness of revolutionaries,” Meridian depicts its eponymous heroine in a series of nonchronological vignettes that span several decades but which are focused primarily on the 1960s and early 1970s.10 Piecing together these vignettes, the reader learns that the heroine grew up in the South with a melancholy father and a stern mother, accidentally got pregnant, and felt she had no choice but to marry. As the fifties turn into the sixties, however, Meridian becomes involved in the civil rights movement, leaves her husband, and eventually has her child adopted by 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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another family. While attending an African American college, she becomes involved in revolutionary politics, but she remains committed to passive rather than violent resistance, and the present day of the novel finds her still living in the South and engaging in direct action on behalf of poor, rural African Americans. As Madhu Dubey has pointed out, Meridian’s representation of black politics in the 1960s and 1970s privileges the civil rights movement while critiquing the politics and aesthetics of the Black Nationalist movement, which, like the late-1960s New Left, adopted a totalizing vision of political change as an “abrubt, decisive rupture of ” the social realm.11 As in Vida and The Women’s Room, Meridian finds that this vision of totalized resistance becomes a form of domination in its own right. The totalizing quality of the movement unfolds primarily through its insistence on an ideological purity exemplified by the commitment to revolutionary violence. In a scene recounted in the first pages of the novel, to which it returns several times, Meridian is asked by her revolutionary comrades whether or not she is willing to kill for the revolution. While she finds it easy to vow that she will die for her convictions, she is not able to pledge to kill, and for this failure she is purged from the group with considerable contempt and vitriol. Meridian’s expulsion from the cadre and the movement thus highlights the way in which revolutionary discourse totalizes by creating a vision of reality that excludes and expunges inconvenient and incongruent aspects—like Meridian herself, in this case. Just as the group pledges to kill for the revolution, it excises everything that does not match its own vision of reality. Killing for the revolution thus becomes both an example of and metaphor for the way in which the black revolutionary cadre destroys anything that does not fit within its chosen vision of the world. As this vignette also makes clear, this tendency to eradicate that which cannot fit the totalized revolutionary vision has a crucial temporal valence. Meridian cannot pledge to kill for the revolutionary because she feels she is “held by something in the past,” and this past, she intuits, does not mesh with the desired form of revolutionary transformation.12 When Meridian’s fellow college students first become enraged by university injustices, for example, they register their protest by chopping down the majestic tree known as the Sojourner, a legacy of a storytelling female slave and a site of gender solidarity and solace for the all-female student body. While Meridian agrees with the students’ grievances, she attempts to save the Sojourner and thus retain the painful heritage of slavery associated with the tree. As the students’ action indicates, attempts at transformation in the novel not only break with the past of necessity but also produce violence against an African American past linked to both the pain of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




extreme oppression and the laudable ability to endure that pain. While Meridian thus joins popular women’s liberation novels like The Women’s Room in critiquing a teleological form of futurity linked to totalization, it temporalizes this process in a different way from those novels: rather than revolutionary politics simply operating by totalization, the totalization process here specifically works by erasing the past, which comes to seem the primary element excised in the drive for epistemological uniformity. While this dynamic might seem merely to underscore the inevitable opposition between past and future, continuity and change, this relationship is complicated by the novel’s insistence that past and future are not as equal or symmetrical as their seeming mutual exclusivity would suggest. If revolutionary futurity involves the desire to create a conveniently totalized world—to kill off whatever does not fit the desired future—the past seems to possess precisely the opposite epistemological signature in the novel: it stands in for a complete and untrammeled reality from which nothing has been left out. For instance, when Meridian glimpses a particularly evocative image of a black man on a television program about the South, she feels that “[i]t was the kind of face . . . seen only in the South. A face in which the fever of suffering had left an immense warmth, and the heat of pain had lighted a candle behind the eyes. It sought to understand, to encompass everything at the same time, and the struggle to live honorably and understand everything at the same time, to allow for every inconsistency in nature, every weird possibility and personality, had given it a weary serenity” (Walker, Meridian, 173–74). The problem with forgetting the past for Meridian arises because the very suffering and violence associated with African American history has become associated with totality for her, while the revolutionary futurity of black radicals only produces totalization. As the “light behind the eyes” of this young man indicates, suffering enlightens the sufferer so that everything can be seen, encompassed, and understood. As many critics have suggested, the violence that brought about such suffering in the American South—historically associated with lynching in particular—can be read as a ritual sacrifice of African Americans by the white community.13 Enacting such a sacrifice produces a sense of safe distance from impurity for the group, but the sacrificed one obviously gains none of this protection, instead becoming particularly exposed and vulnerable to those impurities. That is, if his or her suffering is to purge and hence shore up the social system, the sacrificed one must embody everything the group cannot bear to know or experience. While social groups employ sacrifice in order to create a totalized picture of reality in which every element is homogeneous and coherent, the subject of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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sacrifice thus exists instead at the point of totality, where all elements, even the most unpleasant or inappropriate, are included. Through its very act of totalization, in other words, the social group produces the subject of sacrifice as the site of true totality, as one who signifies the circle that “encompass[es] everything” (Walker, Meridian, 174). In keeping with this understanding of sacrificial suffering, Walker’s novel suggests that the suffering of the African American Southern rural community stands in for both the past and an access to totality that is associated with that past. Tellingly enough, when Meridian’s friend Anne-Marion, one of the revolutionary cadre, decides to break with Meridian, she does so because Meridian, “for all her good intentions, might never be ready for the future,” since, “[l]ike the idea of suffering itself, [she is] obsolete” (Walker, Meridian, 125). Rather than aiming for a world that can encompass everything, the revolutionary cadre embraces a world in which one set of ideas eradicates another and the future kills off the past. Meridian is able to hold on to this past because it is constructed as a living entity in the novel, one that might be preserved rather than inevitably allowed to slip away through the passage of time. In a regionalist spatialization of time with a long history in American literature of the South, the novel presents the Southern black rural folk as embodying a past that is no longer present in the rest of the nation but persists in an isolated locale to which one can physically return.14 As the narrator suggests after Meridian is excised from the revolutionary cadre, Meridian alone was holding on to something the others had let go. If not completely, then partially—by their words today, their deeds tomorrow . . . the memory of old black men in the South who, caught by surprise in the eye of a camera, never shifted their position but looked directly back; by the sight of young girls singing in a country choir, their hair shining with brushings and grease, their voices the voices of angels. When she was transformed in church, it was always by the purity of the singers’ souls, which she could actually hear, the purity that lifted their songs like a flight of doves. (Walker, Meridian, 27–28)

Although she calls these images memories, describing them as a part of the past that holds her, Meridian’s explanation of her experience in church seems to suggest something ongoing and alive, something that she says “always” moves her. In a gesture typical of the American regional imagination, Meridian thus constructs the contemporary South as an avatar of the past in the present—as a memory and a history that still lives in a remote region that its heroine can visit in the contemporary moment. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




The central problem for Meridian, however, is that, when it comes to the specific oppression of women, the novel cannot completely displace its own desire to eradicate the suffering of the past and claim a future not defined by those sufferings. Like the women’s liberation novels of the same period, Meridian rails against a totalizing futurity that is itself a form of violence but finds this same totalization process is required to alleviate the oppression of women. This double bind becomes visible when the novel turns to the dynamics of past and future as they take shape in the mother/daughter relationship. As the novel makes clear, the familiar conception of motherhood as willing self-sacrifice has particular resonance in relationship to African American history: because of the violent dismemberment of the family under slavery, preserving and honoring familial relationships becomes a way of honoring that past and especially the sacrifices of one’s elders who, as the narrator puts it, “had laid down their lives, gladly, for their children” (Walker, Meridian, 91).15 In contrast, when Meridian accidentally gets pregnant and marries her lover, she sinks into a depression so deep that eventually she decides that the best thing for both her and her son is for him to be adopted by another family. In other words, she chooses an option that was not available to her mother and breaks with the tradition of African American maternal self-sacrifice. While the novel casts this decision as both brave and inevitable, it leaves Meridian wracked with guilt—not because she feels she has hurt her child but rather because she has failed to “live up to the standard of motherhood that had gone before” (Walker, Meridian, 91). As her lament suggests, Meridian sees the historical advantages that allow her to make a different choice than women in her mother’s generation as resulting in a failure to keep faith with the past. As Meridian’s mother, Mrs. Hill, tells Meridian, “Everybody else that slips up like you did bears it. You’re the only one that thinks you can just outright refuse” (Walker, Meridian, 88, emphasis in original). In order to give the past its due, it seems, what has been must be reproduced, what was borne must continue to be borne—in both senses of the term. Although the narrator remarks that “[i]t never occurred to [Meridian] that her mother’s and her grandmother’s extreme purity of life was compelled by necessity” as “they had not lived in an age of choice,” the imperative to reproduce the past means that Meridian condemns herself for embracing the advantages of her historical moment: she feels she is part of an “unworthy minority, for which there was no precedent and of which she was, as far as she knew, the only member” (Walker, Meridian, 124, 91). From this perspective, to have no precedent is to be by definition unworthy, since the only ethical choice is to perpetuate what has gone before. Thus, equivalence between past and 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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future is presented as ideal, and transformation is seen to incur a debt or an obligation to the past. The seeming totality of the past turns out to be a myth, as the one thing it cannot contain is a future different from, and better than, the past. If the revolutionaries wanted the future to eradicate the past, the putative totality associated with the suffering past in fact masks a very similar drive, one in which the past eradicates the future. As the novel continues this exploration of the mother/child dynamic, it comes to suggest that this mutually exclusive relationship between past and future may be inescapable. Given its concatenation of the past, suffering, and sacrifice, the mother/child relationship would seemingly offer a perfect counter to the totalizing futurity the novel associates with revolutionary change. Yet, despite the fact that Meridian believes that “[h]er mother’s life was sacrifice,” the long-suffering Mrs. Hill seems to have experienced no enlightened recognition of totality; instead, Mrs. Hill exists in a constant state of rage at the way her life was sacrificed to her children (Walker, Meridian, 77). In a chapter titled “‘Have You Stolen Anything?’” Meridian, the beneficiary of this sacrifice, feels constant, free-floating guilt that the novel suggests has arisen from her sense that she has robbed her mother of her life (Walker, Meridian, 49). Rather than representing a space in which everything might be included, the mother/ daughter relationship seems to have produced a particularly virulent economy of mutually exclusive demands in which the daughter’s life exists at the expense of her mother’s. For example, during her depression, Meridian finds herself contemplating killing her child, but she attempts to suppress these thoughts by “conceiv[ing], quite consciously, methods of killing herself ” (Walker, Meridian, 69). In stark contrast to the production of totality through suffering and self-sacrifice associated with the black Southern past—a past not coincidentally represented by old men and young girls, not adult women—the mother/daughter relationship evokes a nightmare of mutual exclusivity, a closed system whose “kill or be killed” imperatives echo those of Meridian’s revolutionary comrades at their most incendiary. The mother/daughter relationship thus suggests the limitations of the seeming totality of sacrifice; in fact, the demand for sacrifice means that that someone’s life must be eradicated, a form of violent erasure directly at odds with the demand for totality, which requires that everything must be included in a unified whole. Behind the seeming totality of the suffering past, which seemingly leaves nothing out, the mother/daughter relationship reveals a violent either/or economy in which something is always left out: either the life of the mother/past must be sacrificed to the daughter/future, or vice versa. Feeling “condemned, consigned, to penitence, for life” for her failure to sacrifice herself within this economy, Meridian instead sacrifices herself 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




to the novel’s more idealized zone of past suffering, the black Southern folk, persisting in political actions on behalf of the rural poor that her comrades have left behind (Walker, Meridian, 91). Yet even this form of allegiance to African American history only makes it clear that the demand to keep faith with the past ends by eradicating transformation itself. For example, when Meridian performs a civil-rights-style direct action by attempting to desegregate a carnival exhibit—a wagon in which a white man is displaying the mummified body of his murdered wife— Meridian collapses afterward and falls into a kind of paralytic trance, requiring that she be carried home on the shoulders of the men present in a fashion disturbingly reminiscent of a funeral procession. In its association of Meridian’s coffin-like posture with the white woman’s mummified body, which is denied even the change of decay, the novel suggests that Meridian’s acts of reparation are likewise forms of mummification, attempts at keeping what is dead and gone from rotting away. While to fail to repeat the past is, by the standards of the novel, to abandon a debt without payment, reproducing the past ad infinitum apparently leads to an outcome the novel cannot ultimately recommend either: the deathly immobility of static time. However, if reproduction is mummification (or mommy-fication) and change is betrayal, there seems to be no way forward for either the character or the novel: faced with two mutually exclusive and equally negative options, Meridian finds itself stuck in much the same way as the women’s lib novels from the same decade. Static time arises here not only when commitment to the past eradicates transformation but also when the novel finds itself facing a choice that is impossible to make and grinds to a halt as a result. This narrative impasse is expressly acknowledged in Meridian’s recurring dream: she dreams she is a character in a novel whose resolution can only be accomplished by her death—that is, she dreams a situation very like hers in the novel we are reading. In order to resist excising its heroine in this way, Meridian eventually turns against the supposed utility of self-sacrifice and insists that the only “new thing” would be for “[a]ll saints [to] walk away” rather than to be killed like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X (Walker, Meridian, 151). As in the phrase “walking away from a fight,” the instruction to “walk away” seems to imply abandoning something that is already in process, refusing to finish something that has been started. Through this phrase, the novel implies that the newness of genuine transformation requires breaking with the need for reproduction: for Meridian to become one of the saints who walks away, she must imitate her revolutionary comrades and leave with her debts to the past still and forever unpaid; she must refuse 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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to be martyred to that past in the way that Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were martyred to their causes. While Meridian does quite literally walk away at the end of the novel, leaving behind her position in the South in a way that suggests she will no longer attempt to reproduce the past, the novel finds a way to keep faith with the past nonetheless, through a form of temporal manipulation that takes place in the novel’s epiphanic scene. Having gone to the sort of African American church service earlier associated with angelic choir girls, Meridian is surprised to see that the photographic, picturesque stasis she expects is completely missing; instead, the church has become a dynamic one in which they have changed the music and preaching style to a more militant strain. Yet, rather than an easy expulsion of tradition, Meridian finds that among the congregants “the problems of life were not discussed fraudulently and the approach to the future was considered communally, and moral questions were taken seriously” (Walker, Meridian, 199). In this communal and serious atmosphere, pointedly opposed to the overwrought and self-important ambiance of the Black Nationalist cadre, the congregation “weaves” their new anger into “what [they] already know—into the songs, the sermons” (Walker, Meridian, 199). In describing this transformation of spiritual practice, the novel suggests that, while Meridian has been sacrificing herself to remain consistent with these “righteous guardians of the people’s memories,” the guardians have themselves been busy changing (Walker, Meridian, 200). As a father gives an account of the murder of his son, the congregation is roused to anger and, in their rage at this politically motivated murder, they imply that they will reject the self-sacrifice associated by the novel with the African American rural populace. Now, it is implied, they will choose to kill rather than be killed. In light of this transformation, Meridian seems finally able to abandon the path of self-sacrifice she has used to atone for the life she feels she has stolen: [T]here was in Meridian’s chest a breaking as if a tight string binding her lungs had given way, allowing her to breath freely. For she understood, finally, that the respect she owed her life was to continue, against whatever obstacles, to live it, and not to give up any particle of it without a fight to the death, preferably not her own. . . . Under a large tree beside the road, crowded now with the cars returning from the church, she made a promise to the red-eyed [father of the murdered boy]: that yes, indeed she would kill, before she allowed anyone to murder his son again. (Walker, Meridian, 200) 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




In both the mother/daughter relationship and the political situation facing this community, the choice is either/or, kill or let oneself be killed. In both cases, the right decision now seems to require letting go of the past, which must be left behind if life is to be preserved—both the mother’s suffering for which Meridian has tried to atone and the ennobling history of suffering by the African American rural folk. Totality is revealed as a myth grounded in the erasure of the self ’s own future and in the either/or choices forced upon Meridian and her community; the self and the future must be chosen over the other and the past. Thus, Meridian will now take the advantages she has and move forward with them, in full knowledge that she has chosen her life over another’s and without any more attempt to make recompense for that inequity. In this scene, then, Meridian receives permission to let go of the past from the congregants in the church: once the righteous guardians of memory change, the novel implies, surely change is acceptable. However, because the generic characteristics of regionalism deployed by the novel associate the African American Southern community with the past, this scene also implies that the past itself has changed. In other words, Meridian’s debt to the past is canceled because the difference between her life and the lives of the previous generation has been erased by their capacity to change; through its thematic and temporal manipulations, this scene provides Meridian with the precedent that she has been lacking. Rather than abandoning the past and embracing what is new about her situation, Meridian is now able to change while following the example provided by the past. This covert mode of continuity is underscored by the circular structure of the novel, which ends in the same general chronological moment in which it begins. In this final scene, Truman, Meridian’s sometime lover, takes on her role as the sacrificial member of the African American community, suggesting that the position must be handed on rather than simply abandoned in the way that Meridian’s “walking away” would seemingly require. In its substitution of Truman for Meridian, the novel finds another way to pay what it owes and replace what it takes away, leaving the social system in its same, ongoing equilibrium despite Meridian’s decision to abandon her debt to the past. Tellingly, however, all these manipulations occur not in relationship to African American maternity but rather on the ground of rural Southern spirituality, which is pointedly metaphorized through a Christological father/son relationship rather than a highly material mother/daughter relationship. Much as the novel cannot manage to suggest that suffering and self-sacrifice created any hallowed or precious totality in Meridian’s mother, it seems incapable of imagining that it 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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could change her past in a way that would make Meridian’s choices equal to her mother’s. The novel finds it possible to transform the African American spiritual past but not the past of Meridian’s own mother’s life, so the former must stand in for the latter. On a more general level, this conclusion suggests that the novel still has not found a way to escape what is presented as the most pressing version of the demand to both free the present and keep faith with the past; it can only do so by shifting away from the most difficult incarnation of the problem— the mother/daughter relationship. It is this version of problem, I argue, that The Color Purple manages to solve. The Production of Coevalness: The Color Purple as Prolepsis In recent years, the critical consensus regarding The Color Purple seems to have has shifted toward the negative. Such readings represent The Color Purple as something of a failed hybrid: beginning from grim realism, it shifts into a fairy-tale story of miraculous transformation, punctuated by incongruous and rather dull tales of African missionary work.16 Such an approach implies that a novel like The Women’s Room might have just as easily presented its oppressed heroine with everything she wanted by its conclusion, provided it was willing to defy its own narrative logic in the way The Color Purple does. To put it in the terms I have been using, from this perspective The Color Purple would appear not so much to have solved the problem of static time as to have chosen to ignore it, making up pretty stories while pretending the problem doesn’t exist. While it is certainly true that The Color Purple deliberately transgresses key narrative conventions—particularly those connecting temporality, historical chronology, and causality—I want to suggest that it nonetheless produces an alternative account of static time within which it strives to be utterly logical and rigorously ethical.17 (In fact, although it would be impossible to prove, it seems to me that the novel would not have been so wildly successful had it merely abandoned rather than satisfied its own requirements; the more conventional the story, the less forgiving readers tend to be of lapses in narrative logic.) While the particularities of The Color Purple’s approach render its success unique, I will ultimately argue that central elements of its negotiation become the foundations of the 1980s and 1990s feminist depiction of static time. The Color Purple begins with its heroine in a state so abject that many have found it unbelievable, bordering on offensive: poor, nearly illiterate, with her powerless sister her only ally, heroine Celie by age twenty has had two children by her stepfather (who she thinks is her 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




father) and has been married off to an abusive man for whom she is nothing more than a servant and a sexual convenience. As Lisa Maria Hogeland points out, dismissals of the negative presentations of Celie’s world and the men in it often echo those applied to women’s liberation novels like The Women’s Room, especially complaints that such novels violated the conventions of realism because “men can’t be that bad.”18 The primary difference, Hogeland suggests, was that white mainstream reviewers did not seem nearly as invested in defending black men from biased and unrealistic presentations as they were in defending white male characters in novels like The Women’s Room.19 Such critiques arose from other political camps as well—for example, Trudier Harris argues that many black women readers had a “feeling of uneasiness” about the novel, a feeling that was often associated with heroine Celie’s “unimaginable” near-total victimization.20 As the echoes in the negative reviews suggest, the first half of The Color Purple offers a vision of totalized oppression familiar from novels like The Women’s Room, in which the ideological closure of the heroine’s world appears complete: every statement Celie hears only seems to reiterate her worthlessness, and she feels so trapped it is as if she is already dead and buried—in fact, she thinks, it would be better if she were dead because “if [she] was buried, [she] wouldn’t have to work.”21 In this horrific representation of both epistemological and temporal closure, the novel depicts Celie as trapped in an especially dire experience of static time. As in Meridian, however, this experience of intense suffering is located in the past rather than the present—specifically a past that is associated with poor, rural African American communities in the South. While Meridian was able to transform this past through the regionalist chronotope, which allows an isolated region to embody the past within the present, The Color Purple at first seems to have taken on a more difficult job. Lodged in a historical past rather than merely a regional backwater, Celie seems to have even less chance of exiting static time than the women’s liberation heroines who preceded her. In particular, because The Color Purple associates totalized oppression with the past, it can’t present feminist transformation as existing in that period without transgressing its own definition of the period. Once the past is defined as the zone in which the burdens of history were much greater, there appears to be no way for it to take part in a form of openness specifically associated with a later chronological moment. If static time arises when the world appears too totalized to admit change, The Color Purple intensifies this perception by focusing on a historical moment when such changes could not even be expected. To produce historical change out of its time would seem to defy the conventions the novel itself has constructed. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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It is precisely this transgression of historical chronology that has led so many critics of The Color Purple to condemn both its anachronism and its fairy-tale logic. To take the novel’s key example, Celie eventually transforms through her relationship with Shug, Celie’s husband’s sometime lover and a blues singer. While Shug is clearly modeled on the historical figures that Walker most admires from this period—female blues singers such as Bessie Smith and writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston—she is marked by the contemporary moment in ways that have been well documented. In particular, her animistic spirituality and enlightened approach to sexuality seems to contain none of the wry acknowledgement of social limitation associated with the blues aesthetic and seems to be much more in keeping with Walker’s own womanist moment.22 Furthermore, the novel explains Shug’s possession of such traits not through a realist causality of circumstance and determination but rather through a spiritual logic of epiphany and conversion. For instance, Shug admits during what amounts to her Sermon on the Mount that she once had the same misguided notions about religion that Celie possesses: “When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest” (Walker, Color, 202). She recounts that she found a new approach through a kind of spiritual revelation: “But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can’t miss it” (Walker, Color, 203). What is striking about these statements, two of the only ones in which Shug describes how she gained any of the knowledge she possesses, is the lack of any teacher to impart them. When Shug states that she “found out” God was white and a man, she does not suggest that she found out from anyone in particular, nor does she indicate how she knew “just what it was” when she experienced religious ecstasy. Of course, because the ecstatic experience involved seems to be a kind of divine revelation, it seems apparent that Shug’s teacher was, in some sense, God. While it is certainly possible to embrace spiritual agency as the key impetus for social transformation, The Color Purple does not propound this logic consistently enough to render it a coherent explanation for its avoidance of conventional causality. For example, Celie’s decidedly worldly daughter-in-law Sofia possesses many of the same traits associated with Shug. Sofia is raised by a downtrodden mother and menaced by predatory male relatives in much the way Celie is, but she grows up fearless and aggressive, a reaction which is precisely the reverse of Celie’s to very similar circumstances. While Sofia does have some 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




advantages that Celie lacks (her sisters have not vanished, for one thing), Sofia’s character is so opposed to Celie’s that being raised on another planet would hardly seem sufficient explanation for it. Because the novel fails to offer this missing explanation, it implies that some sort of inborn character is responsible for Sofia’s always already healthy ego and selfpossession. This approach is underscored by the novel’s tendency to link Sofia and Shug and to celebrate their strengths as a sort of unique gift to the community: while Celie and her husband decide that what Sofia and Shug have is “womanly,” they don’t know why these two women have it when no one else, male or female, seems to (Walker, Color, 276). Again, while such a focus on inborn character is certainly one approach a novel might take to causality, The Color Purple does not develop this account consistently either: most crucially, such an approach explicitly contradicts the novel’s own central trajectory, in which Celie gradually transforms in a way that eradicates her determination by earlier circumstances. If strong women are born, not made, then Celie’s entire transformation, which forms the heart of the novel, should be impossible. Instead of foundering on this contradiction, however, The Color Purple feeds on it: on the one hand, it depicts characters who are mysteriously in possession of exceptional strength, while on the other hand, it depicts a character broken by circumstance who needs examples from which to learn to be strong. Celie is able to transform in the way she does because Shug Avery has already learned most of the things that Celie needs to know by means both extradiegetic to the novel and otherworldly in a more profound sense. To put it another way, it is Shug who receives the revelation, while Celie receives the education—and this division allows the novel to relate a story of gradual transformation that for the first two-thirds of the novel does not have recourse to the extraordinary, all the while indicating that only extraordinary means could have sparked this transformation. Thus, while much of The Color Purple describes in more or less realist terms what it would have been like for a woman of an earlier generation to have had the opportunity to transform in ways associated with second-wave feminism, it is also able to displace the question inherent in realism’s fixation on the link between subjectivity and circumstance: that is, given the extent of social determination, how is such transformation possible? Instead, a feminist consciousness consonant with Walker’s own historical moment manifests itself, unexplained and fully formed, in the persons of Shug and Sofia and then is transmitted by more ordinary means to Celie. Given this approach, the novel’s epigraph, “Show me how to do like you do, show me how to do it,” seems less a straightforward imperative than an acknowledgment of the novel’s crucial recourse to anachrony: the quotation implies an 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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ordinary causal relation in which one person changes by imitating another, but the novel instead functions by prolepsis—by transforming a later feminist effect into a prefeminist cause (Walker, Color, vii). In so doing, however, The Color Purple successfully displaces the problem that haunted the women’s liberation novels of the 1970s: the need to produce feminist transformation out of historical circumstances defined by totalized oppression. By locating static time in the past, The Color Purple frees itself to assume that other historical moments— specifically the future and the present of its own construction—are not trapped in totalization. Crucially, this approach to static time means that the genesis of feminist transformation need not be represented or included in the novel, since that transformation falls outside the chronology and the causality of the novel’s own timeline. The sort of historical causality that critics found lacking in the novel—for example, a demonstration of how the circumstances of Shug’s life produced her knowledge—doesn’t appear in the novel because it doesn’t belong to the timeline contained within the novel. From this perspective, placing the cause of Shug’s liberation outside the historical chronology of the text is precisely what allows the effects of that liberation to be represented: rather than having to undertake the impossible task of producing liberation from totalized oppression, the novel can airlift that liberation in from a later moment in which, it is implied, totalization did not prevent its creation. As a result of this strategy, the production of feminist futurity takes place within a textual and temporal aporia: it unfolds during the missing years between the period covered by the novel and the time of its writing and reception. Rather than having to demonstrate the impossible generation of feminism from a seemingly totalized landscape of oppression, the novel instead borrows from a feminist future that is assumed already to exist, one whose historical causality may therefore be left unexplored. Thus, rather than transforming patriarchy, The Color Purple instead must manipulate time, inserting a present already defined by openness into a past already defined by closure. By locating such oppression in the past, the novel transforms a struggle against historical determination into one against historical chronology: it does not need to create generate futurity; rather, it needs to share an existing futurity with a prefeminist past. As in Meridian, the impulse toward this temporal equivalence appears most obviously within the mother/daughter dyad. Whereas Meridian longed to escape the dynamic in which the daughter/future appears to feed off and oppress the mother/past, The Color Purple enacts this escape in full, insisting that the advantages usually consigned to the new generation be shared with the previous one as well. In particular, as many critics have noted, the novel resists the conventional temporal burdens associated with 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott




motherhood that result in the mother giving her time—and hence her own possibility of development—to her children. While Celie has two children in rapid succession before she is twenty, these children are immediately taken from her by her stepfather and—as Celie and the reader learn later—given to a minister and his wife to raise. Eventually, Celie’s sister Nettie joins this family as nurse and maid and accompanies them when they travel to Africa as missionaries. (Not coincidentally, a similar separation takes place for Shug, who leaves her children to be raised by their grandmother in order to pursue her career as a singer.) Not only do mothers in this novel fail to give their time to their children in the usual fashion, but also, in Celie’s case, a temporal equivalence between mother and child is created through a collapse of generational time. For instance, when Celie sees her six-year-old daughter Olivia on the street, she recognizes her because they are identified in a way that far exceeds mere resemblance: “She got my eyes just like they is today. Like everything I seen, she seen, and she pondering it” (Walker, Color, 14). Along with “her” eyes, Olivia seems to have had Celie’s experiences as well, placing the two generations on precisely the same timeline. Perhaps most tellingly, the novel warps its own temporal logic in order to make the children’s journey to adulthood and Celie’s journey to happiness take exactly the same amount of time and unfold during the same chronological period. In one of her final letters from Africa, Nettie writes that “[n]early thirty years have past without a word” being exchanged by the sisters, which means that Nettie and the children have been in Africa for more than thirty years (Walker, Color, 264). Given that Olivia is six years old before Nettie even meets her, Olivia would be at the very least thirty-six years old when she, Nettie, and the rest of the missionary family return to America at the end of the novel. But the novel presents Olivia and her brother, Adam, as having newly entered adulthood in the last sections that take place in Africa: in one of her last letters, Nettie acknowledges that she “shouldn’t call [Olivia and Adam] children” now that “they’re grown,” which would be a strangely belated realization if the “children” were in their mid-thirties (Walker, Color, 247). While such disruptions of chronological time (rather than a character’s internal experience of it) are usually only found in science fiction or avant-garde narrative forms, The Color Purple has no choice but to manipulate the children’s temporal trajectory if it is to allow them and Celie equal and identical time to mature: by putting the children into a kind of temporal holding pattern, the novel allows them to reach adulthood at the same moment when Celie completes her own developmental path, a process which takes most of her life. Similarly, the novel’s conclusion equates these two moments of narrative telos: while 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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the children’s return to America at the beginning of their adulthood would seem to suggest a kind of generational handoff in which their story would now take priority, Celie insists that for her generation, the reunion marks “the youngest us ever felt” (Walker, Color, 295). Rather than being ready to step aside for the newly made adults, the older people seem to be primed to begin their own lives anew. If the mother/child relationship usually provides an example of the way in which the future inevitably displaces the past, The Color Purple evades that problem by collapsing generational time so that the developmental trajectory given to mother and child takes the same amount of time and unfolds within the very same years. While these violations of chronology could be viewed as arising from mere sloppiness, such a reading can’t be reconciled with the way in which the novel consistently foregrounds and thematizes the question of temporal manipulation. In particular, by constructing a series of negative examples of temporal transgression, the novel explores both the necessity and the danger of such machinations, insisting that its own recourse to such strategies is ethically motivated and undertaken only with all due consideration of the attendant dangers. For example, what is arguably the most evil act perpetrated in the novel involves a sinister version of the collapse of generational time: Celie’s rape by the man she thinks is her father. While this is obviously a transgression of the incest taboo, it is also the infliction of adult sexuality on a child. When “Pa” tells Celie, “Your gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t,” he assumes that the child should shoulder the burden of the woman; he eradicates the temporal distance that should exist between the two generations (Walker, Color, 1). Thus, when the novel invalidates this perception of incest by informing Celie and the reader that, as Celie puts it, “Pa not pa,” it not only saves Celie from the shame she feels but also pries apart the temporal identity between generations that Pa had instituted (Walker, Color, 183). Yet, even once it is clear that Pa— now known as Alphonso—has not in fact perpetrated incest, the novel demonstrates that his villainous powers still arise from and are reflected in his tendency to avoid the usual negative effects of time. When Celie and Shug go to Alphonso’s house in order to ask him some questions, for example, they find that his wife is a “child” who is “dress up like a woman” and that he looks far too young have fathered Celie’s almost grown children (Walker, Color, 186). His turn to yet another young wife (his third that we know of) and his own youthful good looks suggest that, much like Celie, Alphonso is continuing his own developmental trajectory in the time that would ordinarily have belonged to the next generation— as if he is hoarding all the advantages of youth for himself and refusing 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott



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[T]he first thing us notice soon as we turn into the lane is how green everything is, like even though the ground everywhere else not warmed up good, Pa’s land is warm and ready to go. Then all along the road there’s Easter lilies and jonquils and daffodils and all kinds of little early wildflowers. Then us notice all the birds singing they little cans off all up and down the hedge, that itself is putting out little yellow flowers smell like Virginia creeper. It all so different from the rest of the country us drive through, it make us real quiet. I know this sound funny . . . but even the sun seemed to stand a little longer over our heads. (Walker, Color, 184–85)

Just as Alphonso has drawn his wealth from his Machiavellian manipulations in the largely white business world, his larger success seems tied to a kind of supernatural power over time, an ability to reap simultaneously the advantages that arise from the acceleration of time (the early spring) and the cessation of time (the sun that stays still in the sky). If Alphonso serves as the negative example of the collapse of generational time, I would argue that Nettie’s missionary work in Africa provides a cautionary example of the novel’s other major investment in temporal manipulation: its reliance on prolepsis. As described in her letters, Nettie travels to Africa and works as a missionary in a remote village inhabited by the Olinka. As Johannes Fabian has argued, the approach to such remote “tribes” developed by anthropology and other colonial discourses was structured by the “denial of coevalness,” or the tendency to consider peoples living in remote, non-Western locals as still living in a premodern moment that the West had left behind.23 In what the novel depicts as their naïve devotion to a discourse of uplift, Nettie and her fellow missionaries endorse such an approach to Africa, depicting it as a temporal origin point, a zone in which the African American prediasporic past is preserved in much the same way that the rural South is depicted in Meridian as a still-existing example of the African American past within the United States. The production of this uneven temporalization, or what Fabian calls allochronism, makes the relationship between Nettie and the Olinka strikingly similar to that between Shug and Celie: Nettie appears from what is constructed as a future moment for the Olinka, bringing knowledge that would not yet be generated from within the historical circumstances in which the Olinka currently exist, much as Shug possesses aspects of a feminist future not generated from within Celie’s 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


to pass them on. This temporal manipulation, bordering on the magical, is underscored by the description of his farm, which seems to exist in a kind of temporal bubble:

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world. Crucially, unlike anthropologists who both denigrated and fetishized this seeming past, missionaries like Nettie aimed to use the knowledge of their historical moment to hasten Africa’s entry into its future. In other words, while Nettie’s story arises from the denial of coevalness, it also proceeds from an attempt to produce coevalness; much as The Color Purple attempts to do when it provides Celie with access to a later feminist moment, Nettie works to close the gap between a premodern past associated with closure and lack of knowledge and a modern future associated with openness and transformation. Nettie is to the Olinka as Shug (and by extension Walker herself) is to Celie— not simply because Nettie and Shug attempt to convey new knowledge but more particularly because in both cases the knowledge they offer is associated with a future set of historical circumstances.24 While the similarities between Nettie’s and Walker’s approaches are striking, the ethical valence attached to these two versions of prolepsis is pointedly opposed. The marvelous vitality of Celie’s voice renders it almost impossible not to welcome her transformation by whatever fairy-tale means necessary; in contrast, arguments against Nettie’s endeavor are so numerous that they eventually come to contradict one another. Critiques of her efforts include (but are not limited to) the following: she has picked the wrong past to save; her assumption regarding the superiority of her time is mere arrogance; the Olinka are fine the way they are; the Olinka should change but will not; the Olinka are not sorry for their participation in slavery and therefore deserve to be left behind; the only progress imaginable for the Olinka is metaphorized by a road that flattens their village; and the Olinka should escape time— retreating into a hidden rift in the continent—rather than joining the march of supposed progress. As this list makes clear, the negative valence of Nettie’s attempt at prolepsis is so overdetermined that it seems to attach any possible criticisms to itself like a magnet picking up pins. Every aspect of The Color Purple’s own proleptic imagination that might conceivably be suspect is extracted and linked to Nettie’s endeavor, from the arrogance of assuming one knows better than one’s elders did to the concern that progress itself may actually be a tool of the oppressors. By contrast, the gift of prolepsis the novel grants to Celie appears innocent, even inevitable. Whatever the novel is doing to the African American past, we are reassured, it is not what Nettie is doing to the African moment characterized as a premodern past. From this perspective, the very flatness and lack of interest that characterizes Nettie’s sections only tends to make the reader share the novel’s own desire to dismiss such an approach. The reader turns away from Nettie’s version of prolepsis just as the novel itself would like to. Through the contrast to Nettie’s 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott



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The Figure of the Woman of Color and the Return of Narrative Fulfillment In its flamboyant triumph over the logic of historical determination, The Color Purple dramatically reworks the imagination of static time. I have argued that, in the women’s liberation novel, the feminist depiction of women’s lack of opportunities operates as a means of representing the problem of totalization and static time. Here, however, feminism becomes a marker for a futurity that is both possible and problematic. While we might read this shift merely as part of the antifeminist backlash of the 1980s, Walker’s novels seek to retain links to previous generations of women precisely because of a fundamentally feminist reading of and loyalty to the sufferings of women in the past; feminism requires both that the suffering of previous generations of women be honored and that it not be reproduced in later generations. Thus, Meridian doesn’t reject feminist futurity so much as express a profound and paradoxical wish that leaving behind suffering did not also mean leaving behind those who suffered. If static time arose in the women’s lib novel because of a post-1960s perception that both domination and resistance resulted in totalization, Meridian conceives of the same epistemological and political conundrum in terms of contradictory demands of past and future: transformation requires a totalization that excises a suffering past, but this past can be neither abandoned nor perpetuated. Once static time becomes reconfigured in this way, it becomes available for another solution, one that could not be offered by the women’s liberation novel. In the women’s liberation novel, static time arises because of the collapse of the two options at hand: there is ultimately no choice in these novels because both the acceptance of domination and the embrace of feminist teleology result in a totalized political landscape at odds with genuine futurity. In contrast, the version of this dilemma associated with the figure of the woman of color arises not because all of her choices are identical but rather because they are mutually exclusive: she both must and cannot choose between ethnic belonging and feminist futurity, reproduction and transformation, continuity and change. The threat of totalization takes a specific form in this version of static time: it arises not because teleological narrativity necessarily 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


misguided efforts, the novel insists that its own proleptic imagination is acceptable because it serves a higher logic in which the future and the past are equalized to provide the same justice for all.

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leads to totalization but because such narratives cannot accommodate another, equally important requirement—that the past not be left behind. Thus, the turn to the multicultural feminist text reconfigures static time as arising from the need to fulfill mutually exclusive requirements for change and transformation; totalization occurs here when one of these options is chosen at the expense of the other. While the need to embrace continuity and change simultaneously would seem an even more impossible demand than that which faced the women’s lib novel, given that it requires thwarting the logic of time itself, I have suggested that Meridian and The Color Purple are nevertheless able to resolve this dilemma in a way that the women’s lib novels failed to do. They are able to do so because they escape the double bind associated with the simultaneous rejection of and need for narrative teleology. Whereas women’s lib novels foundered on their realization that feminist teleology would itself lead to totalization, in Meridian totalization arises when the subject chooses one of the mutually exclusive options of continuity and change. Therefore, provided narrative teleology serves to meet these seemingly contradictory demands, it works against totalization rather than participating in it. Thus, to tell a story in which the advantages of the future come to be shared with the past, as The Color Purple does, is to avoid totalization by rendering the transformations of the future compatible with the reproduction of the past; the present-day feminist has not left the past behind by changing, because the past now participates in that change. Moreover, because to fail to create such equivalence between past and present is to tolerate or even embrace totalization by excising the past, the telling of such stories becomes itself a kind of ethical imperative. That is, while a novel like The Women’s Room could not tell a story of feminist fulfillment because that story would itself become a technology of totalization, for The Color Purple, feminist fulfillment must be transferred to the previous generation if totalization is to be avoided; both novels are rigorously faithful to the demand that feminist transformation not become a form of totalization in its own right, but this demand prevents a story of feminist fulfillment in The Women’s Room and requires one in The Color Purple. As this description begins to suggest, the shift to the multicultural feminist novel also initiates a new approach to time as a medium of domination. Whereas static time arises in women’s lib novels when time becomes divorced from its commonplace association with transformation, here it is precisely the commonplace properties of time that are the problem: the mutual exclusivity of continuity and change; the way in which the forward march of time inevitably leaves behind the past; and 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott



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the fact that one generation comes to replace the previous one as the years unfold. It is this tendency to associate domination with the ordinary motion of time itself that ultimately comes to the fore in the novels discussed in Chapter 6, which offer the most successful attempt to displace static time.


My Mother, My Self Sentiment and the Transcendence of Time in The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood Willing liberates; but what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters? “It was”—that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy. —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra It seems useful . . . to distinguish, from [the] ultimate subtext which is the place of social contradiction, a secondary one, which is more properly the place of ideology, and which takes the form of the aporia or the antinomy: what can in the former be resolved only through the intervention of praxis here comes before the purely contemplative mind as a logical scandal or double bind, the unthinkable and the conceptually paradoxical, that which cannot be unknotted by the operation of pure thought, and which must therefore generate a whole more properly narrative apparatus—the text itself—to square its circles and to dispel, though narrative movement, its intolerable closure. —Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

The Temporalization of Sentiment

A

lthough separated by several years, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996) are united by their status as blockbuster mother/daughter 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Chapter 6


bestsellers that generated profound emotional responses in their readers.1 While it is certainly arguable that not every mother/daughter story is a feminist one, the mother/daughter form has clear links to second-wave feminist discourse. Before second-wave feminism, stories of motherdaughter relationships were few and far between. In the American Library of Congress catalogue, there are 1,211 entries under the subject-heading “Mothers and daughters—Fiction,” and of these only 62 are dated before 1970.2 And while novels like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) devote chapters to the mother/daughter relationship, it was not until the 1980s that second-wave novels that focused primarily on the mother/ daughter connection became bestsellers. As this timeline suggests, the mother/daughter story grew apace with the other new trend in popular women’sliterature: the boom in the consumption of novels by and about women of color. This trend eventually wound its way back to writers like Marilyn French and Marge Piercy, both of whom were associated with the women’s liberation novel and both of whom produced mother/ daughter narratives in the 1980s and 1990s, French in the tellingly titled novel Her Mother’s Daughter (1987).3 As many critics have noted, this trajectory also resulted in a kind of privatization of feminist narrative. Mother/daughter novels are almost by definition domestic novels, and certainly they are more concerned with teasing out the intricacies of familial emotions than with describing scenes of radical activism as novelists like French, Piercy, and Alice Walker did in the 1970s.4 However, feminist concerns don’t go away in mother/daughter novels so much as they are writ small, figured through the intimate relationships between two generations of women. In adopting this approach, these novels partake in a long-standing tradition of sentimental literature primarily written and consumed by women. As Lauren Berlant puts it, sentimental texts “render scenes and stories of structural injustice in the terms of a putatively preideological nexus of overwhelming feeling whose threat to the survival of individual lives is said also to exemplify conflicts in national life.”5 The sentimental mode uses the emotive to register the political so that oppression comes to be experienced and negotiated through channels of deep feeling running between individuals. Critics continue to debate whether this approach offers an effective goad to political action or merely co-opts the suffering of the disenfranchised for the consumption of the privileged.6 While critiques of feminism’s turn to the domestic novel often echo condemnations of the sentimental, feminist criticism has not usually approached this fiction as a sentimental genre per se. In general, the movement from the women’s liberation novel to the popular mother/daughter novel has been treated either as an unfortunate sign of the backlash against feminism or as 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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a newly born feminist ability to read the mother as more than an absent backdrop for, or present obstacle to, daughterly ambition.7 In both cases, the growth of the mother/daughter novel as sentimental form in the 1980s is read from within feminism as a transformation with meaning primarily for feminist politics. To some extent, the sentimental form encourages this reading: because it works to figure national struggles within intimate relationships, the sentimental is always already allegorical. When we read mother/daughter novels as presenting a specifically feminist allegory—the mother standing in for a prefeminist past, the daughter for a new feminist future—we are reading the political as figured by the intimate in the way that sentimental narrative encourages. Yet, because of the sentimental genre’s long-standing position as a matrix for national subjectivity, such stories enable negotiations of national as well as feminist temporality in a much more overt way than do the women’s liberation novels of the 1970s. In particular, American sentimental fiction has negotiated between two visions of national citizenship, as Berlant describes: In one, the classic model, each citizen’s value is secured by an equation between abstractness and emancipation: a cell of national identity provides juridically protected personhood for citizens regardless of anything specific about them. In the second model, which was initially organized around labor, feminist, and antiracist struggles of the nineteenth-century United States, another version of the nation is imagined as the index of collective life. This nation is peopled by suffering citizens and noncitizens whose structural exclusion from the utopian-American dreamscape exposes the state’s claim of legitimacy and virtue to an acid wash of truth telling that makes hegemonic disavowal virtually impossible, at certain moments of political intensity.8

Although feminism has historically been associated with the suffering, excluded position, I have suggested in the previous chapter that this equation takes a different shape in the popular fictions of multicultural feminism. In such fictions feminism comes to be associated with homogenizing, abstract collectivity and ethnicity with injustice and exclusion, and heroines struggle to reconcile their desire for feminist transformation with their desire to preserve their ethnic identity.9 As the terms of this divide shift, so does its temporalization: Berlant’s account of suffering exclusion and the “utopian-American dreamscape” describes these vectors as coexisting in a single moment, but in the postmodern period the position of painful particularity became associated with past injustices through the discourse of identity politics, while the falsely 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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universal “We” of liberalism became associated with a totalizing futurity that would erase these particular histories. In this paradigm, totalization arises when either the suffering past eradicates positive futurity or the homogenizing future erases a past whose pain should not be forgotten. Because it provides an elaborate narrative technology for transcending divisions in national belonging, the sentimental form is perfectly positioned to represent and to resolve this contradiction between the need to maintain a suffering past and the need to achieve positive futurity. As I argue in Chapter 5, The Color Purple (1982) reconciles these mutually exclusive demands by changing the past, thereby creating a world in which present-day women can transform without leaving behind previous generations. This intervention requires that the usual logic of time be scrambled through a proleptic imagination of postfeminist effect as prefeminist cause. In contrast, the sentimental form locates the contradictory desires for both positive futurity and the escape from totalization in interpersonal relationships and then dissolves this contradiction through an intense experience of shared emotion. Of course, the mere depiction of such dynamics through familial relationships does not necessarily result in a sentimental resolution: for example, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the mother/ daughter relationship figures the need both to preserve the past and to achieve positive futurity as an ultimately insoluble contradiction. As the novel’s famous injunction that “[t]his is not a story to pass on” implies, the paradoxical, mutually canceling imperatives to both forget and hold on to the past persist to the end of the text and beyond.10 Although the novel allows its heroine and hero to begin to forget their traumatic past, it only does so by insisting that its readers remember that past: given that the community of ex-slaves has banished its ghost at the end of the novel, it is the reader who is left still haunted by slavery’s traumas in the novel’s final, and unforgettable, passages. Thus, whereas The Color Purple changes the past so that we can transform without leaving it behind, Beloved accepts the mutually exclusive principles of time—the way in which change and continuity cannot both be had at once—but circumvents this problem by gifting its traumatized characters with change and its less traumatized readers with the burden of continuity. In contrast, in the mother/daughter novels I analyze in this chapter, the contradictions between the desire for and rejection of totalizing futurity are resolved within the emotional connection between mother and daughter. Because of the historical intervention of second-wave feminism, the mother/daughter narrative form provides a particularly fruitful ground for this temporalized version of the sentimental paradigm. As Nancy Armstrong points out, daughters have long been privileged 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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figures in the sentimental negotiation of national belonging because “[w]henever marriage outside a group threatens that group’s ties to the country of its origin, daughters tend to become problematic.”11 In early American sentimental fiction, Armstrong argues, the father/daughter relationship takes center stage because the daughter belongs to the father unless or until she is married, and therefore the threat of assimilation into an outside group can be figured as an attenuation of his power over and ownership of her. These texts choose to kill off daughters rather than to have them leave their fathers’ household. In contemporary sentimental fiction, it is the mother who becomes the freighted point of connection: because of the perceived transformation of gender roles brought about by second-wave feminism, the mother is perceived to have been necessarily more oppressed than the daughter. The same feminist transformations also lead to a heightened sense that the mother’s suffering at the hands of patriarchy makes her unable to provide good mothering to the daughter, who then becomes damaged in her own right. Not only is the daughter seen as too damaged to embrace the advantages that belong to her historical moment, but also this emotional repetition is intensified by the feminist imperative that the daughter will understand and identify with the mother’s oppression rather than simply leave her to her less favorable fate. Even without the specificity of ethnic belonging, the feminist approach to the mother/daughter relationship produces an opposition between suffering past and transformative yet homogenizing futurity. What ultimately makes the mother/daughter narrative such a potent allegorical form is that it is able to fuse this version of static time, which highlights the claims of the suffering past, with another that came to prominence in the late 1980s: the perceived inability of an existing mode of futurity to truly leave the past behind. Although it seems counterintuitive to perceive futurity as simultaneously present and not present, this doubled approach to the future necessarily arose as chronological distance from the end of the 1960s grew without a resolution of the problem of static time. By the late 1980s, American culture had changed profoundly since 1970 in ways that ranged from the movement to a service economy to the creation of the personal computer. However, because these changes did not produce a new trajectory of positive political fulfillment, they were not of the sort to shift the perception of static time that accompanied the end of the 1960s. As the 1980s turned into the 1990s, this perceived discrepancy between rapid transformation and actual political change came to take center stage in Left academia through the tremendous proliferation of discourse concerning postmodernism, which was conceived and developed in 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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the same period as the mother/daughter narrative form. Fredric Jameson bases his classic theory of postmodernism on exactly this doubled perception of postmodern futurity. On the one hand, the concept of postmodernism is said to reflect a paradigm shift, which has led to a new cultural dominant in the post-1960s landscape; on the other hand, the most crucial transformation brought about by this paradigm shift is its dissolution of positive futurity. As Jameson puts it, “everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, [but] nothing can change any longer.”12 This state has come about both because capitalism has triumphed globally, resulting in a totalized world in which real differences have been eradicated, and because Left totalization no longer seems capable of presenting an effective counterforce. Because of this saturation of capital, it is extremely difficult to imagine creating a mode of Left totalization that would counter its effects. While for identity politics the problem is that futurity would homogenize identity at the expense of a past that should be preserved, in late Marxism the problem is that we can no longer produce a futurity that would be potent enough to leave behind the overriding reality of domination. To put it another way, in the discourse of identity politics, futurity has become all too totalizing, and, in the discourse of Marxist postmodernism, futurity is no longer totalizing enough. In what follows, I will argue that the mother/daughter narrative conjoins these two seemingly contradictory problems, along with others I have discussed in this book, in a way that allows them to be resolved simultaneously. The experience of static time we are familiar with from Marxist discourse theories of postmodernism, in which a false and accelerated futurity fails to break with an underlying totalization, finds a perfect analogue in the daughter’s inability to reap the benefits of the feminist future in which she finds herself. As in the Marxist vision of postmodernism, feminist futurity is both a given and a failure in these narratives, an inauthentic temporality that produces rapid change without meaningful, positive transformation. At the same time, these texts suggest that the daughter cannot achieve genuine futurity because of the hold the suffering maternal past has on her, a narrative trope that evokes the identity politics discourse in which the past it totalized at the expense of the future. Amplifying the problem in novels like Meridian, whose heroine chooses to align herself with the past, the mother/daughter narrative here depicts the daughter as trapped in helpless, involuntary repetition of her mother’s fate. In fusing the perception that we cannot achieve totalization with the perception that we should not, this doubled depiction of static time also encapulsates that offered earlier by the women’s liberation novels. As I argued in 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Chapter 2, women are represented in these texts as trapped by both the inability to produce feminist teleological futurity, and the rejection of it as itself a tool of domination. Here, however, the displacement of this doubled problem to the sentimental form creates a new relationship between these two vectors that allows them to be resolved simultaneously. In brief, mother/daughter narratives imply that the only way to eradicate the daughter’s stasis is for the strife between mother and daughter to be resolved, but this process requires the daughter to reconcile or identify with the mother. As a result, the same gesture that would seem to restore genuine teleology by releasing the daughter from the weight of the past also reconnects the daughter to the mother/past, thereby dissolving the threat that a totalizing futurity will erase the past completely. Once the rejection and embrace of feminist futurity are encapsulated in the same gesture—the reconciliation with the mother—both desires can finally be satisfied at the same time. Ultimately, by personifying these contradictory vectors through a sentimental tale of a mother who suffered and a daughter who is unable to embrace the futurity she possesses, the mother/daughter narrative offers a means of dissolving and resolving simultaneously the multiple, competing versions of static time in the supercharged emotional crucible of the mother/daughter relationship. However, as I will argue, these narratives can only to do so by dissolving the operation of time itself, an approach that ultimately ends by displacing the political imagination in its entirety. Zero-Sum Games: The Persistence of the Past and the Fraudulence of the Future In The Joy Luck Club, the temporal disparity between prefeminist mother and postfeminist daughter is underlined by the novel’s immigration narratives, which associate the mothers with a premodern China and the daughters with an ultramodern America, as if they had not one but several generations between them.13 In so doing, the novel suggests that immigration to America is the only choice for Chinese women who desire their female children to be free, and it refuses to consider America’s role in creating the very oppression the novel associates with China. As one of the mothers recounts, “My mother, she suffered. . . . There is nothing more to understand. That was China. That was what people did back then. They had no choice.”14 In contrast, America is presented as a land of openness and possibility, particularly for women: “[O]ver there [in America] nobody will say [my daughter’s] worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch. . . . And over there she will always 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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be too full to swallow any sorrow!” (Tan 17). Such passages obviously enact the sort of privileging of Western modernity as both inevitable and always an improvement for women that transnational and postcolonial feminist theorists have frequently criticized. As Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong puts it, “[F]or the feminist audience, the Chinese American mother/daughter dyad in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife allegorizes a Third World/First World encounter that allows mainstream American feminism to construct itself in a flattering, because depoliticized, manner.”15 Because she possesses the purported advantages of mainstream American feminism, the daughter’s choices serve as a means of representing the tension between earlier, supposedly Chinese premodern womanhood and the assimilated Western femininity America offers. Pop feminist readings of the mother/daughter narrative propagated in the 1970s and 1980s made this temporalized model transportable to the white, middle-class mother/daughter relationship as well. For example, in her 1977 bestseller, My Mother/My Self, Nancy Friday argued that contemporary women were stuck in a symbiotic relationship that led to their fighting over scant resources. As Friday describes it, when symbiosis begins, it produces in mothers a sense that their daughters are mere extensions of themselves, so that praise for the daughter is perceived as praise for the mother and vice versa. During the Oedipal phase, the daughter begins to separate from the mother and especially to compete for the father’s attention, but often symbiosis still persists, with both mother and daughter perceiving themselves as locked in what Friday calls a “psychic economy of scarcity”: now that the daughter is beginning to individuate, attention paid to the daughter no longer feeds the mother but rather seems to take away from her—and vice versa.16 Because mother and daughter do not perceive themselves as separate adults with separate domains, they remain emotionally stuck in a kind of bad symbiosis in which they share a single set of limited resources.17 Unless they individuate, they will continue to experience their world as a zero-sum game in which either mother or daughter can have a life but never both. As pop psychologists like Friday would have it, this zero-sum game is merely a neurotic fantasy. Both mother and daughter are invested in a form of psychic scarcity in which their lack of separation makes each feel that to become a separate adult is to eclipse and destroy the other. Yet this situation was often perceived to have a material reality for the generation of mothers who had children in the last decades before second-wave feminism and the daughters who were those children. While fathers are often portrayed as sacrificing themselves to give their children lives they themselves did not have, they are not perceived to 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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give their time directly to their children in the way that stay-at-home mothers do: from the housewife’s perspective, it may appear as if her children consumed her future along with their baby food. As Walker’s Meridian suggests, in such versions of the mother/daughter relationship, there is only room for one trajectory of growth and maturation between the two generations, and the mother is often represented as feeling that she sacrificed hers to enable her children. Moreover, once the daughter is no longer required to make the same sacrifice to her own children but can instead choose to be childless, she appears to have consumed her mother’s futurity in a different way from previous generations: it is as if she has taken that time and made it her own, hoarding it rather than passing it on in another round of generational sacrifice. The scant resource over which mother and daughter struggle in their zero-sum game turns out to be time: the daughter has eradicated her mother’s opportunities because she has taken up all of her time— in particular the time that the mother might have used for her own teleological narrative of transformative futurity. This is much the situation presented in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Mother Vivianne, a golden girl in high school in the 1940s, marries immediately after college, has four children, and then attempts to drown her lack of achievements in a tide of bourbon and branch water, though her vitriol routinely overflows on her oldest daughter, heroine Sidda. Vivianne’s tragedy is that she has had children instead of the glamorous life of fame and fortune she feels she deserved, and—in case we have somehow missed the point—Sidda turns out to have much the sort of life Vivianne feels she was denied: Sidda is a theatre director who at the beginning of the novel has just had a major directorial triumph. Sidda thus not only signifies the future but also possesses more futurity than her mother’s generation did even in its heyday: she is able to pursue the sort of life her mother wanted, thanks to the transformation of women’s roles brought about by second-wave feminism. From Vivianne’s perspective, though, it is Sidda rather than the forces of determination that is the problem. For example, when Sidda has a cast party after the first play she professionally directs, her mother sabotages the evening by getting drunk and making a scene, insisting loudly that “[t]hey should not allow children to direct.”18 As the reference to “children” suggests, Vivianne sees Sidda as taking up an adult role that should be Vivianne’s—as if the daughter/future had robbed the mother/past of its rightful moment of priority. While these descriptions of the daughter’s ability to achieve such success suggest easy access to exactly the sort of teleological progress that has been so problematic for all the novels I have discussed, the 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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overidentification and bad symbiosis perceived to characterize the mother/ daughter relationship results in much the opposite effect: a world in which the weight of the suffering past inevitably eradicates positive futurity that should be the daughter’s. Despite major differences between the mother/daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club and Divine Secrets and among the various mother/daughter pairs in The Joy Luck Club, the past, in the form of the mother, overwhelms the future, in the form of the daughter, in every case. Most obviously, this eradication of the future happens in The Joy Luck Club owing to an overload of mother/daughter sympathy that thwarts the usual powers of sentimental emotion. As I have already suggested, the overidentification of women with their mothers became a given in the late 1970s and 1980s American cultural landscape, from pop-psychology bestsellers like My Mother/My Self to serious feminist tomes such as Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (1976). Rich, for example, argues that because of the permeability of the boundary between mother and daughter, the daughter struggles with the threat of “[p]sychic osmosis. . . . The power of the bond [is] often denied because it cracks consciousness, threatens at times to lead the daughter back into ‘those secret chambers . . . becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same.’”19 As Rich’s water imagery (borrowed from Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse) suggests, mother and daughter possess particularly fluid boundaries that may at any time be dissolved, allowing them to return to a merged state.20 But such watery fusion also has particular significance for the popular sentimental form: in Berlant’s words, tellingly infused with liquid imagery, sentiment works by “dissolv[ing] contradiction and dissent into pools of basic and also higher truth.”21 Thus, the fluid boundaries that threaten to render mother and daughter indistinguishable from one another also make them especially ripe for sentimental fusion; as Glenn Hendler puts it, “[t]he complete submergence of the female self in an identification with an other [is] sympathy in its most extreme form.”22 Because of the intensity of their identification, however, the daughter does not so much provide sympathy for the mother as mirror and inhabit the mother’s pain. In her discussion of the dynamics of sentimental mother/daughter narratives in mid-twentieth-century China, Rey Chow argues that this version of sympathy breaks down the binaries between subject and object. In the standard sympathy dynamic, “‘(one) fill[s] (another’s) pain with (one’s) sympathy,’” offering compensation for suffering through one’s understanding.23 In the mother/daughter relationship, this dynamic is “reformulated as ‘(one) filling (another’s) pain with (one’s) pain.’ In other words, the binary oppositions that 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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underlie the common understanding of sacrifice and compensation in the form of ‘giver versus receiver,’ ‘sympathy versus pain,’ or ‘fullness versus lack’ are dissolved.”24 Whereas sentimental identification usually works by dissolving the contradiction between particular pain and universal belonging, here the identification is so overwhelming that only particular pain is left: when the daughter fully inhabits her mother’s pain, she does not share the advantages of her futurity with her mother so much as abandon them to participate in the suffering past. In The Joy Luck Club, such fusion through shared pain characterizes many of the mother/daughter relationships, particularly those located in China. In the story that mother An-Mei tells about her relationship with her own mother, for example, this pain is the defining element in their relationship. Although she has spent much of her childhood without her mother, An-Mei recognizes her immediately when they meet, recounting, “I knew she was my mother, because I could feel her pain” (Tan 216). An-Mei’s mother attempts to caution her daughter against showing too much of this pain, as others might use it to their own advantage: “Now you see . . . why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.” But after my mother finished her story, I looked at her and saw she was crying. And I also began to cry again, that this was our fate, to live like two turtles seeing the watery world together from the bottom of the little pond. (Tan 217)

Echoing the images of liquidity associated with both mother/daughter merging and sentimental fusion, this passage represents mother and daughter as almost swimming in tears. And, while An-Mei’s mother suggests that An-Mei’s tears may benefit someone else, that dynamic doesn’t define the mother/daughter relationship. Rather, the tears of one merely prompt the tears of the other, locking them in an endless cycle of mutually consuming grief that threatens to drown them both. If daughters represent the abstract future and mothers the painful and particular past, mother/daughter fusion in suffering figures an overload of past pain such that the abstract, painless future is eradicated entirely. To put it another way, mother/daughter fusion works so well that the daughter’s identification with the mother’s pain eradicates her own access to futurity. In Divine Secrets, a very similar problem is represented in a rather different register: the therapeutic discourse of dysfunctional familial 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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relationships and the problems created when one cannot heal the child within. The novel begins with a cataclysmic fight between mother and daughter sparked by a New York Times article about Sidda’s most recent directorial triumph. Tellingly enough, the article includes information about the childhood beatings Sidda received from her alcoholic mother, intertwining Sidda’s success with a story of her abuse at her mother’s hands. The story so enrages Vivianne that she disowns and disinherits Sidda and, as a result, Sidda breaks off her engagement to a man represented as the perfect mate for her, arguing that she is so damaged by her childhood that she “[doesn’t] know how to love” and hence shouldn’t marry anyone (Wells 11). As in the classic sentimental form, the daughter’s movement toward exogamy serves as a marker for the possibility of futurity, and Sidda’s inability to marry registers the hold the past has on her. Although Sidda should have more futurity than her mother, Vivianne’s rage at her lack of opportunities has enacted a form of psychic damage that keeps Sidda from embracing success. Through its reliance on self-help discourse, the novel suggests that Sidda cannot move forward because she cannot forgive her mother and therefore remains in thrall to her past grievance. While Sidda and Vivianne do not identify with each other’s pain, since each sees the other as having caused it, the mother’s suffering thus still causes the daughter to have failed to access the futurity that is available to her. Given that the daughter’s lack of futurity arises here from the mother’s suffering and lack of power, the more general solution would seem to be for the mother to have power so that, when the daughter identifies with her, the daughter incorporates her mother’s strength rather than her oppression and misery. In fact, The Joy Luck Club suggests that the opposite is true: as we learn from Lindo and Waverly’s story cycle, strong mothers produce miserable daughters as well. Even as a young girl, mother Lindo seems able to manipulate the oppressive systems around her in China by using the very rules that confine her to produce the effects she desires. This power persists even in America, where Lindo has the most obviously successful daughter, the onetime chess prodigy Waverly. At first, it appears that Lindo is able to pass on her talents to Waverly, whose aptitude for chess resembles her mother’s ability to manipulate systems to her own benefit. Although Waverly is pleased with her chess triumphs, she becomes increasingly frustrated with Lindo’s tendency to want to claim credit for those victories, and the two have a fight. Waverly loses this battle, and afterward she never plays chess so successfully or confidently again. This series of events suggests that Waverly can have power only as long as she remains tied to and aligned with her mother; for Waverly, though, this power doesn’t seem her own precisely because she remains under 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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her mother’s control. To put it another way, Lindo cannot help Waverly learn to manipulate the system because, for Waverly, Lindo is the system. Waverly’s story suggests that, because the mother’s power is experienced by the daughter as a threatening force, the mother cannot transmit whatever power she possesses to her daughter: instead, in keeping with the zero-sum dynamic, the mother’s power immediately becomes power over rather than power shared by the daughter. In a fashion that perfectly metaphorizes the mutually exclusive vectors of past and future, the mother’s strength cannot be shared with the daughter but rather works against her, such that the past still triumphs over the future. In every case, it seems, the past, in the form of the mother, overwhelms the future, in the form of the daughter. This sense of almost uncanny uniformity in the mother/daughter relationship is underscored in The Joy Luck Club by what Shirley Lim calls the mother’s position as “the figure not only of maternality but also of racial consciousness.”25 The novel repeatedly associates its vision of this racial consciousness with nonrational or magical models of cause and effect.26 One of the sections in the novel begins with a sort of parable that encapsulates the power this nonrational causality has in the novel: a mother tells her daughter not to ride her bike around the corner because a Chinese book called The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates says that bad things will happen to the daughter away from her house. The daughter becomes frustrated when the mother refuses to explain what these bad things are and finally begins to yell: “‘You can’t tell me because you don’t know! You don’t know anything!’ And the girl ran outside, jumped on her bicycle, and in her hurry to get away, she fell before she even reached the corner” (Tan 87, emphasis in original). Thus, the mysterious knowledge associated with the Chinese book trumps the daughter’s supposed agency, turning even her defiance into a means of fulfilling its prophecy: whatever action the daughter takes still ends in reinforcing both the mysterious forces of Chinese causality and the infallibility of the mother. That the mother and daughter are unnamed suggests the way that this vignette serves as a kind of ur-narrative that underlies all the mother/daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club. Behind the rational American version of cause and effect, the novel insists, a more mysterious set of forces is at work, bending any action to fit a predetermined outcome. Because this form of inexorable determination is associated with both the mother and a racial consciousness associated with the mother country, so to speak, it serves as a kind of metaphor for the power of the past: the inexorable weight of the past determines events much the way the mysterious, magical powers of a supposedly premodern Chinese causality do, 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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molding what could have been different futures into the preformed image of the past. The Joy Luck Club thematizes this sense of overdetermination through its proliferation of mother/daughter pairs. As Dana Heller points out, “Balance is structurally foregrounded [by the novel] in symmetrical pairings, a reiteration of fours. There are four mothers, four daughters, four directions, and four corners of the mah-jongg table.”27 Among the four mother/daughter pairs, we also find a balanced set of oppositions: the novel depicts a mother who is a victim of the system of Chinese causality (Ying-Ying), a mother who is a victim of the American system of causality (An-Mei), a mother who is powerful in her manipulation of Chinese causality (Lindo), and a mother who is powerful in her belief in American causality (Suyuan). Yet this balanced set of opposing situations collapses into a single disastrous result: all the daughters feel powerless and stuck, unable to embrace the positive futurity that the novel implies is theirs by right of having been born in the right place and time. As An-Mei puts it, I was raised the Chinese way; I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness. . . . And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way. (Tan 215)

Using language reminiscent of The Women’s Room’s description of a weaving in which all the strands are the same color, The Joy Luck Club suggests the way in which the mother/daughter relationship figures the link between totalization and static time: because the mother and daughter are invariably the same, the difference that should inevitably arise with the passage of time is erased, so that the same world is reproduced in the same way, ad infinitum. Ultimately, then, the resonance of the mother/daughter relationship arises not only from the way in which it consistently demonstrates the power of the past but also from the way in which it suggests the overdetermination of that process, the way in which every possible permutation of the mother/daughter equation returns the same bleak answer. The mother/daughter relationship is thus a kind of engine of totalization: from its disparate dysfunctional relationships, it produces the same identical effect—a daughter who is no freer than her mother before her. Whereas in Meridian and The Color Purple the burden of the past was one chosen by the subject, who did not want to 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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erase the noble suffering of previous generations, here the burden is enforced: the past operates as a form of totalization in its own right, eradicating access to positive futurity and leaving the subject trapped in static time. When The Joy Luck Club and Divine Secrets depict their heroines as actually possessing all the opportunities required for feminist fulfillment—which these novels associate with independence, selfdetermination, and success in love and work—but as unable to inhabit or enact this futurity fully, these novels evoke the perception of denatured and inadequate futurity that came to the fore in the late 1980 and 1990s. All the daughter’s efforts at embracing a fate better than her mother’s seem, like Jameson’s post-1960s Left, “somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.”28 As a result, the daughter finds herself in a future seemingly utterly different than what came before but that still fails to break with the perception of underlying totalization—in other words, in the world of postmodern futurity. As Jameson puts it, postmodernity is characterized by “a gleaming science-fictional stasis in which appearances (simulacra) arise and decay ceaselessly without the momentous stasis of everything that is flickering for the briefest of instants or even momentarily wavering in its ontological prestige.”29 That is, because it does nothing to affect the underlying mode of totalization that renders everything static, this version of futurity offers continual movement but no actual change. In Andreas Huyssen’s terms, this temporal mode is characterized by “the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive” and the problems of “heterogeneity, non-synchronicity and information overload.”30 In a similar fashion, versions of the mother/daughter story consistently present the daughter’s futurity as having accelerated and fragmented her life without actually presenting the means for genuine positive change. Divine Secrets makes the false aspect of this futurity particularly clear in its comparison between Sidda’s friendships and the relationship between Vivianne and her loyal cadre of girlfriends, the titular Ya-Ya sisterhood. The camaraderie of these four women, crazy drunken divas all, is miraculously free from jealousy, competition, and power struggles of any kind. Not coincidentally, this sisterhood exists in a temporality that Sidda enviously describes as “porch time”: both a lazy, rural temporality without hurries and worries and a time before the competitive landscape that characterizes both mother/daughter power games and women’s struggle for achievement in the world supposedly created by second-wave feminism. In her frequent longing for girlfriends of the sort her mother has, Sidda suggests that her own position 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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after feminism has robbed her of a longed-for experience before the hustle and bustle associated with the contemporary careerist woman.31 Instead, Sidda has only one female friend, a writer who is associated with Sidda’s life in the theater—a realm which Hendler argues tends to eradicate authentic female-to-female identification: “‘Proper’ sympathetic identification integrates a female protagonist into . . . a sympathetic community. . . . All other acts of sympathy are mere ‘mimic scenes’” of the sort associated with theatrical performance.32 As if to underscore this distinction, Sidda has just taken on a production of The Women when the novel begins, and she asks her mother to help with it since Vivianne and the Ya-Yas “know everything about female friendship” (Wells 6, emphasis in the original). Vivianne takes umbrage at the request, insisting that she and her friends “are nothing like those cats in The Women. . . . They hated each other” (16, emphasis in the original). Whereas Sidda must make do with theatrical “mimic scenes” of female connection, scenes so artificial that they miss the mark entirely, the Ya-Yas have the genuine article. As do the theorists of postmodern time, Sidda finds herself in trapped in a form of futurity whose only real difference from the past is that it results in a form of hyperacceleration and simulation at odds with authentic experience—temporal and otherwise. In this way, Sidda’s futurity, the very difference between her life and her mother’s, turns out to constitute another form of static time. From Transformation to Transcendence Having managed to inscribe both the danger of leaving the past behind and the impossibility of doing so, the sentimental mother/daughter narrative then washes the contradiction between these two forms of static time away in a tide of shared sentiment, one which seems to release the daughter into a new experience of futurity. In each of the mother/daughter relationships depicted in Divine Secrets and The Joy Luck Club, this resolution occurs when reconciliation with the mother/ past paradoxically becomes what is required for the daughter/future to be released from static time. Just as The Joy Luck Club presents various, contradictory causes for the daughters’ stasis, it offers a range of mutually contradictory solutions to this stasis, each of which relies on a reconfigured form of the mother/daughter connection. That these conflicting solutions can coexist without seeming to cancel each other out suggests the power of the sentimental resolution to eradicate contradiction through emotional catharsis. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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In its traditional American form, the sentimental resolution of historical contradiction requires the nonsuffering citizen to identify with those in pain so that the poles of universal, abstract belonging and particular, suffering exclusion can be merged in a single shared emotion. In contrast, as I have suggested, the daughter’s ability to share her mother’s pain can so be intensified through their overidentification that, rather than fusing the daughter’s futurity with her mother’s pain, their sentimental linkage erases the future entirely. However, this approach still leaves a loophole through which mother/daughter identification can be recovered and transformed: if identifying with the mother’s pain or internalizing her suffering causes the problem of static time, then the solution in these cases is for the mother to offer the daughter strength rather than suffering as a point of identification. The Joy Luck Club adopts precisely this strategy for the mother/daughter pairs defined by the mother’s suffering. For example, mother Ying-Ying St. Clair’s story centers on the way in which she feels determined by various forces around her and hence fails to act, and she has passed this passivity to her daughter, Lena, who feels incapable of standing up for herself in her marriage. At the conclusion of the mother’s story cycle, Ying-Ying abandons her previous world view and decides that she must find a way to resist the determinations of fate and encourage her daughter to do the same. Thus, rather than the suffering of the past reproducing itself into the next generation, the mother/past is now able to offer the daughter/future precisely the knowledge she needs to navigate her own developmental trajectory successfully. Not only is the totalizing quality of the past eradicated when the daughter is able to embrace her futurity, but the totalizing quality of the future dissolves as well, since identifying with the past is what is required to enable the future. Even relationships that operate on the opposite principle become subject to this same resolution. As I have suggested, Waverly’s inability to embrace the future has arisen not from mother Lindo’s lack of strength but rather because Lindo is all too strong: because of the zero-sum game of the mother/daughter relationship, the mother’s strength does not enable her daughter but instead oppresses her, making Waverly feel powerless and inadequate. The final story in Waverly and Lindo’s cycle provides a way out of this double bind by representing the mother’s strength as enabling for the daughter, as if the previous problems with this approach had never been elaborated by the novel. Sitting at the hairdresser’s with her daughter, Lindo notices that she and her daughter have the same “crooked” nose—a fact Lindo finds strange given that she got her 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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crooked nose in an accident rather than by birth (Tan 265–66). Unaware of the accident, Waverly believes that this nose is a genetic inheritance from her mother, which she feels accounts for their shared, “twofaced”ability to mislead others about their plans—a power Waverly is happy to have inherited from her mother (Tan 266). This assertion that the crooked nose was passed on to Waverly without the intervention of biology suggests a kind of magical transmission of qualities from the mother to the daughter, so that whatever the mother gained through experience would automatically become the property of the daughter as well. As Lindo puts it, “[h]er character, it came from my circumstances” (Tan 265). Rather than the zero-sum economy in which the mother’s strength produces the daughter’s weakness, here we have an undiluted, even supernatural conduction of female empowerment from generation to generation. As if to underscore this process of positive reproduction, Lindo’s epiphany takes place as she and her daughter gaze into a mirror together. In both of these mother/daughter pairs, then, the contradiction between past and future is erased in a moment of shared empowerment, which both releases the daughter from stasis and undoes the requirement that feminist futurity leave the past behind. In the final words of the Waverly/Lindo vignette, for example, Lindo thinks about the two faces created by her crooked nose, wondering, “Which one is American? Which one is Chinese? Which one is better? If you show one, you must always sacrifice the other. . . . So now I think, What did I lose? What did I get back in return? I will ask my daughter what she thinks” (Tan 266). Although the insistence that one face always exists at the expense of the other suggests the zero-sum game with which we began—either the American, future-oriented face threatens to displace the Chinese face associated with the past or vice versa—the novel displaces the zero-sum dynamic between mother and daughter by suggesting that Lindo can now discuss and evaluate these costs and benefits with her daughter. Even while insisting that you can’t have it all, that one life exists at the expense of the other, the novel shows Lindo and Waverly escaping this dynamic, and hence the central affective register of the battle between past and future in the novel. At the conclusion of their story, the past no longer overwhelms the future but rather enables it. In this way, The Joy Luck Club also undoes the temporalized contradiction between Chinese belonging and feminist empowerment that it has developed throughout the novel, in effect suggesting that the daughters may have their ethnicity and be feminists too. Of course, as the transnational feminist critique of The Joy Luck Club makes clear, the conception of a necessary contradiction between 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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feminist empowerment and Chinese identity is not an historical reality but rather an ideologically invested fantasy that the novel offers to its first-world readers. However, because the novel has produced such an extensive and lavishly detailed vision of this fantasy, this sudden conflation of Chinese and Western womanhood serves as an additional, and highly seductive, version of the transcendence of temporalized contradictions between mother and daughter. The Joy Luck Club doesn’t discover that its elaboration of these purported differences between Chinese and Western gender identity is a cognitive or political error that must be unpicked. Rather, it suggests that such differences do exist but can be suddenly unraveled in a moment of intense interpersonal identification. The ultimate expression of this process occurs in the reunion moments that conclude both The Joy Luck Club and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. In The Joy Luck Club, this reunion concerns the central mother/ daughter pair, Suyuan and daughter June, whose stories begin and end the volume. As the reader and daughter June eventually learn, Suyuan had two daughters by an earlier marriage, but, when the Japanese invaded China, Suyuan was forced to leave her twin baby daughters behind, though she made all the provisions she could for them, hiding money and jewels inside their clothes for whomever would find and rescue them. Although the novel is careful never to say so directly, it is clear that Suyuan was forced to choose between fleeing on her own and staying to be killed by the Japanese and that in abandoning her babies she saves her own life. In the story of Suyuan’s flight, then, we have a particularly tragic and literalized version of the zero-sum game between mother and daughter, in which mother and daughter cannot both proceed down the road to safety. Although the mother appears to have saved herself, this event becomes associated with the weight of a tragic past that has created the mother’s own suffering, a weight intensified for June when Suyuan dies just before the lost daughters are located. In a conversation with his daughter, June’s father describes Suyuan’s name in a way that encapsulates the temporal problematic created by this tragedy: The way she write it in Chinese, it mean “Long-Cherished Wish.” Quite a fancy name, not so ordinary like flower name. See this first character, it mean something like “Forever Never Forgotten.” But there is another way to write “Suyuan.” Sound exactly the same, but the meaning is opposite. . . . The first part look the same: “Never Forgotten.” But the last part add to first part make the whole word mean, “Long-Held Grudge.” Your mother get angry with me, I tell her her name should be Grudge. (Tan 280) 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Because the mother’s wish to be reunited with the daughters never came true, it became a “grudge,” a grievance associated with the burden of past suffering in the present. The novel associates this burden with Suyuan’s fixation on making June into a prodigy, as if her remaining daughter’s triumphant success could erase the grief associated with the missing daughters. As a child, June feels her only defense against these inflated expectations is to cease trying to fulfill them; in other words, because what her mother wants is June’s success, June cannot free herself from this pressure without turning her back on her own positive futurity. This dynamic offers another example of the way in which the mother/daughter relationship reduces every permutation to the same experience of static time: even the mother’s desperate desire for the daughter’s teleological fulfillment only makes that fulfillment impossible. The hidden benefit to this configuration is that making her mother happy and embracing futurity become conflated in June’s story: she is stuck because of her guilt at never having fulfilled her mother’s wish and is trapped by her own grudge against her mother’s expectations, which kept her from achieving everything she might. The novel finds a way to fulfill this wish when June returns to China to have the reunion that her mother never got to have. The status of June’s half sisters as twins, tellingly referred to as “double-image women” when June first catches sight of them, sets the stage for a moment of mirroring and identification that transcends the zero-sum game of mother/daughter relations. As the novel’s last pages inform us, the sentimental intensity of the reunion is such that all three daughters and their mother become fused into one identity: the three daughters are captured in a snapshot, and as they stare at it, they realize that “[t]ogether we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish” (Tan 288). In collapsing all three daughters into an image of their mother, this scene deploys the overidentification of mother and daughter in order to return the mother to life long enough to fulfill her wish. Rather than mother and daughter existing at one another’s expense in a static time of perpetual grudges, mother and daughters become the means of fulfillment for one another—both because what the twins and the mother most want is to see each other and because the daughters are the instrument that enables the mother to be there for her wish to be fulfilled. Finally, this reunion with and undoing of the past becomes what is required for June to become freed of her own internal dilemmas: as she puts it, “And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood. After all these years, it can 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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finally be let go” (Tan 288). Although June depicts returning to China as paradoxically providing her with a way to move forward, her freeing realization amounts to an acknowledgment that there is no moving beyond her Chinese heritage: what is in the blood is what can never be “let go.” Divine Secrets ends in a similar moment of profound identification, in which boundaries and contradictions are dissolved in a wash of tears. As I have suggested, Vivianne and Sidda’s story focuses on the way in which they operated the means of each other’s destruction: Vivianne’s past suffering led to the bad mothering that damaged Sidda, and Sidda and her siblings stole the futurity that might have been Vivianne’s. Each served as the force of historical determination for the other— the future that eradicated the past and the past that eradicated the future, simultaneously. Despite Sidda’s declaration that their final reconciliation arises because she “gave up the need to know” the truth about her mother, this denial is undercut by the fact that the vast bulk of the novel has been spent providing precisely this understanding (Wells 346). When Sidda learns the “divine secrets” of Vivianne’s past, shared through documents and stories provided by the Ya-Yas, she learns that Vivianne’s suffering made her too damaged to be an adequate mother for Sidda. Crucially, most of Vivianne’s emotional pain was produced by her own mother, whose Catholic strictures were little more than an alibi for her envious hatred of her daughter. When Sidda learns that her mother was damaged as well, and by a very similar mother/daughter dynamic to the one in which she herself has suffered, she is able to forgive Vivianne for her failures as a mother; she comes to see them both as sharing in the same experience of pain rather than simply being the instruments of each other’s suffering. Although this identification through pain might seem to leave Sidda and Vivianne drowning in the same tide of grief that threatened some of the mother/daughter pairs in The Joy Luck Club, Divine Secrets manipulates the temporality of forgiveness in a way that keeps their mutual empathy from locking them in static time. In Hannah Arendt’s account, to forgive is to restart the clock in a relationship by agreeing to place the injury in the past and no longer have it define the relationship in the present: “[w]ithout being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacks the magic formula to break the spell.”33 In other words, forgiveness is precisely what keeps the weight of a past grievance from determining everything that comes after it; in an interpersonal relationship, forgiveness saves us from the sort 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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of experience of static time associated with identity politics, in which a past injury continues to define the identity in the present and the future. Thus, forgiveness is aligned with futurity, with the ability to leave the past behind. In contrast, by creating the capacity for this forgiveness through identification, Divine Secrets suggests that forgiveness actually relies on a connection to the past: for Sidda, letting go of her grievance means identifying with the past—in effect strengthening its hold on her. While the novel denies this process by insisting that Sidda no longer needs to understand her mother, the fact that the novel spends more time recounting Vivianne’s life than Sidda’s makes it clear that learning about her mother’s past is precisely what enables Sidda to forgive. For Sidda, the supposedly teleological forward motion of forgiveness becomes indistinguishable from the need to recover and preserve the past, metaphorized by the precious book of “divine secrets” created by the Ya-Yas. Because this book shares the same title as the novel itself, the entire act of reading the text becomes itself a form of returning to, concretizing, and sustaining this past. Once the ability to go forward and the ability to go back become encapsulated in the same gesture, and in the same text, identification through grief no longer threatens to eradicate the daughter’s futurity, just as the daughter’s futurity no longer requires leaving behind the mother’s pain. The fusion of these two vectors is metaphorized by the gifts that Sidda and Vivianne exchange when they finally meet and repair their relationship. Sidda gives her mother a lachrymatory, a tiny vial designed to hold tears, a gift that invokes both the sentimental power of Sidda’s ability to share her mother’s pain and the imperative that this pain be preserved rather than left behind. Vivianne gives Sidda a diamond ring associated with painful experiences in Vivianne’s own childhood, thereby registering the way in which past pain now binds mother and daughter: when Vivianne places the ring on Sidda’s finger, it is as if mother and daughter have married each other. Because the contradiction between the production of futurity and the preservation of the past has now been eradicated, this reconciliation simultaneously allows Sidda to realize that she does “know how to love” and can go ahead with her marriage to her fiancé. Underscoring this ability to keep the past while accessing the future, Sidda’s marriage takes place a few pages later, at her parents’ house. In a gesture reminiscent of June’s simultaneous return to and ability to “let go” of China, Sidda goes home rather than leaves home when she gets married—to both her mother and her lover. Instead of a totalizing vector of futurity, which would require leaving behind the past for a different future, the novel provides a futurity that relies on the persistence of the past. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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From one perspective, these conclusions offer a marvelously successful resolution of the persistent problem of static time. Because the mother/past and the daughter/future exist in a zero-sum world where one inevitably oppresses the other, their relationship metaphorizes the tendency of the future to exist at the expense of the past and the past to exist at the expense of the future, simultaneously. Moreover, by presenting the version of feminist futurity on offer to daughters like Sidda as both present and inadequate, these stories also allegorize the way in which the futurity on offer in the 1980s and 1990s failed to provide genuine motion forward. As in Marxist descriptions of postmodernism, this version of futurity erases everything about the past except the experience of oppression, beyond which it is powerless to move. Both novels fuse a perception of the dangers of teleological futurity, exemplified by the daughter’s eradiation of the mother’s opportunities, with a perception of the failure of teleological futurity, exemplified by the daughter’s inability to be any happier despite her many advantages. Most importantly, these narratives also create a causal relationship between these two vectors that allows the very contradiction between them to become the source of their resolution: because the daughter/ future has been damaged by the mother/past, she cannot embrace her futurity unless she finds a way to produce a new relationship to that past. In other words, engaging with the weight of the past becomes the means of releasing the daughter from her stasis. While these novels inscribe in great detail the way in which the mother/past prevents the daughter from embracing her futurity, all of these various versions of static time can thus be transcended when mother and daughter reach a new understanding of that past through a flood of shared emotion. Where the daughter’s identification with her mother’s pain was the problem, it is replaced by identification with her mother’s strength; where their mutually exclusive relationship to futurity was the problem, this competition is eradicated through a new identification through pain. On the allegorical level, this operation erases the contradiction between the need for teleological futurity and the rejection of teleological futurity: it creates a vision of forward motion that in fact requires a return to, rather than an abandonment of, the past. As will no doubt be clear, there are striking limitations to this strategy. While the double bind posed by the rejection of and the need for totalization can be dissolved in a moment of profound emotional intensity, the key word here is moment. For example, in each of the mother/daughter novels I have discussed, the narrative process is temporalized in such a way that it displaces any actual representation of progressive development for the daughter: there is little temporal advancement in the present day of 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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either novel, both of which expend their narrative energy in recounting events from the past. In Divine Secrets, the actual temporal progression of Sidda’s present-day life is limited to the month or two she spends in a remote cabin, in almost literal stasis as she sits and reads about her mother’s life. A similarly skewed temporal operation is in evidence in The Joy Luck Club, where the contemporary lives of the daughters are represented in very brief vignettes, and the bulk of the narrative is spent recounting either the mothers’ lives in China or the daughters’ childhoods in America. Significantly, the only extended description of June’s presentday life is that of her journey of “return” to China. The temporal form of these novels thus mirrors their thematic strategy: the imperative to go back in order to go forward. In general, the texts travel backward until they reach a point that is seen to enable a new relationship with the past, at which point they jump forward to roughly the same presentday moment at which they began. Thus, the final pages of the text offer not forward motion so much as a transcendent moment in which the imperative to reconcile with the past has finally been satisfied—that is, the moment in which the difference between the desire for the past and the desire for the future is collapsed. This moment amounts to the completion of a temporal loop, which leaves readers in much the same place in which they began. It is thus no accident that the novels end with this moment of transcendence, because in a sense there can be no time that comes after it: having eradicated the difference not only between past and future but between moving forward and moving backward in time, these novels have imploded into a kind of temporal black hole from which no vector of motion can emerge. While Divine Secrets and The Joy Luck Club do escape the problem of static time, they thus do so only by denying the operations of time, by placing us outside of any kind of imaginable temporal motion. In adopting this approach, these novels conflate their resolution of static time with the escape from time itself, an approach that greatly intensifies the emotional charge of their conclusions. The particular problem of time and teleology I have been describing in this book occurs when time no longer appears to function as it should, when its link with change is broken. In contrast, this larger sense of human imprisonment within time arises from the normal functions of temporal progression: the irreversibility of time, the way in which the past is out of our reach, the inevitability of aging and death, and our lack of choice over the moment in which we are born, which has so much effect on the opportunities for development we will possess. When it renders the resolution of the mother/daughter dynamic as a transcendence of time’s normal properties, the mother/daughter narrative taps into the flood of feeling associated with these operations 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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—both our grief at what time has taken from us and our rage at our helplessness before it. The resolution of the June/Suyuan story cycle, for instance, derives its emotional freight, not only from the way in which it allows June to heal herself through healing her mother, but also from its seeming ability to thwart the inexorable operations of time: when it brings the mother to life in the snapshot, the novel undoes the death that came too soon and kept the daughters from ever getting to know the mother and the mother from having her wish fulfilled. In so doing, this passage enacts what Berlant terms the sentimental “transcendence of the self who exemplifies the impossibility of existence outside history” and “the tragedies that seemed long ago to constitute whatever horizon of possibility [one’s] identity might aspire to.”34 In this picture of a moment outside of time, metaphorized in the freeze-framed, simultaneous experience of pure identity captured in the snapshot, The Joy Luck Club offers access to a lifeworld untainted by the grief that time installs at the beating heart of our most profound relationships. On the one hand, such a solution ratifies the longing for political change by associating it with a longing that every human is assumed to share: it conflates the anger, sadness, and helplessness arising from the foreclosure of political transformation with the anger, sadness, and helplessness we feel before the inexorability of time. On the other hand, such an approach implies that actual political transformation is impossible: if we have as much hope of shifting our political realities as we do of shifting the reality of time, then political transformation is truly and permanently out of reach. To put it another way, despite the boundaries seemingly washed away by shared grief before time’s inexorable motion, there is no avoiding the fact that if we cannot have political fulfillment within the confines of human time, we cannot have it at all. The political dangers of the sentimental mother/daughter narrative, then, aren’t limited to those usually leveled at the sentimental form: that it makes the suffering of the oppressed available for readerly consumption or that it encourages readers to believe that when we have felt something about injustice, we have done something about injustice. In addition to these potential liabilities, mother/daughter narrative generates another, perhaps greater problem: it offers a solution to static time that paradoxically incorporates an acknowledgment that the problem can have no solution. From a certain perspective, though, this is a realization that may inevitably accompany the narrative resolution of a material problem. As Jameson argues in the passage I have used as one of my epigraphs, narrative forms manifest the reality of social contradiction as an antinomy: a “logical scandal or double bind, the unthinkable and the conceptually paradoxical, that which cannot be unknotted by the 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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operation of pure thought.”35 In Jameson’s terminology, the antinomy allegorizes the social contradiction, which cannot be grasped or resolved by the text itself.36 Because it does not operate on the level of the social contradiction, the resolution of the antinomy is inevitably not a solution to the social problematic but rather, as Jameson puts it, “the very caricature of a dialectical resolution.”37 In Divine Secrets and The Joy Luck Club, the antimony at hand lies in the simultaneous need for and rejection of totalizing futurity, a logical double bind that only the eradication of time itself can resolve—surely a caricature of a dialectical resolution if there ever was one. Yet, in foregrounding the inexorability of time, these novels push us toward a recognition of the paucity of the narrative resolution of social contradiction in a way that the other novels I have examined do not. Time, as my other epigraph suggests, is the one element that, short of science fiction measures, is absolutely beyond the purview of human agency. Our engagement with time is always in that sense epiphenomenal—we react, emote, flail, and rage, but we do not, we cannot, change time. Without discounting the political defeatism inherent in this emphasis on the human powerless before time, I want to suggest that this approach to time also allegorizes the very limitation of the narrative resolution these novels so successfully produce: in moving from transformation within time to the transcendence of time, they inscribe both the best resolution to static time that the feminist allegory can offer and the knowledge that, separated from praxis, this resolution can only be on the level of the imagination.



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hroughout this book, I have aimed to uncover the way that feminist narrative has been used to think about overarching problems in time and totalization. In conclusion, I want to briefly reverse this interpretive process and suggest something of the role that the association between feminism and static time has played in the way feminist politics has been received—particularly through the link between feminism and the desire to transcend time that I explored in the previous chapter. At the same time that popular feminist novels were at work exploring this relationship, backlash novels were busy—very, very busy—working out another kind of temporal trauma: the problem of the woman who has no time. Popular culture brought us many such hurried women in the 1980s and 1990s, from early films like Baby Boom (1987) to late novels like Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It: The Life of Working Mother Kate Reddy (2002), originally published in England but a bestseller in the United States as well. These novels fall into two general groups: those that explore the tension between work and family and those that explore the evil of the postfeminist woman through the relationship between a female underling and a female boss.1 In this genre, we find not only work/family stories such as Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It but also working-girl stories like Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada (2003) and Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s The Nanny Diaries (2002), both of which focus on young women who find themselves virtual slaves to the despicable older women for whom they work. For the most part, this fixation on frenzied women unfolds below the radar of novels in my archive, since it is a backlash rather than a pop-feminist trope; not surprisingly, it makes its presence felt primarily in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, arguably the most conservative of the novels I have analyzed in the previous chapters. Yet the cultural obsession with frantic women, or what might be called “hurried woman discourse,” draws on much the 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Coda


same association between feminism and the transcendence of time that I have been tracing in the previous chapter.2 In I Don’t Know How She Does It, for example, working mother Kate Reddy finds that being a career woman and a mother has placed her in a losing battle against time. The novel suggests that being a working mother creates two complete lives because women have gained a new job without dispensing with their old job as housewives. Kate cannot give up any of the housewife role because she believes that no one can ever take care of her children as well as she can, even their father, who is the subject of much Erma-Bombeck-style humor about the domestic failings of the male. Because these failings are presented as congenital defects, the problem in this novel is not that men need to learn to replace the toilet paper roll themselves but rather that women need somehow to fit both the new working-woman duties and the old stay-at-home duties into a single life. Thus, in a fashion reminiscent of the mother/daughter stories I discussed in the previous chapter, Kate’s need for feminist transformation is turned into a struggle against a mutually exclusive relationship determined by time: as she puts it, “twenty-four hours is not enough” because she has “two lives and . . . [no] time to enjoy either of them.”3 Moreover, I Don’t Know How She Does It attaches this overriding power of time to maternal ideology in ways that associate its demands on Kate with the inexorability of time as well. The third entry on Kate’s list of reasons to quit work is that “[her] children will be young for only a short time” (Pearson 325). Like time, the novel insists, children wait for no (wo)man, leaving behind their adorable lisp while Mommy is busy checking the Nikkei index. Whereas in the mother/daughter tales the struggle with time arises because of the mutually exclusive desires for continuity and for change, here the struggle takes shape through Kate’s desire to spend her time on work and have it for her children too. In a fruitless battle to escape this forced choice, the novel suggests that Kate and women like her attempt to move quickly enough to satisfy both sets of duties during the same finite number of hours. Driving the point home, this view is expressly connected with the sort of popular hurried woman discourse that abounds in women’s magazines: as one of Kate’s friends puts it in an e-mail, “Read in Good Housekeeping that half all working mothers are worried relationship with husband is suffering because of a terrible ‘time famine.’ What are the other half doing, 30-second blow jobs?” (Pearson 265). Unfortunately for Kate, however, her struggle to beat the time famine is never quite successful enough, and as she chases taxis, sneaks in late to meetings, and sprints to her son’s birthday party, the novel becomes an endless series of lost battles against the clock; reading it is 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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like being trapped in someone else’s anxiety dream. Because Kate cannot produce a forty-eight-hour day that will allow her to live both of her lives, because she cannot produce more time to eradicate her time famine, the novel suggests that her fight to have both the things she wants is inevitably lost. Kate will never triumph over time and, the novel insists, neither will feminism. When the battle for the working mother’s fulfillment becomes a battle with time itself, it is one that feminism is doomed to lose. In making this point, I don’t mean to suggest that the second-shift that working mothers find themselves doing at home doesn’t exist or isn’t a genuine problem. Rather, my point is that, by turning the woman’s struggle for the life she wants into a struggle against time, hurried woman discourse presents feminism as always already defeated. This way of conceiving of the problems in contemporary women’s lives doesn’t just direct our attention away from more pressing problems—for example, those of women who do not have the privilege of choosing between working outside the home and staying home with their children. It also associates the problems in women’s lives with a force that serves as a symbol of human powerlessness: as one of Kate’s colleagues puts it when she explains why she wants to stop working, “Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus” (Pearson 326). In a fashion reminiscent of the endings of The Joy Luck Club and Divine Secrets, I Don’t Know How She Does It insists that feminism can only triumph if it can best time itself; however, unlike those mother/daughter novels, it fails to provide that transcendent triumph, aligning feminism’s powerlessness with human powerlessness before time’s flight. In contrast, novels of the female-underling type like The Devil Wears Prada demonstrate feminism accomplishing this triumph over time but insist that such a triumph is virtually satanic. According to The Devil Wears Prada, working mothers can only beat the time famine if they steal that time from the other women around them, and this is presented as a fundamentally unjust and unnatural act: alienating other women from their temporal resources and adding them to one’s own in a kind of temporal hoarding. As the novel unfolds, heroine Andrea becomes the assistant to the sadistic Miranda Priestly, fashion editor of Runway magazine, an obvious stand-in for Vogue. While Miranda mistreats Andrea in any number of ways, her most consistent crimes have to do with her unreasonable demands with regard to Andrea’s time. What Miranda wants is all of Andrea’s time, every single moment, and time out or time off is out of the question. While in the office, Andrea is not allowed to leave Miranda’s desk phone unattended for a single second, since Miranda will not allow anyone but her personal assistant to 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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answer this phone—even if it means that Andrea has to wait five hours to go to the bathroom. And she is given a cell phone that she must keep with her and answer at all times so that she can cater to Miranda’s latest whim at any hour of the day or night. Andrea’s time is almost literally no longer her own. As if this weren’t enough, Miranda consistently demands that she not be made to wait a single second, a demand that often requires incredibly time-consuming and absurd efforts on Andrea’s part. In the novel’s first scene, for example, Miranda insists that Andrea retrieve Miranda’s car and dog from Miranda’s apartment and bring both to her at the office inside fifteen minutes. For those readers perhaps unfamiliar with Manhattan’s geography, Andrea provides the following explanation of the Herculean nature of this task: “Fifteen minutes? Was this woman hallucinating? It would take a minute or two to get downstairs and into a Town Car, another six or eight to get to her apartment, and then somewhere in the vicinity of three hours for me to find the puppy in her eighteen-room apartment, extract the bucking stick shift from its parking spot, and make my way the twenty blocks to the office.”4 As this description suggests, Miranda expects those around her to cram an absurd, usually physically impossible amount of activity into minuscule segments of time in order to satisfy her wishes. Yet there is rarely any actual urgency to Miranda’s demands, even if one deems the publication of a fashion magazine urgent business. However, from another perspective, that’s precisely the point. Miranda insists that she never be made to wait at all, that she never be prey to the static time of inert expectation, no matter how trivial her request. Whenever Andrea spends days of her time to prevent Miranda from having to wait a few minutes, we learn that, because Miranda has power over Andrea, time has no power over Miranda. While I Don’t Know How She Does It suggests that power over time is impossible, that time can only be stretched so far, Miranda demands that those around her somehow find a way to give her whatever she wants in the instant she wants it. In so doing, she transfers the impossible struggle against time to her assistant, whose time she takes as her own. If I Don’t Know How She Does It insisted that feminism required a war against time that was always already lost, The Devil Wears Prada relies on much the same association of feminism and the impossible triumph over time: it associates the evil career woman with the demand that time be bested through the almost vampiric extraction of time from another, less powerful woman. As I have already suggested, arguing that feminism must defeat time in order to succeed is another way of saying that feminism either can’t or shouldn’t win—the despairing moral that lies at the heart of every hurried woman tale. In that sense, the hurried woman tales present 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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the flip side of the same logic found in the sentimental mother/daughter tales: we see feminism failing rather than succeeding to reconcile desires that time renders mutually exclusive, failing rather than succeeding in its attempt to transcend time. Hurried women tales transform the same conception of oppression by time into a means of insisting that the oppression can never be lifted. The finality of this view suggests that there can be no future for feminism, no way forward from the realization of its utter powerlessness before time. Despite the continued commitment of both academic and activist feminists, this perception does seem to have some resonance with feminists’ own oft-repeated fears that, after thirty years of backlash, feminism is dead, dying, or at least terminally ill. Certainly in academic circles, there has been a sense that feminism has been displaced by the sheer power of time, such that it no longer has the intellectual urgency or currency it once possessed, even if its politics are still just as necessary.5 However, the allegorical role that I have suggested feminism has served over the last thirty years may offer another way of interpreting this sense of waning energy around feminism. If popular feminism offered a central means of working through the long crisis of time and totalization associated with the aftermath of the 1960s, its urgency may appear diminished in part because it is no longer serving this role—because American popular culture no longer requires the compulsive rehearsal of feminism’s relationship to progressive time as a means of working through its fears about national progress. To say this is not to suggest that these fears have been laid to rest but rather that, since the destruction of the World Trade Center, they have begun to take on a different shape and hence require different symbols and allegories than those provided by feminism. If feminists’ own perception that feminism is somehow outdated or inappropriate to the contemporary moment arises from such a shift, then it would seem that even feminists’ own sense of energy and commitment in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s owed something to the cultural priority of feminism at large—to the sense that feminism was near the center of national discourse. Yet this reading also indicates that feminist discourse may now be untrammeled and pliable in a way that it could not be when it was made to carry the burden of these national obsessions. Without disputing the negative aspects of the way that feminism now appears off the cultural radar, it may be worth considering what is gained when feminism is relieved of its allegorical priority in the national consciousness and whether it might now be possible to tell different stories about what it takes to change the lives of women. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Introduction 1. Osborne is elaborating on a quotation from Pierre Bourdieu: “The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise . . . is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token, its logic” (Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 99, quoted in Osborne, “The Politics of Time,” 36). 2. For an analysis of the way “time represents itself as a problem” for long-term prisoners, see Cohen and Taylor, eds., “Time and the Long-term Prisoner.” 3. The question of an inherent link between time and change has been a topic of debate among philosophers for millennia. These debates are often assumed to begin with Aristotle, who does not equate time and change but still defines time by its relationship to change. See Aristotle, “Physica,” 289–300. In the twentieth century, this debate has been central to the British analytic philosophy of time in particular. See Le Poidevin and MacBeath, The Philosophy of Time. I intend “static time” to refer to the sense of dis-ease that accompanies time when it is perceived to become divorced from significant change, not to an absolute philosophical division between time and change, which would require that time pass during which no movement or transformation whatsoever would occur. Although static time shares some characteristics with what Marder (Dead Time) and Russell (“Against Dead Time”) have each termed “dead time,” or the standardized, abstract, reified time of capitalist modernity, I intend “static time” to designate a more specific experience of comingled temporal stasis, epistemological uniformity, and diminished agency. 4. Although I have chosen to focus on novels alone, there are clear links between this literary trend and films of the same period, not only in film adaptations of The Stepford Wives, but also in 9 to 5 (1982), a film that is obsessed with the unrewarding experience of repetitive, nonteleological time for working women trapped under the glass ceiling. For more on the problem of time for the career woman, see the Coda. 5. On the women’s liberation novel as a publishing phenomenon in the 1970s, see Walters, “Ten Years of Best Sellers.” Much press has been devoted to the way in which Oprah Winfrey has revitalized the paperback publishing industry with her book club, which has chosen several novels associated with women’s 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Notes

issues, including Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In 1997, for example, Winfrey’s unprecedented effect on publishing was recognized when she was named publishing’s Person of the Year by the Literary Marketplace association. See Baker, “Oprah is LMP’s ‘Person of the Year.’” 6. Popular discourses regarding the failure of American progress after the 1960s took several forms between the late 1960s and the end of the twentieth century, forms that were inevitably shaped by the political views of the authors and audiences in question. While progressives lamented the failure of 1960s revolutionary aspirations and the rise of the Right in the 1980s, conservatives depicted the hopes of the 1960s as all too successful, destroying American promise through the poisonous doctrines of liberalism. I discuss the Left perception of failed transformation after the 1960s at length in Chapter 1. For an early reading of the cataclysms of the 1960s as signs of the breakdown of American society, see Joan Didion’s classic essay, “Slouching Toward Bethelehem.” For later, conservative versions, see Collier and Horowitz, eds., Destructive Generation; Kimball, The Long March; and Fukuyama, The Great Disruption. Popular texts from the 1980s and 1990s arguing that liberalism has destroyed American promise are too numerous to list; for a characteristic example, however, see Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorroh. For a conservative version that attempts to displace the decline discourse, see Nau, The Myth of America’s Decline. Although they were interpreted differently, a core group of key tropes were deployed across the political spectrum as proof of decline, including the course of the Vietnam War, the transition from an industrial to a service economy, the shrinking of American cities, the growth of the racial “underclass,” and the weakening of civil society. After the period examined by this book, the discourse of American decline both took on new urgency and foregrounded new tropes in response to the “War on Terror,” in the process becoming decoupled from the stories of feminist progress I examine here; I discuss this shift briefly in the Coda. 7. For one reading of these trends, see, for example, Levy and Michel, The Economic Future of American Families. 8. For a critique of the remasculinization of American culture in the 1970s and 1980s, see Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America. For a more general discussion of masculinity and the nation in the 1970s, see Savran, Taking It Like a Man. The majority of existing analyses of the relationship between gender, second-wave feminism, and time focus on the ways in which feminism has or has not aligned itself (and should or should not align itself) with the progressive temporality of modernity, including Kristeva’s foundational essay “Women’s Time.” More recent work on feminism and time has explored the temporalized narratives by which feminism negotiates its own history and genealogy or how its history is constructed by popular or academic culture. See, in particular, Freeman, “Packing History”; Heller, “Found Footage”; Kavka, “Feminism, Ethics and History”; Roof, “Generational Difficulties”; and Wiegman, “Feminism’s Apocalyptic 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

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Futures.” For a range of work on feminism and time, see Laird, Feminism and Time. For early second-wave explorations of feminism and time, see Forman, Taking Our Time. In general, this work focuses on the utility of various forms of historical progress for feminism, not the reverse, as I do here. Two exceptions to these trends include work by Felski (The Gender of Modernity and Doing Time) and Watts (“Back to the Future”). For recent key interventions in the feminist philosophy of time, see Grosz, Nick of Time and Time Travels. Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 14. In general, Felski argues that we must attend not only to the way in which feminism has relied on the temporalized politics of modernity but also to the way in which modernity has been characterized in the public imagination through the deployment of gendered imaginaries. For a reading of woman as an allegory of modernity that focuses on Walter Benjamin’s highly specific definition of allegory, see Rauch, “The Trauerspiel of the Prostituted Body.” For an especially subtle analysis of this allegorical matrix with regard to Egyptian cinema in particular, see Dickinson, “I Have One Daughter.” For a related argument regarding the symbolic role of women in narratives of the modernization and Westernization of China, see Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity. On the woman-as-nation and woman-as-land paradigms, see, for example, Boehmer, “Motherlands, Mothers and Nationalist Sons.” See, for example, Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction. Armstrong argues that “narratives which seemed to be concerned solely with matters of courtship and marriage in fact seized the authority to say what was female, and that they did so in order to contest the reigning notions of kinship relations that attached most power and privilege to certain family lines” (5). Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 90. Jameson, “From Metaphor to Allegory,” 27. On allegory and popular form, see Fletcher: “The reader is often perhaps not aware that these works, mainly romances, are at least partially allegorical” since “the whole point of allegory is that it does not need to be read exegetically; it often has a literal level that makes good enough sense all by itself (Allegory, 5, 7). For this reason, Fletcher argues, “we must avoid the notion that all people must see the double meaning, for the work to be rightly called allegory” (7–8). See also Hult’s argument that “the practice of allegoresis is alive and well in the reception of popular culture” and in fact structures the reception of popular texts such as TV shows (“The Allegoresis of Everyday Life,” 213). For other key theorists of allegory, see Fletcher, Allegory; Clifford, The Transformations of Allegory; Quilligan, The Language of Allegory; and Madsen, Rereading Allegory. For accounts that have been crucial to debates on allegory within the realm of contemporary theory, see Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama; de Man, Blindness and Insight; and Jameson, The Political Unconscious and “Third-World Literature.” See, for example, Murrin, who refers to this definition as the one with which “everyone is familiar” (The Veil of Allegory, 55). For more on the 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


NOTES

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

relationship between allegory and diachrony, see Gary Johnson, “The Presence of Allegory.” Jameson, “From Metaphor to Allegory,” 27. Ibid. Ibid. Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 319. Jameson’s argument has been extensively critiqued and defended. See, for example, Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness”; and Lazarus, “Fredric Jameson on ‘Third-World Literature.’” On the loss of historical continuity and futurity as a key aspect of postmodernity, see, for example, Jameson, “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History?’” and Postmodernism, particularly 21–31; and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, especially 54–58. Debates between poststructuralists and Marxists on the role of totalization have been extensive. For one set of examples, see the essays in Kellner, Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, in particular the essay by Best, “Jameson, Totality and the Poststructuralist Critique.” For a different and revealing perspective on Jameson and totality, see Bill Brown, “The Dark Wood.” For a review of debates regarding totality internal to Marxism, see Jay, Marxism and Totality; and Grumley, History and Totality. For a range of poststructuralist approaches to time, see, for example, Derrida, Given Time; Docherty, “Now, Here, This”; Lyotard, The Inhuman; and Grosz, ed., Becomings. For key descriptions of the cultural experience of time in postmodernity, see, for instance, Huyssen, Twilight Memories; and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. Depictions of postmodern time as the “extended present,” offered by Nowotny (Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience) and others likewise tend to focus not on static uniformity but rather on the ability of postmodern culture to contain the heterogeneity of past, present, and future in a single, ongoing present. Brown, Politics Out of History, 5. Jameson, “End of Art,” 91. Arguments focused on a homogeneous and static world of total domination are also found among the German posthistoire theorists; Niethammer (Posthistoire) provides an excellent overview of these arguments. Some thinkers more associated with poststructuralism than with Marxism also focus on the homogeneity of the contemporary landscape rather than heterogeneity and difference; see, for example, Baudrillard’s discussion of inertia in The Illusion of the End (3–4). For an account that emphasizes this aspect of Baudrillard’s thinking, see Hegarty, Jean Baudrillard. For an exploration of the similarities between Baudrillard and the theorists discussed by Niethammer, see Brantlinger, “Apocalypse 2001.” Marshall Berman (All That Is Solid) associates poststructuralism with a similar sense of totalized domination that he argues accompanies the rejection of political commitment. For a discussion of this view, see the section entitled “Static Time and the Post-1960s Ends of History” in Chapter 1. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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25. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 19. 26. Although this book focuses primarily on the ways in which feminism allegorizes the thwarted desire for positive futurity also reflected in Left academic discourse regarding postmodern time, the same allegorical connection between feminism and progress can be found in conservative discourse that depicts feminist transformation as a sign of futurity run amok—of dramatic, all too rapid changes in the wrong direction that have led to America’s decline. I discuss the role of temporality in backlash discourse in the Coda. 27. See Brown, Politics Out of History. The term “detotalized time” is my own. 28. Hutcheon (A Poetics of Postmodernism) coined the term, though it has been widely used. 29. Lyotard, “Answering the Question,” 82. 30. This tendency is also evident, for example, in Heise’s Chronoschisms. Heise opens new ground by focusing on postmodern fiction’s reflection of what might be called the temporalities of postmodern culture rather than the epistemological dilemmas of history; however, she argues that highbrow postmodern literature containing repetition, metalepsis, and experimental typographies provides the best depiction of these temporalities, despite associating such temporalities with popular TV and video game technologies. There is some recent evidence that this cohesion between poststructuralist theory and postmodern literary time is beginning to dissolve; see for example Currie’s About Time, which focuses largely on phenomenology and British analytic philosophy. 31. Ermarth, Sequel to History, 7. Elias (Sublime Desire) rereads this crisis by examining it within the context of methodological debates regarding history as a field. For a critical discussion of these transformations as a perceived “crisis” from within the discipline of history, see Scott, “History in Crisis.” For a critique of Ermarth’s argument in particular in relationship to contemporaneous developments in history as a discipline, see Jenkins, Why History? 32. Ermarth, Sequel to History, 213; Lyotard, “Answering the Question,” 81. 33. On this distinction, see for example DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 183–86. 34. For a collection of some of the most important criticism on Beloved, see Andrews and McKay, eds., Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 35. Elias, Sublime Desire, 45. 36. Ibid., 29. Elias quotes this passage from Readings, Introducing Lyotard, 62. 37. There is growing evidence that our consensus about postmodern fiction is beginning to crack, offering other means of thinking about the post-1960s novel. See, for example, Bewes, “The Novel as an Absence”; and Currie, About Time. Although it is less focused on experimental fiction, my argument here is intended to take part in this attempt to broaden the literary historical horizon of the postmodern period. 38. For a useful review of these debates, see Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


NOTES

39. This reading echoes Felski’s argument that the “money, sex, power” novels of Judith Krantz thematize both modern and postmodern concerns through the transformations of gender roles they represent (Doing Time, 99–115). This approach also complements work previous critics have done in demonstrating that even popular feminist fiction may reproduce key aspects of postmodern aesthetics; see for example Zimmerman, “Feminist Fiction and the Postmodern Challenge.” However, I follow Felski in arguing that the novels I analyze may engage with issues key to postmodernity whether or not they reflect what we have come to consider the formal aesthetics of postmodernism. 40. Rosowski, “The Novel of Awakening.” Although the explosion of criticism on twentieth-century women’s literature from a feminist perspective is such that any listing is necessarily inadequate, for some of the most influential studies delineating feminist genres and tropes, see Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop; Barbara Christian, Home Girls and Black Women Novelists; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending; Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics; Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot; and the essays collected in Abel, Hirsch, and Langland’s volume The Voyage In. 41. In general, studies of post-1945 contemporary feminist fiction can be divided into four major areas: books examining a body of literature variously designated as feminist (for example, Greene, Changing the Story; Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics; Hite, The Other Side of the Story; Michael, Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse; and Roller, The Politics of the Feminist Novel), those examining works focused on a single designated feminist theme or genre (including Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot; and Heller, Feminization of Quest-Romance), those examining the relationship between popular literature and feminism (including Makinen, Feminist Popular Fiction; Whelehan, The Feminist Bestseller; and Loudermilk, Fictional Feminism), and those examining the women’s liberation novel of the 1970s (Lauret, Liberating Literature; Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions). In each of these cases, however, the focus is on determining and examining the way in which feminist concerns shape the form and content of the texts in question. 42. For an analysis that focuses on the relationship between bestsellers and feminism and includes antifeminist novels such as The Witches of Eastwick, see Loudermilk, Fictional Feminism. 43. See, for example, Coward, “Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels?” and Roller, The Politics of the Feminist Novel. 44. See, in particular, Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 19–48. 45. For the most famous critique of the logic of genre, see Derrida, “Law of Genre.” 46. Ultimately, even more recent and rigorously historical approaches inevitably constitute a genre based on the definition of feminism selected by the critic and then, not surprisingly, find that the novels in the genre reflect formal and content elements associated with the type of feminism that the critic privileges. See, for example, Hogeland (Feminism and Its Fictions) and 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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Lauret (Liberating Literature), who both use a historical focus on the women’s liberation movement to delineate the boundaries of their archive. 47. Lauret (Liberating Literature) devotes a chapter to Meridian. 48. The term “denial of coevalness” was coined by Johannes Fabian to describe the temporal manipulations through which anthropology constructed the subjects of its discourse. See Fabian, Time and the Other, 32–34. For an historical account of black women’s feminist organizations that were contemporaneous with more well known, largely white women’s liberation organizations, see Springer, Living for the Revolution; for a history that surveys the simultaneous emergence of black, Chicana and white women’s feminist movements, see Roth, Separate Roads. For an extended critique of the standard narrative of feminist phases, see Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 41–64. This exclusion frequently structures not only stories of the 1970s but also those of the 1980s: as Barbara Smith points out, the common belief that women’s liberation activism was waning by the early 1970s depends upon assumptions about the whiteness of the women’s liberation movement as well, since “the 1970s saw . . . growth of feminists of color organizing (often led by lesbians) all over the country” which “reached its peak in the early 1980s” (“‘Feisty Characters,’” 480). On the “belatedness of the other woman” in contemporary feminist discourse regarding globalization, see Joseph, “Gendering Time in Globalization.” For an important critique of feminist historiography as necessarily invested whatever version one tells, see Friedman, Mappings. 49. As I suggest in Chapter 5, this vision of the woman of color as prey to divided loyalties was both elaborated and critiqued from within feminist theory of the period.

Chapter 1 1. Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholia.” 2. For an argument that explores parallels between Fukuyama’s arguments and the Left turn against totalization, see Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias, 298–339. For a particularly useful analysis of Fukuyama’s “end of history” argument in the context of Kojève’s rereading of Hegel, see Perry Anderson, “The Ends of History.” For an important critique of Fukuyama, see Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 56–75. 3. Niethammer, Posthistoire, 12; Carby, Cultures in Babylon, 101. Although end-of-history arguments usually eschew mention of nuclear holocaust, the debates regarding nuclear proliferation that Ken Cooper terms “arms-racism” also suggest an ongoing investment in the idea that the end of white monopoly over nuclear arms is the end of the future itself. See Cooper, “The Whiteness of the Bomb.” 4. Niethammer reads end-of-history discourse as symptomatic. See Niethammer, Posthistoire, 138, 143. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


NOTES

5. While Hegel is often assumed to be the key progenitor for end-of-history discourse, arguments have also been made that the distinction belongs instead to Antoine-Augustin Cournot. See Niethammer, Posthistoire, 25–29. Other crucial end-of-history theorists include Friedrich Nietzsche, Arnold Gehlen, and Alexandre Kojève. For two important surveys of end-of-history theories, see Niethammer (Posthistoire) and Perry Anderson (“The Ends of History”). In their fixation on the continued existence of a world from which change has been erased, end-of-history theories differ substantially from other kinds of eschatological and apocalyptic discourse, which posit the end of the world itself. Niethammer makes this distinction in his description of the German posthistoire theorists. For a useful categorization of various theories of the end of the world, see Bull, “On Making Ends Meet.” 6. Niethammer argues that theorists of posthistoire view “world civilization” in terms of “crystallization” and see “isomorphism” as accompanying crystallization (143, 47). 7. Niethammer (Posthistoire) identifies the reduction of humans to animality as one of the features shared by theories of posthistoire (3). Nietzsche evolved the concept of the “last man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (17–18). See also Anderson’s discussion of the aimlessness and insect-like functioning of the last men in “The Ends of History,” 309–10. 8. For example, Shoemaker (“Time Without Change”) reviews arguments regarding time divorced from change in the British analytic philosophical tradition and poses his own vision of a frozen yet multifarious world. 9. Raymond Williams defines the term “structure of feeling” as pertaining to “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension” (Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132). 10. In fact, this sense of American prosperity was so pronounced that it produced some 1960s precursors to Fukuyama’s account of the end of history. On this tendency, see, for example, Brick’s discussion of the influence of Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology, published in 1960 (Age of Contradiction, 34). Mario Savio argued against this perception that American need not be improved in a 1964 essay entitled “The End of History,” and similar language of resistance to stagnation and complacency appears in the Port Huron Statement. See Students for a Democratic Society, “The Port Huron Statement,” 178. 11. For conservative arguments of this type, see, for example, Collier and Horowitz, eds., Destructive Generation; Kimball, The Long March; and Fukuyama, The Great Disruption. I discuss the Left perception of revolutionary impasse at length in this chapter. 12. While it is certainly true that the George W. Bush administration has been radical in its attempt to remake the world in keeping with its own agenda, 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

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it has consistently done so through a rhetoric of return to American traditions, thereby eschewing the reliance on futurity I explore in detail in the section entitled “How Freedom Becomes Unfreedom: The Logical Juggernaut of Static Time” in this chapter. This temporalization of the Bush administration’s radicalism may go some distance toward explaining why, for many voters, its attempts at sweeping world transformation did not seem prey to the perceived dangers of revolutionary thinking that I discuss at length in this chapter. For different reading of 1960s radicalism as epiphenomenal with regard to underlying shifts in capital, see Jameson “Periodizing the ’60s.” The iron grip of the declension narrative of 1960s radicalism has been weakening since 2000. Historians Van Gosse and Richard Moser in particular have been prominent critics of the declension narrative, both in their essays and in the collection The World the Sixties Made, which contains a range of such scholarship. See especially the introductory essays in that volume: Van Gosse, “Postmodern America”; and Moser, “Was It the End.” Other newer histories work to avoid the declension narrative while engaging with it less explicitly. See, for example, James C. Hall’s Mercy, Mercy Me, which challenges conventional ways of reading African American culture in the decade as structured by divisions between nationalists and assimilationists, and Doug Rossinow’s The Politics of Authenticity, which focuses on the influence of Christian existentialism on the New Left in Texas. Although feminist historians have often been ignored by proponents of the “new” historiographic movement away from declension, scholarship on feminism’s relationship to the decade, notably that of Alice Echols and Sara Evans, has long been critical of the declension narrative, since it tends to associate the rise of feminism with the “fall” in question. See, especially, Evans’s essay “Beyond Declension.” For an account of continuities between the 1960s and the postmodern politics and aesthetics that followed, see DeKoven’s Utopia Limited. Van Gosse, “Postmodern America,” 1. Until the end of the twentieth century, it was difficult to find any historian of the 1960s movements—Left, Right, or center—who did not bemoan the gradual adoption of militancy that characterized the end of the 1960s. This longstanding consensus was challenged in 2004 by Varon in Bringing the War Back Home, which argues that the militant violence associated with the Weather Underground in the United States and the Red Army Faction in Germany were productive rather than destructive of the centrist Left consensus. Isserman, “The Not-So-Dark and Bloody Ground,” 991. Time-Life Books, The Fabulous Century; Boyle, “The Times They Aren’t A-Changing,” 304. I have focused on what might be considered mainstream and generally well-known general accounts of 1960s radicalism (rather than histories of the counter culture) as the basis for the analysis that follows, including those 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


NOTES

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

by Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias; Breines, Community and Organization; Brick, Age of Contradiction; Burner, Making Peace; Farber, The Age of Great Dreams; Gitlin, The Sixties; Isserman and Kazin, America Divided; and Miller, Democracy Is In the Streets. Although historians have critiqued Gitlin’s account as more memoir than history, I have included it despite this generic difference because its influence on the declension narrative has been so marked. Because these histories often downplay black radicalism by attending primarily to its influence on the white Left, I supplement them with Carson’s important history of SNCC, In Struggle. Gitlin, Isserman, and Miller in particular have been considered key proponents of the declension narrative (Moser, “Was It the End,” 49). All of these accounts have important disagreements on key points of 1960s history, and their assessment of 1960s radicalism ranges from overtly celebratory (at least in its first phase) to more or less condemnatory throughout; however, they all tend to reproduce the three-phase, declension structure that Boyle (“The Times They Aren’t A-Changing”), Moser (“Was It the End”), and Van Gosse (“A Movement of Movements” and “Postmodern America”) describe. My analysis thus builds upon Hayden White’s insights about the narrativity of historical writing as a genre, but takes as a given the extent to which historical accounts create ideologically meaningful structures out of sheer chronology. See White, “The Value of Narrativity.” Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. Ibid. Malcolm Bull makes a similar distinction when he argues that endof-the-world discourses can be located “ideologically on the continuum between the religious or secular, and sociologically on the axis between ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture”; in the terms of Bull’s schema, the social imaginary could be expected to house the low-religious and low-secular versions of the end of history (“On Making Ends Meet,” 3). Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 24. Anderson, A Zone of Engagement, 286. Osborne, “The Politics of Time,” 42. There are numerous and competing accounts of the process by which, as Lawrence Grossberg describes, history comes to “involv[e] the affirmation of the continuity and coherence of a totality of time” of which “[p]rogress is the most optimistic articulation” (“History, Imagination, and the Politics of Belonging,” 151). Many of these accounts are located in debates regarding the “secularization thesis,” or the argument that secular temporalizations of history, including the liberal doctrine of progress and the Marxist schema of revolutionary phases, evolve from the secularization of Judeo-Christian temporality. For classic arguments in favor of the secularization thesis, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, and Löwith, Meaning in History. For the most prominent critique of this approach, see Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Bull (“On Making Ends Meet”) and Wallace (“Progress, Secularization and Modernity”) both provide overviews of the debates between these two 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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camps. For a particularly useful account of the temporalization of history from the perspective of intellectual history, see Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, especially 118–23 and 218–35. I discuss the connection between revolutionary cataclysm and religious apocalypse at the conclusion of the section “The Declension Narrative and the End of the 1960s” in this chapter. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 46. Ibid. Ibid. The conventional example here is the detective story. Peter Brooks, following closely in Kermode’s footsteps, explains this process through Freudian psychoanalysis (Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 90–112). Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 105. Ibid., 103. For example, Linda Hutcheon argues that “‘to totalize’ does not just mean to unify, but rather means to unify with an eye to power and control; and as such, this term points to . . . hidden power relations” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, xi). Jameson takes issue with this description and argues for a distinction between totalization and totality (Jameson, Postmodernism, 332–34, 402–3). For more on these debates, see the Introduction in this book, note 21. On the political valences of utopia, see Davis, “Isaiah Berlin”; Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia”; Levitas, The Concept of Utopia; and Moylan, “The Locus of Hope” and “Special Section.” On the intellectual history of the temporal valences of the concept, see Koselleck, “The Temporalization of Utopia.” Jameson provides a useful synopsis of the most critical approaches to utopia on the Left: “Foremost among these conclusions is that Utopian thinking—although seemingly benign, if not altogether ineffectual—is in reality dangerous and leads among other things to Stalin’s camps, to Pol Pot . . . to the ‘massacres’ of the French Revolution (which themselves lead us back immediately to the ever vital thought of Edmund Burke, who first warned us about the violence that was bound to emerge from the hubris of human attempts to tamper with and transform the organic fabric of the existing social order” (Postmodernism, 335). For a discussion of Williams’s argument see Jameson, Postmodernism, 336. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 219. Agamben, Infancy and History, 96. Ibid. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 98. The understanding of desire as asymptotic is taken from Lacan, Ecrits, 2. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 77–78. Ibid., 82. Agancinski, Time Passing, 4, emphasis in original. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


NOTES

43. Breines, Community and Organization, 6–7. For an important theorization of such moments, see Frantz Fanon’s description of what he terms “strategies of immediacy,” which have many common elements with the prefigurative mode that characterizes the first phrase of the declension narrative. For Fanon, this immediacy is temporal, producing a revolutionary body in which “spontaneity is king,” as Fanon puts it (The Wretched of the Earth, 131). In this spontaneous period, there is no temporal difference between the desire for an action and its occurrence—no strategic postponement or temporizing. Furthermore, there is no representational difference or distance in either the epistemological or the political sense: “Each man or woman brings the nation to life by his or her action, and is pledged to ensure its triumph in their locality. . . . If the nation is everywhere, then she is here” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 132). 44. Burner, Making Peace, 14. 45. I have borrowed this vocabulary from Michael Serres, who has argued that time in general is best understood to be “crumpled” or “folded,” akin to a handkerchief that could be balled up and flattened again. Serres compares his approach to the “difference between topology (the handkerchief is folded, crumpled, shredded) and geometry (the same fabric is ironed out flat” (Conversations on Science, 60). My point is that, again borrowing Serres’s terminology, in the 1960s the substitution of topology for geometry was not understood as the general condition of contemporaneous late capitalism but rather is associated with the desires and powers of those who belonged to and participated in 1960s political (and sometimes counter-cultural) forms. 46. Burner, Making Peace, 8. 47. Brent Whelan describes a similar tendency to escape the degradation of signals inherent in representation and/or mediation in the counter culture, specifically Ken Kesey’s attempt to render perception immediate by transforming experience into what he called the “NOW.” See Whelan, “‘Further.’” The overlap between structures of immediacy in countercultural aesthetics and movement politics deserves more attention than I can give it here. 48. Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias, 12. 49. Gitlin, The Sixties, 220. 50. Isserman, “Not-So-Dark and Bloody Ground,” 994. 51. For example, Gitlin argues that “the movement’s language hardened into blunt instruments” (The Sixties, 345). See also Farber, The Age of Great Dreams, 211. That Farber is arguably the most prominent scholar of the “new” generation of 1960s historians—that is, historians that were not old enough to be participants in the events of the decade—suggests something of the persistence of this approach. 52. Burner, Making Peace, 49. 53. Ibid., 157. 54. Farber, The Age of Great Dreams, 78; Carson, In Struggle, 287. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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55. This use of eschatological tropes to encode the “madness” of these years repeats a conventional observation regarding the close relationship between such structures and revolutionary politics. One of the more well-known arguments of this general sort is that of Norman Cohn, who posits that both Marxism and Nazism are forms of “revolutionary millenarianism” (Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 286). For similar assessments, see also Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 16; Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias, 290; and Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 99. 56. Burner, Making Peace, 67. 57. Isserman, America Divided, 181. Gitlin titles one of his sections “The Language of the Millennium” (The Sixties, 345), and he refers to the Chicago convention as “Gotterdammerung” (319). Brick also describes the “apocalyptic tone” of the counter culture, while Paul Berman makes a specific connection between the 1960s political forms and apocalyptic structures (Brick, Age of Contradiction, 116; Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias, 290). However, it is important to note that different authors employ this vocabulary differently from each other and with varying degrees of precision. Brummett is particularly useful in accounting for the different usages of such terms, including “eschatological,” “apocalyptic,” and “millenarian.” While “eschatology” refers more generally to the “study of final things or furthest boundaries,” “apocalyptic” signifies a more specific “branch of eschatology and has a very complex meaning. It includes the expectation of an apocalypse: the end of the world, of an era, or of some state of affairs, an end that is final and definitive. It also involves the expectation of a millennium after the end of history” (Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric, 17). Brummett also points out that “Millennial and chiliasm both are usually used to describe the expectation of the millennium and for that reason usually refer to the postmillennial belief in an impending advent of the millennium, although they can also refer to premillennial apocalyptic’s expectation of the millennium that is to follow the imminent apocalypse” (Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric, 17, emphasis in the original). My use of “apocalyptic” focuses primarily on what Brummet would term its premillennial aspect. Benjamin’s use of “messianic” in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” contains crucial differences from all these paradigms, as does Derrida’s distinction between a “messianism” that is to be avoided and the “messianic” that presents positive political promise (Specters of Marx, 89, 168). Regarding Benjamin, Derrida, and revolutionary eschatology, see the final section of this chapter. On philosophical relationships to the end of the world, see Kuzniar, “Philosophic Chiliasm.” 58. Walzer, for example, implies that what he calls the “apocalyptic framework” has become a kind of lamentable historical habit (Exodus and Revolution, 145). 59. On concordance and apocalyptic discourse, see Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 30. 60. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 21. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


NOTES

61. Brick, Age of Contradiction, 116. 62. Carson describes this negative turn in SNCC as resulting in talk of “racial genocide” and “premature calls for armed revolt” (In Struggle, 290). Describing similar logic in SDS, Gitlin explains, “By the late Sixties many of us had concluded the problem wasn’t simply bad policy but a wrongheaded social system, even a civilization. The weight of decades, or centuries, even millennia had to be thrown off overnight—because it was necessary” (The Sixties, 256). Burner likewise argues that radicals “became fixated on what had to be done to transform society totally” (Making Peace, 158). 63. Gitlin, The Sixties, 256. 64. On this tendency, see Brummett, Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric, 70–71. 65. For example, Carson suggests that “[d]uring the final years of SNCC’s existence, staff members became increasingly dogmatic and isolated. Formerly controversial ideas became cant and posturing” (In Struggle, 300). Paul Berman isolates 1969 as the year that SDS “finally went mad” (A Tale of Two Utopias, 88), while Gitlin likewise describes the movement of the late 1960s as existing in a “hallucinatory state in which the space between illusion and plausibility has shrunk to the vanishing point” (The Sixties, 243). 66. Gitlin, for example, makes this connection explicit when he uses a sociological study of a doomsday cult entitled When Prophecy Fails to explain the Weather Underground’s persistent and unfounded conviction that revolution was just around the corner (Gitlin, The Sixties, 398). 67. Kermode, The Sense of An Ending, 8. 68. Ibid., 9. 69. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 15. Brummett attributes the continuing power of apocalyptic discourse in part to the fact that its audience is “reassured, not by regaining control, but by knowing that history is nevertheless controlled by an underlying order and that it has a purpose that is nearing fulfillment” (Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric, 38). If it is a key aspect of this supernatural function that it forecloses human agency, then the apocalyptic framework cannot remain unchanged if “[t]he old religious idiom [is] replaced by a secular one” as Cohn suggests (The Pursuit of the Millennium, 286). In other words, if we follow Cohn’s own definition, it becomes difficult to accept what he nonetheless posits as “the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism . . . [is] with us still” (286). Something very similar is still with us, but with crucial differences along with the obvious continuities. For a related argument, see Arendt, who suggests that the “secularization thesis” is misleading in its emphasis on what is retained from religion rather than on what is transformed in the secular version of progress—in particular the location of ultimate agency in the historical rather than the eternal realm (Between Past and Future, 68). 70. See Gitlin, The Sixties, 247. For a useful account of early Marxist debates regarding the question of revolutionary agency, see Hanson, Time and Revolution, 61–63. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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71. On the “romance” of supposedly “strategic” action, see Gitlin, The Sixties, 256. According to Brick as well, there is something strangely non-instrumental about this supposedly strategic violence, both for its perpetrators and its audience. While “[i]t is one thing to accept the political utility of violence,” Brick suggests that ordinarily this decision “entails careful judgment of whether violent means, in particular circumstances, are likely to lead to desired ends” (Age of Contradiction, 163). Despite the fact that, “[u]nder certain conditions, violence can be a viable means of political struggle,” it seems clear that for Brick and other 1960s historians the violence of the late 1960s was anything but “viable,” given that it was “bound to alienate large parts of the populace” (159). Thus, the supposedly “instrumental attitude” overlays a warring tendency to “invest violence with meaning beyond strict utility, with value in its own right” (163, emphasis in original). 72. The acceleration of time is associated with conventional apocalyptic narratives and gradually comes to be associated with a revolutionary acceleration of history. See Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 245; and Futures Past, 7. 73. This process is described in detail in phenomenological accounts of the temporal expectations created by narrative form but takes a more extreme form in apocalyptic narratives. For example, Carr argues that “emphasis on the future-orientation of action, and on the role of the end in organizing ‘backward’ in time the various phases of the action which are the means to its realization, must not obscure the fact that the agent is still rooted in the present. Though his concern is in the future he is still in the present. Any retrospective element in action (looking back on it as completed) can only be a quasi-retrospection, as . . . [in] the future perfect. As was the case with passive experience, protention encloses the envisaged future and unites it with present and past, but the whole action, thus unified, stands vulnerable to the real future, which can intrude on the action in the rudest way” (Time, Narrative, and History, 39–40). 74. Although 1960s radicals experienced the “Great Refusal” as a cry to arms, Marcuse himself depicted the absolutes to which both the state and resistance had been reduced as one of the most dire aspects of contemporary America. See Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 255–56 in particular. Marcuse echoes the logic of time and totalization in various ways in Eros and Civilization as well, arguing that “intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom” (4). For an analysis of the totalizing quality of 1960s forms of psychoanalytic discourse, including that of Marcuse, see DeKoven, “Psychoanalysis and Sixties Utopianism.” 75. Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets,” 313. 76. The distinction between imminent and immanent endings is drawn from Kermode. However, the static present of totalization I am describing does not reflect the feeling of perpetual transition associated with Kermode’s “immanent” apocalyptic—quite the opposite (The Sense of an Ending, 101). 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


NOTES

77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87.

88.

89.

Gunn and Beard also relate Kermode’s terms to contemporary apocalyptic discourse (“On the Apocalyptic Sublime,” 272). Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 89. Berman, All That is Solid, 35. Berman’s assessment of Foucault is certainly debatable; see, for example, the arguments regarding Foucault and totality in Grumley, History and Totality, 183–205. Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt, 2–3. Although Starr’s focus is primarily on the Lacanian branch of French theory, examples of static time arising from the perception of historical closure can also be found in the work of other theorists as well, even those who do not necessarily employ the logics of failed revolt Starr describes. See, for example, Mathy’s analysis of the links between Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s end-of-history discourse and contemporary American culture in “Out of History.” Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt, 15. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 32. Brown, Politics, 1, 3. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 166; Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” 251. For a related approach to the event, see, for example, Lyotard, The Inhuman, 68–69, as well as my discussion in Chapter 4. For a reading that argues for the indeterminacy of the messianic in Benjamin, see, for example, Lindroos, Now-Time/Image-Space. Reading the same tendency from a negative standpoint, Osborne critiques Benjamin for not providing a sufficient relationship between the messianic event and narrative futurity (The Politics of Time, 155–59). Niethammer provides a useful discussion contrasting Benjamin and the posthistoire theorists (Posthistoire, 104–20). Osborne, “The Politics of Time,” 38. See, for example, Jameson’s argument that the “the emergence of . . . new collective ‘identities’ or ‘subjects of history’” in the 1960s must be related to “something like a crisis in the more universal category that had hitherto seemed to subsume all the varieties of social resistance, namely the classical conception of social class” (Jameson, “Periodizing the ’60s,” 181). Dubey, Signs and Cities, 23. Signs and Cities offers a particularly trenchant and important elucidation of the relationship between African American cultural politics, postmodernism, and the post–civil rights era. Dubey argues that “the betrayal” of “the progressive political promise” of earlier eras “haunts Africa-American writers in the postmodern period” (6). My argument regarding the tendency to read black radicalism as symptom of rather than participant in post-1960s transformations is indebted to Dubey’s approach. For other readings of apocalyptic strains in 1960s and post-1960s African American culture, see Hall, Mercy, Mercy Me; and Matthew Brown, “Funk Music as Genre.” On the challenge to universals associated with black nationalism, see Dubey, Signs and Cities, 36. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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90. DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 232. 91. On the politics of melancholia, see Eng and Kazanjian, eds., Loss; and Lash, “Being After Time.” On race and melancholia in particular, see Cheng, The Melancholy of Race. Key texts in trauma studies include those by Caruth (Unclaimed Experience) and Leys (Trauma). For a particularly useful critique of trauma discourse, see LaCapra’s “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” For an excellent exploration of the limits of melancholic politics, see Forter, “Against Melancholia.” 92. LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 720. 93. For a more condemnatory elucidation of this logic, see Wendy Brown, who argues that politicized identity “installs its pain over its unredeemed history in the very foundation of its political claim” (States of Injury, 74). 94. The women’s liberation movement occupies a doubled position in narratives of the 1960s, one that puts it both inside and outside of the central activism of the decade. For Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, coeditors of the Feminist Memoir Project, feminism must be understood as crucial to the 1960s: “in the context of general upsurge of political energy, feminism created a movement of breadth and staying power, hope and influence” (“A Feminist Memoir Project,” 3). For others, as Alice Echols points out in Daring to Be Bad, “the relationship of women’s liberation to social change movements of the 1960s is complicated and paradoxical” (25). According to Echols, this paradoxical relationship occurred because women’s liberation activists often began their political work in the New Left, and many gained in confidence and self-respect because of that work; however, this empowerment eventually enabled these women to comprehend the subordinate position they had within the New Left. For that reason, leaving behind the New Left—the project described with such incantatory fervor in Robin Morgan’s famous essay, “Good-bye to All That”—became a signature gesture in women’s liberation theory and activism (509). At the same time, this gesture was a contested one, at least until about 1973. Barbara Habar, for example, “maintains that the tension between being a radical and being a feminist was widespread in the early 1970s. And by 1973, cultural feminists were beginning to make non-involvement with the so-called male movement a precondition for feminist acceptance” (quoted in Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 135). In other words, this leave-taking gesture was both enacted and contested by feminists until the year that many have selected as the end to the 1960s. This confusion over whether to position the women’s liberation movement inside or outside of 1960s radicalism has at times been recast by New Left radicals as a question of feminism’s culpability in the downfall of the New Left. Echols, for example, argues that many male historians of the New Left tend to associate the women’s liberation movement “with the fragmentation of Sixties radicalism” (Shaky Ground, 65). Echols herself has responded to this charge by attempting to relocate women’s liberation within 1960s radical history, to “make the women’s liberation movement an integral part of the Sixties by demonstrating 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


NOTES

186 NOTES its considerable philosophical connections to the New Left and the black freedom movement—without, of course, denying its originality” (Shaky Ground, 62).

1. See the section “The Declension Narrative and the End of the 1960s” in Chapter 1 of this volume. Todd Gitlin uses the phrase “politics of extremity” in his chapter on 1968 (Gitlin, The Sixties, 285). 2. French, The Women’s Room, 2. Hereafter cited in the text as French. 3. For one approach to this division, see Kristeva, “Women’s Time.” See also the essays in Forman, ed., Taking Our Time, particularly Ermarth’s “The Solitude of Women.” For a review and critique of such approaches, see Felski, Doing Time, 15–23. 4. While my focus here is on the links as depicted by the novels themselves, considerable historical scholarship exists on the temporal and conceptual overlap between 1960s radicalism and the women’s liberation movement (an overlap often vehemently rejected by the movement). See Chapter 1, note 94 in this book. 5. French and Piercy both have been treated as the key authors of the women’s liberation novel in existing criticism. See, for example, Hogeland’s Feminism and Its Fictions, the most recent monograph on the women’s liberation novel; Hogeland gives more attention to Piercy and French than to any other novelists, both in terms of number of references and number of novels discussed. While The Women’s Room is undoubtedly French’s most well-known novel and has certainly received the most critical attention of all her work, Piercy’s novels have been more widely discussed, with Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) arguably receiving the most attention. While Woman was also published in the late 1970s and (as its title suggests) engages with many of the same thematic issues of time and totalization as does Vida, Woman’s science-fiction form makes it a less appropriate companion for French’s realist text. I discuss the politics of realism with relationship to The Women’s Room in particular in the section “Totalization = Death: Killing Time and Enduring Stasis in The Women’s Room” in this chapter. 6. Lauret and Hogeland consider these and other 1970s women’s liberation novels in terms of their feminist content and ambitions. With the exception of Rosalind Coward, who critiques popular women’s liberation novels’ explorations of women’s sexuality on Foucauldian grounds, participants in these debates rarely considered to what other uses narratives of feminist fulfillment (whatever their formal deployment) might be put. Dever’s essay, “The Feminist Abject,” considers the trope of death in women’s liberation novels but places it fully within the conflicts within feminism regarding the mind/body split. 7. Piercy, Vida, 125, 126. Hereafter cited in the text as Piercy. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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187

8. See the section entitled “Static Time and the Post-1960s Ends of History” in Chapter 1 of this book. 9. In general, Lauret’s emphasis is on the way that personal relationships contain a utopian feminist pulse in the novel, which she sees as set against this paranoid structure. See Lauret, Liberating Literature, 144–64. 10. Žižek, Looking Awry, 18 11. Ibid., 19. 12. Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, 19. 13. On the politics of paranoia, see Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping.” For a critique of his argument, see Mason, “A Poor Person’s Cognitive Mapping.” For arguments emphasizing the conservative valence of paranoia and conspiracy in postmodernity with relationship to literature in particular, see Melley, Empire of Conspiracy; and McClure, “Forget Conspiracy.” 14. On the well-documented surveillance associated with COINTELPRO, see, for example, Blackstock, Cointelpro. 15. Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholia,” 459. 16. For a review of these debates see Echols, Shaky Ground. 17. Given Lohania’s status as a Latina, this depiction might be compared with narratives of sexual betrayal associated with Mexican and Chicana women through the figure of “La Malinche,” though it should be noted that Vida’s condemnation of Lohania is at odds with the reclamation of the Malinche figure by some Chicana thinkers, particularly in Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera. Alarcón’s essay “Traddutora, Traditora” investigates various uses of the Malinche figure by a variety of male and female Mexican and Chicana and Chicano scholars and the associations of the figure with an impure or crossbred epistemology. On Anzaldúa and La Malinche, see also Friedman, Mappings, 97–102; on La Malinche and lesbian sexuality in particular, see Sugg, “The Ultimate Rebellion.” I discuss the imagination of the woman of color as a figure for “divided loyalties” and hence divided approaches to time in Chapter 5 in particular. 18. Important early versions of this critique were collected in Moraga and Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back; for a particularly iconic contribution in that volume, see, for example, Audre Lorde’s “Open Letter to Mary Daly.” See also Christian, ed., Home Girls; and, for a more recent collection that includes the academic work on race and gender that resulted from this critical moment, see Bhavani, ed., Feminism and Race. 19. Moraga and Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back. 20. Lauret, Liberating Literature, 111. 21. On the authoritarian nature of these fictions, see Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, 10. For her discussion of redundancy, see Authoritarian Fictions, 158–98. 22. In her analysis of reviews of women’s liberation novels, Hogeland points out that reviewers who disagreed with the feminist analysis offered by women’s liberation novels found it easy and convenient to argue that this analysis constituted a formal failure, a marker of the novel’s inability to 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


NOTES

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

reflect the world in a fashion the reviewer was willing to accept as “realistic” (Feminism and Its Fictions, 83). Such criticisms were later compounded by the tendency of some poststructuralist feminists to view realism as by definition authoritarian and to pin its hopes on more experimental or antinarrative forms. For a review and critique of these debates, see Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, 56, 189. See, for example, Lauret’s reading of this passage in Liberating Literature, 103–4. On the “novel of awakening” see Rosowski, “The Novel of Awakening.” The Women’s Room follows many of the conventions Rosowski uncovers, particularly the “awakening to limitations” (49). However, The Women’s Room differs from the novels Rosowski analyzes by emphasizing the ongoing experience of foreclosure of opportunity through the narrator’s present-day meditations on her fate. Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, 186. DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, 5. For a reading of the consciousness-raising novel through DuPlessis’s argument, see Hogeland’s discussion of the “strategies of futurity” these novels develop in order to resist the conventional romance plot (Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions, 44). For a discussion of this tendency, see the section in Chapter 1 entitled “Static Time and the Post-1960s Ends of History” and Chapter 4. For a classic example of this approach, see Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern as “that which, in the modern, puts forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself; that which . . . searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (Lyotard, “Answering the Question,” 81). The Christian vocabulary of grace that marks the utopian moment of possibility in The Women’s Room—evoked explicitly when Mira confesses she thinks of the party “in terms that belied her atheism”—echoes the association of alternatives to capitalist disciplinarity with the post-secular in postmodernism (French 398). See, for example, the analysis of the recourse to Eastern spiritual traditions as a mode of release from problems of paranoia in postmodernism in McClure, “Forget Conspiracy, 264–72. DeKoven also examines the relationship between religion and the post-1960s persistence of utopianism in her analysis of Beloved. See DeKoven, “Utopia Limited.” On such intermittent and ephemeral moments of utopian possibility or “utopia limited” as a crucial aspect of the literary legacy of the 1960s, see DeKoven, “Utopia Limited.” While The Women’s Room lacks the formal experimentation that signals utopian moments within DeKoven’s analysis of more conventionally postmodern novels, the New Year’s Eve passage encodes in its content, if not its form, what DeKoven describes as the “desire for elimination of domination . . . but also of [the] desire for transcendence itself ”—a mode of “discredited” yet persistent utopianism 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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existing in the wake of the “profound historical rupture” associated with the 1960s (DeKoven, “Utopia Limited,” 91).

1. Such usages abound, even in materials written for younger readers and viewers before the 2004 remake of the film—see, for example, the teenage witch film The Craft (1996); and the young-adult novel Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (2003), by Chris Crutcher (108). Similar uses of “Stepford” as an adjective in scholarly criticism include Altacruise, “Stepford Writers: Undercover inside the M.F.A. Creativity Boot Camp”; and D’Cruz, “‘Stepford Criticism’: ‘Subversive Acts’ and Resistance in Post-Colonial Drama.” 2. Levin, The Stepford Wives, 13. Hereafter cited in the text as Levin. 3. Klemesrud, “Feminists Recoil,” 29. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. The scene appears in the Simpson’s episode “Pygmoelien.” Days of Our Lives begins with a voiceover stating, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives.” 7. In one of the classic critiques of this type, Tania Modleski argues that “the soap opera as a narrative form . . . reflects and cultivates the ‘proper’ psychological disposition of the woman in the home” (98). See Modleski, Loving With a Vengeance, 85–109. 8. See the Introduction in this book, note 48. 9. The other central figure of popular feminism was of course the young, attractive, “liberated” white woman engaged in various sexual adventures. While this trope was already in the works in texts like Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (and its 1964 film adaptation), it arguably comes to full pop feminist fruition in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (see Chapter 4). On the feminist content of Sex and the Single Girl and related 1960s texts, see Whelehan, The Feminist Bestseller, 21–41. 10. For an analysis of the similarities between The Stepford Wives and contemporaneous feminist discourse, see Silver, “The Cyborg Mystique.” 11. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 14, 13. 12. Sobchack, Screening Space, 123. 13. For a range of analyses of political dimensions of the uncanny, see, for instance, Bhabha, “DissemiNation”; Engle, “The Political Uncanny”; Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves; and James Young, “Between History and Memory.” 14. Dolar, “I Shall Be With You,” 13. 15. See Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 233–35, 240, 243–44, 247. 16. Hoffman, “The Sandman,” 32. Freud’s reading of Hoffman’s tale is notoriously selective. See Cixous, “Fiction and Its Fantasms”; and Royle, The Uncanny, 39–50. 17. Hoffman, “The Sandman,” 11. 18. Castle, The Female Thermometer, 8. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Chapter 3

19. Copjec, “Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety,” 40. 20. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 232n. 21. Cixous, “Fiction and Its Fantasms,” 538, emphasis in the original. Chow argues that such readings are first-world variants that shift the burden of automatization onto third-world women. See Chow, Writing Diaspora, 65–72. 22. Chow, Writing Diaspora, 64. 23. Ibid., 61. 24. See, for example, Bakhtin on the provincial town: “Such towns are the locus for cyclical everyday time. Here there are no events, only ‘doings’ that constantly repeat themselves. Time here has no advancing historical movement; it moves rather in narrow circles: the circle of the day, of the week, of the month, of a person’s entire life. A day is just a day, a year is just a year—a life is just a life. Day in, day out the same round of activities are repeated, the same topics of conversation, the same words and so forth” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 247–48). 25. This remark plays on the title of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel The Land that Time Forgot (1924), about World War I soldiers who find a place where dinosaurs and Neanderthals still exist. Although a film adaptation was made of the novel, the film was not released until 1975 (after The Stepford Wives novel). 26. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 31–36. 27. Hoffman, “The Sandman,” 11. 28. Felski, Doing Time, 84. 29. On déjà vu as an example of the uncanny, see Royle, The Uncanny, 172–86. On the uncanny aspects of current technology, especially the sensation of being “programmed” as an aspect of globalization, see Christopher Johnson, “Ambient Technologies.” 30. See de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 425. 31. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 302. 32. Ibid., 60. 33. See, for example, DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending; and Abel, Hirsch, and Langland, eds., The Voyage In. 34. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 302; Niethammer, Posthistoire, 143. 35. See Chapter 1, note 7 in this book. 36. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 21–22. 37. For an analysis of the complex relationship between women, everyday life, and teleological time, see Felski, Doing Time, 76–98. For a critique of the way in which second-wave feminists like Friedan positioned themselves against a convenient image of the home as a place of “emotional dis-ease and even stasis,” see Johnson and Lloyd, Sentenced to Everyday Life, particularly chapter 5. 38. See Marx, Capital, 224–25. 39. Ibid., 174. 40. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capital,” 60. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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191

41. For example, culture-war era arguments against the politicization of the aesthetic realm relied on exactly this opposition. For a review of such debates, see Levine, “Introduction.”

1. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 30. 2. For example, Coward (“Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels?”) reads the sexual confessional style of some women’s liberation novels from a Foucauldian perspective, arguing that the supposed liberation of sexual truths merely contributes to more domination. 3. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1–36. 4. See Walters, “Ten Years of Best Sellers.” 5. Jong, Fear of Flying, 77. Hereafter cited in the text as Jong. 6. See, for example, Fishbein, “Rubyfruit Jungle.” 7. Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, 60. 8. Ibid., 55. 9. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 110. 10. For a discussion of Fear of Flying as American picaresque, see Butler, “The Woman Writer as American Picaro.” On Rubyfruit Jungle as picaresque, see Mandrell, “Questions of Genre and Gender.” 11. For example, Fishbein argues that while Rubyfruit Jungle “purports to be a bildungsroman,” it fails on this score because its heroine “neither grows nor changes” (“Rubyfruit Jungle,” 156). For an analysis that reads Rubyfruit Jungle in terms of both the picaresque and the bildungsroman genres, see Zimmerman, “Exiting from Patriarchy.” 12. Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, 55. 13. See de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 425. For a discussion of de Beauvoir and Friedan’s depiction of the housewife’s Sisyphean labors, see the section entitled “‘The Town That Time Forgot’: Static Time, Housework, and the End of History” in Chapter 3 of this book. 14. Guillén, Literature as System, 85, quoted in Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, 39. 15. Mandrell, “Questions of Genre and Gender,” 163. 16. Butler, “The Woman Writer as American Picaro,” 309. For a discussion of the American road novel, see Sherrill, Road-Book America. 17. Butler, “The Woman Writer as American Picaro,” 310, 309. 18. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle, 88. Hereafter cited in text as Brown. 19. As Judith Roof puts it, the middle is “a locus seemingly occupied by the bad object choice, the homo, and the perverse” (Come as You Are, 16). While narrative teleology for Roof exemplifies a heterologic that leads to a combination of opposites and ultimate fulfillment and closure, homosexuality signals a static middle state that threatens to produce quiescent equilibrium, since there are not enough differences in play to produce narrative movement or culmination. The similarity between the static middle and the stasis of telos is explored in the section in this chapter entitled “‘Nothing Is More Constant 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Chapter 4

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

than Inconstancy Itself ’: Seriality and Static Time.” For a range of different approaches to queerness and time, see also Freeman, ed., Queer Temporalities. Jong has also stated explicitly that she set out to copy aspects of eighteenth-century libertinage writers. See Nancy K. Miller, “Libertinage and Feminism,” 25. Felman, The Literary Speech Act, 34, emphasis in original. Ibid., 40, emphasis in original. Ibid., 45, 46. Kott, “Don Juan,” 48, 42. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 99, 101. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 194, emphasis in original. Catherine Cusset, in a question posed to Nancy K. Miller during an interview, quoted in Nancy K. Miller, “Libertinage and Feminism,” 18. See Butler, “The Woman Writer as American Picaro,” 315, 319. Cusset, “The Lessons of Libertinage,” 2. Miller offers a similar reading of the zipless fuck as Jong’s attempt to “reinvent [the] very eighteenth-century notion of taking pleasure with no future” in which a “woman [has] a sexual relationship without consequence, or at least an attempt to represent that possibility” (Nancy K. Miller, “Libertinage and Feminism,” 25). Cusset, “The Lessons of Libertinage,” 14. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 59. Ibid., 59. Readings, Introducing Lyotard, 56, emphasis added. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 74–75. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 113, emphasis added. Mandrell, “Questions of Genre and Gender,”157. Readings, Introducing Lyotard, 56. Wicks, “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative,” 245. On the distinction between narrator and focalizer in first-person retrospectives, see Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, 73. On time as the crucial ground for moral evaluation in first-person retrospectives, particularly confessionals, see Currie, About Time, 51–72. Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt, 9. Ibid., 8–9. Harris, “Thinking @ the Speed,” 147. On the limitations of Lyotard’s approach to time, see also Altieri, “Temporality and the Necessity for Dialectic.” On the link between reproduction, children, and teleological futurity, see Edelman, No Future. On the tendency of narratives of libertinage to rely on the inconsequential nature of sexual encounters for men as compared with women, see Nancy K. Miller, “Libertinage and Feminism.” Mandrell, “Questions of Genre and Gender,” 163.



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1. In addition to Walker, novelists associated with this turn include Charles Johnson, Gayle Jones, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman. For a survey of this turn, see Byerman, Remembering the Past, 1–12. On the effect of Roots on its viewers, see Wander, “On the Meaning of ‘Roots.’” 2. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 394. 3. Brown, 53, States of Injury, emphasis in original. 4. Ibid., 71, emphasis in original. 5. Ibid., 74. 6. See the section in Chapter 1 entitled “Static Time and the Post-1960s Ends of History.” 7. Some of the most important work in this body of theory is collected in Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism; and Grewal and Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies. For a very useful analysis of the third world women’s moment in American feminism, see Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: Differential Social Movements.” 8. For critical explorations of the motif of woman of color as betrayer, see for example, Alarçon, “Traddutora, Traditora”; Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion; and Chow, Ethics after Idealism, 55–73. For an analysis of how the notion of transgressive sexuality functions in the negotiation of these double binds for Chicanas in particular, see Sugg, “The Ultimate Rebellion.” 9. Gerald Early complains that “The Color Purple has all the historical sense of ‘Cinderella,’ not quite a folk tale because there are no real folk in it, but a superbly realized feminist cartoon about a woman, victimized by cruel relatives, who is transformed into a princess” (Early, “The Color Purple as Everybody’s Protest Art,” 405). For an overview of debates regarding the novel’s happy ending, see Light, “Fear of the Happy Ending.” For another assessment Walker’s relationship to the mother/daughter dynamic, see Sadoff (“Black Matrilineage”), who sees Walker’s need to invent precursors as arising from the need to deny the anxiety of authorship. 10. Walker, In Search, 381. 11. Dubey, Black Women Novelists, 134. On the relationship between Meridian and Black Nationalist movement aesthetics in general, see Dubey, Black Women Novelists, 126–44. On Meridian, revolution, and civil rights history, see Pifer, “Coming to Voice”; Stein, “Meridian”; Danielson, “Alice Walker’s Meridian”; and Hendrickson, “Remembering the Dream.” 12. Walker, Meridian, 27, emphasis in the original. Hereafter cited in text as Walker, Meridian. 13. As Susan Mizruchi puts it, lynching made white Americans “the last ritual sacrificers of the West” (The Science of Sacrifice, 338). 14. For key texts on American regionalism, see, for example, Howard, Unraveling Regions”; Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire”; and Sundquist, “Realism and Regionalism.” 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Chapter 5

15. On the discourse of maternity as self-sacrifice, see for example E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 76–106. Within the ideology of motherhood as developed in the nineteenth century, the mother stands for an ethic of self-sacrifice and caring for others that is perceived to be the opposite of capitalist subjectivity associated with the public world— what Jochen Schulte-Sasse calls the “agonistic identity we assume in the struggles of everyday life and the sensuous-material interest we develop within this struggle, which fosters competitiveness, egocentricity, and greed” (Schulte-Sasse, “Afterword,” 99). 16. On the shift to a negative view in the critical reception of the novel, see Ellis, “Out from Under the Cucumber.” For important critiques, see Early, “The Color Purple”; Harris, “On The Color Purple”; and hooks, Yearning. For a key reading of the novel as a successful romance rather than a failed realist text, see Hite, “Romance, Marginality, Matrilineage.” For a very different approach to the novel’s engagement with temporality than the one pursued in this chapter, see Chambers, “Right on Time.” 17. Walker has been vocal about her desire both to make The Color Purple an historical novel and to have it deviate from the history with which it engages. In particular, Walker famously asserted that she based the character of Celie on her great-grandmother and that she provided her ancestor with a happy ending because she wanted to “liberat[e] her from her own history” (Anello and Abramson, “Characters in Search of a Book,” 67). 18. Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions, 84. 19. Ibid., 101. On the media’s convenient construction of the “controversy” over the novel and film as a quasi-domestic squabble between black men and women, see Bobo, “Sifting Through the Controversy,” and Harris, “On The Color Purple.” 20. Harris, “On The Color Purple,” 155, 157. 21. Walker, Color, 18. Hereafter cited in text as Walker, Color. 22. On the way in which the characterization of Shug both draws on and diverges from the blues aesthetic, see Wall, who argues that “when Shug urges Celie to ‘conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock’ when she wants to pray, the novel inscribes a pantheism that to [her] ear has no resonance in the blues” (Wall, Worrying the Line, 155–56). 23. See Fabian, Time and the Other, 32–34. On the way in which such conceptual temporal distancing can produce material effects on the experience of time for African Americans, see Reichardt, “Time and the AfricanAmerican Experience.” 24. For an excellent analysis of Nettie’s letters as depicting a parallel and negative version of Celie’s instruction by Shug, see, for example, Katz, “‘Show Me How to Do Like You,’” 68–69.



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1. For a useful analysis of the reception of Divine Secrets, see Travis, “Divine Secrets.” For an analysis of the marketing of The Joy Luck Club and other contemporary American bestsellers, see Ween, “This is Your Book.” 2. These totals are not absolute, given that the some of the texts dated after 1970 are in fact new editions of fiction first published earlier in the century, but the vast majority of these entries can still be considered post-1970 texts. 3. See Piercy’s Three Women (1999), a novel about a woman’s relationships with her mother and her daughter. 4. For example, Gayle Greene argues that the most “well-known, widely read” novels by women in the 1980s are characterized by “the privatization and politicization of their concerns [and] the sentimentalization of the family”: they “offe[r] a small, circumscribed canvas, focu[s] on character and relationship, and reduc[e] sexual politics to a soap opera” (Greene, Changing the Story, 200). 5. Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” 636. 6. The vociferous debate about the politics of sentiment is ongoing. For the classic texts in the field, see Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture; Tompkins, Sensational Designs; and Samuels, Culture of Sentiment. For excellent overviews of and interventions in these debates with regard to nineteenth-century literature in particular, see Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature”; Gilligan, “Reading, Race, and Charles Chestnutt”; and Hendler, “The Limits of Sympathy.” For arguments that connect the tradition of nineteenth-century American sentimental literature to the contemporary political landscape, see Berlant, “Poor Eliza” and “The Subject of True Feelings.” For recent critical returns to Douglas’s thesis, see Gould, ed., Revising the “Feminization” of American Culture. 7. Since 1980, a substantial body of criticism has been produced that focuses on the mother/daughter narrative. For classics in the field, see Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot; E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation; Davidson and Broner, eds., The Lost Tradition; and Pearlman, ed., Mother Puzzles. Both The Lost Tradition and Mother Puzzles contain bibliographies of mother/ daughter criticism surveying the state of the field at the time of their publication. Guillory-Brown, ed., Women of Color, offers a useful survey of the novels by women of color most frequently read and consumed as mother/ daughter texts. While indebted to these crucial taxonomies and theorizations of feminist mother/daughter narratives, particularly Hirsch’s, my approach differs from this body of work by reading the feminist mother/daughter narrative as a register for overarching problems in national time. 8. Berlant, “The Subject of True Feelings,” 53. 9. See Chapter 5, section titled “The Figure of the Woman of Color and the Return of Narrative Fulfillment,” in this book. 10. Morrison, Beloved, 275. 11. Armstrong, “Why Daughters Die,” 10. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


Chapter 6

12. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 18. 13. Much of the literary criticism written about The Joy Luck Club focuses on mother/daughter dynamics. See, for example, Braendlin, “Mother/ Daughter Dialog(ic)s”; Heung, “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text”; Mountain, “‘The Struggle of Memory’”; Shear, “Generational Differences”; and Wong, “‘Sugar Sisterhood.’” 14. Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 241. Hereafter cited in text as Tan. 15. Wong, “‘Sugar Sisterhood,’”181. 16. Friday, My Mother/My Self, 201. 17. Friday’s fixation on the zero-sum economy of the mother/daughter relationship is reflected in more academic work as well—for example, in the insistence on the mutually exclusive desires for autonomy and nurturance described by Jane Flax. For Flax, the mother/daughter relationship instills in us the sense that we can only have closeness either with the mother or with our own autonomous self, and a gain in one means a loss in the other. See Flax, “The Conflict Between Nurturance and Autonomy.” 18. Wells, Divine Secrets, 180, emphasis in the original. Hereafter cited in text as Wells. 19. Rich, Of Woman Born, 232. 20. Although Rich’s description makes clear the way in which this merging was represented as a threat, in the late 1970s and 1980s such fluidity increasingly came to be valorized as a vestige of the pre-Oedipal or presymbolic and was often associated with modernist or avant-garde experimental narrative practices. On water imagery, the feminine, and the modernist imagination, see DeKoven, Rich and Strange. On mothers and daughters and the pre-Oedipal and/or pre-Symbolic, see, in particular, Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering; and Kristeva, “Stabat Mater.” E. Ann Kaplan offers a useful overview of psychoanalytic paradigms of the mother/ daughter relationship (Motherhood and Representation, 27–56). 21. Berlant, “The Subject of True Feelings,” 58. See also Berlant’s discussion of water imagery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved; and Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” 665. 22. Hendler, “The Limits of Sympathy,” 691. 23. Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity, 159. 24. Ibid., 159–60. 25. Lim, “Japanese-American Women’s Life Stories,” 293, quoted in Heung, “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text,” 28. 26. Examples of this nonrational causality in the novel include the omnipotence of thoughts, the inexorability of predetermined fate, and the ability of the seemingly extraneous to create material effects—for example, through the doctrine of feng shui. On feng shui in The Joy Luck Club, see Hamilton, “Feng Shui.” For another discussion of fate, determination, and its connection to Chinese experience in the novel, see Shear, “Generational Differences.” 27. Heller, Family Plots, 121–22. 28. Jameson, Postmodernism, 49. 29. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 16–17. 10.1057/9780230612808 - Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, Jane Elliott


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30. Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 7. Huyseen mounts this description in support of his argument that the turn to the past arises because of an attempt slow the accelerated rush of the empheral futurity associated with postmodernism. My argument is instead that both the persistence of the past and the seeming inauthenticity of the future are related expressions of the same problem of time and totalization, rather than the former serving as a response to the latter. 31. For a particularly insightful discussion of the distinction between Ya-Ya camaraderie and feminist collectivity, see Travis, “Divine Secrets.” 32. Hendler, “The Limits of Sympathy,” 697. 33. Arendt, The Human Condition, 213. 34. Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” 665. 35. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 82–83. 36. As Jameson puts it elsewhere, “the crisis embodies a contradiction, which is articulated as a binary opposition, and the allegorical narrative will consist in the attempt to overcome this opposition in one way or another” (Jameson, “From Metaphor to Allegory,” 27–28). 37. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 169.

Coda 1. See also 9 to 5 (1982); Baby Boom (1987); and Working Girl (1988). In general, the hurried woman genre begins in film and migrates to literature with the growth of the “chick lit” format, whose comic, formulaic bent mirrors that of the films themselves. The political resonance of this genre transforms as the backlash against feminism grows: in 9 to 5, for example, the horror of repetitive time is caused by patriarchal control of the work place, while in Working Girl it is the career woman herself who causes problems for the female underling. 2. I borrow the phrase from the pop-medical diagnosis of “hurried woman syndrome” among working mothers. See Bost, The Hurried Woman Syndrome. 3. Pearson, I Don’t Know How She Does It, 325. Hereafter cited in text as Pearson. 4. Weisberger, The Devil Wears Prada, 7. 5. On this tendency, see my essay “The Currency of Feminist Theory.” On feminist generations, see, for example, Looser and Kaplan, eds., Generations.



NOTES




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The letter n following a page number indicates a note on that page. 1960s: and apocalypse, 35–39; conclusion of, 38–40, 51, 53–54; and direct action, 33; and fugitives, 53–54; and historical destiny, 53, 55, 58, 67; historiography of, 24–25, 33; and instrumentality, 53, 61; and national time, 23–24; and polarization, 36; and the politics of extremity, 34, 49, 50, 52–53, 61; and postmodernism, 141; and poststructuralism, 26, 40–42; and prefigurative politics, 33; and revolution, 35, 37, 38; and violence, 35, 37, 38. See also feminism: and the 1960s; narrative: declension; time: and the 1960s; totalization: and the 1960s 1960s: African Americans: conceptualized as sacrifice, 118–19, 120, 122–24; represented via regionalism, 118–19, 122, 124, 126; women’s liberation novels’ representations of, 43–44, 68–69, 85–86. See also feminism: relationship to race and ethnicity; fiction; past: and African American politics; woman of color, figure of 1960s: Agamben, Giorgio, 30 agency, 23, 29, 30–32; and apocalypse, 37–39, 54, 182n69; and

spirituality, 127; and the uncanny, 74–77 allegory, 6–9, 141, 159, 162; national, 6, 9 allochronism, 132. See also coevalness, denial of Anderson, Benedict, 78 Anderson, Perry, 26 animalization, 23, 81, 82, 84–85 anti-feminism. See backlash apocalypse: and the 1960s, 35–39; and agency, 37–38, 54; definitions of, 181n57; fulfillment of, 36–37, 38; and narrative levels, 36; resilience of, 37; and totalization, 36 Arendt, Hannah, 31–32, 34, 157 Armstrong, Nancy, 140–41 automaton, 71, 72, 75, 76–77, 86–87. See also uncanny autonomy, 74–76 backlash, 4, 13, 20, 134, 138, 163, 167, 173 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 92 Barth, John, 11 Barthes, Roland, 41 belonging, national, 139–40, 141 Beloved (Morrison), 11, 140 Benjamin, Walter, 42–43, 55 Berlant, Lauren, 138, 139, 146 Berman, Marshall, 40–41 Berman, Paul, 34 Bildungsroman, 92, 93



Index

INDEX

black nationalism, 117. See also Black Power Black Power, 35, 39, 44 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 15 Boyle, Kevin, 25 Breines, Wini, 33 Brick, Howard, 36 Brown, Rita Mae. See Rubyfruit Jungle Brown, Wendy, 9, 10, 21, 55, 113–14 Burner, David, 34, 35 Butler, Robert, 93 Carby, Hazel, 21 careers. See narrative: career Castle, Terry, 75 castration, 76, 77 causality, 125, 127, 128, 129, 149. See narrative: career change. See time: relationship to change Chow, Rey, 76, 87, 146–47 chronology. See time chronotope, 78, 92 citizenship. See belonging, national civil rights movement, 33, 116–17, 122 Cixous, Hélène, 41, 76 coevalness, denial of, 15, 132–33 Cohn, Norman, 36, 37 Color Purple, The (Walker), 18, 113, 116, 125–36, 140 consciousness-raising, 4, 57, 58, 64, 65, 66, 128 Copjec, Joan, 75–76 Crichton, Michael, 13 Cusset, Catherine, 95, 97 Daly, Mary, 73 De Beauvoir, Simone, 71, 72, 79 debt, 18–19, 121, 122 declension narrative. See narrative: declension decline, American discourse of. See time: national DeKoven, Marianne, 44;

Deleuze, Gilles, 97 Derrida, Jacques, 42–43, 97 desire, 30, 33–34, 95 detotalized time. See time: detotalized Devil Wears Prada, The (Weisberger), 20, 163, 165–67 dialogism, 64 Disclosure (Crichton), 13 Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Wells), 145–46, 147–48, 151–52, 157–58, 160 Dolar, Mladen, 74 Don Juan, 94–95, 97–98, 99–100, 102 Doppelganger. See double double, 17, 75–76, 86–87. See also uncanny Dubey, Madhu, 43–44, 117 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 65 dystopia, 29 economy, zero-sum. See time: and the opposition between past and future Elias, Amy, 11 end of history, the. See history Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 11 event: and feminist fiction, 91, 96–98, 99–100, 103, 104, 105; and static time, 91, 99–100, 103–4, 108. See also narrative: resistance to; poststructuralism: and the event; representation, resistance to Fabian, Johannes, 132 fanaticism, 35 Fanon, Frantz, 44, 180n43 fascism, 28 Fear of Flying (Jong), 17, 89–94, 95–96, 98, 100, 104–6, 138 Felman, Shosana, 94, 95, 103 Felski, Rita, 6, 79 feminism: and the 1960s, 45–46, 49–52, 57–58, 61, 64, 185n94; and aesthetics, 13–14; and critiques



220

of housewifery, 72–73, 79–81, 82; and the end of history, 83, 86–87; relationship to race and ethnicity, 14–16, 18, 59, 68–69, 114–15, 154–55; and static time, 4–5, 9, 50–52, 65, 72, 81–82, 83–84, 87, 89, 115; and teleology, 6, 82–83; and totalization, 50–52, 60–65, 129, 134, 135. See also fiction; futurity; history Feminist Mystique, The (Friedan), 17, 79–80, 82. See also Friedan, Betty fiction: authoritarian, 62–63; allegorical function of feminists, 7–8; definitions of femnists, 14; and feminist aesthetics, 13–14; and feminist genre, 13–14; and feminist propaganda, 4, 51, 63–64; feminist relationship to race and ethnicity, 14–16, 18, 59–60, 62, 68–69, 114–15, 134–36; multicultural feminists, 18–19, 116, 135, 139; popularity of feminist, 4, 13–15; postmodernist, 11–12; and static time, 10, 16, 17–20, 50–52, 65–66, 69, 134–36; and teleology, 89, 92, 94, 95, 100, 103, 143; and whiteness, 14–16, 18, 51, 52, 58–60, 68–69, 72. See also feminism; event: and feminist fiction; time; and under individual novels Fletcher, Angus, 3 forgiveness, 148, 157–58 Foucault, Michel, 40–41, 90 freedom: and art, 85; imminence of, 30–33, 34, 36; and narrativity, 28–29; and paid labor, 84–85; and time, 29, 78–79; and repetition, 79; and the uncanny, 74–77, 84–85 French, Marilyn, 51, 138. See also Women’s Room, The Freud, Sigmund, 17, 74, 75, 79 Friday, Nancy, 144

221

Friedan, Betty, 17, 71, 79–80, 81, 82 Frye, Northrup, 7 fugitives, 53–54 Fukuyama, Francis, 21, 22, 23 futurity: attempts to achieve, 19, 68–69, 83, 85–86, 87, 116, 129, 132, 134–36, 147–48; feminism as problematic, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 129, 134, 143; and postmodernism feminism, 19, 142, 151, 152, 159; loss of, 5, 8, 9, 21, 22, 24, 67–68, 142; vs. the past. See also postmodernism: and futurity; prolepsis; time: and the opposition between past and future; totalization: and futurity generations. See time: generational genre. See feminism; and under individual genres Gitlin, Todd, 24, 34, 36 Gosse, Van, 24 Guillén, Claudio, 93 Hall, Stuart, 113 Harris, Trudier, 126 Harvey, David, 9 Hayden, Tom, 39 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich, 26 Heller, Dana, 150 Hendler, Glenn, 146, 152 history: approach of the end, 30–32; breakdown of, 9, 10, 12, 21; definitions of the end, 21–23, 26–27; and end of feminism, 10, 12, 17, 81–83, 86–87, 89; and end of the housewife, 81–83, 86–87, 89; and end of the Left, 9, 12, 21, 39–40, 42, 53–54; last men of, 22, 31, 83; narrativization of, 27, 28; subversion of, 11–12. See also futurity: loss of; teleology Hoffman, E. T. A., 74. See also “The Sandman” Hogeland, Lisa Marie, 126



INDEX

INDEX

Housekeeping (Robinson), 13 housewifery: and the end of history, 81–83, 86–87, 89; feminist critiques of, 72–73, 79–81, 82. See also housework housework, 17, 71–72, 79–80, 81, 87 hurried woman tales, 163–67 Hurston, Zora Neale, 127 Huyssen, Andreas, 40, 151 identification, 141, 143, 146–48, 152, 153, 155, 156–58, 159 identity politics: critiques of, 21–22, 43–45, 113–14, 142; and postmodernism, 43–44, 139–40; and sentiment, 139–40. See also feminism; fiction; identity politics; time I Don’t Know How She Does It (Pearson), 163–66 imaginary, social, 25–26 immediacy, 30–32, 33, 42 immigration, 143–44 incest. See time: generational instrumentality, 38, 53, 61, 68, 76, 85, 183 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 74 Isserman, Maurice, 24, 35 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 9, 12, 137, 142, 151, 161, 162 Jong, Erica. See Fear of Flying Joy Luck Club, The (Tan), 19, 137, 143–44, 146, 147, 148–50, 153–57, 160 Kermode, Frank, 26, 27, 37 Kierkegaard, Søren, 95, 97 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 13 Kojève, Alexandre, 26 Kott, Jan, 95 Kristeva, Julia, 41, 95 Künstlerroman, 92, 93, 105 labor: and freedom, 84–85; and static time, 80–81, 84–86, 87. See also

housework; feminism: and the critique of housewifery Lacan, Jacques, 30, 74 lack, 30 last men. See history, last men of Lauret, Maria, 54 Left, the: and the end of the 1960s, 23, 24, 39–40, 42, 43; melancholia, 56; and postmodernism, 141–42, 151. See also history: the end of the Left; totalization: and the Left Left, the: and the end of the 1960s, 23, 24, 39–40, 42, 43; melancholia, 56; and postmodernism, 141–42, 151. See also history; totalization lesbianism, 57, 66, 91, 94, 107, 108. See also sexuality Levin, Ira, 71. See also Stepford Wives, The liberalism, 29, 35, 140 libertinage, 94, 95, 96, 97 Lim, Shirley, 149 Lyotard, Jean-François, 10, 11, 12, 90, 96–98, 103–4 Manchurian Candidate, The, 74 Mandrell, James, 93 Mannheim, Karl, 29 Marcuse, Herbert, 39 marriage. See plot, marriage Marx, Karl, 31, 84–85 Marxism, 9, 21, 22, 28, 56, 103, 114, 142, 159 Matrix, The, 79 May 1968, 40 melancholia, 45, 56 Melley, Timothy, 54 Meridian (Walker), 14, 18, 116–25, 126, 132, 135, 142 messianic, the, 42–43 messianism, 42–43 metafiction, historiographic, 10 militancy, 34–35, 37 millenarianism. See apocalypse Miller, James, 39 Millet, Kate, 71



222

INDEX

Nabokov, Vladimir, 11 narrative: and allegory, 8; and binarization, 36; career, 17–18, 68, 85–87, 163–67; declension, 24–25, 33, first phase of declension, 33–34; focalization, 55–56; and freedom, 28–29; and history, 27, 28; mother/daughter, 108–9, 137–38, 140–42, 143–62; resistance to, 11, 40, 65–67, 89, 98, 100, 106; second phase of declension, 34–38; telos of, 36–37, 43, 65–66, 80–82, 86–87, 94; third phase of declension, 38–40; upward-mobility, 68–69, 85–86. See also plot; totalization: narrative national allegory. See allegory: national New Left. See Left New Woman, 6 Niethammer, Lutz, 21, 81 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 137 novel: of awakening, 13, 64; domestic, 7, 138; feminist; key examples of women’s liberation, 49, 51; and the mother/daughter narrative, 138, 139, 142–43; and realism, 63, 126; representation of African Americans, 43–44, 68–69, 85–86;

and totalization, 118, 120, 129, 134, 135; and whiteness, 14–15, 16, 18. See fiction; plot: marriage; Women’s Room, The; Vida Of Woman Born (Rich), 146 Osborne, Peter, 3, 27, 43 paranoia, 54–55, 73–74 past: and African American politics, 117–21, 122, 124, 133, 140; epistemological signature of, 118; ethical demand of, 16, 18–19, 113–15, 120–22, 123, 125, 134–35, 140; and Southern regionalism, 118–19, 122, 124, 126; and totality, 118–19, 121; transformation of, 123–25, 126, 128, 140. See also time; totalization: and the past Pearson, Allison. See I Don’t Know How She Does It picaresque, 17, 89, 92–94 Piercy, Marge, 51, 138. See also Vida plot, 17, 28; marriage, 7, 65, 80–81, 94–95, 100. See also narrative Posthistoire. See history postmodernism: and the 1960s, 141; and Beloved, 11; feminist, 19, 142, 151, 152, 159; and futurity, 9, 19, 141–42, 151, 152, 159; and identity politics, 43–44, 139–40; and the Left, 141–42, 151; and detotalized time, 9–12; static time, 151, 152, 159. See also fiction: postmodernist poststructuralism: and the 1960s, 26, 40–42; and the event, 42–43, 90, 91, 97, 103–4, 104–5, 108; and static time, 26, 40–43, 103–4, 108; and totalization, 9, 10–12, 28, 40–43, 66 prefiguration. See 1960s: and prefigurative politics progress. See time: progressive prolepsis, 128–29, 132–34, 140



Morrison, Toni, 11, 15. See also Beloved mother/daughter narratives. See narrative: mother/daughter mother/daughter relationship, 19, 120, 121, 124–25, 129–30; and Friday, Nancy, 144; overidentification within, 146–7; and Rich, Adrienne, 146; zero-sum economy of, 144–45. See also mother/daughter narratives; time: and the opposition between past and future My Mother/My Self (Friday), 144

223

INDEX

promiscuity, 17, 89, 91, 95 prophecy, 37 psychoanalysis, 30 rape, 61–62 realism, 12, 63, 116, 125, 128 reconciliation, 139, 143, 157. See time: reconciliation of; forgiveness regionalism, 78. See also past: Southern regionalism; repetition, 17, 62–63, 72, 78–79; structural, 103 representation, resistance to, 90–91, 96–98, 99, 103–4. See also narrative: resistance to resistance, 3, 12, 18, 39, 40, 41, 50, 91, 93. See also narrative: resistance to; representation, resistance to revolution, 24, 35, 37, 38, 41. See also totalization: and revolution Rich, Adrienne, 146 Right, the, 5, 21, 23, 176n12 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 11 Robinson, Marilyn, 13 Roots, 113 Rosowski, Susan, 13. See also novel: of awakening Rubyfruit Jungle (Brown), 17, 89–94, 98, 99, 100–102, 106–9 sacrifice. See African Americans: conceptualized as sacrifice. “The Sandman” (Hoffman), 74, 75, 76, 79 Sense of an Ending, The (Kermode), 26 sentimentality, 138–39, 141, 143, 146–47, 152–62 seriality, 17, 95, 99, 103 sexuality, 90, 91–92, 94, 98 Simpsons, The, 72 Sisyphus, 71, 72, 79, 83, 93 sixties. See 1960s Sobchack, Vivian, 74 Spectres of Marx (Derrida), 42–43 spirituality, 123–25, 127, 168n30

Starr, Peter, 41, 103 static time. See time. Stepford Wives, The (Levin), 17, 71–74, 76, 77–80, 81, 83, 85–87 structure of feeling, 23 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 24, 33, 39 Suleiman, Susan, 62–63 Tan, Amy. See also Joy Luck Club, TheTan, Amy. See also Taylor, Charles, 25 teleology: breakdown of, 5, 9, 10, 12; and feminism, 6, 82–83. See also fiction; feminism: and teleology; history; time: teleological Telos. See narrative: telos of; teleology temporality. See time This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga), 59 time: detotalized, 10, 12; and the 1960s, 16, 24, 40, 41–42, 51, 53–54, 61; and Color Purple, The, 116, 125–26, 128, 129, 134, 136; definition of, 4, 23, 33; disruption of, 129–32, 135; and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, 147–48, 151, 160; and Fear of Flying, 102–3, 105, 108; and the figure of the woman of color, and forgiveness, 157–58; and freedom, 29, 78–79; generational, 130–32; and housework, 78–81; and identity politics, 16, 19, 43–45, 113–15, 139, 158; inexorablity of, 135–36, 137, 160–62, 164–69; and Joy Luck Club, The, 147, 148–51, 160; and labor, 80–81, 84–86, 87; and the Left, 9, 12, 31, 39, 40–45; and Meridian, 122; national, 5, 20, 18, 20, 23–24, 139–41, 170n6; and the opposition between past and future, 118, 120–21, 140, 141, 143, 149, 153, 154, 155, 159; and the past, 14, 122, 128, 129, 134,



224

146–51, 156; progressive, 4–5, 20, 83; reconciliation of, 152–60; relationship to change, 4, 22, 23, 169n3; 134–35; resolution of, 159–62; and Rubyfruit Jungle, 102, 103, 107–8; and Stepford Wives, The, 72, 78, 81–82, 87; teleological, 5, 6, 82–83, 157; transcendence of, 152–60; and the uncanny, 78–79, 81–82; and Vida, 53–54, 60, 65; and Women’s Room, The, 3–4, 50–52, 68. See also event: and static time; feminism: and static time; history; postmodernism; poststructuralism: and static time; prolepsis; time totalitarianism, 28, 29, 35 totality, 27–28, 118–19, 121 totalization: and the 1960s, 34–35, 39, 40, 41, 49–50, 53, 55; and apocalypse, 36; and Black Power, 35, 117; and focalization, 56; and futurity, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121, 129, 134–35, 140, 141, 142, 143, 153, 159; and genocide, 28; and history, 27, 28, 58; and housework, 87; and identity politics, 43–45, 113–15; and immediacy, 31–33, 34; and the Left, 9, 12, 31, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43; and narrative, 12, 27, 28, 32, 35, 36, 65–66; and paranoia, 54–55; and the past, 117–19, 120, 121, 126, 134–35, 150–51; and revolution, 34–35, 39, 117–18, 119; and women’s liberation novels, 118, 120, 129, 134, 135. See also feminism: and totalization; narrative: telos of; poststructuralism: and totalization transcendence. See time: transcendence of trauma, 11, 16, 45, 140

225

uncanny: and agency, 74–77; and the Enlightenment, 75–76; and feminism, 76–77, 81–82; and freedom, 74–77, 84–85; housework as, 17, 77–80; and repetition, 79; and time, 78–79, 81–82; and uniformity, 73, 81, 149 universalism, 43–44, 113–14, 140, 147, 153 unrepresentable, 11–12. See also representation, resistance to Updike, John, 13 upward mobility. See narrative: upward-mobility utopia, 29, 36, 40, 188n31 Vida (Piercy), 16, 53–60 Walker, Alice, 14, 18, 138. See also Meridian; Color Purple, The Weather Underground, 35, 52 Weisberger, Lauren. See Devil Wears Prada, The Wells, Rebecca. See Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood whiteness, 21. See also fiction; novel: key examples of women’s liberation Wicks, Ulrich, 92, 93, 100 Williams, Raymond, 23 Witches of Eastwick, The, 13 woman of color, figure of, 58–60, 69, 114–15, 116, 134–35 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston), 13 women’s liberation movement, 3–4, 45, 57, 58, 59, 61, 71, 83, 86, 91 women’s liberation novels. See novel: women’s liberation Women’s Room, The (French), 3–4, 16–17, 49–51, 50–52, 60–65, 72, 86, 87, 125–26, 135, 150 Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia, 144 Žižek, Slavoj, 54



INDEX

Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time

Encyclopedia of American Popular Fiction (Literary Movements)

Writing Popular Fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing Popular Fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing Popular Fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing Popular Fiction

Writing popular fiction

Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction

Time in Feminist Phenomenology

American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction

Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900

Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900

American Popular Music (2008)

Jazz (American Popular Music)

Folk (American Popular Music)

American Popular Music

Classical (American Popular Music)

American Science Fiction TV

Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance

Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought

Tracing Arachne's Web: Myth and Feminist Fiction

Libra (Contemporary American Fiction)

American Science Fiction TV

Americana (Contemporary American fiction)

Negro in American Fiction

Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture

Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time

Encyclopedia of American Popular Fiction (Literary Movements)

Writing Popular Fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing Popular Fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing Popular Fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing popular fiction

Writing Popular Fiction

Writing popular fiction

Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction

Time in Feminist Phenomenology

American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction

Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900

Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900

American Popular Music (2008)

Jazz (American Popular Music)

Folk (American Popular Music)

American Popular Music

Classical (American Popular Music)

American Science Fiction TV

Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance

Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought

Tracing Arachne's Web: Myth and Feminist Fiction

Libra (Contemporary American Fiction)

American Science Fiction TV

Americana (Contemporary American fiction)

Negro in American Fiction

Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture

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