encountering the islamic other in print: students’ readings of christiane bird’s neither east...

receptiontexts,

readers,

audiences,

history

the pennsylvania state university press

t h e o f f i c i a l j o u r n a l o f t h e r e c e p t i o n s t u d y s o c i e t y

vol. 7

2015

special topic

reception study and

cultural diversity

Guest edited by Patrocinio Schweickart and Philip Goldstein

Editors

James L. Machor, Kansas State University

Amy L. Blair, Marquette University

Editorial Board

Tony Bennett, The Open University

Temma Berg, Gettysburg College

Rhiannon Bury, Athabasca University

Philip Goldstein, University of Delaware

Barbara Hochman, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Charles Johanningsmeier, University of Nebraska at Omaha

Steven J. Mailloux, Loyola Marymount University

Walter Metz, Southern Illinois University

Toby Miller, University of California at Riverside

Kimberly Nance, Illinois State University

Rhonda Pettit, University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College

Emily Satterwhite, Virginia Tech University

Patrocinio Schweickart, Purdue University

Janet Staiger, University of Texas at Austin

Charlotte Templin, University of Indianapolis

Publication of Reception is made possible in part

through funding support from the Klingler College

of Arts and Sciences, Marquette University, and from

the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department

of English, Kansas State University.

receptiontexts,

readers,

audiences,

history

volume 7, 2015

special topic: reception study and cultural diversity

1 Editors’Introduction 4 GuestEditors’Introduction

essays 8 (Re)readingZoraNealeHurstonand“TheLost

KeysofGlory”m. genevieve west

29 PopularReceptionofToniMorrison’sBeloved:ReadingtheTextthroughTimelydia magras

45 StagingtheReceptionofAmericanEthnicAuthorsinWomen’sPopularMagazines:EncounteringAmyTan’sThe Joy Luck ClubStoriesinSeventeenandLadies’ Home Journal

matthew james vechinski

64 AsianAmericanLiteratureandReadingFormations:ACaseStudyofNoraOkjaKeller’sComfort WomanandFox Girl

allison layfield

83 EncounteringtheIslamicOtherinPrint:Students’ReadingsofChristianeBird’sNeither

East nor West: One Woman’s Journey through the

Islamic Republic of Iran

perry l. carter

Reception_7_FM.indd 1 15/06/15 9:29 PM

book reviews 101 BeverlyLyonClark.The Afterlife of “Little Women”

review by anne k. phillips

104 KimberlyChabotDavis.Beyond the White Negro:

Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading

review by cameron leader-picone

107 SarahJ.Jackson.Black Celebrity, Racial Politics,

and the Press: Framing Dissent

review by molly abel travis

111 DavidKinney,The Dylanologists: Adventures in the

Land of Bob

review by todd richardson

113 CliffordR.Murphy.Yankee Twang: Country and

Western Music in New England

review by michael saffle

116 JonathanRose.The Literary Churchill: Author,

Reader, Actor

review by a. warren dockter

119 HiesunCeciliaSuhr,ed.Online Evaluation of

Creativity and the Arts

review by rhiannon bury

121 ChristopherV.Trinacty.Senecan Tragedy and the

Reception of Augustan Poetry

review by ika willis

124 MingXie,ed.The Agon of Interpretation: Towards

a Critical Intercultural Hermenuetics

review by patrocinio schweickart

128 OtherNewBooksinAudienceandReceptionStudies

130 contributors


Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, Historyisascholarly,

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dialogueanddiscussionamongscholarsengagedintheoretical

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thebook,audienceandcommunicationstudies,institutional

studiesandhistories,aswellasinterpretivestrategiesrelated

tofeminism,raceandethnicity,genderandsexuality,and

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receptionvol. 7, 2015

Copyright © 2015

The Pennsylvania State

University, University

Park, PA

editors’ introduction

As reception study continues to grow and expand, it has moved into areas that were not in the field’s vision a decade or more ago. One of those areas is reception within both minority-culture and cross-cultural contexts. This issue of Reception offers a contribution to that expansion with its second special-topic issue since the journal’s inception seven years ago. Under the guest editorship of Patrocinio Schweickart, professor emerita at Purdue University, and Philip Goldstein, professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, the core of this issue consists of five articles that explore various dimensions of multicultural reception. As Schweickart and Goldstein point out in their guest-editors’ introduction, the goal in bringing together these articles is to “contribute to the broad effort at opening American literature to the diverse literatures and readers that make it up.” That includes studying the response to the works of authors of color, particularly by a culturally specific audience, which Lydia Magras explores in her article on the popular reception of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as well as attending to the “dialectical relation between readers and texts” at times of historical crisis, which Genevieve West examines to shed light on Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Lost Keys of Glory” and Hurston’s status as a feminist. Offering a different angle is Matthew Vechinski’s examination of the appearance of portions of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in two popular magazines—both before and after the publication of the full novel—and Orientalist and gendered assumptions behind the editorial changes made in those excerpts. Turning to both professional reviewers’ responses and the online reactions of what historians

Reception_7_01_Editors_Introduction.indd 1 15/06/15 8:31 PM

reception2

of the book call “common readers,” Allison Layfield analyzes both the vastly different receptions of two of Nora Okja Keller’s novels, Comfort Woman and Fox Girl, and the cultural conditions that produced those differences. Cross-cultural reception is also the focus of Perry Carter’s discussion of the ways a group of U.S. college students responded to representations of Iran, Islam, and the Middle East through their reading of Christiane Bird’s travelogue in Iran, Neither East nor West. Although Schweickart and Goldstein offer further details about each of these articles, readers will want to turn to the essays themselves to discover the richness and complexity of the authors’ various approaches to and insights about readers and reception in these multicultural contexts.

Since one of the journal’s goals is to keep readers abreast of important new books published in reception studies, this issue continues our practice of including reviews of books in literary, cultural, and media studies as well as in the history of the book that explore various dimensions of reading, looking, and listening. The nine reviews in this issue discuss and evaluate volumes that span a range of subjects, including literary studies, children’s literature, classical reception study, biography, cultural and media studies, and, in a fitting connection to the focus of this issue, cross-cultural reception. For the last of these, readers will want to take a look at Patrocinio Schweickart’s review of The

Agon of Interpretations: Towards a Critical Intercultural Hermeneutics, edited by Ming Xie, and at Cameron Leader-Picone’s review of Kimberly Chabot Davis’s Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading. Those with a special interest in the reception of children’s literature and in classical reception study can turn to Beverly Lyon Clark’s The Afterlife of “Little Women,” reviewed by Anne Phillips, and Christopher Trinacty’s Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of

Augustan Poetry, reviewed by Ika Willis. Jonathan Rose’s The Literary Churchill:

Author, Reader, Actor, reviewed by A. Warren Dockter, offers an interesting example of scholarship that combines reception study, book history, and biography. Scholars drawn to mass media, music, fandom, Internet, and cultural studies can find ample fare in Molly Travis’s review of Sarah Jackson’s Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press, Rhiannon Bury’s review of Hiesun Cecilia Suhr’s edited collection Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts, Todd Richardson’s review of David Kinney’s The Dylanologists, and Michael Saffle’s review of Clifford Murphy’s Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New

England. Finally, for further news about additional scholarship in audience and reception studies, this issue continues our practice of including a bibliography of other new books in the field that have appeared in the last eighteen months.

We are also pleased to announce a new feature beginning with this issue: the inclusion of abstracts for the main articles. As scholars of reception, we are acutely aware of the potential positive and negative effects of such paratexts on reading practices. We hope these abstracts will be only a benefit to our readers


editors’ introduction3

and authors alike by enabling scholarly selection and visibility in the electronic databases that organize our labor in the twenty-first century.

As we at the journal and our sponsoring organization look forward to the future, we would like to invite readers to join us at the Reception Study Society’s sixth biennial conference, which will take place September 24–26, 2015, at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, under the direction of Professors Janet Badia and Steven Carr. We hope to meet many of you there.

James L. Machor and Amy L. Blair, coeditors



Copyright © 2015



Park, PA

guest editors’ introduction

Reception Study and Cultural Diversity

Literary and cultural study in the last half century has been marked by the recognition that culture is best understood not as a coherent unity of well-assimilated elements but rather as the product of the continuous interaction of heterogeneous, contradictory elements. Culture is the discursive and social product of the intersection and interaction of differences—of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and other social and cultural categories. A corollary to this view is the recognition that the traditional canon of American literature misrepresents American culture to the extent that it privileges voices of white men at the cost of drowning out the voices of many others.

The last half century saw the prolific production of texts by Native American, African American, Latino American, and Asian American writers. But as we now all know, texts become literature only to the extent that they are read—and they become part of the literary tradition only to the extent that they continue to be read, interpreted, understood, and studied.

Two concepts from reception theory have been influential in the study of literary reception in a dynamic multicultural environment: the first is Hans Robert Jauss’s idea that readers produce the meaning of texts within a “horizon of expectations” that is a function of historical and cultural conditions; the second is Tony Bennett’s concept of “reading formations,” which he defines as sets of “discursive

Reception_7_02_Guest Editors_Introduction.indd 4 15/06/15 8:31 PM

guest editors’ introduction5

and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another by constituting readers as subjects of particular types and texts as objects to be read in particular ways . . . texts have, and can have, no existence independently of . . . varying reading formations . . . through which their historical life is modulated, within which texts can be constituted as objects of knowledge.”1

We offer this special-topic issue of Reception as part of the ongoing effort to develop horizons of expectations and reading formations that are conducive to a more inclusive, and hence more accurate, understanding of American literature and American culture.

The dramatic recovery of the work of Zora Neale Hurston has been hailed as one of the significant achievements of feminist literary scholarship. Genevieve West suggests that an expanded “horizon of expectation,” which includes yet unpublished works like the apparently antifeminist essay “The Lost Keys of Glory” (1947) would allow a richer, more complex understanding of her literary achievement. In “The Lost Keys,” Hurston provides a mythological and expository defense of the traditional notion that women’s place is in the home, while men, stronger and dominant, rule the public world. To explain Hurston’s view, West distinguishes between individual and relational feminism. She argues that, while Hurston’s essay rejects individual feminism, which defends women’s autonomy, she is in accord with relational feminism, which takes into account the social and cultural differences of men and women. West goes on to suggest that, after World War II, the failure of women to keep the jobs in industry and business they acquired during the war may explain Hurston’s disillusionment, as would her sense that her career as a writer had not turned out very well.

Lydia Magras uses Bennett’s concept of “reading formations” to show how Black community activists and academics, among whom she counts herself, responded to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She argues that BUPPIES (Black Urban Professionals) who were part of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement as well as the later black power movement, and who entered academic and nonacademic careers, enabled Beloved and Morrison’s other novels to gain a broad intellectual and politically influential following, which in turn promoted the production of criticism and scholarship that secured her place in the American literary canon. Magras’s essay illustrates how the recognition of the significance of a literary work depends on the existence of reading formations potent enough to produce strong popular response and a substantial intellectual and scholarly reception.

Matt Vechinski examines how the publication of parts of Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club in women’s magazines—“The Rules of the Game” in


reception6

Seventeen and “The Joy Luck Club” in Ladies’ Home Journal—conditioned the popular and academic reception of the novel. Portions of the stories included in the novel were omitted from the magazine versions. Vechinski attributes these omissions to editorial decisions, since the novel had already been completed when the magazine stories were published. He argues that these changes made the stories more immediately appealing to the magazines’ female readers, young women seeking to establish autonomous identities, as well as middle-aged professional women trying to reconcile family and work. The initial publication in the magazines set the stage for the wide appeal of the novel, but it also shaped the reception of the novel so as to emphasize familiar universalized themes—for example, the mother and daughter relationship—at the expense of the exploration of the specificities of the Asian American experience.

Allison Layfield examines the contrasting reception of Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) and Fox Girl (2003). Comfort Women is set in World War II. Fox Girl is set during the Korean War and its aftermath. Both novels feature women who engage in sex work: Akiko in Comfort Women is forced to be a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers during World War II; Hyun Jin in Fox Girl is a prostitute who started in the business by servicing American soldiers during the Korean War. Both novels also address mother-daughter themes. In spite of these similarities, Comfort Women met with popular success and generally positive readings, while Fox Girl was ignored by reviewers and received generally negative responses from readers. Layfield gives a thorough and detailed account of professional reviews, literary criticism, and online readers’ responses to explain the historical and cultural conditions that have produced contrasting receptions of these two novels.

Perry Carter, who teaches geography at Texas Technological University, examines a particular set of contemporary responses to Neither East Nor West, a travelogue in Iran written by journalist Christiane Bird. Bird spent three years in Iran as a child, and the book chronicles her three-month return visit in 1998. In the fall of 2002, Carter asked students in his undergraduate world regional geography class to read and write essays on Neither East nor

West. Carter’s essay offers a content and thematic analysis of the essays his students wrote on Bird’s book, in an effort to gain insight into the American perceptions of Iran, Islam, and the Middle East. He found both what he expected—strongly held stereotypical notions of the Middle East as a contentious and benighted and distant region, and of America as the seat of power and enlightenment—as well as potential for the development of better understanding.


guest editors’ introduction7

In these very different ways, the five essays included in this issue of Reception contribute to the work of realizing the diverse literatures and readers that should be pertinent to the study of American literature as it actually is.

Patrocinio Schweickart and Philip Goldstein, guest editors

note1. Tony Bennett, “Texts in History: The Determination of Readings and Their Texts,” in

Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, edited by James L. Machor and

Philip Goldstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 66.



Copyright © 2015



Park, PA

(Re)reading Zora Neale Hurston and “The Lost Keys of Glory”

m. genevieve west

abstract: This essay revisits one of the thorniest issues in

Hurston scholarship—the question of whether Hurston

and her writings should be considered feminist. I place

the debate within contemporary scholarship and address

the question via an unpublished and little-known 1947

essay titled “The Lost Keys of Glory.” In this essay—a

blend of folklore and analysis of gender roles—Hurston

argues that most women are unable to compete with men

in the workplace and that feminism has failed women.

To address the incongruity between the essay and the

way in which Hurston lived her life, I establish the roots

of persistent late twentieth- and twenty-first- century

perceptions of Hurston as a feminist. I move on to trace

the lineage of the folktale Hurston uses to frame this

critique of gender relations. Then, drawing from three

definitions of feminism, I argue that while on the surface

Hurston’s essay seems strikingly anti-feminist in the

twenty-first century, when read within its original context

and within various feminist frameworks, the essay does

contain a number of feminist elements, suggesting that

to some degree in 1947 Hurston held what we would call

today feminist ideals, particularly given the ideological

context of the post-World War II re-conversion era.

Reception_7_03_West.indd 8 15/06/15 8:32 PM

m. genevieve west 9

Talking about Zora Neale Hurston is like approaching the Sphinx—so much

riddle, so many faces, and all of it occurring on fairly high holy ground.

—hortense spillers

[F]eminism is a historically specific concept that often is not treated as such.

—ann ducille1

The earliest explicit connection between Zora Neale Hurston and feminist thought appears in the 1937 review of Their Eyes Were Watching God by journalist, critic, and novelist George Schuyler. He describes the novel’s protagonist, Janie, as “the brown feminist who did as she pleased and didn’t regret it.” Schuyler was, however, the only contemporary critic to have mentioned the gender issues that so occupy today’s readers. In a striking manner, Their Eyes, widely regarded as Hurston’s masterpiece, demonstrates the significance of the interaction between text and reader in determining what Hans Robert Jauss describes as the life of the text. The now hyper-canonical novel was strongly criticized by powerful black male critics, including Richard Wright and Alain Locke, for being too pastoral when it appeared in 1937. For Ann duCille, this changed status from marginal to canonical demonstrates “that texts become what their interpretive communities say they are.” That is, the significance and interpretations of texts change over time as the communities themselves change, in Cornell West’s words, in response to whatever “cultural crisis” occupies the historical, social, cultural moment.2 This dialectic relationship between readers and texts within specific historical moments is precisely the reason for my interest in “The Lost Keys of Glory,” an obscure and unpublished essay by Hurston, and in labels of her as a feminist.

When Hurston and Their Eyes were recovered in the late 1960s and 1970s, in large part by emerging black female academics (many of whom have become important writers, professors, and critics), the development of black studies programs, second-wave feminism, and the presence of black women in the academy coincided to help rescue Hurston from the margins of literary study.3 Alice Walker, Mary Helen Washington, Toni Cade Bambara, Sherley Ann Williams, and Gayle Jones were central to the recovery and canonization of Hurston.4 In the late sixties and early seventies Hurston’s out-of-print books began to appear as reprints from Fawcett Publications, Chatham, Arno Press, and Negro Universities Press. At the same time, the Black Arts Movement, the development of black studies programs, and second-wave feminism all made it possible for Hurston’s writings to find new audiences. Washington remembers that by 1971, “Their Eyes was an underground phenomenon, surfacing here and


reception10

there, wherever there was a growing interest in African American studies—and a black woman literature teacher.” Washington discovered Hurston in a book store about 1968 and went on to write the foreword to the Harper and Row 1990 edition of Their Eyes.5 In 1971 Jones introduced well-known critic and scholar Ann duCille to Their Eyes.6 Seven years later, in 1978, Williams wrote the foreword to a University of Illinois Press reprint of the novel. Making more explicit the link between emerging black feminist critics and writers and Hurston’s recovery, in 1979 the Feminist Press published the first collection of Hurston’s writings, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing. Walker wrote the dedication while Washington wrote the introduction. Two years later Toni Cade Bambara wrote the foreword to a slim volume of Hurston’s folklore, The

Sanctified Church, which is still in print today. In “The Mark of Zora” duCille explores this relationship “between the arrival of black women and black feminism in the academy in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the reclamation and rise of Hurston as an intellectual subject and a feminist icon.” Hurston’s recovery and the emergence of black feminist discourse in the academy are so tightly interwoven—both occurring at the same historical moment and driven by many of the same voices—that duCille wonders, “Where would Hurston and black feminist studies be without each other?”7

As Hurston’s works have undergone both canonization within the academy and a resurgence of popular interest (manifested in finger puppets, book marks, stationary, and postage stamps), critics have continued to recover works by Hurston that have been undocumented or neglected. As such work appears, we continue to develop a fuller, more complete view of the woman and her art. Greater awareness of such texts will inevitably yield new scholarship exploring Hurston’s writings and her personal values. Yet, the very texts recovered also offer the possibility of generating negative assessments. The ideas Hurston expressed in such writings may not always coincide with the positive, often feminist, legend so many would prefer. Hurston’s “The Lost Keys of Glory” is a prime example. How will Hurston’s readership respond—when it is published in The Collected Essays—to this 1947 essay that argues women are not equal to men and that feminism has led to a high rate of “neurasthenics”?8 Hurston’s arguments in “The Lost Keys of Glory” are hardly what readers today expect from a feminist, but stripping Hurston of what duCille calls her “feminist mantle” would not be simple, particularly given her current status as a feminist icon.9 How, then, are we to reconcile frequent labels of Hurston as a feminist with this particular essay? Reception theory offers a productive lens through which to view both Hurston and “The Lost Keys.” By recovering Hurston’s horizon of expectations for the essay we can better appreciate its biographical significance and its impact on Hurston’s legacy as a writer and a feminist. Indeed, reconstructing Hurston’s horizon of expectations helps to provide a


m. genevieve west 11

more complete, subtle, and complex view of Hurston’s gender politics, for if we fail to acknowledge the whole of Hurston’s work and identity (and oversimplify her legacy), then we distort literary and feminist history, both for ourselves and for those we teach.10

Reading Hurston and Her Legend

Perceptions of Hurston have varied remarkably over time, making Hortense Spiller’s description of Hurston as the Sphinx apropos. In Hurston’s own time, the politics of art evolved from the celebratory, exploratory spirit of the Harlem Renaissance to the social critique of the protest tradition exemplified by Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939). During these decades, Hurston’s personal and literary reputation evolved from that of up-and-coming writer to exploiter of minstrel traditions to “handkerchief head” (a female Uncle Tom). Since Hurston’s death, however, the tide of public opinion has shifted to the “high ground” Spillers points to as more recent descriptions range from “incredible,” “foremother,” “Janus-faced,” and “genius.”11 This recurring question of who Hurston was, as a person, affects the way readers interpret her fiction. For instance, Trudier Harris argues, “We somehow feel that we have to ignore the fact that Hurston, the model on whom Janie [in Their Eyes] is partially based, was thrice-married, liked men, and was never as self-determining as contemporary feminist models would suggest.”12 Even as Harris questions labeling Hurston as a feminist, she demonstrates the point that interpretations of Hurston (the woman) often mediate perceptions of her fiction.

From a theoretical perspective, the author’s identity as mediating agent between text and reader is to be expected, as readers always come to texts with presuppositions. Those presuppositions produce Gadamerian bias or prejudice. While in popular discourse today prejudice implies negative, unfounded, and unfair beliefs about another, Gadamer uses the term to indicate predisposition—both positive and negative—in a broader sense. I couple Gadamer’s theories of bias with those of Boris Tomasevskij, who argued in 1923 that the “legend created by the author” mediates between the text and reader. It matters not whether the public perceptions of an author are accurate or complete, positive or negative. Those perspectives of the author’s legend affect the hermeneutic process for readers.13 As Harris demonstrates in the passage above, Hurston’s public persona serves as one of the forms of bias that affects readers’ interpretations of her texts. It follows, then, that Hurston’s current legend, her present status as a canonical author and as a feminist, creates bias for today’s readers and influences the ways they respond to her writings. If


reception12

readers come to the text expecting to find a feminist (or a “handkerchief head”), they are more likely to find one—whether the label is appropriate or not. As a result, whether we label Hurston as a feminist actually matters.

One of the reasons that perceptions of Hurston as a feminist have persisted is the legendary status of her biography. Hurston lived her life in very unconventional ways for a woman of her time, and she apparently enjoyed challenging others’ expectations. For instance, when ladies (and I use the term deliberately to convey its attendant connotations) did not smoke in public, Hurston did—simply to enjoy the reactions of passersby. At a time when an unmarried woman in her thirties might be considered an old maid, Hurston in her mid-forties declined a marriage proposal from a long-time lover because he demanded she give up her writing career for life as a full-time wife. She eventually married at least three times to younger men, but she also divorced three times, never staying married for long. She never bore or reared children. Biographers Robert Hemenway and Valerie Boyd tell us about a woman who travelled the South alone, carrying a gun, masquerading as a bootlegger’s woman, collecting folklore; who roved swamps and turpentine camps alone or guiding other folklorists; who delved into Voodoo alone in Haiti and Jamaica; who endured bedbugs to study as a Voodoo priestess; who lived on a houseboat; and who travelled to Honduras to search for a lost city.14 All of these activities violated the norms for women of her period. Respectable black women of her time did not travel alone unless absolutely necessary. Marita Bonner, Hurston’s lesser-known fellow Harlem Renaissance writer, complained that she could not even take the train from Washington, D.C., to New York alone because doing so would have been socially unacceptable.15 It would also have been unsafe. Although designations of female/male and private/public space were slowly changing, the stereotype of overly libidinous black women made them especially vulnerable to assault and to perceptions they were prostitutes, regardless of their social status or occupation.16 With a northern, urban environment holding such threats for a black woman alone, it takes little imagination to conjecture the very real dangers for a black woman driving in the South alone during the rule of Jim Crow law. Yet because Hurston did it successfully and apparently safely, the disjunction between her lived experience challenging gender norms and the arguments of “The Lost Keys” defies easy explanation.

Apparently Hurston submitted “The Lost Keys of Glory” to Helen Worden Erskine, “her contact” at the New York World Telegram in 1948, in hopes of seeing it published.17 For reasons that remain unclear, the essay never made it into print, however, and it exists now only in carbon typescripts in Erskine’s papers at Columbia University. Except for brief treatments by Boyd and critic John Lowe, the essay has been neglected, perhaps because it has never been reprinted or perhaps because it presents such a complex and frustrating image



of Hurston. Boyd reads the essay and its message that women cannot compete with men in the workplace as a satire on gender relations, and I admit it would be much easier, less messy, to view “The Lost Keys” as a contribution to that genre. Readers might then consider Hurston clever rather than conventional or even regressive.

In a 1951 letter to her literary agent, Jean Parker Waterbury, Hurston describes a project she is “half through with,” a “tongue-in-cheek exhortation to career women to return to the home lest we lose our ascendency over men.” This letter was written almost three years after she shared “The Lost Keys of Glory” with Erskine. As Hurston’s letter to Waterbury continues, several parallels between her “half-finished” project and “The Lost Keys” become clear. She explains to Waterbury that “‘God is impartial, but Old Devil now, he always has his pets.’ His special pet being female woman, and he always looks out for our interests. We have his expert guidance in handling men, if only we will stick to it.”18 Clearly Hurston was working with similar themes and folk materials (God, the devil, and gender relations) in this now-lost essay she describes to Waterbury. Since Erskine apparently did not publish “The Lost Keys,” Hurston may have been revising it in the hopes that a lighter tone would make the essay attractive to a publisher. Furthermore, the claim that women need to “stick to” the devil’s guidance in order to handle men suggests a line of thought similar to that in “The Lost Keys”: that women are most powerful when they perform traditional gender roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers, rather than when they try to compete with men in the workplace. At the same time, “The Lost Keys” lacks a tongue-in-cheek tone, and if that was what Hurston intended with the version she sent to Erskine, she clearly missed the mark. While we know from Hurston’s larger body of work that she could be a very adept satirist, an examination of another of her satirical works helps confirm for me “The Lost Keys of Glory” is not satire.

Hurston’s 1925 essay “The Emperor Effaces Himself” satirizes the well-known Harlem Renaissance figure Marcus Garvey. Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which was known for elaborate costumes and parades. Hurston’s essay targets these aspects of Garveyism. Consider this brief passage: “Eight modest, unassuming brass bands blared away down Lenox Avenue. It was August 1, 1924, and the Emperor Marcus Garvey was sneaking down the Avenue in terrible dread lest he attract attention to himself. He succeeded nobly, for scarcely fifty thousand persons saw his parade file past trying to hide itself behind numerous banners of red, green, and black.”19 Hurston’s use of irony and understatement unmistakably indicate her intent to lampoon Garvey with indirect satire. These hallmarks of satire are entirely absent in “The Lost Keys to Glory.”


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Lowe, too, does not see the essay as satire. Instead, he reads “The Lost Keys” as a complement to Hurston’s last published novel, Seraph on the

Suwanee (1948). That novel has long perplexed critics, who have objected to Hurston’s white characters, her treatment of the few black characters in the novel, and the protagonist’s conversion to devoted wife and mother. Feminists in particular have struggled to make sense of the conclusion in which Arvay, the protagonist, decides that as a wife and mother she has all she needs. Arvay concludes that her husband “[is] hers and it [is] her privilege to serve him.” The ending surprises and frustrates those who see the protagonist of Their Eyes

Were Watching God as a feminist who simply walks away from her first loveless marriage, plays the dozens with her second husband, and shoots her third. However, if read within the context of “The Lost Keys,” Seraph’s conclusion makes sense: Arvay embraces her role as a traditional helpmate, just as Hurston recommends in the “The Lost Keys of Glory.”20

Recovering “The Lost Keys” and Hurston’s Horizon

In the essay, Hurston uses a folktale to frame her critique of women’s attempts to compete with men in the workplace. The tale appears at least twice in Hurston’s published writings. In Mules and Men Mathilda tells the folktale to explain “why women always take advantage of men.” The same basic tale also appears in the posthumously published Every Tongue

Got to Confess: Negro Tales from the Gulf States. In both iterations, the tale opens with God having created Man and Woman as equals, but, as Mathilda explains, man quickly grows tired of “fussin’ bout who gointer do this and that and sometimes they’d fight, but they was even balanced and neither one could whip de other.” Man then goes to God to request greater strength than Woman so he might “make her mind.” Ole Maker complies, and Man returns to the home he shares with Woman to become the “Boss.” When Woman realizes what has happened, she, too, goes to see God. When God tells her he cannot take back Man’s new strength, Woman goes to the devil to complain. The devil then tells Woman to return to God to request the three keys hanging on his mantle. Having received the keys, Woman returns to the devil, who tells her how to use them: The keys control access to the kitchen, the bedroom, and the cradle. When Man realizes he has lost access to those things, he goes back to God, but Man’s only recourse is to submit “hisself to de woman” so she might open the doors. As a result Man “must mortgage his strength” for Woman “to live.”21 In Mules and Men this story serves as a transition from other religiously based, etiological tales to more secular folklore surrounding relationships between men and women.



As Hurston crafts the folktale for her 1947 audience, however, she reshapes the narrative, opening with details of the keys alluded to in the essay’s title: “The keys are on an exquisite ring of gold, set with rare and very precious stones. The keys themselves are made of some material so rare, that it has never been seen anywhere outside of Heaven.”22 As the narrative progresses, Hurston develops a more thoughtful, reflective portrait of God than in the earlier versions presented in Mules and Men and Every Tongue Got to Confess.23 When Man seeks greater strength over Woman, he complains, “‘It’s no getting along with her no matter what I do and say. She just wont gee nor haw [sic], and that keeps us fighting all the time. There is just no peace around the house. . . . [N]othing ever gets settled.’” God, however, had given the two genders equality because he hates “‘bulldozing an[d] oppression. I just don’t want to see nobody run over.’” After reflection, in hopes of achieving peace, God grants Man greater strength on one condition: “‘That when you are stronger than Woman in every way, that you will not take advantage of Woman, and mistreat her in any form nor fashion. You must be good to her, and kind, and take care of her.’” God sends Man away, telling him to “‘look after [Woman], and mix your strength with her weakness, and from now on You [sic] love her like she was a part of yourself.’” This caution from God to treat Woman kindly—a well-intentioned paternalism—is absent from the two versions of the story recorded in Hurston’s book-length folkloric works, and the warning seems to fall on deaf ears. When Man next gives Woman “a command to do something,” she responds as she always has, expecting the physical fight to be a draw. Instead, Man whips her three times before telling her “that from now on, Man was Boss around the house, and she was going to do as she was told.”24

As in the other versions, the devil in “The Lost Keys” tells Woman to ask for the keys on God’s mantle and offers directions for ways to use them. When Man realizes what he has lost, he even tries to trade Woman part of his strength “if she would let him handle the keys just as much as she did.” However, the devil cautions Woman to keep her keys: “‘Hold on to them with all your might and main, and you will always have the advantage of Man.’” The two find peace as he “enjoyed showing off his strength before the weakling thing, and [s]he did all kinds of little things to his delight.”25 Man and Woman learn to love and complement one another.

From this point on, Hurston extends the folktale by reporting that the Devil and Woman “had a falling out.” In a renewed pursuit of strength equal to Man’s, she “laid aside her keys,” and “after awhile they got mis-placed, and Woman forgot what she had done with them. God did not change His mind and give her equal strength, but woman didnt [sic] notice. She got ahold of some of the tools of Man, and felt that they would give her the same strength that she used to have.” Woman leaves the home to challenge Man in the workplace: “She


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grabbed up every tool that Man had in his tool-box and told him that she would match him row for row in everything that he did.”26

These tools provide Hurston the transition to her critique of contemporary gender relations and women’s attempts to gain equality in the workplace. While Hurston most directly addresses women’s roles, she also critiques the failings of masculinity. What emerges in the passages that follow are contradictory ideas and ideologies of gender roles that reflect both Hurston’s experiences and the zeitgeist of the moment.

Quickly Hurston makes claims likely to baffle twenty-first-century readers: “[W]omen have entered every profession and skill that men follow for a living. There is no doubt that women are taking themselves quite seriously as the equal of men in all of these pursuits. It is obvious, however, that women are not adequate to the struggle.” As evidence, Hurston argues that “except for the fields of literature and theatre, the very best women in any particular field have never been able to come up to a standard of excellency equal to the best men in the same profession.” She goes on to point out that women must even work with “the very tools” invented by men, and with her use of pronouns, she soon includes herself in the groups of women who are unequal to men:

And let no woman deceive herself that she ever impresses men by her intellect. We get along in the professions or in public life because some man in power is impressed by our femininity, and for what that compels in him, lets us have our way to an extent. Men pay us the compliment of saying that we are smart enough to pay him the compliment of his strength. If we accept our success as a grant from him, in other words.

Women who attempt to challenge men as their equals receive “much more cruel” treatment than another man might in the same situation. Men will even gang up on women to “chase us back to our knitting.” If, however, a woman asks for what she wants as a “favor,” “men will outdo themselves to help.”27 The portrait she paints of gender roles is complex: While women are unequal to men in the professions, men emerge as egotistical and self-serving. Neither image flatters. While Hurston’s essay does allow for exceptions to these generalizations about women’s skills and abilities, she indicates that most women are not suited to competing in the workplace with men.

Hurston offers several examples of women to support her argument. Her first is Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987), a well-known woman who worked as managing editor at Vanity Fair, made a name for herself as a playwright,



reported for Life Magazine during World War II, served as ambassador to Italy and Brazil, and was elected to Congress in 1942.28 Reading Luce’s obituary suggests that, at some level, Hurston was correct in suggesting that men opened doors for Luce’s success. Luce married into wealthy society, and after divorcing her husband of six years for “mental cruelty” in 1929, she asked friend Conde Nast to find her a position in publishing. That first opening soon led to her editorship at Vanity Fair. Her second husband, Henry R. Luce, was the publisher of Time and Life Magazine. President Eisenhower, for whom she campaigned, appointed her ambassador to Italy.29 I do not mean to suggest, of course, that Luce failed to deserve or earn her many successes. Hurston herself believed Luce “a very intelligent and capable woman.” Nevertheless, Hurston argues that Luce’s success is more attributable to “her beauty and her female charm” than to “her brains.” Foreseeing the looksism addressed in today’s women’s studies courses, Hurston argues that “no homely awkward female would ever have gotten as far as she has in this world. The brains are there, but if they had been in an ugly head, the men would have taken pleas[u]re in beating them out and forgetting all about her the next moment. Where men see no possibility of mating in a woman, she holds no interest for them.”30 Her critique of masculinity illuminates a reality all too common even today: men seeing women primarily as decorative and sexual objects.

More generic examples follow. Hurston devotes several paragraphs to Emily F., “a beautiful and utterly feminine girl” who wanted to be a dentist. She refused two marriage proposals in her first year of school, but she persisted in her studies because she wanted to “prove the case for the women.” Emily fails to realize, however, that her male classmates are at least partially responsible for her success because they “were ever ready to help her with her laboratory assignments, and the professors were not indifferent to her young body and face.They were happy to give her their strength. She misunderstood and thought herself a whale of a Dentist.” Emily’s persistence in the profession leads to her closing her practice, going through three divorces, having a “nervous-breakdown,” and becoming a social worker who talks “about the now-distinguished men she could have married.” Winifred B., Hurston’s second example, sounds a bit like Hurston herself. Winifred, a native of the South who studies at Columbia University, marries “a young and ambitious medical Doctor” but insists on pursuing her own studies. For years, the married couple disagrees over her studies: “She complained that the doctor was too old-fashioned, and wanted to crush her personality by confining her to his home.” By the time Winifred realized she was married to a “very important man,” “[h]e was indifferent” to her. Her tale ends with “sleeping pills every night so as not to remember what she had once held in the palm of her hand” and her conversion into one of the worst things Hurston could imagine in the late 1940s, a “rabid


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Communist.” Winfred is just one of the “thousands” of women “who have followed the light that failed,” presumably feminism.31

Hurston’s treatment of power in gender relations is perhaps most problematic from a twenty-first century perspective. For instance, Hurston argues explicitly and metaphorically that men are in control. She says, “[o]ur very frailty becomes us. We add that color and the fill-in to Man’s bold outline of life, [w]e are the pigments on the palette after men have sketched in the figure.” Such a metaphor clearly paints women as secondary to men, as they “fill-in” what men have begun. Hurston argues that women cannot “apply what [they] have learned with the same intensity and drive as the men do.” Further reinforcing hegemonic gender norms, she asserts that what women really want is “some other woman’s grown-up boy to pet and mother over.” Embedded here is a critique of both men and women—men who never mature and women who do not want them to. Hurston saw the tension created by changing gender roles as dangerous for most women who could not reconcile unattainable equality and a “suppressed desire” to mother men. As a consequence, she argues, “the nation is strewn with female neurotics from end to end.” Hurston contrasts Winfred with a woman “who practised [sic] her trade only when it did not interfere with her domestic arrangements. Her husband gets steak and potatoes and apple pie on demand, his slippers brought to him wherever he might choose to flop down and wallow in the house, and his cigar ashes brought no protest.” This same woman “betrayed the feminist movement in other ways,” although Hurston does not detail those betrayals.32 She seems here to advocate a compromise that allows the woman to develop her individual interests outside the home while she also satisfies her husband’s needs to be served.

Addressing a final important difference between the sexes, Hurston turns her attention to sexual relations outside of marriage. She argues that as women pursue “the free life of males,” they are also distracted by the “mirage” of “sexual freedom.” Even assuming that women can “enjoy the same sexual freedom as men with impunity,” Hurston argues that they undermine their own marriages by “kill[ing] off the mystery that men used to feel, and mak[ing] marriage less binding.”33 Here Hurston notes the sexual double standard that exists even in the twenty-first century: Men who pursue multiple sexual partners are manly or “studs,” while women who do the same continue to risk being pejoratively labeled as sluts or promiscuous. The case of Amanda Knox, labeled “Foxy Knoxy” by the Italian press and accused of killing her roommate during a sex game, immediately comes to mind.34

In the closing paragraphs, Hurston may reveal her own sense of loss and regret. She asks, “[H]ow much is a career worth to a woman anyway? Are not the unknown women, bossing the man of her choice really happier than the career woman, however famous outside her natural sphere?”35 Hurston by this point



had married and divorced three times, and she had endured decades of economic uncertainty as she attempted to support herself as a writer. Is it possible that even after three failed marriages Hurston wondered if she might have been happier in woman’s “natural sphere”? Hurston’s use, here and in other passages, of the word natural suggests that she saw women as fundamentally, biologically, essentially different from men. Most women, she suggests, should not fight their natural urges to mother and should make home and hearth their first priorities. It is impossible to know whether Hurston was questioning her own choices or whether she exempted herself from such generalizations, as one of those in “the fields of literature and theatre” who has “come up to a standard of excellency equal to the best men in the same profession.” In any case, Hurston’s explicit claims about the skills and abilities of women sound strikingly anti-feminist to a twenty-first century ear.

Feminist Thought and Hurston’s Horizon of Expectations

Hurston was writing in 1947, at a specific moment in history very different from our own. As the epigraph by duCille with which I began this essay suggests, my own understanding of feminism is as a historically embedded, historically specific concept. Articulating feminist thought, then, becomes central to my project—and highly complex. Hurston’s critique of masculinity in “The Lost Keys” aligns with Karen Offen’s general definition of feminism. Hurston, who so often lived without regard to convention, clearly understood a woman’s value, in Offen’s words, “distinct from an aesthetic ideal of womanhood invented by men.” Furthermore, Hurston’s critiques of masculinity demonstrate “consciousness of, discomfort at, [and] even anger over institutionalized injustice (or inequity) toward women as a group,” criteria Offen ascribes to feminist thought. For instance, Hurston paints men metaphorically as pigs that “flop” and “wallow.” Likewise, in her argument that men are interested only in a woman they can “mate” with lies a complaint that, despite the advances of women in the workplace, men continue to see women only in terms of their sexuality. More specifically, Hurston’s conflicted (and conflicting) discourse in “The Lost Keys” demonstrates both “branches” of the history of feminist thought articulated by Offen as relational feminism and individualist feminism. Although Offen’s arguments are not without their critics, the two branches of feminist thought she sketches provide an instructive and historically rooted lens through which to analyze Hurston’s essay. Offen explains that twentieth-century relational feminism sought “equality in difference”:

The fundamental tenets included the notion that there were both biological and cultural distinctions between the sexes, a concept of womanly or manly nature, of


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a sharply defined sexual division of labor, or roles, in the family and throughout society following from that “difference” and that “nature,” of the centrality of the complementary couple and/or the mother/child dyad to social analysis.

This philosophy “combined a case for moral equality of women and men with an explicit acknowledgement of differences in women’s and men’s sexual functions in society.”36 On the other hand, the individualist feminism Offen describes more closely aligns with contemporary feminisms. This branch of feminism, focusing on “highly educated, single women intent on achieving personal autonomy,” emerged between 1890 and 1920 in the United States during the New Woman movement and the fight for women’s suffrage.

Biographically, Hurston appears to have been an individualist feminist as her life choices to pursue her education and career, to reject marriage, and to reject childbearing and rearing align more closely with this tradition. In “The Lost Keys,” Hurston nods to this tradition in God’s initial construction of gender roles. At the beginning of creation, God establishes man and woman as equals because he hates “bulldozing and oppression.”37 This equality, however, is short-lived in the folktale, as was the New Woman movement in the United States. At the same time, Hurston’s focus on woman’s “natural” inclinations and abilities in “The Lost Keys” reflects a relational approach. In the essay, for instance, man seeks control of woman in the early stages of the folktale, suggesting that it is in man’s nature to want to control woman. The biological differences between Woman and Man in the essay also produce a complementary relationship that is mutually beneficial—at least until Woman opts to pursue work equality. This duality of relational and individualist traditions present in Hurston’s work is not necessarily unique; it is, for instance, also present in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s work.38 While situating Hurston within these Euro-American feminist traditions provides one framework for analyzing Hurston’s treatment of gender roles, the approach also has limitations, particularly given that Anglo-American feminism has so often neglected the experiences of women of color.

Black feminist thought, also difficult to define, offers another means to measure Hurston’s life choices and writings. Patricia Hill Collins’s Black

Feminist Thought is particularly attentive to the challenges of defining this tradition. Collins notes repeatedly that not all women experience the same kinds of oppression or have the same responses to oppression: “Social theories emerging from and/or on behalf of U.S. Black women and other historically oppressed groups aim to find ways to escape from, survive in, and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injustice. . . . Feminism advocates women’s emancipation and empowerment.” Moreover, she sees “analyzing and creating



imaginative responses to injustice” as central to black feminist thought. Collins notes the difficulties of “the very vocabulary” of black feminist thought and argues, “Rather than developing definitions and arguing over naming practices—for example, whether this thought should be called Black feminism, womanism, Afrocentric feminism, Africana womanism, and the like—a more useful approach lies in revisiting the reasons why Black feminist thought exists at all.”39 She discusses at length six common emphases that converge within black feminist thought: (1) the connection between individual, lived experience and thought, (2) the acknowledgement that African American women have diverse experiences and assign varying levels of significance to those experiences, (3) the acknowledgement that despite these differences, collective experiences exist and may result in individual activism, (4) the significance of black female intellectuals and their merger of action and theory, (5) the centrality of change and dynamism, and (6) “its relationship to other projects for social justice.”40 Collins’s treatment of core values of black feminism overlaps significantly with that of Beverly Guy-Sheftall, but the latter is more attentive to the intersections of racism, classism, and sexism, or “triple jeopardy.” She notes particularly that “the needs of black women are different in many ways from those of both white women and black men,” and that black women must at the same time fight for gender and race equality.41

As with the feminist paradigms Offen sketches, we can see elements of black feminist thought also present in Hurston’s life and essay. Hurston’s viewpoint was very much influenced by both her lived experience with first-wave feminism and her struggle for race and gender equality. These experiences undoubtedly contributed significantly to her horizon of expectations in 1947. Born in 1891, Hurston had lived through the high and low tides of first-wave feminism’s pursuit of the ballot, the low tide of feminist thought that followed in the twenties, the crisis of the Great Depression, the call for Rosie the Riveter by war industries, and the calls for women to return to the home during reconversion. Specifically speaking to black women’s experiences, Hurston had seen the cycle of “liberation” and return to masculine oppression during the New Negro movement.42 In the years following the 19th amendment, middle-class New Negro women were encouraged to remain in the domestic sphere, to project the Victorian image of mother and homemaker. Even those educated black women who sought work outside the home were expected to “mother the race” in fields such as teaching, nursing, and sociology.43 Hurston had pursued the individualist goals of the New Woman movement and had resisted “mothering the race,” but she had not been able to build a financially secure life for herself. Whether she regretted her choices is unclear, but certainly the path of individualist feminism was not an easy one to tread in the first half of the century. Without a husband to help offset the economic challenges posed by the


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Great Depression and racist hiring (and book-selling) practices, Hurston lived in poverty throughout much of her life.

By 1947, when she wrote “The Lost Keys,” Hurston had seen the tide turn against women in the workplace for a second time—during the post-World War II reconversion period. Despite the advances and unionization of women in a number of industries, hegemonic discourses again were pushing women to leave the public sphere. Hurston’s horizon of expectations, then, reflects the repeated flow and ebb of change she had twice seen without systemic changes in gender oppression. Is it any wonder that she had apparently lost hope in the ability of feminism to change women’s lives permanently? If, as Collins argues, black feminist thought “aim[s] to find ways to escape from, survive in, and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injustice,”44 then, indeed, Hurston’s cynical response to diachronic cycles of gender oppression emerges as not only as an entirely logical response within her historical moment, but also as a black feminist one crafted to help women survive the contradictory raced and gendered impulses of the moment.

Consider the many conflicts of post-World War II America she witnessed. Jane F. Levey notes in her study of that period’s popular culture how “[s]ocial prescriptions and their violations stand check-by-jowl in the same texts, and contradictions abound.” It was the time in which “middle-class ideology of family and gender-appropriate behavior” was firmly established.45 As the war industry transformed to suit a peacetime economy, women were expected to become consumers as “upward mobility, and accumulation of material goods” became a central priority. Women—black and white—who had built cars and planes and managed businesses while men were at war were suddenly expected, in Paula Giddings’s words, to “stay at home and revel in the shower of appliances and household cleaners now inundating the country.” Women were told that professional work outside the home, assertiveness, and the pursuit of a college degree were “leading to ‘the masculinization’ of women with enormously dangerous consequences to home and children.”46 Even as women were being encouraged to stay home, however, economic realities forced most women to work outside the home to help support their families.47 Black women who did marry and continued working outside the home contributed significantly to family income, indicating the challenges facing black men who attempted to subscribe to dominant ideologies of masculinity. Despite the economic consequences of racism in the workplace for black men and the financial necessity of black married women working outside the home, notes Giddings, “Black men saw Black women in the same context that White men saw White women.” That is, black men needed black women to contribute to the financial stability of the family and simultaneously to serve as the family’s emotional center, its cook and housekeeper. How were women to cope with what Giddings describes as a



“damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation?48 Hurston’s advice to women of any race in 1947 seems to have been this: Pursue your own interests outside the home, develop as an individual person, and at the same time give your husband the home and apparently devoted wife dominant culture tells him he needs. This duality advised by Hurston immediately brings to mind Janie’s experience in Their

Eyes. When “something [falls] off the shelf inside her,” Janie recognizes that she “[has] an inside and an outside now and suddenly she [knows] how not to mix them.”49 Janie learns to separate her insides and her outsides as a coping strategy for dealing with gender oppression and domestic violence.

The struggle against male domination provides common ground for relational, individualist, and black feminist thought, and one of the ways we see Hurston’s resistance to male domination manifest in the “The Lost Keys” is in her critiques of masculinity. These critiques suggest that although Hurston had at some level relinquished the individualist feminist goal of equality in the workplace, she is “aim[ing] to . . . survive in, and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injustice” that enshrined man as more powerful and more important than woman.50 She clearly possessed an awareness of inequitable gender roles. Insights and critiques of gender relations (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) cross the body of her fiction, folklore, and essays.

Admittedly, Hurston did not take an activist role in fighting gender inequality as many black feminist forerunners, such as Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Watkins Harper did. As a well-educated black woman in 1947, however, Hurston clearly understood that the promises of first-wave feminism remained unfulfilled. Her cynical response to these unfulfilled promises is very similar to her approach to racism. Critics responding to the larger body of her work, with the notable exception of her essay titled “My Worst Jim Crow Experience,” describe her approach to issues of race variously as indirect, masking, signifying, or “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick.”51 Hurston indirectly approaches issues of gender in “The Lost Keys” in much the same way. Her method of resistance to gender oppression is to critique from within, to signify just as she does on issues of race in her fiction, essays, and folklore. She advises a trickster-like approach to living a divided life that both affirms a woman’s need for individual development and expression and allows for survival in a masculine culture intent on keeping women in the domestic sphere.

Reading Hurston in the Twenty-First Century

Was Hurston in 1947 feeling the strain of having to support herself financially? Did she, like Winfred, feel herself betrayed by the “mirage” of feminism? Did Hurston regret having sacrificed what might have been a comfortable, secure


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marriage to well-respected physician for an independent life of financial hardship as a writer? We will likely never know. How then are we to reconcile the life that Hurston led with the essay she wrote? How are we to describe her in our publications and our classes? Hurston lived her life in pursuit of her own personal development, outside the boundaries of hegemonic gender roles, which seems in keeping with the general goals of individualist feminism and black feminism, both within her own time and ours. She clearly understood and critiqued the unequal role of women in her culture. At the same time, Hurston in “The Lost Keys of Glory” demonstrates far more relational feminist tendencies than individualist ones, which is why the essay seems so discordant in our own historical moment, when individualist feminisms dominate. Likewise, her presentation of a strategic response to gender oppression links her to black feminist traditions at the same time that the apparent absence of an activist agenda also distances her from it. From my own horizon of expectations, I have come to see “The Lost Keys” as a signal of Hurston’s disillusionment with first-wave feminism’s inability to create deep, systemic changes in gender relations. Lowe perceptively speculates that the essay reflects not Hurston’s ideal sense of what gender roles and relations should be but instead indicates her “sense of frustration” with the realities of daily life in a period in which—after years of progress—gender (and racial) equality still hovered on the horizon like a “mirage.”52 I now understand Hurston in the late 1940s as a disappointed, conflicted woman who was in some ways a relational, individualist, and black feminist, despite her apparent surrender to hegemonic constructions of gendered identity appropriate for most women. I realize that I will be accused of trying to have it both ways, but why do we try to reduce a person’s (any person’s) complex identity to an either/or choice? Are not feminism and people more complex than that?

The way Hurston lived her life and questioned gender roles speaks to an early—if not fully developed and perhaps thwarted—feminist consciousness. As Hurston scholarship moves forward, we will need to be more specific about her treatment of gender roles and be more attentive to the specific moment in which the text under consideration was written. We must acknowledge the ways in which a difficult life and the unfulfilled promises of first-wave feminism likely changed Hurston and her perceptions. Perhaps most importantly, we must also be far more specific in the way we talk about feminism, both in our classes and in our scholarship. If we allow contemporary versions of feminism to eclipse or abridge varieties or “branches” of feminist thought or if white feminists (like myself) fail to engage black feminist thought, we shortchange the next generation of readers who should appreciate the hard-won victories of our diverse collective foremothers. “The Lost Keys to Glory,” then, challenges twenty-first century readers to reconstruct Hurston’s own horizon



of expectations, to consider the ways in which our own horizons are markedly different from hers, and to recognize the ways we partially shape the horizon of expectations for and the hermeneutic prejudices of the next generation of readers, teachers, and scholars.

notes1. Hortense Spillers, “A Tale of Three Zoras: Barbara Johnson and Black Women

Writers,” diacritics 34, no. 1 (2004): 94–97; Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention:

Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press,

1993), 11.

2. Schuyler, George, “Views and Reviews,” Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, by

Zora Neale Hurston, Pittsburgh Courier, Dec. 25, 1937, 12; Hans Robert Jauss and

Elizabeth Benzinger, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” New Literary

History 2, no. 1 (1970): 7–37; Ann duCille, “The Mark of Zora: Reading between the

Lines of Legend and Legacy,” Jumpin’ at the Sun: Reassessing the Life and Work of Zora

Neale Hurston, Scholar and Feminist Online 3, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 4, accessed Nov. 14,

2014, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/hurston/; Cornell West, “Minority Discourse and

the Pitfalls of Canon Formation,” Yale Journal of Criticism 1, no.1 (1987): 193.

3. I discuss at length the reception of Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hurston’s

recovery in Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture (Gainesville: University

Press of Florida, 2005), 91–126 and 229–48 respectively.

4. duCille, “The Mark of Zora,” 3.

5. Mary Helen Washington, “Foreword,” in Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were

Watching God (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), x.

6. duCille, “The Mark of Zora,” 3.

7. Ibid., 1. Hurston’s canonization, while appropriate, is not without its problems, as

it has led to what duCille describes as Hurstonism, “The conspicuous consumption

of Zora Neale Hurston as the initiator of the African American women’s literary

tradition” (2) and the concomitant neglect of other African American women writers.

In addition to the obvious consequences of neglecting other authors, duCille notes

such “conspicuous consumption” also distorts “Hurston’s individual literary

history.” The distortion of Hurston as the foundational figure of African American

women’s writings is further compounded by the fact that Hurston’s literary corpus is

incomplete.

8. Zora Neale Hurston, “The Lost Keys of Glory,” unpublished typescript, ca. 1947,

Collection of Helen Worden Erskine, Columbia University. John Lowe describes a

neurasthenic in this way: a person with “an emotional and psychic disorder that is

characterized by impaired functioning in interpersonal relationships, and often by

fatigue, depression, feelings of inadequacy, headaches, hypersensitivity to sensory

stimulation (as by light or noise), and psychosomatic symptoms” (Jump at the Sun:

The Cosmic Comedy of Zora Neale Hurston [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997],

305). “The Lost Keys” is slated for inclusion in Zora Neale Hurston: The Collected

Essays, being edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and M. Genevieve West.


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9. duCille, “Mark of Zora,” 1.

10. I am here indebted to duCille’s discussion in “The Mark of Zora” of the distortion of

Hurston’s literary legacy as the foremother of black women’s writing for prompting

me to consider the implications of oversimplification and distortion.

11. Spillers, 94–97. Hurston was described in 1931 as “one of the best-known black

short story writers.” See Otelia Cromwell, Lorenzo Dow Turner, and Eva B. Dykes,

eds., Readings from Negro Authors (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 58. However, by

1937 Richard Wright was accusing her of minstrelsy (“Between Laughter and Tears,”

Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, New Masses 5

[October 1937]: 22, 25). Roi Ottley labeled Hurston a handkerchief head in 1954

in “Roi Ottley Says,” Chicago Defender, September 10, 1955. The more affirmative

descriptions appear in Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (San Diego:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 100.

12. Trudier Harris, “Celebrating Bigamy and Other Outlaw Behaviors: Hurston,

Reputation, and the Problems Inherent in Labeling Janie a Feminist,” in Approaches

to Teaching “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and Other Works, edited by John Lowe

(New York: MLA, 2009), 67–80.

13. Hans George Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming

(New York: Seabury, 1975), especially 235–52; Boris Thomasevskji, “Literature and

Biography,” 1923, trans. Herbert Eagle, in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and

Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Promorska (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1971), 47–65.

14. Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University

of Illinois Press, 1997); Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale

Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003). Hurston’s account of her declining the marriage

proposal is in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), in Zora Neale Hurston, Folklore, Memoirs,

and Other Writings, edited by Cheryl Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 747.

15. Marita Bonner, “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored,” in Frye Street and

Environs, edited by Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 4–5.

16. Nella Larsen’s protagonist in Quicksand, Helga Crane, demonstrates the point. In

Chicago she is accosted by white men who assume that because she is alone on

the street she is a prostitute. For discussions of gender norms from the period see

Erin Chapman’s Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

17. Boyd, 384.

18. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, edited by Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday,

2002), 674.

19. Zora Neale Hurston, “The Emperor Effaces Himself,” in Call and Response: Key

Debates in African American Studies, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Jennifer

Burton (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 267.

20. Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), in Zora Neale Hurston Novels

and Stories, edited by Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 351; Lowe,

Jump at the Sun, 304–5. Both Trudier Harris and Jennifer Jordan have argued against

such feminist readings of the novel (Harris, “Celebrating Bigamy and Other Outlaw



Behaviors”; Jordan, “Feminist Fantasies: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were

Watching God,” Tulsa Journal of Women’s Studies 7, no. 1 [1988]: 105–17).

21. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; New York: Harper Perennial, 1990),

31–32, 34.

22. Hurston, “The Lost Keys of Glory,” 1.

23. Although Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Tales from the Gulf States first appeared

in 2001, its contents likely predate those of Mules and Men (1935). Hurston

wrote and re-wrote the material she had collected while supported by patron

Charlotte Osgood Mason until she found a publisher for Jonah’s Gourd Vine,

the J. B. Lippincott Company. Hurston’s letters indicate that Lippincott would

not publish her folklore collection without the narrative between tales that so

distinguishes the two volumes from one another. See Zora Neale Hurston, A Life in

Letters, 329.

24. Hurston, “The Lost Keys of Glory,” 3, 6. In “The Lost Keys” Hurston treats man

and woman as proper nouns. Thus, the capitalization of Man and Woman in this

section reflects Hurston’s choices. Except in the case where brackets are present,

all of the quotations from “The Lost Keys of Glory” appear verbatim from the

carbon typescript, complete with Hurston’s idiosyncratic use of capitalization and

apostrophes.

25. Ibid., 6.

26. Ibid., 8–9.

27. Ibid., 9, 9A.

28. “Clare Booth Luce Biography,” Henry Luce Foundation, accessed July 12, 2012,

http://www.hluce.org/cblbio.aspx.

29. “Clare Booth Luce Dies at 84: Playwright, Politician, Envoy,” New York Times,

October 10, 1987, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0310.

html.

30. Hurston, “The Lost Keys of Glory,” 9A.

31. Ibid., 11, 13–14. In a letter to Robert Hemenway, Kristy Anderson makes the same

point about the parallel between Hurston and Winifred, May 9, 1997, Hemenway

Collection, University of Kansas.

32. Hurston, “The Lost Keys of Glory,” 9–11, 14.

33. Ibid., 15.

34. Irrespective of Knox’s guilt or innocence, what is striking is that because Knox

admitted to engaging in casual sex, she was labeled “Foxy Knoxy.” For an overview of

the Amanda Knox case, see “Murder Abroad,” Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, CNN.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1303/29/acd.02.html.


36. Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,” Signs 14,

no.1 (1988): 152. Offen goes on to note that “‘relational feminism’ could and

did incorporate demands for women’s right to work outside the household, to

participate in all professions, and to vote, alongside demands for equality in civil law

concerning property and persons” (139). For critiques of this approach to the history

of feminist thought, see Ellen Carol DuBois, “Comment on Karen Offen’s ‘Defining


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Feminism: A Comparative Approach,’” Signs 15, no. 1 (1989): 195–97; and Nancy

F. Cott “Comment on Karen Offen’s ‘Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical

Approach,’” Signs 15, no. 1 (1989): 203–5.


38. DuBois, 196–97.

39. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 11.

Interestingly, this debate over terminology emerges in published critiques of Offen’s

approach (see, for example, Cott). I have opted not to engage the discourse of

Womanism here for two reasons. First, the term feminist remains deeply entrenched

in the academy and functions for better or worse, as Offen notes, as a convenient

form of “shorthand, too convenient to give up” and second, because exploring

Womanism would push the length of this project beyond the limits of this particular

venue.

40. Collins, 24–48.

41. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought

(New York: New Press, 1995), 2.

42. For a discussion of Hurston’s engagement with New Negro femininity in the 1920s,

see M. Genevieve West, “‘Youse in New Yawk’: The Gender Politics of Hurston’s

‘Lost’ Aunt Caroline Tales,” African American Review, forthcoming.

43. Chapman, 71.

44. Collins, 11.

45. Jane F. Levey, “Imaging the Family in Postwar Popular Culture: The Case of The Egg

and I and Cheaper by the Dozen,” Journal of Women’s History 13, no. 3 (2001): 127.

46. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Race and Sex in America

(New York: William Morrow, 1984), 127, 242.

47. Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical

Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 752.

48. Giddings, 254, 252.

49. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 233.

50. Collins, 11.

51. For discussions of Hurston’s use of indirection, see Susan Meisenhelder, Hitting

a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale

Hurston (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); and Carla Kaplan, “Zora

Neale Hurston, Folk Performance, and the ‘Margarine Negro,’” in The Cambridge

Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, edited by George Hutchinson (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2007), 213–35.

52. Lowe, Jump at the Sun, 306.



Copyright © 2015



Park, PA

Popular Reception of Toni Morrison’s Belovedreading the text through time

lydia magras abstract: I present a snapshot of Toni Morrison’s

novel Beloved from a personally experienced, particularly

significant cultural moment in the public and

academic discourse. I argue that BuPPIes (Black urban

Professionals), children of the turbulent sixties as readers,

were meaningful precursors to the appropriately serious

literary (aesthetic) reception of Morrison’s work. In the

case of the novel and the film, this popular reception was

actually an embryonic response that bolstered an academic

one, resulting in considerable overlap between these two

interpretative communities. The initial popular reception

propelled the text firmly into the arms of the academy,

where it has settled into a long-lasting embrace. Pulling

from the work of reception studies scholars like Patrocino

schweikart, this study connects the American Black Power

Movement of the ’60s and the subsequent emergence

of Black studies programs to the reception of the text and

its film adaptation, as well as incorporating Morrison’s

own words on interpretative interaction between readers

and her work.

so much of what affects popular reception of a text is aligned with particular cultural moments, both past and present. The ability or opportunity to remember these moments is especially critical to the discernment of why

Reception_7_04_Magras.indd 29 15/06/15 8:34 PM

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a text is received well (or not). And more crucially, a critic must ask: Who is the reader? What impacts have the cultural moments made on her?

I present a snapshot of Tony Morrison’s novel Beloved from a personally experienced, particularly significant cultural moment in the public and academic discourse. In the case of the text and the film, a specific group of popular readers was a meaningful precursor to the appropriately serious literary (aesthetic) reception of Morrison’s work. Black intellectual women (and to some extent men) were a vital force in catapulting Beloved into academic prominence, while simultaneously forcing a wider canonical appreciation of the author’s work. In the case of this Morrison text, popular reception was actually an embryonic intellectual response that bolstered scholarly investment. What is interesting is the considerable overlap between the popular and academic reception—the way in which these two interpretative communities nurtured and reinforced each other. As time passed, the composition of the two groups stratified, making room for new iterations of themselves. These now stratified communities, the popular and the academic, continued to trouble the question of what to do with criticism, even as new players were introduced. such an argument by no means diminishes the exemplary accomplishments and recognitions Morrison previously achieved. The publication of four novels, including the National Book Critics winner and Book of the Month Club selection, Song of Solomon, recognition by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and appointment to the National Council on the Arts provide only a synopsis of her achievements in the seventeen years preceding the 1987 release of Beloved.

Within this particular historical moment, Black popular readers in the united states are determined to be college-educated Black women and men who were at least politically astute, if not overtly activist, who came of age in the 1960s, and who twenty years later were firmly identified, along with their White age-group members, as Baby Boomers. In the vernacular they were called BuPPIes, and this group of readers brought the popular gaze to the initial publication of Beloved.

As an acronym for Black urban Professionals, the term BUPPIES, which came into the cultural lexicon with the publication The Official Buppie Handbook in 1985, was a variation on the newly coined expression Yuppies or Young upwardly Mobile Professionals.1 BuPPIes were children of the turbulent sixties, which saw unprecedented numbers of young Black men and women attending mainstream American colleges and universities as a result of the civil rights movement, economic growth, and public policy. Their campus experiences there not only would shape the face of higher education curricula but also would generate the foundational tenets in their personal appreciation of the world of arts and letters. Hence, BuPPIes, particularly as relevant to this essay, were those college-educated Black women and men who chose a nonacademic career path and yet retained a love of literature generally and


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Black American literary production in particular. BuPPIes were comprised of women like me: a college-educated english major before the time of Black studies, living in a high-rise apartment with a view of Lake Michigan, holding down a good job. They were men and women who carried an admiration, sometimes participatory, for the Black Panthers and the armed brothers at Yale, while simultaneously celebrating the birth of the Alvin Ailey Dance Troupe and the Black theater renaissance. As a member of this group, I have drawn upon personal reflections to support my argument that we, as BuPPIe readers of Beloved, were in fact a force to be reckoned with.

BuPPIe popular readers became arbiters of what was a “must read,” joining the emerging class of Black activist scholars or Black academics, many of whom were members of the Black Power movement who had moved from graduate students to members of the professoriate. The BuPPIes were stratified by this presence of Black activist writers, sprinkled in the ivied halls of higher learning yet directly connected through community-based cultural events celebrating Africana’s presence in the twentieth-century New World.

In “understanding an Other: Reading as a Receptive Form of Communicative Action,” Patrocinio schweikart argues that the onus of reception studies can be found in the reader’s “communicative activity . . . [with] other subjectivities.”2 For Black readers, popular and academic, these other subjectivities were embedded in their embrace of what I am defining as a Black cultural aesthetic: a commitment to community, ancestry, cultural production, and a nonsectarian sense of spirituality. These elements are buttressed by definitions offered by Black scholars of Morrison’s early works and serve as signposts to her appeal. For example, Wilfred samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems point out the role of the Black Power movement in making possible “an almost evangelistic struggle for personal identity.” This desire became what Barbara Christian identified as her own search for texts “invented by herself, writing herself or her own discourse into it.” samuels and Hudson-Weems furthered the connection of dots among this Black cultural aesthetic, the Black Power movement, and Morrison’s texts by tracing a thematic trajectory in her novels: the communal focus of the Bluest Eye, the personal struggles of identity told in Sula, which, according to samuels and Hudson-Weems, established Morrison as a major American writer, and the treatment of race relations in Tar

Baby, which garnered a Newsweek cover and an appearance on the highbrow talk show hosted by Dick Cavett.3 Song of Solomon graced the cover of the New York

Times Book Review and became the first Black Book of the Month selection since Richard Wright’s Native Son.4

Adding his voice to the discussion of Morrison’s impact on Black readers, Bernard Bell goes as far as to assert that literary contributions by Black writers in this particular moment were most definitely influenced by the “political and


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cultural developments of the 1960s.”5 Part of the political nature of reading was the choice of ideas one opted for. For activist scholars and BuPPIes alike, the idea was the re-emergence and ascendancy of Black writers. Black women, especially, were excited by Morrison’s forays into the world of fiction. I, for one, had a deep appreciation for White women writers, popular and canonized, who wrote from within their cultural context, but the elevation of women writers who looked like me and wrote from within a cultural context that was familiar and relevant to my life was inspirational, confirming, and yes, political. This was a feeling shared by my BuPPIe sisters.

Bell also marked the impact of paperback book sales on reception as a signal for change in the breadth of Morrison’s readership.6 she became more accessible to the popular reader. she began to appear on the shelves of those militantly garbed Black bookstores that sprang up, flying their revolutionary colors of red, black, and green and carrying paperback texts on their shelves, mostly dealing with African history and political manifestos. Here many of us found our first copies of Morrison.

Although Harold Bloom asserted in 1990 that “Morrison’s five novels [including Beloved] to date leave us with literature and not a manifesto for social change,” BuPPIe habitués of these Black bookstores might have wondered why Bloom pronounced an either or condition. In the case of Morrison, the literature was being read by the daughters (and sons) of those who marched, bled, and died in the cause of social change. We wanted both literature and liberty. In fact, as is well known, Beloved grew out of Morrison’s work as editor on The Black Book, a text that Marilyn sanders Mobley described as being “compiled in scrapbook fashion” as a record of the “material conditions of Black life from slavery to freedom.”7 What could be more of a manifesto for social change than that? In the aftermath of an era of strident and often incendiary rhetoric, while Morrison’s narrative voice rang decidedly less angry than those seminal Black Power texts such as eldridge Cleaver’s 1979 Soul on Ice, her contributions were no less influential.

Consequently, in 1987, I rushed out to purchase my first-edition copy of Beloved. I wholeheartedly embraced the political reality of holding in my hands a nicely packaged hardback book written by a Black woman. My friends, college educated and voracious readers like me, also experienced the political relevance I felt as I purchased the book. We bought Morrison’s latest book for the reasons we bought other texts by other Black authors of the day—as a demonstrable, cultural, and economic support of one of our own literary giants. It did not matter that a White house was publishing Morrison. In fact, the reality that Knopf, with its prestigious lineage, was taking up Morrison’s cause was even more reason for celebration and pride.

By 1987, the years of counterculture protests and demands for Black curricular entries in colleges, universities, public schools, indeed within the


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American education system in general, were slowly fading reminiscences of a few diehards. The wrongs that activists sought to redress in the sixties remained, for the most part, still unaddressed. In the world of Black belle lettres, this state manifested itself in the failure of Beloved to win the 1987 National Book Award. My friends and I did not know anything about this award at the time. We just knew that a sister had written a book about us and that we were struggling to read it. But people we knew from the black theater movement and black bookstores and those who just passed along news on the drums were also people who did know about the significance of the slight. This group of politicized Black writers pooled their resources and negotiated a half page in the New York Times Book Review. They viewed Morrison’s absence as an academic slight, since “today all the literate world knows Toni Morrison,” as Houston Baker and June Jordan wrote in their preamble to the manifesto of praise signed by forty-eight well-known Black writers.8

Many of the Times Book Review co-signers were familiar to us as cultural icons, writing our life stories, writings both political and cultural. Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, sonia sanchez, Angela Davis, and Luisah Teish were our conduits to the academy of the time. If anyone was going to teach us about the Morrison style, they would be the ones, and their praise poem did much in this regard. Moreover, many of them did much more, participating in community-based conferences about Black affairs and writing in and appearing on Black popular media. Morrison herself spoke to the issue in an interview in Ebony Magazine, a mainstay among Black popular magazines along with its sister, Jet Magazine. some seven months after the New York Times Book Review manifesto of praise and shortly after her receipt of the Pulitzer Prize, Morrison had this to say:

It [the manifesto] was incredibly newsworthy, although nobody remarked on the news. [The real news] is that 48 Black writers and scholars got together and agreed to raise their voices about something material to them. And ultimately, what they did was destabilize prize-giving because they said quite eloquently and quite publicly, “Irrespective of what you’re doing and whether you acknowledge it or not, we who know recognize this as valuable.” so you see it really had very little to do with winning prizes. But that was the message—that we don’t need you to recognize this work as valuable to our community—that was so extraordinary.9

The community of the forty-eight was a contemporary microcosm of Black society and not just of the various and sundry academic institutions in which its


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members were scattered. The New York Times manifesto illustrated that valuable receptions of Morrison’s Beloved also occurred in tandem with popular culture. Though not widely acknowledged, the word-of-mouth phenomenon, coupled with a communal synergy of experiences between the two groups, positioned Beloved for phenomenal success. In a conversation with Gloria Naylor, Morrison touched upon this reality:

I look at [Naylor] and think for the thousandth time how fine it is now [this burst of Black women writers]. so many like her and more coming. eyes scrubbed clean with a Fuller brush, young

Black women walking around the world who can (and do) say

“I write is what I do. I do this and that too, but write is what I do, hear!”10

Meant as a description of Naylor, Morrison’s lyric could have been talking about me or any number of my BuPPIe sisters. We were not always writers, but we were definitely readers. And we, too, did a little of this and that, but we read; it was what we did, too, hear! To my mind, this statement was Morrison’s exhortation to Black people about the role of popular receptors, an affirmation that reading, or at least the reading of her work, could be a political act.

The elevation of popular readers in general, BuPPIe readers in particular, and the rising critical status of reader-response theory was highlighted in a review the following spring by a Black scholar, who was not a co-signer of the Times manifesto. Trudier Harris wrote about the novel from the perspective of a folklorist, but she also commented on issues that might have been of concern and interest to the popular reading public. The review appeared in Callaloo, an academic journal with a decidedly grassroots leaning as testified by its name, taken from the Caribbean soup of greens and cream. The activist leanings of the journal frequently obscured the lines between the academy and the community, since the articles in Callaloo aligned themselves with the political movement that spawned Black studies programs.

Harris’s analysis gestured toward the space in which readers of novels operate and judge the characters therein, often in opposition to the preferred or mainstream academic reception. Harris credited Morrison with creating a literary masterpiece that so blurred the lines “between popular literature and belle lettres that we stop trying to create them.”11 Harris’s point is salient not only because she advocates an erasure of what may be artificial divisions


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between commercial best sellers and canonical texts, but also because of its relevance to reception theory studies. The work of reception studies is about not only the explicit empowerment of the interpretations of readers but the privileging of the narrative content exactly because of its resonance within readers. Harris argues, and I agree, that Morrison’s work as a whole, not just Beloved, opened up advocacy channels for consideration of what nonacademic readers think and say as no less valid than responses coming from the academy.

The preferred or mainstream academic response of the time would have been skewed by the minority status of the few Black faculty at major academic institutions. Moreover, because many of the Black scholars who wrote about Beloved had significant ties to Black cultural practices, what they wrote not only reflected the pro forma, commodified academic response, but also was written in a way to appeal to and be understandable by the popular reader. This appeal was essential to what I am calling a “popularization” of literary criticism, a phenomena which validated the fundamental role of the BuPPIe reader within the optics of reception study.12

Both the BuPPIes and Black academics could count in their ranks those who, as survivors of the Black Power Movement, reflected what Trudier Harris calls a “range of militancy . . . beyond stirring the water to draining the lake.”13 In other words, they represented both those who were or had been on the front lines, articulating in loud voices, as well as those like Morrison, whose voices spoke in quieter tones of more personal struggles. This range of behavior also embodied the connection between the two groups of readers. The BuPPIes ranged from the “show and tell” of collecting Black art and sporting authentic African garb to genuine immersion in a shared cultural experience exemplified by travel to Africa and exploration of African-inspired religious traditions in America. The scholars, on the other hand, who sat on the ground floor of english departments and budding Black studies programs and whose allegiance to the cultural aesthetic was demonstrably different from that of the BuPPIes, forged the study of the Black cultural aesthetic as a discipline. There may have been only tangential personal interactions, but both shared the penchant for literary criticism, formal or not. Furthermore, if to read, hear, or view the work of a writer/artist is to “know” something about her, then the BuPPIes “knew” these scholars.

BuPPIes became literary critics of another kind, reception theorists as it were, with the power to influence, as illustrated by young Black women on the local bus, clutching copies of Beloved. In fact, as elizabeth Kastor reported the year Beloved was published, “When Toni Morrison attended a book signing at the smithsonian for Beloved, her readers, most of them women, [held] the volume close to their chests like a treasured object.” Both BuPPIes and Black


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academics shared a desire to locate themselves and their self-interests in what they read. Morrison fit that bill and in her own words validated Christian’s affirmation of the point. In an interview with Thomas LeClair, Morrison gave a glimpse into her writing mantra: “I write what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people.”14 even if BuPPIes did not initially understand the signature Morrison voice, the text resonated with us in another, unspoken language: the call of a mother to her daughters, the call of the crossings of the diaspora. That we are still interpreting that call some thirty years later is a tribute to the multilayered universality of language, its longevity, and the ability of Beloved to withstand the test of time.

In 1985, three years before the publication of Beloved, Gloria Naylor sat down, in Morrison’s blue house on the Hudson River, for a conversation with the author. Reading the introduction to Naylor’s interview in the context of this essay, I realize how timeless Naylor’s observations were. “The writers I had been taught to love were either male or white,” she wrote, acknowledging the overwhelming presence of Black male writers in the Black studies departments when she “hit college.”15 While Naylor’s comment reflected the actual gender hierarchical structure of the Black Power Movement and the growing independence of Black women, separated though many of us were from a close identification with the second wave of feminism, more pertinent to my argument was her underlining of our shared aesthetic.

Morrison responded to Naylor’s comment by furthering the nature of reading and its connection to the groups of readers I am discussing:

I had been taught to read very badly . . . trained to think of great books as resolutions and solution . . . [like] the way you go to a medicine cabinet. That’s not the way I go into a book . . . the last thing I would do with black people, if they’re anything like I am or like the black people I have respect for is to . . . tell them what to do. You don’t hand out these little slips of paper and say, “You will do the following: this is the message.”

Reading this conversation a quarter of a century later, I again find that connection between the Black activist scholar and that BuPPIe me. For here, I believe, Morrison was speaking directly to BuPPIe popular readers. she was writing Beloved at the time of this conversation, and she confessed to Naylor that she was concerned about her people and what she called the “enormous responsibility” in tackling a subject she knew would arouse


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painful memories.16 she seemed to be saying that it was okay that we might not have understood the text the first time, that there were layers of the story, embedded unknowingly in our rememories, which would pop up at odd moments.17 And so they would. We read Morrison’s Beloved as a political act, to extend Ishmael Reed’s “writing is fighting” metaphor. As the February 1988 Los Angeles Sentinel printed in its review by Marie Moore, we wanted to be among those “who consider[ed] themselves connoisseurs of Black literature.” We wanted to be among those who were right, because as Moore put it, “if one of Morrison’s works is not on the shelf, then something is wrong.”18

The existence of an overlap between popular and academic reception of the novel is paralleled in the reception of the film. Though frequently criticized for its reductive treatment of the lyrical Morrison text, Beloved the film took its place in a political and historical context as well. For example, there were frequent comparisons to steven spielberg’s Amistad and the relatively unchartered waters of sweeping big screen depictions of slavery and “popular memory.” The year Beloved the film was released, Maggie Humm’s Feminism and Film was published. Noting the marginalized role of Black women in films as the stereotypic mammies, maids, and prostitutes and their utter dearth behind the scenes, Humm paid tribute to the Black film renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s that drew on Black popular culture in all its artistic, pleasant, and politically uncomfortable realities. she underscored the emergence of critical studies focusing on this genre, while supporting Black filmmakers, who were not yet significantly affecting Hollywood’s stereotypical representations. Into this milieu stepped Oprah Winfrey, who, according to Natalie Zemon Davis, “eschewed African garb and what she considered the militant politics . . . at Tennessee state” where Winfrey was enrolled, marking her somewhat un-BuPPIe-ish posture.19

In 1984, three years before the publication of the novel Beloved, Winfrey was the host of a third-rated talk show in Chicago. up against the formidable Phil Donahue, Winfrey re-named her platform and a mere two years later was syndicated in nearly two hundred American cities. In 1986, after her Academy Award nominated performance in The Color Purple, she founded Harpo Productions and began to secure film rights to literary properties.20 In 1996 she launched her on-air book club, a business venture that would propel her out of the realm of mere entertainer into status as an arbiter between popular reception of novels and that of academics. The first Morrison text among the Oprah’s Book Club inaugural selections was not Beloved, but 1977’s Song of

Solomon. The 1998 book club selection was Paradise. In fact, Beloved has yet to appear as an Oprah Book Club selection, even in its twenty-first century, digital 2.0 version. It was in film that Winfrey forever inscribed the novel’s presence in


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the popular mind through her appearance in and production of its big-screen adaptation.

To extend Humm’s argument, Beloved the film was born out of the Black film genre categorized by the presence of what ed Guerrero called a spate of 1990s films made by “Black directors for black audiences.” These included Michael schultz’s and Kevin Hooks’s Strictly Business and spike Lee’s Jungle

Fever, both of which Guerrero accurately described as being populated by BuPPIes.21 Winfrey and director Jonathan Demme wished to ensconce Beloved into a gentler space heralded by the release of Daughters’ of the Dust, Julie Dash’s artistically beautiful film about the geechee culture of the Carolina islands, which was commercially unsuccessful, at least in its initial theatrical release.

In terms of the reception of Beloved, Morrison’s comments on the difference between print and film media are instructive in reviewing the differences and similarities in response by the BuPPIes and the activist scholars: “[There is] a powerful difference in the two mediums [sic]. . . . [Y]ou have a major void in a movie, which is . . . you don’t have a reader, you have a viewer, and that is such a different experience. As subtle as a movie can be, it’s blatant because you see it . . . but the encounter with language is a private exploration.”22 On this point, BuPPIes’s acceptance of the novel Beloved, easily understood or not, began to fall away in relation to the film. The private exploration of language was lost. Additionally, for the film, positive reception by BuPPIes did not translate into commercial or industry success. even though Black print publications lauded the performances of the actors, the box office numbers suffered greatly.

In her November 1998 Ebony Magazine review, Laura B. Randolph, while carefully avoiding the trivialization of the project as a simple love story, described the film in terms of the on-screen personal interactions of Winfrey and her co-star Danny Glover. The Ebony review served as a prototype of other reviews by other Black popular media outlets. The review in the Atlanta Daily

World, circulated within this southern city with a singular significance as the home of six historically Black colleges, called its readership to see a film that was “breathtaking, mind-blowing and satisfying . . . a well crafted, captivating film.” Jet Magazine offered the following as the lead in its review of the film: “Oprah Winfrey stars as a Former slave in Compelling Drama Beloved.” The Jet Magazine piece further described the joint project of Winfrey and award-winning director Jonathon Demme as “haunting and emotion-packed,” concluding that Winfrey’s performance was “riveting.”23 In general, popular reception within the Black press was more concerned with cinematic features and dramatic portrayals and not necessarily the film’s pure faithfulness to the original text. While the popular reviews in no way minimized the film’s treatment of slavery and its influences on the content of the film, popular appreciation dwelt on the characterizations of fortitude, that nearly universal


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depiction of slaves as bearing up under excruciating pressures, as well as the capacity of the film to embody these represented experiences within the minds and hearts of the moviegoer.

In the reception of the film, Black activist scholars, however, seemed to hit their stride, layering their commentary around issues of “cultural authenticity and experiential credibility.” In Divas on Screen: Black Women on Screen, Mia Mask devotes a chapter to Oprah Winfrey, presenting a fine discussion of the hi-low dichotomy Beloved the film illustrated. Mask writes: “By eroding the boundary between high (literary) culture and mass television or popular (low) culture, the film collapses a boundary for example between Toni Morrison, the erudite cultural producer and Nobel Prize winner and Oprah Winfrey, the TV icon and arbiter of bourgeois taste.”24 This boundary collapse contrasted with the focus some mainstream popular media reports placed on the film because of Winfrey’s status within the entertainment community. For example, CNN touted the film as a “Loud Oprah vehicle to the Oscar.” The Oscars, of course, represent the American film industry’s highest and most coveted honor and serve as the American arbiter of authorized film interpretative strategies. In the case of the emerging online magazine Salon, contributing film critic Charles Taylor wrote his review of the film with a tone that castigated director and star as out of tune, out of turn, and out of sorts. Focusing on director Demme, Taylor said, “Nothing is as potentially destructive to a filmmaker as the praised wrong turn.” In essence, Taylor read the film as evidence of Demme’s decay as a director. Morrison, however, called Demme “a man of principle and taste.”25

Variety, the gold standard among the entertainment industry’s trade magazines, actually compared the film adaptation to the novel, pronouncing the adaptation a “meticulously mounted” work reflecting “both the letter and spirit of Morrison’s work.”26 However, while Variety’s fairly lengthy review included accolades for the cinematic features of the film, the accolades did not transfer to a highly regarded reception by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and sciences. At the 1999 Oscars ceremony, Beloved, nominated only for best costume design, won nothing.

Yet the film did win in an un-nominated category. Mask points out the role it played in the ever-growing “discursive struggle over the reception of dramatic Black films by critics and audiences.” Indeed, Beloved garnered only seventeen percent of the votes at that year’s NAACP awards, losing out to How Stella Got

Her Groove Back, which earned more in two weeks than Beloved earned during its entire theatrical run.27 The BuPPIe readers were splitting their votes when it came to film. unfortunately, that split vote reflected poorly on the only film review that mattered: ticket sales.

The film industry is drawn by numbers, not rave reviews, and Beloved’s numbers were not good. Beretta e. smith-shomade quotes the Economist’s


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November 1998 analysis: “the first week, Beloved garnered $8 million and placed number five in terms of box office receipts. By the end of the second week, ticket sales had dropped fifty percent.” she caps the analysis by pointing out that the film ran a mere eight weeks, generating only a little over $22 million against its $80 million in costs. The BuPPIe word of mouth that elevated the sales of the novel did not translate into bottoms in the seats for the film. smith-shomade argues that it was the collision of Oprah’s blackness and the whiteness of her audience, “particularly those who still [had] Black and Brown women in their kitchens and nurseries [that] helped tank the film.”28 The attendance of a significant, consistent Black viewership was not sufficient to counter this effect. Additionally, since films, unlike novels, must garner astronomical receipts to make a profit, Mask’s assessment of the limited word-of-mouth effect reaped by Beloved the film seems accurate: “As the product of commercial culture (and society), [a film] must make a profit, it must entertain consumers.”29 As a film, Beloved was not seen as entertaining.

The schisms within the reception of Demme’s adaptation of Beloved uncovered another relevant consideration addressed directly by neither its academic critics nor its popular moviegoers. That was the question of how to manage criticism. What do we do with these schisms, controversies, and disparate points of view? In approaching an answer, a consideration of the contemporary moment in which a film appears must come into play. For when the cultural moment passes, so may the interest in the text. A case in point might be the interest regenerated in Ntosake shange’s For Colored Girls Who

Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Tyler Perry’s recent film adaptation.30 While critical acclaim was also split between its huge popular audience and its academic reception of the dramatic presentation, and while the film spurred the reissue of the original text, I wonder if it will take another thirty years before the written text is again a topic of conversation by any audience. While Perry’s adaptation revived a discursive struggle, forcing the re-engagement of divergently opposed critical realities, it did not answer the question. It merely pointed out, again, and through huge box office numbers, that the popular is significant and that so-called “authorized” determinations are not enough. What is essential is that the text in question be a topic of conversation over a period of time. For it is through the lens of time passing, cultural moments retreating, that one is able to discern meaning in the diversity of opinion.

Literary criticism is particularly relevant within a cultural context, a particular cultural moment. The varying mainstream-media responses to Beloved were a product of mass culture’s dominance of film production itself. My argument has been founded on a postmodern aesthetic in which meaning is a transaction among the author, the text, and the reader. I have focused on the latter two


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components as a way of privileging the validity of personal experience. I am, as Wolfgang Iser might say, filling in some gaps with my own subjective knowledge, a personal knowledge augmented by commentary from within the constituencies that I am espousing. The reactions to the film adaptations of contemporary Black texts as cultural products continue to reverberate within the readers/viewers that this essay has identified as the outside deciders, BuPPIes as popular receptors, so to speak. The points I have raised about their importance to the success of a film or the elevation or recuperation of a fictive narrative are still relevant. Furthermore, the debate among these grass-roots literary critics has widened in appeal as we have moved further into the twenty-first century.

Film adaptations, like written narratives, are wont to spawn controversy. In the historical chronology of the reception to Beloved the film, the literature revealed, at least among popular receptors, a marked tendency to mirror its reception as a written text. Yet these readers and filmgoers did not represent just one demographic. The responses were sharply divided between BuPPIes, the college educated nonacademics, and the newly created class of the Black studies professional. The differences continue to reappear from time to time even now, as illustrated by the brief discussion of Perry and the later phenomenon of The Help.31 What the controversies seem to illustrate, and what I argue for, is recognition of the critical value added by analysis of the reception by popular viewers/readers who are products of specific historical contexts and personal connections. Failure to acknowledge properly their contribution is to disenfranchise a significant slice of the audience pie. The BuPPIes, as I have described them, were absolutely instrumental in bestowing classic status onto Beloved through their engagement in a methodology that involved mediating their own personal cultural perspectives and politics through the lens of what had been said before, and by whom.

Toni Morrison’s oeuvre has continued to be read, certainly among academics, regularly landing on syllabi for courses ranging from literature surveys and postmodern seminars to entire courses designed around her work. Without this actual fact, the reality of a well-written, universally applicable, and creatively imaginative text, whether viewed favorably or not, becomes moot. Yet the upshot of all this critical diversity is that popular reception can, in certain instances, propel a text firmly into the arms of the academy, where it can settle into a long-lasting embrace. Moreover, film can help to secure the text’s tenure in that embrace, by popularizing critical debate. The publication of Beloved, along with Jonathan Demme’s cinematic adaptation, shone a light on an interpretative community connected to yet loosely identified with the simultaneous emergence of Black studies departments across the landscape of higher education in the united states. This bifurcated audience of BuPPIes and Black


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academics exerted a critical power in both defining a text and reinforcing its academic prominence. At the same time, BuPPIes in particular stood firmly on behalf of their own particular interpretations. In addition to strengthening a case for the validity of reader-response, or in the case of film, viewer-response criticism, these popular receptors have reminded us of a particularly vital strand in the discourse on the meaning and utility of critical interpretations. Taken together, the responses of these two groups underscored the political nature of reading, an attribute that is also characteristic of the publication and canonization processes. That is to say, these responses troubled the constructs of identity and power. This acknowledgement of “politicized reading” reminds us that literature exists in some instances to challenge worldviews through the telling of a story. The goal is to engage the reader, or viewer, in an examination of human existence through universal and detailed language.

To return to Patrocino schwiekart’s argument that there is intersectionality between the reader and “other subjectivities,” the form of communication becomes bi-modal, expressive and receptive, characterized by speaking and writing and listening and reading.32 To listen is to beg the question of hearing. What did these two groups hear in reading Morrison’s novel? They both heard themselves! To quote Morrison herself on this point, “[they] found texts in which [they] could . . . find [themselves] properly spoken of.”33 In Beloved, BuPPIes and Black scholar activists alike found themselves properly spoken of in a text in which they “heard” themselves, as writers and as witnesses. While there may have been a divide, there was also a bridge. Together, both groups were readers. Because readers will continue to play a central role in the anointing of texts, their voices contribute to vibrant, popularly grounded, and universal discourse. The initial reception of Beloved, both the novel and the film, involved double-consciousness, a love affair with what was both difficult to read and undemanding of interpretation. It moved BuPPIes and Black activist scholars into an examination of the tradition from which Black women write. As Beloved drew our attention to the issue of the voices of its readership, we learned that those popular or academic voices, divided though they might be on points of interpretative technicalities, were indeed inextricably connected. Morrison’s ability to connect with readers across generations and across class and profession—readers who were both alike, yet not alike at all—is what has made all the difference.

notes1. Thayer William Staples and Katherine McMillan Staples, The Official Buppie

Handbook: Black Urban Professionals (Pittsburgh: Pyramid Designs, 1986). BUPPIE

has sometimes been interpreted as Black Upwardly Mobile Professionals.


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2. Patrocinio Schweikart, “Understanding an Other: Reading as a Receptive Form of

Communicative Action,” in New Directions in American Reception Study, edited by

Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.

3. Wilfred Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems, Toni Morrison (Boston: Twayne,

1990), 6, 9; Barbara Christian, “The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison,” in

Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah

(New York: Amistead, 1993), x.

4. Nellie Y. McKay, “Introduction,” in Critical Essays on Tony Morrison, edited by Nellie

Y. McKay (Boston: Hall, 1988), 4.

5. Bernard Bell, Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1987), 277.

6. Ibid.

7. Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” Toni Morrison, edited by Harold Bloom (New York:

Chelsea House, 1990), 2; Marilyn Sanders Mobley, “A Different Remembering:

Memory, History, and Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Toni Morrison,

edited by Harold Bloom, 189. In 1974, Morrison, along with Middleton A. Harris

and a cadre of collectors of historical artifacts and anecdotes, compiled images of

the Black experience in America, from its beginnings in the West African slave trade

through the first three quarters of the twentieth century.

8. Houston A. Baker and June Jordan, “Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison,”

New York Times Book Review, June 24, 1988, 36.

9. Morrison qtd. in Laura B. Randolph, “Oprah and Danny Sizzle in Her First Love

Scenes in the Powerful Film Beloved,” Ebony Magazine, November 1988, 102.

10. Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, “A Conversation,” Southern Review 21, no.3

(1985): 592.

11. Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants: Black Domestics in Black American

Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 388.

12. This popularization of literary criticism is not to be confused with its scholarly

production. For example, while iconic Black intellectual academic Henry Louis Gates

Jr. has relied on the Black cultural phenomenon known as signifyin[g] to construct

theories of literary criticism, he has done so for an audience other than the popular

reader. Self described as “wedded to the study of theory generally,” Gates defines

signifying as a Black trope rather than employing the more lengthy, yet more

accessible, definition offered by Geneva Smitherman: the instance in which “the

speaker puts down, needles, talks about someone to make a point or sometimes

just for fun” (Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-

American Literary Criticism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], xx; Geneva

Smitherman, Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner

[Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000], 260).

13. Trudier Harris, “Of Mother Love and Demons,” Callaloo 35 (1988): 135.

14. Elizabeth Kastor, The Dilemma of “Double-Consciousness”: Toni Morrison’s Novels

(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 1; Thomas LeClair, “The Language

Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” in Tony Morrison: Critical

Perspectives, 37.


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15. Naylor and Morrison, “Conversation,” 568.

16. Ibid., 579, 582.

17. Rememory is a term used by the protagonist of Beloved, Sethe, to describe the

forceful recurrence of specific, often traumatic memories. Samuels and Hudson-

Weems define rememory as a “journey to a site to see what remains have been left

behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply” and as “a ‘memory’

loaded with the past” (94).

18. Marie Moore, “The Inextricable Link between Thandie Newton and ‘Beloved,’” Los

Angeles Sentinel, December 3, 1993, B4.

19. Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2000), 70.

20. Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America.

(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008), 160.

21. Ed Guerrero, “Framing Blackness: The African-American Image in the Cinema of the

Nineties,” Cineaste 20, no. 2 (1993), EBSCOhost Academic Search Premier.

22. Morrison qtd. in Barbara Tepa Lupac, Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema:

From Micheaux to Morrison (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 506.

23. Catrina D. Harvey, “Oprah Is ‘Beloved,’” Atlanta Daily World, October 15, 1988,

2; “Oprah Winfrey Stars as a Former Slave in Compelling Drama,” Jet Magazine,

October 19, 1998, 60.

24. Mia Mask, Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film (Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 2009), 168, 177.

25. Paul Tatara, “‘Beloved’ is Loud Oprah Vehicle to Oscar,” CNN.com, October 20,

1998, 1; Charles Taylor, “The Designated Martyr,” Salon Magazine, October 16, 1998,

2; Morrison qtd. in Davis, Slaves on Screen, 100.

26. Todd McCarthy, “Beloved,” Variety, October 4, 1998, Variety.com.

27. Mask, Divas on Screen, 178, 181.

28. Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lines: African-American Women and Television.

(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 3–4, 171, 172.

29. Mask, Divas on Screen, 165.

30. Tyler Perry is a prolific Black playwright, actor, director, and producer who began his

career touring a series of comedic dramas featuring his iconic character, Madea,

played by Perry himself. He has since branched into the production of highly

successful film and television series. According to Box Office Mojo, a website that

tracks and publishes film earnings, between 2007 and 2011 Tyler Perry films grossed

nearly $800 million (www.boxofficemojo.com).

31. Based on a text by a White woman in which race relations, specifically among

women in the 1950s South, is addressed, The Help spawned significant controversy

among Black scholars and college attendees over its so-called unrealistic portrayal

of Black women. Older Black women, on the other hand, tended to see the film as a

broader human-interest story.

32. Schweikart, “Understanding an Other,” 3–4.

33. Morrison, qtd. in Jan Furman, Toni Morrison’s Fiction (Columbia: University of South

Carolina Press, 1996), 6.



Copyright © 2015



Park, PA

Staging the Reception of American Ethnic Authors in Women’s Popular Magazinesencountering amy tan’s the joy luck club stories

in seventeen and ladies’ home journal

matthew james vechinski

abstract: This article investigates how Amy Tan’s The

Joy Luck Club penetrated the mainstream with the help of

magazines read by millions of women and teenage girls.

Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal first published two stories

from the book that were edited to isolate the relationships

between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-

born daughters. This emphasis in turn simplified the stories’

representation of Chinese-American families and peer

groups, offering a way for the magazines to appeal to their

audiences’ existing cultural assumptions. The book’s title

story as edited for Ladies’ Home Journal celebrates an adult

daughter’s renewed interest in her mother’s traditions, and

the version of “The Rules of the Game” that appeared in

Seventeen champions a talented young daughter asserting her

independence from her mother. In addition to the reception

of these stories in the context of women’s magazines,

the article considers readers’ responses to The Joy Luck

Club book—an example of a short story cycle by an ethnic

American author. Audiences outside the academy have found

it difficult to read across interlinking stories, which limits

their level of engagement with the text. The demanding

fictional form of Tan’s book, much like the truncated

magazine versions of the stories, may actually encourage

shallow interpretations of the struggles of its ethnic

American characters.

Reception_7_05_Vechinski.indd 45 15/06/15 8:35 PM

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In her 2003 memoir, Amy Tan describes how she happened upon a CliffsNotes guide to The Joy Luck Club while waiting around a bookstore before giving a reading. She was shocked to find an unfamiliar version of her life story offered as a means of explaining her fiction. Tan has to admit, though, that she is “perversely honored to be in CliffsNotes.”1 After all, inclusion in the series is evidence of the popular success of her book and the status it has acquired among literature teachers. I imagine that the students and book club members lately exposed to The Joy Luck Club (1989) would be just as surprised to discover that stories from the book were first published in Seventeen and Ladies’ Home

Journal. That is, Amy Tan’s fiction initially appeared in the magazine racks in grocery stores, not in the company of canonical authors with CliffsNotes guides of their own, and both the commercial and academic success of the book can be credited in part to positive book reviews and author interviews in mass circulation magazines. Before The Joy Luck Club was a mainstay in the classroom, it penetrated the mainstream with the help of the mass media, including magazines read by millions of women and teenage girls.

This article examines two stories from The Joy Luck Club that were published in Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal. I consider how the readers of each magazine may have responded to these samples of Tan’s book. These periodicals capitalize on the stories’ suggestions of conventional dynamics present in Chinese-American families and peer groups to encourage their audiences to identify with the characters. Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal give readers the impression that Tan’s stories describe a culture unfamiliar to them, while carefully preserving their audiences’ usual frames of reference. My essay explores two stories from The Joy Luck Club: “The Rules of the Game,” published separately in Seventeen in 1986 after a small literary magazine had featured a longer version of the story earlier that year, and the book’s title story, which appeared as a first serial in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1989. Both Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal isolate the mother-daughter relationships already heavily emphasized in Tan’s early fiction by removing details in the exposition that the editors could have regarded as nonessential, and in so doing, they simplify the stories’ representation of Chinese-American families and peer groups. Given their different target audiences, the effects of the edits differ, particularly in regards to the depiction of the daughters of Chinese immigrants. Seventeen obscures a daughter’s self-isolation from her family and community, whereas Ladies’ Home Journal celebrates a daughter’s renewed interest in tradition. This article explores how the deletions from Tan’s stories—and there are no additions, only cuts—reflect the magazines’ strategies of connecting with their female audiences.2

Because Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal reframed the stories through subtraction, it is important to consider what was already present in Tan’s fiction


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that disposed them to the magazines’ treatments. The reviews of The Joy Luck

Club in mass circulation magazines that acknowledge the book as a volume of interlinked stories—neither a novel nor a typical short story collection but a short story cycle 3—emphasize the insights it provides into Chinese-American culture for the common reader. In a book review for Mademoiselle given the revealing title “The Almost All-American Girls,” Joyce Maynard claimed that “Tan has managed to convey both the foreignness of her narrators’ experience and its universality. . . . Any of these women’s narratives could stand alone as a short story, and one way they inform us is by suggesting that the individual experience of one Chinese woman in no way defines that of another.”4 Publishers

Weekly contended that “each chapter” of The Joy Luck Club “can stand alone; yet personalities unfold and details build to deepen the impact and meaning of the whole.”5 Literary scholars have raised concerns about these reductive readings of the book, however. Melanie McAlister argues that by and large the reviews of The Joy Luck Club “insis[t] that Amy Tan has written a story which, underneath its Chinese ornamentation, is the same for all of us.”6 For McAlister, the way that many readers regard the references to Chinese culture as an exoticism that envelops the familiar often leads to an unfortunate oversimplification of Tan’s fiction. Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong deems Tan to be complicit in the faux mysticism of her Chinese background. Her stories “appear to possess the authority of authenticity but are often products of the American-born writer’s own heavily mediated understanding of things Chinese.”7 Wong points out several aspects of Chinese culture that Tan gets wrong, although readers may take her for an authority.8 These misperceptions, Wong argues, “enable Orientalism to emerge in a form palatable to middle-class American readers of the 1980s,”9 repurposing the term “Orientalism” from Edward Said’s landmark study of the Western European perception of the Middle East to refer to Americans’ exoticization of Chinese and Japanese culture—what the United States tends to associate with the East or the “Orient.”

It would be easy enough to extend Wong’s argument to the editors of the women’s magazines that published The Joy Luck Club stories. Yet Wong makes the point that Orientalism “emerges,” meaning that it is in part a function of readers’ responses to the material. Combining traditions with new trends is old hat for women’s magazines. Perhaps Amy Tan’s stories appealed to Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal precisely because they dress familiar narratives about mother-daughter relationships in new, more fashionable clothes. This does not mean that their readers would accept the narratives uncritically, though. The audiences may very well have had their guard up. Naomi Wolf, writing about women’s magazines at the outset of the 1990s in The Beauty Myth, describes the ambivalent relationship women often have toward the periodicals that are supposed to be “theirs.” She argues that, because these magazines provide a


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rare outlet for women’s mass culture, women may accept fluff pieces and at the same time, resist them in favor of the features showing feminist sensibilities. As a result, such magazines have split personalities that reflect the double bind women face. “Like its readers, the magazine must pay for its often serious, prowoman content with beauty backlash trappings; it must do so to reassure its advertisers,” Wolf argues.10 This in turn makes the experience of reading women’s magazines an exercise in aligning oneself with or against a particular representation of women’s mass culture.

Wolf’s observation about women’s magazines raises a valuable question that must be addressed by anyone studying popular magazines and reception: can we consider the readers of mass market periodicals one distinct audience? It seems as if women’s magazines provide a mix of content in order to offer readers choices and avoid the exclusion of any segments of their potential audience. Tan’s fiction finds itself in the midst of a variety of material in the pages of these periodicals, whose readers likely did not pick up the issue for any one article. It would be misleading, then, to focus on only how women’s magazines cater to intended audiences without also appreciating how they shape their readerships in so doing. With this in mind, I do not focus on predetermined audience demographics. Instead, I approach the women’s magazine as a context that stages reception. Tony Bennett in his scholarship on reception study describes context as “a set of intertextual and discursive relations that produce readers for texts and texts for readers.”11 Here Bennett underscores the need to see audiences as fluid constructions, and in mass circulation magazines it is impossible to pin down an ideal reader across the diverse material contained in a single issue.

The split personality of women’s magazines that Wolf describes makes it even more difficult to discuss how reception might be staged. If reading involves resistance to and renegotiation of the meanings offered, then the audience cannot be passive. But how exactly can readers’ engagement be measured? Critics’ answers to that question vary. For example, in her study of the history of Seventeen magazine, sociologist Kelley Massoni cautions that, “unlike adult women who have attained a certain amount of self-understanding and may read women’s magazines critically, female adolescents are on a mission of self-discovery that makes them more susceptible to magazines’ messages.”12 Janice Radway emphasizes the ways teenage girls subvert the messages they may seem to readily adopt. She finds that “girls were sutured into traditional gender arrangements by the cultural materials marketed to them and yet they still managed to carve out some small space of playful resistance despite that interpellation.”13 While Radway offers the rich example of girls authoring their own ‘zines as evidence of adolescents constructing their own cultural spaces, she admits a wide range of these “cultural creations.” Building



friendships and decorating bedrooms, for instance, are also acts of production that show adolescents invested in shaping their own environments.

It turns out that the study of the short story cycle has much in common with Radway’s approach to reception that acknowledges an audience’s uniformity and diversity. Many have argued that the short story cycle form, featuring characters and situations that span several narratives, strongly contributes to the concurrent experience of cultural difference and self-recognition readers enjoy. According to James Nagel, the story cycle is particularly suited to “a literature that directly illustrates the sensibilities of people from a given ethnic background, expressing their unique concerns and aspirations as well as their more generalized participation in the human condition.” He cites the “proliferation of volumes of stories from virtually every racial and nationality group in the United States” to indicate that it is a form writers knowingly adopt for that purpose.14 Tan was herself smitten by Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, and perhaps took it for a model for The Joy Luck Club, her first book of fiction.15 Rocío G. Davis’s article on The Joy Luck Club in particular argues that Tan’s book consists of “not merely individual tragedies of those caught up in the history of Chinese immigration but [also] the difficulties of a culture undergoing transformation.”16 The “not merely” here underlines how the short story cycle, as realized by Tan and Erdrich, respects simultaneously the independence of the individual and her solidarity with her community.

But to what extent are these critical judgments inspired by form rather than content? Readers of the full book, who I examine here through their reviews and comments, do not articulate a more complex appreciation of the subject matter, which suggests that thinking across stories in the cycle simplifies in its own way the themes in Tan’s fiction. My observations that the short story cycle may actually encourage shallow interpretations challenge the arguments of those who have associated the fictional form with ethnic American writers. They contend that short story cycles invite readers to reflect deeply on the experiences of characters struggling to integrate themselves within their minority communities and against a dominant culture. At the close of the article, I return to the possibility that the approach of scholars such as Nagel and Davis offer only an idealized theory of reception.

“The Rules of the Game”

Amy Tan’s story of a precocious daughter of Chinese immigrants who becomes a chess champion attracted the attention of Seventeen after it was brought out by a local literary magazine in San Francisco, FM Five.17 The text of “The Rules of the Game” as it appeared in FM Five (there titled “End Game”) is nearly


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identical to the version in The Joy Luck Club, but several passages were later removed from the Seventeen version.18 The excisions were likely intended to streamline the narrative, concentrating the focus on junior chess champion Waverly Jong and her ongoing disagreements with her mother, Lindo. Seventeen puts the spotlight squarely on Waverly’s quick rise to the top, as if to celebrate her success, unusual for someone of her age and background, and her humbling return to her station as a result of hubris. James Nagel, in his analysis of The Joy Luck Club as ethnic short story cycle, believes that although two “substantial sections” were left out of “The Rules of the Game” in Seventeen, “the fundamental elements of the plot were essentially the same as in the book.”19 It is difficult to disagree with him, although the fact that Tan preferred for her volume of stories the FM Five version strongly suggests that she found value in the supporting details that illustrate the particular circumstances of the Jong family. In contrast, the Seventeen presentation of the story—including its layout on the page—was more narrowly focused on the plight of a talented young woman wanting to break free of her mother’s influence.

Seventeen seized on chess as a metaphor for the struggle between Waverly and her mother. With the title “The Rules of the Game,” the book version and the Seventeen version call attention to the moment in the story when Waverly begins to learn how to move the chess pieces, and her mother examines the instruction book and remarks, “This American rules” (Joy Luck 94, “Rules” 160). No one explains the rules to immigrants, she tells her children; they have to learn for themselves and find their own way. The phrase “American rules” crops up again later in the story when Waverly is reluctant to move up from playing in the parks of Chinatown to entering more challenging American-style competitions for fear of embarrassing her family (Joy Luck 96, “Rules” 177). The need to learn the rules and the existence of two standards reflect the ambiguities faced by Waverly and Lindo as Chinese Americans. Yet it is also apparent that the mother and daughter are playing by different rules. Waverly’s success with American-style chess emboldens her, and she forgets that her household observes a different mentality.

Seventeen makes the mother-daughter battle obvious to its readers. The story opens on a two-page spread, with an illustration representing Lindo and Waverly as pieces on a chessboard facing one another. They are blown by a wind coming from the west. The daughter has her back to it and her mother faces the gust. Having the wind at her back suggests Waverly has the advantage, whereas Lindo confronts the influence of the West head on. Along with the illustration and title, the Seventeen version offers another interpretive frame: a blurb that is not actually a quotation from the story. It reads, “My mother taught me everything I knew about winning—except what I needed to win against her. Once my strongest ally, she was now my fiercest opponent” (160). Whether or



not Tan wrote this statement or approved of it, it leaves no question that the mother-daughter conflict is the focal point in Seventeen. But does the conflict become generalized, separated from the particular cultural dynamics at play in the Wong family? To answer that question we must look at what passages were left out of the story.

The longer book version of “The Rules of the Game” suggests that Waverly’s success at chess forces her into maturity while she is still a child. Details about losing her youth are not found in the Seventeen story, where Waverly might easily appear years older to some readers. Waverly is in fact a preteen girl in the story, but her coming-of-age conflict with her mother could draw in the full spectrum of the magazine’s audience, which Seventeen counts as young women between the ages of 12 and 19.20 Seventeen edits out several paragraphs on Waverly’s childhood in Chinatown prior to devoting herself to chess. In these, we see Waverly playing with neighborhood friends in the alleyways, which she refers to as “the best playground” (Joy Luck 91). One backstreet near her home, with its traditional herb shop and fish market, “was crammed with daily mysteries and adventure” (Joy Luck 91). Her account of her childhood memories mirrors her explanation of her passion for chess: “I loved the secrets I found within the sixty-four black and white squares. I carefully drew a handmade chessboard and pinned it to the wall next to my bed, where at night I would stare for hours at imaginary battles” (Joy Luck 95). The Seventeen version does not show what becoming a chess prodigy has cost Waverly: she has to give up her childhood pleasures and isolate herself from her former playmates.

Seventeen also leaves out the passages, prominent in the novel, that show that even before she learned to play chess, Waverly took delight in being an outsider—and in turning the tables on unsuspecting adversaries. For example, the passage below is excluded from the magazine version of the story:

Tourists never went to Hong Sing’s, since the menu was printed only in Chinese. A Caucasian man with a big camera once posed me and my playmates in front of the restaurant. He had us move to the side of the picture window so the photo would capture the roasted duck with its head dangling from a juice-covered rope. After he took the picture, I told him he should go into Hong Sing’s and eat dinner. When he smiled and asked me what they served, I shouted, “Guts and duck’s feet and octopus gizzards!” (Joy Luck 91)

Just when the man might seem to be making a connection with the children, Waverly asserts herself defiantly to remind him that he is only a tourist and to


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affirm she is not the sweet little girl he took her for. This scene foreshadows another passage where she has her photo taken, this time for Life magazine, which celebrates her as a “child prodigy” and candidate for the rank of grand master (Joy Luck 97, “Rules” 177). David Gates’s review of The Joy Luck Club in Newsweek claims, “Tan is so cagey it takes a while to discern that fetching little Waverly, who posed for the press with ‘the delicate points of [her] elbows poised lightly on the table,’ has become a disagreeable young woman.”21 It is possible to reach the same conclusion from the Seventeen story alone, but there is far less of a suggestion that the seeds of her confrontational nature were with her while she was still a child. When these two “portrait sessions” are read in relation to one another, readers are apt to notice a certain ruthlessness hidden behind her appearance of innocence. Seventeen’s editing decisions highlight Waverly’s extraordinary talent, contradicting stereotypes of race, gender, and class, but they elide the question of why she is inclined to seek to raise herself up by cutting others down.

Waverly’s embarrassment at her mother’s pride in her daughter seems one of a piece with her desire to stand alone, which Seventeen readers may be less inclined to recognize. At the end of “Rules of the Game,” following an intense altercation with her mother, Waverly runs off: “I ducked into another dark alley, down another street, up another alley. I ran until it hurt and I realized I had nowhere to go, that I was not running from anything. The alleys contained no escape routes” (Joy Luck 100, “Rules” 178). Because of the deleted passages mentioned above, Seventeen readers are likely to miss the irony of her return to the alleys, which earlier she remembers fondly as the setting of her childhood adventures. Now the alleys trap her, when before she was in her element. Earlier Waverly describes her ascent to chess champion in this way: “I no longer played in the alley of Waverly Place. I never visited the playground where the pigeons and old men gathered. I went to school, then directly home to learn new chess secrets, cleverly concealed advantages, more escape routes” (Joy

Luck 98, “Rules” 177). Escape routes, literal and figurative, play an important part in understanding Waverly’s character. When faced with cross-cultural misunderstandings with her mother, here and elsewhere in The Joy Luck Club book, she looks for a way out. “End Game”—the story’s title in FM Five—points to the moment in a chess match when the playing field is considerably narrowed yet no player’s king is yet in check. At this stage the players’ learned strategies are of little use. That title emphasizes the close of the narrative, in which Waverly projects her mother’s withdrawal from her as only a temporary setback. She envisions a chessboard and considers the moves she has left to play after putting herself in a compromising position. Seventeen readers may not see the complexity of Waverly’s ongoing relationship with her mother, but the story’s last line, in both versions, shows her “pondering her next move” (Joy

Luck 101, “Rules” 178).



Seventeen prefers the story of a willful Americanized daughter actively asserting her independence from her Chinese-born mother. This clash of opposites is often cited in reviews of The Joy Luck Club, including Seventeen’s review of the book as a whole written by Ann Patchett. Patchett praises the book’s treatment of “patterns that bind mother and daughter,” which follow familiar contours across different ethnic and cultural contexts. She commends Tan for “portray[ing] the struggle and love so realistically that you might find yourself taking another look at your mother, wondering about her life before you and how it shapes you both right now.”22 The review in Seventeen reminds its readers that a mother is an indisputable influence on a daughter’s identity, despite periods of alliance alternating with conflict that ultimately strengthen the relationship. Patchett speaks to teen readers directly through the use of second-person pronouns, encouraging them to see themselves in the characters, even though they may not be the same age or share the same cultural background. Patchett’s view of The Joy Luck Club as a whole conforms to the message that Seventeen readers are likely to take away from the edited version of “The Rules of the Game”: mothers and daughters may have intense disagreements at times, but they nevertheless retain a close bond.

The mother-daughter bond also suffers from Waverly losing a connection with her community, and so there is reason for Seventeen to downplay her self-isolating acts of provocation. Patchett’s Seventeen-sanctioned reading of Amy Tan could easily be considered proof that the magazine “trains” teenagers to adopt “socially correct behavior,” as Ellen McCracken puts it in her study of women’s magazines.23 However, the magazine’s emphasis on peace in the family does not always appear absolute. “The Rules of the Game” appeared in the November 1986 issue, just pages after an article that discussed the challenges facing so-called bicultural children of parents with different ethnicities or religious beliefs. Seventeen attempts to empower multicultural adolescents by putting a positive spin on this situation: the power to choose between or blend traditions. The author of “Ethmix!”, Betsy Israel, writes, “For some of us, having a choice can mean choosing something unexpected, or coming up with a unique way to merge very different worlds.”24 Read alongside “The Rules of the Game,” “Ethmix!” seems to suggest that, although Waverly has developed a talent uncommon for her peer group, perhaps she has not yet arrived at a the right way to integrate it into her family life.

Tan’s book, however, openly acknowledges that some worlds cannot be easily merged. Lindo Jong, in the story “Double Faced” near the end of The Joy

Luck Club, muses, “It’s my fault [Waverly] is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?”25 Young readers of The Joy Luck

Club book may find that “biculturalism” never really reaches the harmonious


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stasis Betsy Israel describes. One student voiced on Amazon.com that this lack of resolution—unlike the obvious triumphs of the teenagers described in the “Ethmix!” article—was a distinct drawback of the book: “You never know if the daughters get out of troubling relationships, or if the mothers ever get the relationship they want with their daughters.”26 The readerly desire for a satisfying resolution may be another reason Seventeen steers away from the themes that complicate the relationships portrayed in The Joy Luck Club book.

“The Joy Luck Club”

The review of The Joy Luck Club in Seventeen assumes that in time daughters will see their mothers differently as they age and begin to think about families of their own. The book’s power to engage women at various life stages features prominently in reviews on Amazon.com as well. One reader praises the cross-generational appeal of The Joy Luck Club: “The point is that all mothers and daughters find themselves having to find new ways to relate to each other as time and their lives change. The way you relate to your mother as a child is vastly different from a teenager, from a young adult and then as a mother yourself.”27 This comment describes the situation in the title story, which opens at a meeting of the Joy Luck Club founded decades ago by the recently deceased Suyuan Woo, consisting of her three women friends and their spouses. After dinner, the women play mahjong, where June (Jing-mei) Woo takes the place of her mother at the mahjong table. The story centers on June’s awareness of how these new circumstances have changed her interactions with her mother’s peers—Chinese-born immigrants and the mothers of June’s childhood friends, likewise born in the United States. In turn, June revisits her memories of her mother and comes to see their relationship in a different light.

The title story of Tan’s book appeared in condensed form in the March 1989 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (the same month the book was released).28 “The Joy Luck Club” serves as an introduction to the entire book, so it is not surprising that the sections that allude to characters who appear in later stories are left out of the magazine version. Yet in the late 1980s Ladies’ Home

Journal was intentionally reshaping its audience in two particular ways that may have influenced the editing of Tan’s story. The first is the result of the near disappearance of fiction from the magazine in favor of personal narrative. Ladies’ Home Journal thereby encouraged their readers to regard authors as speaking from the immediacy of lived experience. Second, and more important, in their marketing to potential advertisers and subscribers Ladies’ Home Journal described how their magazine aspired to reach so-called New Traditionalists—women interested in setting aside their careers to devote themselves to



their families. Catering to this target audience served as a way for women’s magazines to reach both working women and housewives.

Mary Ellen Zuckerman and John Tebbel describe how fiction has been largely pushed out of women’s magazines in recent decades and replaced with coverage of “social and political topics through the time-honored device of educating about an issue through an individual’s story.”29 Ladies’ Home Journal went from being a magazine filled with short stories, serial fiction, and poetry to a periodical that devoted less than one percent of its contents to fiction.30 Like the personal narratives that fill the pages of the periodical, “The Joy Luck Club” provides a window into a cultural experience uncommon to most readers of the magazine. The short story in Ladies’ Home Journal sets up an outsider’s view of June’s Chinese immigrant community. Here June, the narrator, is a proxy for a reader new to the characters and the customs she describes. By contrast, in the book, June remembers how when she was young she was forced to accompany her parents to club meetings and babysit her siblings and her mother’s friends’ children. Her mother and Auntie An-mei “were dressed up in funny Chinese dresses with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches of embroidered silk sewn over their breasts. These clothes were too fancy for real Chinese people I thought, and too strange for American parties” (Joy Luck 28). She concludes, “In those days . . . I imagined Joy Luck was a shameful Chinese custom, like the secret gatherings of the Ku Klux Klan or the tom-tom dances of TV Indians preparing for war” (Joy Luck 28). These details, left out of the Ladies’ Home Journal version, affirm that in her youth June did not even know which traditions were proper to her own family and friends and which were traditions more widely held. The aunties, on the other hand, have gone from trying to recreate a Chinese party to adapting the event to suit their current circumstances, which includes bringing store-bought food and wearing slacks. Readers of Ladies’ Home Journal might not recognize the extent to which the aunties have indeed assimilated. June herself only recognizes this upon replaying the events of her childhood. Readers of the Ladies’ Home Journal version might take June’s disorientation as the result of encountering the club for the first time, when in the book her unease comes from remembering the group she once knew as a child from her perspective as a grown woman.

In these ways “The Joy Luck Club” replicates the nonfiction in Ladies’ Home

Journal that largely focuses on personal narratives written by women dealing with and overcoming real-life uncertainty. Yet the Ladies’ Home Journal version almost portrays June as psychologically lost after the death of her mother, fortunate to reconnect with family friends and gain strong female mentors. The cuts suggest a concentrated effort to portray the ladies as the real heart of the group, at the expense of all else. The magazine eliminates references to June’s father, the widower, and the men of Joy Luck, as well as June’s childhood


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friends, the sons and daughters of the three other women at the mahjong table. These deletions obviously ensure that the focus stays on the encounter among women of different generations. But these truncations have the effect of misrepresenting the distinct peer group that the club is for these women and their families. June’s father, however, is in fact a member of the club who greets June upon arriving, a blood relation and a fellow mourner also meditating on the memory of Suyuan Woo. In the Ladies’ Home Journal version, the spouses of the aunties play cards while the women play mahjong, but the men are never called the “Joy Luck uncles” as they are in the book (e.g., Joy Luck 29, 32).

It would seem that Ladies’ Home Journal was more concerned with framing “The Joy Luck Club” as a story of a renewed appreciation for and identification with one’s heritage. June’s apparent embrace of traditions from her mother’s generation plays into the kind of readership the magazine was trying to attract at this time. Zuckerman’s survey of women’s magazines in the 1970s and 1980s, co-written with Tebbel, notes that, while some titles were pursuing narrower markets, Ladies’ Home Journal and other mass circulation women’s periodicals bet on a renewed interest in the family and the home as women completed their educations and established themselves in careers. This audience segment was known to magazine publishers as the New Traditionalists or Neotraditionalists.31 In her article “The New Traditionalism: Repackaging Ms. Consumer,” Marcy Darnovsky quotes a print advertisement from Good

Housekeeping aimed at potential advertisers for that magazine that invites them to cater to the “contemporary woman who finds her fulfillment in traditional values that were considered ‘old-fashioned’ just a few years ago.”32 Efforts to address this supposedly new readership is evidence that most women’s magazines resisted changing focus as more and more women entered the workplace, as Susan Faludi argues in her study Backlash: The Undeclared War

against Women.33 Though Faludi stresses that the movement was more invented than real, promoting New Traditionalism offered a way for Ladies’ Home Journal to remain connected to two divergent demographics.

The theme of cross-generational encounter makes “The Joy Luck Club” attractive to women of all ages, in line with the expansive readership Ladies’

Home Journal pursued. June seeks acceptance from the older generation when she once wanted more distance. There is a scene in which June does not correct Auntie Lin for calling her Jing-mei, noting that “it’s even becoming fashionable for American-born Chinese to use their Chinese names” (Joy Luck 37, “Joy Luck” 105). It would be clear to readers that June and the aunties’ daughters would have previously resented their mothers using their Chinese names as opposed to the American names they have assumed. But the cycles of fashion reverse, in part brought on by new circumstances in adulthood, and the Chinese name becomes to these young women a mark of distinction among their peers.



The appeal of this scene to the audience of the Ladies’ Home Journal lies in its combination of the contemporary and the traditional while suggesting a renewed interest in family and heritage.

Darnovsky claims that the magazines’ campaign to reach the New Traditionalist reader “play[ed] to the doubts and dissatisfactions of many kinds of women: women trying to juggle family and career, women wishing they had one or the other or both, women disappointed with the work world, women with twinges of guilt about feminist promises betrayed.”34 In “The Joy Luck Club,” Ladies’ Home Journal avoids putting this anxiety on display, intentionally or not, by leaving out passages where the aunties’ children are discussed. Compared to the other young women narrators in The Joy Luck Club, June is the least successful professionally and financially. The truncated version of the story does not mention that June was evicted from her apartment while Auntie Ying boasts of her daughter Lena buying an expensive house in a coveted neighborhood (Joy

Luck 38). That said, Ladies’ Home Journal retains passages that mention June did not finish college (Joy Luck 37, “Joy Luck” 105), much to the disappointment of her mother, which actually may make her more sympathetic to the magazine’s readers for not presuming higher education and personal fulfillment go hand in hand.

Darnovsky in her article shows how the New Traditionalist ethos appears to celebrate personal choices pertaining to career and family life but may instead intensify women’s tendencies to measure themselves against each other. In “The Joy Luck Club,” there is a veiled and sometimes unspoken rivalry under the surface of the conversations, which Ladies’ Home Journal may have wanted to play down through its editing choices. The women’s children, without their direct participation, even become caught up in the competition among the aunties, as seen in the book version. There June notes, “Auntie Lin and my mother were both best friends and arch enemies who spent a lifetime comparing their children” (Joy Luck 37). The daughters emulate this same behavior as they grow up, despite their efforts to break the cycle. Without these details and dialogue, the magazine readers might not readily appreciate that the intimacy among Chinese immigrants and their Chinese-American daughters implies an element of competition.

But it is the ending of “The Joy Luck Club” story that most plays to the New Traditionalist sensibility. The horizons ahead of June are also ones that reinforce family ties and a connection to the past. The aunties give June the opportunity to meet her estranged sisters in China and build a new relationship that also carries on the memory of her mother. June at first expresses her hesitations about the extent to which she truly knows her mother. Her self-doubt actually assures the reader of Ladies’ Home Journal that June retains the outlook of her age group in deciding to reconnect with her family. The aunties balk at June’s reservations because family is not a choice; your mother “is in your bones,”


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Auntie Ling tells her (Joy Luck 40, “Joy Luck” 106). New Traditionalism combines the views of both generations through reimagining what was once an obligation as a conscious decision. Kathryn Keller, in her monograph Mothers and Work in

Popular American Magazines, stresses how foregrounding the “right to choose” casts women as active even when their activity is not career oriented: in women’s magazines, “the housewife was declared a feminist who sought fulfillment of herself.”35 The trick for women’s magazines is to make the younger generation feel as its freedom to choose is respected while flattering the older generation by demonstrating the enduring currency of its values. The concluding scene of “The Joy Luck Club” appears to transcend the tension between choice and inevitability. The readers of Ladies’ Home Journal are treated in this story to a satisfying ending that they might wish for themselves in their everyday lives.

This essay demonstrates that the magazine versions of Amy Tan’s stories lose layers of meaning when streamlined to stand alone and appeal to narrower audiences. Whereas the shortened stories reduce the complexity of the experiences of the Chinese-American characters, the presence of overlapping stories in one volume is touted by some to have the opposite effect. In The

Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre, James Nagel states that the short story cycle, as compared to a novel or individual story, excels in “representing the situation of the ethnic community as a whole” (255).36 He even calls the contemporary short story cycle a “socially unifying medium” that attracts “a community of readers willing to understand and empathize with a spectrum of characters from ethnic groups unlike their own.”37 Nagel sets before the audience of ethnic American short story cycles a common goal that it might work to achieve. The form of the short story cycle “invit[es] the reader to construct a network of associations that binds the stories together and lends them cumulative thematic impact,” to quote J. Gerald Kennedy.38 When it comes to The Joy Luck Club, however, Joyce Maynard’s review in Mademoiselle is one of the few that acknowledges the extra effort required in reading the book and the benefits of such attentive reception: “while I did need to refer back to Tan’s list of mothers and daughters at the front of the book to keep everyone straight, by the end of the novel I felt intimately acquainted with each of these women.”39 References to the list of characters are frequent in comments posted on Goodreads and Amazon.com, usually in order to show how difficult the book is to read. For the average reader of The Joy Luck

Club, the form’s insistence that any overall interpretation of the book consider how stories play off one another might detract from the reading experience. Whether the ethnic American short story cycle is inviting for or demanding of readers may depend on the audience’s desire to gain a greater cultural understanding that is in part a product of grappling with the fictional form.



Contrary to the assuredness of professional reviewers, online reviews from common readers exhibit some anxiety about whether or not they completely “get” Tan’s book. One Goodreads user was perplexed by finding herself feeling “terribly neutral” about The Joy Luck Club: “I’d say maybe it’s cultural, but I’ve read plenty of books, some about different cultures, where different generations fundamentally don’t understand each other. Some of those have been freaking fantastic. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s not.”40 This reader’s comments suggest that what in the previous discussion Nagel called a readiness “to understand and empathize” may not be enough to arrive at an appreciation of The Joy Luck Club. Rocío G. Davis values the “composite portrait of the immigrant’s dilemma” gained by reading all of Tan’s stories together,41 and perhaps the failure to create this gestalt or muster up the effort to do so makes for dissatisfied readers. Scholars have argued that without sustained engagement, it is all too easy to misread The Joy Luck Club. Melanie McAlister contends that Tan’s simple prose interweaved with fantastical Chinese myth actually predisposes readers to letting details slide by: “If the individuality of the mothers and their daughters is lost in a lyricism that confuses them all, the power of each story—of the particular set of relations between mother and daughter—is destroyed.”42 Clearly reader participation is not only an issue for common readers; scholars, too, could default to preset interpretations of the short story cycle as an ideal representation of ethnic American communities.

Questioning these characterizations of the short story cycle, other critics point to the flexibility of the form as a function of the reader’s participation. Robert M. Luscher notes that “the unity of the short story sequence will ultimately be a looser one, involving us in a more wide-ranging search for patterns of action and meaning—a more cooperative venture between reader and author than less open forms demand.”43 The form frustrates the coherence of an overall assessment and at the same time compels the reader to offer one. Yet not all connections are “intended” or plainly “in the text” for all to see. A cycle, simply by its structure, can suggest links across stories without spelling them out. It is in these cases where the reader considers the respective parts played by recognizing the connections offered in the text and making associations of one’s own. Perhaps the dissatisfaction of the reader described above and McAlister’s call for careful reading both assume that there is a composite portrait the author intends to convey. Unfortunately, reviewers of The Joy Luck Club tend to acknowledge the book’s open form only when they offer slight criticisms that detract from their enjoyment but do not spoil their overall impressions. In the New York Times, Orville Schell acknowledges Tan’s abrupt transitions, though he maintains “these disjunctions work for, rather than against, the novel” and through them readers “get a suggestion


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of the attendant confusion” of young Chinese Americans struggling to find themselves.44 David Gates’ Newsweek review of The Joy Luck Club notes that “inevitably the [characters’] voices sound alike, and the ill-chosen menfolk seem interchangeable. So do the mothers’ awful life stories. . . . But Tan is so gifted that none of this matters much.”45 If something is out of harmony in Tan’s book, reviewers tended to mention it is counterbalanced by other qualities in the mix that are better proportioned, without offering direct commentary on its impact on the coherence of the story cycle.

The readers of women’s magazines accept a looser unity in their constructions of what magazine titles represent overall, although from the outset they do not expect that a periodical has the cohesiveness of a book. This audience’s mode of engagement—that readers do not feel a need to reconcile the various features of a magazine into one coherent whole—both confirms and challenges Sean Latham and Robert Scholes’s recommendation that magazines “should be read as texts that have a unity different from but comparable with that of individual books.”46 Periodical content does occupy a larger, richer context from its proximity to other material brought together in the same issue under one title. But just as readers seek familiarity in the periodicals they read, they also have some interest in variety and a hunger for new material, which includes coverage of diverse cultures—and most likely this consideration prompted mass circulation magazines to run Tan’s fiction. At the same time, the deletions made to the stories in Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal expose fears about losing audience share. Perhaps the magazines anticipated their readers’ discomfort, since the editors could not assume a default interpretation of the stories without some modification. Such anticipation suggests they were indeed aware of their influence in staging reception. This implies, too, that the magazines do not regard their readers as an empathetic community in the way that Nagel characterizes those who pick up short story cycles by ethnic American authors. Foregrounding the mother-daughter themes in the stories of The Joy Luck Club provided a way for the magazines to appeal to their audiences’ existing cultural assumptions, offering an irresistible path-of-least-resistance reading.

notes1. Amy Tan, The Opposite of Fate (New York: Penguin, 2003), 10.

2. See Barbara Somogyi and David Stanton, Interview with Amy Tan, Poets and

Writers 19, no. 5 (1991), 24–32. Tan confirmed to them that she obtained a

book contract for The Joy Luck Club based on stories already written (including

“End Game,” retitled as “The Rules of the Game”) and then wrote stories around

them to complete the volume. There she also states that she never intended

her book to be a novel, though early readers of the galleys called it one, and the



designation seemed to stick. Also, it is necessary to point out that Tan did not

extensively revise her earlier stories to fit the emerging book, as many authors of

short story cycles do.

3. The short story cycle is also known by other names, notably the “composite novel”

and the “short story sequence.” See, for example, Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris,

The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition (New York: Twayne, 1995).

Definitions of the genre and lists of representative works do vary, however. My

research on the short story cycle approaches the narrative form as a consequence

of particular publication circumstances: magazine stories reprinted in single-author

volumes of linked stories.

4. Joyce Maynard, “The Almost All-American Girls,” Mademoiselle, July 1989, 70.

5. Review of The Joy Luck Club, Publishers Weekly, December 23, 1988, 66.

6. Melanie McAlister, “(Mis)Reading The Joy Luck Club,” in Amy Tan, edited by

Harold Bloom (New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009), 4.

7. Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, “‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon,”

in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, edited by David

Palumbo-Liu (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 181.

8. Amy Tan does not purport to be an authority on Chinese culture. See Tan, “In the

Canon, for All the Wrong Reasons,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1996, 28: “I am

alarmed when reviewers and educators assume that my very personal, specific,

and fictional stories are meant to represent down to the nth detail not just Chinese

Americans but, sometimes, all of Asian culture.”

9. Wong, “Sugar Sisterhood,” 181.

10. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 70–71.

11. Tony Bennett, “Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts,” in

Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, edited by James L. Machor

and Philip Goldstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 69.

12. Kelley Massoni, Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine

(Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010), 21.

13. Janice Radway, “What’s the Matter with Reception Study?”, in New Directions in

American Reception Study, edited by Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 340.

14. James Nagel, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of

Genre (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 256–57.

15. See Gayle Feldman’s “The Joy Luck Club: Chinese Magic, American Blessings and

a Publishing Fairy Tale,” Publishers Weekly, July 7, 1989, 24–26. Tan claimed to be

“amazed by [Erdrich’s] voice” and could “identify with the powerful images, the

beautiful language, and such moving stories” (24). She does not actually say she

emulated the narrative form of Love Medicine, though.

16. Rocío G. Davis, “Identity in Community in Ethnic Short Story Cycles,” in Ethnicity

and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown (New York: Garland, 1997), 10.

17. Amy Tan, “End Game,” FM Five 3, no. 4 (1986), 7–9, 12. Feldman’s account suggests

that Seventeen came to Tan after the story appeared in FM Five rather than the

author sharing her work with the magazine. Tan signed a contract to deliver The Joy


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Luck Club book to Putnam in December 1987, just over a year after “The Rules of the

Game” was published in Seventeen.

18. Amy Tan, “The Rules of the Game,” The Joy Luck Club (New York: Putnam, 1989),

89–101; Amy Tan, “The Rules of the Game,” Seventeen, November 1986, 160–61,

177–79. Parenthetical references cite the pages of these texts.

19. Nagel, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, 201.

20. Seventeen Media Kit, http://www.seventeenmediakit.com.

21. David Gates, “A Game of Show Not Tell,” Newsweek, April 17, 1989, 69.

22. Ann Patchett, Review of The Joy Luck Club, Seventeen, August 1989, 126.

23. Ellen McCracken, Decoding Women’s Magazines (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 146.

24. Betsy Israel, “Ethmix!”, Seventeen, November 1986, 182.

25. Tan, The Joy Luck Club, 254.

26. “Reading for a Project, but that’s about it,” Amazon.com, January 31, 2013, http://

www.amazon.com/review/RXDZLW3LRT5XJ/ref=cm_srch_res_rtr_alt_1.

27. “I identified so much with these characters!”, Amazon.com, October 16, 2012,

http://www.amazon.com/review/R11AX09CK2B94G/ref=cm_srch_res_rtr_alt_1.

28. Amy Tan, “The Joy Luck Club,” Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1989, 98, 100, 102–3,

105–6; Amy Tan, “The Joy Luck Club,” The Joy Luck Club (New York: Putnam,

1989), 19–41. Parenthetical references cite the pages of these texts.

29. Mary Ellen Zuckerman and John Tebbel, A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in

the United States, 1792–1995 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), 234.

30. Kathleen L. Endres, “Ladies’ Home Journal,” in Women’s Periodicals in the United

States: Consumer Magazines, edited by Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck

(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), 178.

31. John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America: 1741–1990

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 269–70.

32. Marcy Darnovsky, “The New Traditionalism: Repackaging Ms. Consumer,” Social

Text 29 (1991), 72.

33. See Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (New York:

Crown, 1991), 92–95.

34. Darnovsky, “The New Traditionalism,” 75.

35. Kathryn Keller, Mothers and Work in Popular American Magazines (Westport, CT:

Greenwood, 1994), 112.

36. Nagel, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, 255.

37. Ibid., 257.

38. J. Gerald Kennedy, “The American Short Story Sequence—Definitions and

Implications,” in Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and

Fictive Communities, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995), 149.

39. Maynard, “The Almost All-American Girls,” 70.

40. Megan Baxter, Review of The Joy Luck Club, Goodreads, December 9, 2012, https://

www.goodreads.com/review/show/455681960.

41. Davis, “Identity in Community in Ethnic Short Story Cycles,” 6.

42. McAlister, “(Mis)Reading The Joy Luck Club,” 9–10.



43. Robert M. Luscher, “The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book,” in Short Story

Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana University Press, 1989), 157.

44. Orville Schell, “Your Mother Is in Your Bones,” New York Times, March 19, 1989,

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/19/books/your-mother-is-in-your-bones.html.

45. Gates, “A Game of Show Not Tell,” 69.

46. Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA 121, no. 2

(March 2006): 517.



Copyright © 2015



Park, PA

Asian American Literature and Reading Formationsa case study of nora okja keller’s

comfort woman and fox girl

allison layfield

abstract: Since the 1970s, literature by Asian American

women writers has made a significant impact on the

American literary canon. But despite these gains, this article

argues that the reception of Asian American literature is

limited not only by aesthetics and literary value, but by

several factors specific to the perceived racial and national

identity of its authors or characters. Through a reception

study of two novels by Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman

and Fox Girl, Layfield argues that a positive reception of

Asian American women’s literature depends on several key

factors: first, readers want to experience the situation of

Asian women; second, the story of this “other” needs to be

told in a familiar structure associated with Asian American

literature, such as the mother-daughter tale; and finally, this

story needs to conform to successful immigration stories in

which the heroine reaffirms the importance of the nuclear

family and portrays immigration to the United States as a

means of salvation.

Since the 1970s Asian American literature has grown from an emerging to an established literary tradition, and Asian American women writers in particular have helped with this positive development. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975) has entered into the mainstream American literary

Reception_7_06_Layfield.indd 64 15/06/15 9:24 PM

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canon and is widely taught at the high school and university levels. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) achieved impressive commercial success, and the film adaptation introduced Chinese American experience to a mainstream, non-Chinese American audience. Asian American authors are now more frequently published and earn more commercial and literary success than in the 1970s, and texts written by Asian Americans have made remarkable progress, especially during the 1990s, in mainstreaming Asian American experience into what was a predominately non-Asian American literary canon.1

However, the successes of Asian American literature are typically appraised by looking at the intentions and political goals of the authors or by analyzing the texts themselves. Asian American literature has been assigned the task of incorporating Asian and Asian American experience into audience notions of what it means to be American; thus, it is important to consider the political implications of the relationships between readers and Asian American texts. In “Texts and History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts,” Tony Bennett suggests that the literary critic should analyze the relationships between readers and texts, or “move [texts] about in different ways, to locate them within different reading formations and to produce them as different texts for different readers in accordance with shifting and variable calculations of political objectives.”2 Bennett acknowledges that readers have individual relationships with texts, but also that readers’ uses for texts are politically determined. In studying the reception of Asian American literature,3 I hope to see how readers imagine their own political roles and those of literature when they encounter Asian American writers, characters, and texts.

To this end, I examine the reception of two novels by Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman (1997) and Fox Girl (2003). I look at three specific readerships: professional reviewers, literary scholars and Amazon.com readers. Readers in each of these reading formations make judgments about the literary merit of these texts, but readers are not influenced by literary merit alone. I found that a positive reception of Keller’s work also depends upon several other factors. First, readers want to be introduced to a nonwhite, non-American Other in a friendly cultural context; second, the story of this Other needs to be told in a familiar structure associated with Asian American literature, such as the mother-daughter tale; and finally, this story needs to represent Asian women as either passive victims or as selfless heroines. These heroines should also reaffirm the importance of traditional family bonds or portray immigration to the United States as a means of salvation.

Nora Okja Keller wrote her first novel, Comfort Woman, late at night, in her spare time. The novel was inspired by a lecture given by a former Korean “comfort woman”4 at the University of Hawaii. At the time, Keller had already pursued an interest in Asian American literature as both a graduate student


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at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and as an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii. Born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1965, Keller grew up in Hawaii, and her Korean American background along with the emerging stories of “comfort women” inspired Keller to write her first novel, which quickly received critical acclaim. Keller planned a trilogy of novels about the sexual exploitation of Korean women.5 Each novel was to have a different set of characters, but the texts would be linked together thematically and chronologically: Comfort Woman took place in the 1940s; her second novel, Fox

Girl, was set in the 1960s; and at the time of her interview with Terry Hong of the Bloomsbury Review, Keller planned on writing a third novel to take place in the 1980s. Fox Girl was published six years after Comfort Woman, and the third novel was never completed.

Keller makes for an interesting case study because despite her popularity, only Comfort Woman has received literary awards and been the subject of extensive scholarly criticism. Across all three readerships, Comfort Woman has been discussed more often than Fox Girl. On Amazon.com, Comfort Woman received thirty-three reviews and Fox Girl received only thirteen. The MLA database contains almost twice as many entries for scholarly works on Comfort

Woman as it does for Fox Girl, and there are few professional reviews of Fox Girl in comparison to the many mainstream newspaper and magazine reviews of Comfort Woman. In these professionally written reviews, Keller’s writing style in Comfort Woman is often praised, while it is ignored in Fox Girl. In positive Amazon reviews of Fox Girl, readers usually discuss negative emotions even though readers assign the book a three-star or higher rating.

This discrepancy in positive attention is surprising given that Comfort

Woman and Fox Girl have similar plots and themes. In Comfort Woman, heroine Soon Hyo is sold to Japanese soldiers at a young age and forced to work in “comfort camps” performing domestic duties until she is old enough to be a sex slave for soldiers, euphemistically called a “comfort woman.” She is then renamed “Akiko” by her Japanese captors. After her escape from these camps, she marries an American missionary, who takes her to live in the United States. When he dies, Akiko is still haunted by her experience as a “comfort woman” as she raises her daughter in Hawaii. Hyun Jin, the protagonist of Fox Girl, is banished from her family home and survives by entering into prostitution in “Americatown,” a slum that caters to a neighboring U.S. military base. Hyun Jin climbs through the ranks of sex bars until she takes an opportunity to work as an indentured sex worker in Hawaii, where she moves with her adopted daughter and eventually escapes prostitution.

The positive reception of Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman can be partially explained by its timely publication and the historical context into which the novel emerged. In 1991, Ha Koon Ja, a former Korean “comfort woman,”


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spoke publicly about her experience as a sex slave for the Japanese Imperial Army. After fifty years of silence, many women followed her lead and began speaking out, which led to a public call for apology and reparations from the Japanese government.6 As the stories of “comfort women” spread through international news media, these women began travelling abroad to lecture and bear testimony. Just two years later, Keller attended the symposium that inspired her to write Comfort Woman.

Like Keller, many artists in the 1990s sought to publicize and complicate understandings of “comfort women.” The artwork produced about this topic reflects artists’ desires to “give voice” to a silenced subject.7 Keller herself discusses her need to “give voice” in her 1993 interview, and notes the audience’s reaction to her work: “I remember when I was writing the novel, I would type in ‘Comfort Woman/Women’ in the internet search engines and would only get things like ‘home making’ back. After my book was published, I was gratified to see that when I typed in ‘Comfort Woman,’ reviews and news stories about Korean and Filipina comfort camp survivors appeared.”8 Keller’s desire to speak for these “comfort women” was a perfect fit for an audience searching for more information about the experiences of these Korean women.

Positive reviews and awards earned by Comfort Woman gave Keller more exposure and attracted readers with the promise of a beautifully written “comfort woman” narrative. In March 1997, the New York Times called Comfort

Woman “an impressive debut” and compared Keller to Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison, thereby placing Keller in a tradition of highly respected American women writers.9 The Missouri Review, Bloomsbury Review, New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, and Publisher’s Weekly all share similar views of the novel, describing it as “hauntingly lyrical,” “beautifully written,” and a “powerful” book. The pairing of “beautifully written” and “haunting” reflects the feeling of an American public learning about “comfort women”: this reading public wants to be haunted, amazed, and disturbed in a way that encourages readers to appreciate storytelling techniques. The focus on her lyrical prose invites positive recognition for Keller as an up-and-coming writer of high literary merit. Although it is unclear whether these reviews directly relate to the awards Keller received later on, the high praise she received immediately after publication garnered attention for Comfort Woman and publicized the name of her novel well before she was awarded an American Book Award in 1998 and the 1999 Eliot Cades Book Award.

Winning the American Book Award helped garner more attention for Comfort Woman. The award is given by the Before Columbus Foundation, a group dedicated “to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature . . . BCF has always employed the term ‘multicultural’ not as a description of an aspect of American literature, but as


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a definition of all American literature.”10 The foundation views multicultural literature as synonymous with American literature and thus the story of “comfort women” was validated and recognized as an American story that affirms and contributes to the multicultural composition of the United States. Texts receiving this award are often canonized as multicultural literature in public school and college classrooms, and the award itself is often mentioned as part of the novel’s appeal.

Not only was the novel’s publication well timed, but Comfort Woman also fit perfectly within an already accepted tradition of the mother-daughter tale in Asian American literature, and this shaped reader appreciation for the novel. The narrative structure of Comfort Woman, which alternates between chapters narrated by Akiko (the mother) and Beccah (the daughter), highlights the mother-daughter tale as the framework of the novel. As Patricia P. Chu points out, the mother-daughter narrative has become a staple of Asian American women’s writing and can be found in the works of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston in addition to Keller’s novel. These mother-daughter narratives tend to eclipse the immigrant woman’s experience in favor of a story that has become formulaic:

The Asian American daughter is typically cured of her malaise by hearing about some trauma or ordeal endured by her mother. The more exotic, traumatic, and suspenseful the mother’s story, the less necessary it is to have it organically linked to the issues the American daughter is dealing with. . . . [T]he mother’s story becomes a psychoanalytic revelation to the American-born daughter.11

The narrative of Beccah fits nicely into this formula. While dealing with her mother’s death, Beccah hears of her mother’s life as a “comfort woman” and is better able to understand her own difficult life with a crazy mother as well as her own alienation as a Korean American living in the United States. As scholars have pointed out, this narrative appeals to American ideals of self-improvement and independence.12 The New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani reinforces this reading of Comfort Woman by quoting and describing Akiko’s experience but concluding that it is the “mother-daughter relationship” that warrants appreciation.13 Within this conventional storyline, the story of the “comfort woman” is the backdrop that makes this mother-daughter tale interesting.

It is also important to note that it is Beccah, the American daughter, who develops psychologically, not her Korean immigrant mother. Beccah must learn to relate to her crazy, foreign mother “to gain a sense of self, in order to move from selflessness to selfhood.”14 This aspect of the mother-daughter narrative


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can help explain the novel’s success among American readers because it invites them to “read narratives of Asian women’s experience from a perspective that is involved, yet distanced from that experience . . . the perspective of the American daughters.”15

This appeal of the self-improvement narrative is apparent in the plot summaries in Amazon.com reader reviews. Fifteen of the thirty-three Amazon.com reviews of Comfort Woman discuss Beccah’s story in psychological terms, describing the mother-daughter relationship as either the central focus of the novel’s plot or as important to understanding the “comfort woman” story.16 These readers claim that Beccah’s narrative is ultimately about “the importance of the mother-daughter bond,” a “relationship [that] is so complex and unique for everyone,” and through which “Beccah gains self-awareness.”17 Reader summaries of the novel are divided between recognition of the mother-daughter tale as the defining plot line and their use of the novel as a means of accessing the authentic experiences of “comfort women.”18 Readers often link their plot summaries and reading experiences to their own identities. Although Amazon.com provides readers a space to review books anonymously, nearly one-third of Comfort Woman reviews discuss how the racial, ethnic, gender, or socioeconomic status of a reader affects the experience of reading the novel. Reader identity plays a particularly important role in how readers discuss the mother-daughter tale.

There are two ways in which Amazon.com readers discuss the influence of reader identity on the experience of reading Comfort Woman. The first approach readers take is to avoid self-identification while suggesting a potential reader’s experience would be influenced by racial or ethnic identity. For example, Daniel Clausen of Florida writes, “the novel tells a personal tale about a mother and daughter . . . without knowing anything about Asian-American history or literature, anyone can enjoy this book.”19 Clausen is vague about his ethnicity in relation to his reading of the novel, but he reveals an assumption that non-Asian American readers are the audience for this text and that these readers will react according to their ability to relate to characters. Another reader, “A Customer” from the year 2000, in the review titled, “a beautifully original book . . . again,” defends the clichéd mother-daughter tale in “Asian stories” because the use of this plot line “does not dilute the power of these tales for people who have direct connections to the voices of authors like keller [sic].” This comment comes after this reader’s admission that “the contemporary issue of being Korean American [is] something I’m very interested in.”20 Like Clausen, this reader chooses not to self-identify according to race or ethnicity, but implies that those readers who share ethnicity with authors or characters will see the mother-daughter tale as relevant rather than cliché. Both readers assume that readers of Comfort Woman will evaluate the novel from their own ethnic or racial positions.


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But other readers self-identify according to race, ethnicity, gender or socioeconomic status in order to validate their reactions to the novel. Joan Redden, for example, writes: “I am a Caucasian woman and I wonder how a woman so young could have known the story of my mother and me. This is not just the story of culture, but of aspects of abuse that happen to women everywhere.”21 This reader identifies with the mother-daughter formula and connects it to her own life, but the story of the “comfort woman” is erased by the reader’s focus on the mother-daughter tale. This erasure allows this reader to occupy the “involved, yet distant” position described by Patricia Chu.

Redden’s use of self-identification as a means of discussing the novel is also shared by Asian and Asian American readers. “A Customer” from 1999 confides: “I was in pain for what I [sic] read on the pages of the book was such vividly portrayed pain of Akiko that it emersed [sic] into my own blood. I am of Korean descent.”22 Both Redden and “A Customer, 1999” respond positively to Keller’s novel; the Caucasian-identified reader feels connected to the story in spite of racial differences, and the reader of Korean descent feels connected because of racial similarities. Both readers assume that readers feel more empathy for characters with whom they share a racial identification.

These Amazon.com readers use self-identification to discuss their positive experiences with Comfort Woman, but readers also use race and ethnicity to discuss their negative reading experiences. Of the five negative reviews (those receiving a 2-star or lower rating), four accused Keller of imitating the work of Amy Tan. These readers in the fifteenth percentile are frustrated with the “Orientalist rendering of the Korean woman/immigrant as schizophrenic outsider,” as well as the “cookie-cutter, stereotypical Asian Woman Writer plot” that “brings in some sort of ethereal mother-daughter spirituality.”23 These readers feel that the mother-daughter tale has ceased to be a medium that engages the reader with Asian or Asian American culture but has become the only type of Asian American story to attain national attention. Underneath the animosity in these reviews is also an apprehension that these “cookie-cutter,” “stereotypical” plots are marketed toward a white audience, and this formula severely limits what Asian American women writers can produce if they are to be considered commercially or critically successful. The “Customer, 2000,” who reviewed the book negatively, warns readers that “Praising a novel blindly just because the writer is hapa and the characters are Asian is as bad as panning it for that reason” and justifies this comment with self-identification: “And FYI I am also Hapa (Japanese American).” “Fez Monkey” extends this criticism to both readers and publishers: “Asian women writers are only allowed to achieve success by writing about first hating, then understanding, and eventually appreciating and loving their mothers. But, I guess it’s true. Give the people what they want (and what they expect), and they’ll continue to ask for more.”


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Common among these negative reviews are readers who want texts that break the stereotype of the Asian American mother-daughter tale. Such texts certainly exist; the question is how to bring these works to the attention of reviewers and awards committees who can help popularize these stories and move readers beyond the framework of their familiar expectations.

The ways in which Comfort Woman constructs the identities of Asian women also determine the novel’s reception. Scholars writing about both Keller and Maxine Hong Kingston often discuss the move in Asian American women’s writing to re-position Asian women as active heroines rather than as passive victims. Comfort Woman works against the stereotype of passive Asian women by positioning Akiko/Soon Hyo as a survivor, someone strong enough to overcome her sexual enslavement and provide a better life for her daughter. Popular readers appreciate this transition from powerlessness to strength. Nearly 30 percent of readers on Amazon.com regard Comfort Woman as a pedagogical text that will introduce them to the history of “comfort women” and teach readers about the horrors these women faced as victims under Japanese military enslavement.24 Even more readers value Akiko/Soon Hyo for surviving these atrocities in order to provide a better life for her daughter.25 Not only are these readers expecting a victim’s story, but they value a certain kind of victim’s story, that of the Asian woman who endures victimization to ultimately provide a better life for her child. This “better life” occurs in America and is thus a culturally acceptable immigration story. Amazon.com readers do not mention the victimization of Akiko at the hands of the American husband responsible for her migration to the United States nor do they discuss the poverty, isolation, and exploitation Akiko faces once she settles in Hawaii.

However, these readers are less interested in the character’s survival than in her suffering. A surprising number of readers judge the value of Keller’s work in relation to how much emotional pain it causes them. Thirteen out of thirty-three Amazon.com readers reference pain—if they suffered as much as they expected, they praised the book. If they did not feel enough pain, they blamed Keller’s writing style. One self-identified high school student, Jackie W., writes, “This book is definitely not a happy story, but one that is extremely emotional to the point where you almost feel the character’s pain. FABULOUS!” Another reader describes the book as “painfully realistic . . . deeply moving.”26 Readers imagine that pain and empathy are required of them and experiencing the pain of another is part of what makes for an enjoyable read.

Just as they criticized the stereotypical portrayal of the mother-daughter Asian American novel, negative Amazon.com reviews criticize other readers for this desire to read about an Other in pain. For example, “Fez Monkey” claims that readers who enjoy The Joy Luck Club and Comfort Woman are “a population waiting for something to use their Kleenex box on.” Because readers are waiting


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for a “tear-jerker,” “Fez Monkey” claims, “the book exploits the nightmare of the ‘comfort women’ by making it a convenient backdrop for an otherwise tired re-hash of the slew of Asian Woman Writer novels.”27 Part of this criticism refers to the way readers use texts. For “Fez Monkey,” exploitation arises when a reader uses the pain of another to fulfill a desire that emerges from self-interest. In reader discussions of pain, only one mentions experiencing pain on behalf of the “comfort women”: “I feel deep pain for them, and respect.”28 The other readers speak of experiencing a pain that belongs to readers rather than to the characters. In other words, they appropriate the pain of the character and praise the author’s ability to enable this appropriation. Negative reviewers on Amazon.com recognize this act of appropriation, but those who write positive reviews do not recognize their own appropriation of the “comfort woman” experience. This link between the appropriation of pain and the enjoyment of a novel is important for both writers and scholars of Asian American literature, especially if these responses are consistent in the reception of other Asian American texts. The readers quoted above do not see a difference between empathy and appropriation, and they judge the literary merit of a text based on whether the writing style of an author enables this appropriation.

Like Comfort Woman, Fox Girl focuses on mother-daughter relationships as well as the sexual exploitation of Korean women. In Fox Girl, Hyun Jin is the daughter of a Korean prostitute and an American G.I. stationed in Korea during the Korean War. She is drawn into the world of Americatown, a slum on the outskirts of an American military base. Like Akiko, Hyun Jin experiences horrendous sexual exploitation and sees the possibility of moving to the United States as salvation. She is also similar to Akiko in her desire to provide a better life for her (adopted) daughter, and both women end up in Hawaii. Both novels deal with relationships between women: Comfort Woman focuses on the mother-daughter story of Beccah and Akiko and Fox Girl centers on the relationship between Hyun Jin and her best friend Sookie. Both use the exploitation of Korean women to discuss the exploitation of Korea as a nation and emphasize themes of survival, immigration, and motherhood.

But there are key differences between these novels that may account for the differences in reception. In Comfort Woman, Akiko’s marriage to an American missionary does help her escape to the United States, even though the marriage is abusive.29 But in Fox Girl, the U.S. military plays an active role in the sex trade. U.S. soldiers directly exploit women and young girls sexually, and a U.S. presence cannot be seen as liberatory.30 The military clearly creates a market for prostitution and a black market for other goods, while paying Koreans very little. The military presence reproduces the poor living conditions of Koreans in the community and thus the conditions that perpetuate the system of prostitution. To read Fox Girl, an American reader must acknowledge the role the U.S.


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military played in the sexual exploitation of women in Korea, and the reader must be willing to witness this exploitation.

This would have been difficult for readers given the political climate when the novel was published. By the time Fox Girl was published, Americans were concerned with their own victimization after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The release of Fox Girl was not as convenient as that of Comfort Woman; a story of women exploited by American servicemen and the children left behind may have revealed a brutal truth for American readers at any time, but in the context of the renewed patriotism after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Fox Girl’s timing was poor.

In addition to bad timing, Keller also had to work against a fifty-year history of the erasure of the U.S. military’s sexual exploitation of Korean women.31 When World War II ended in 1945, the American military began an occupation of Korea that officially lasted until 1948 but remains in place to this day. With the change from Japanese to American occupation came a change in sexual exploitation; the slavery of women under Japanese rule was replaced by the camptown system of supplying sex to American soldiers.32 The camptown prostitution system was still flourishing when “comfort women” began speaking out in 1991. A year later, a United States serviceman was convicted in Korea for the murder of a Korean sex worker, Yun Geum-i, an event that sparked mass anti-United States protests throughout South Korea and was one of the very few convictions of an American serviceman in a foreign court.33 That so many Americans are familiar with the situation of “comfort women” and so few with the prostitution “camptowns” speaks to a larger erasure of the role of the American military in sexual exploitation.

This ignorance about the sexual exploitation of Korean women by U.S. servicemen contextualizes the lack of awards and early literary praise for Fox

Girl. The few reviews of Fox Girl did not foreground the literary merit that might have brought it to the attention of award committees and readers. Not only did Fox Girl receive fewer reviews in important venues but reviews of the novel were also less enthusiastic. The Missouri Review, an important literary journal, and the New York Times, influential in both literary circles and among the general American reading public, named Comfort Woman an “astonishing debut novel” but did not review Fox Girl.34 Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly did review the work, but their reviews did not praise Keller’s second novel as highly.35 In the case of Comfort Woman, reviews lauded Keller’s work through comparison to other famous women writers. There are no such comparisons for Fox Girl, suggesting that this second novel was not perceived as working at the same level of literary quality.

While it is not compared to the work of other writers, professional reviewers do refer to Comfort Woman to frame their discussion of Fox Girl, which is said


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to share “brutal candor and moving empathy”36 with Comfort Woman. Both books are considered “disturbing and unforgettable” in “giv[ing] voice to the overlooked and forgotten victims of society’s mistakes.”37 As scholar Laura Hyun Yi Kang recognizes, the popularity and acceptance of “comfort women” narratives is “bound as much, if not more, by the techniques and protocols of producing a ‘good novel’ in English as it may be about publicizing the subject of ‘comfort women’ for American readers.”38 This is true of any novelization that tries to portray a foreign character within the form of the American novel. Professional reviewers hint at the requirements for this “good novel,” in their reviews of Keller’s work. Comfort Woman is described as “lyric” and “haunting.”39 It is said to be a “powerfully told”40 story by a “strongly gifted writer.”41 These comments focus not only on the artistry of the text (lyric), but also on the effect of Keller’s style on the reader (haunting). In comparison, reviews of Fox Girl refer only to the writing style and structure of the novel through descriptions such as “tight”42 and “powerful though gently paced.”43

While reviewers do not give specific examples of “lyric” and “beautifully written” passages, scholars ground their thematic arguments about Comfort

Woman in discussions of literary style. In scholarly work on Fox Girl, style is rarely mentioned. Two major factors distinguish Keller’s literary style in each text: narrative form, and prose style at the sentence level. These two aspects of Keller’s writing place the reader in disparate positions as witnesses to sexual violence. Scholarly discussions of Comfort Woman revolve around the text’s dual narrative structure, which alternates between the story of an American daughter learning of her Korean mother’s past experience as a “comfort woman” and the story of the mother herself, who ends up voicing her experiences to the daughter through a voice-recorded tape. This narrative form works well because Akiko is portrayed as a mystic, whose supernatural experiences may be the result of post-traumatic stress from the comfort camps. Akiko’s psychological state is thus reflected in the organization of the novel’s chapters. Kandice Chuh credits Keller’s use of the dual narrative structure for recasting Akiko/Soon Hyo “as a heroic figure of successful survival.” This comes in the last chapter of the novel, when Akiko reclaims her Korean name, Soon Hyo. According to Chuh, the structure of the novel also implies “that the transformation of victim to heroine results from processes of narrativization, the novel affirms the value of representation (of ‘coming to voice’) as a reparative method.”44 Moreover, the dual-voiced narrative has been seen as enacting “the hybrid place inhabited by so many colonized groups of people.”45 This understanding of the novel as hybridized body and subjectivity fits nicely into academic discussions of postcolonial literature and may account for the scholarly attention paid to the novel.

In contrast, Fox Girl is told through a linear narrative and solely through the character of Hyun Jin. The novel is written in the retrospective voice of a young


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adult (she is roughly twenty years old at the novel’s close), who tells a story that begins in her early childhood. The narrative and linguistic style of the novel parallel Hyun Jin’s development into adulthood, and thus her story is told in a linear, direct manner that reflects her observational powers at the time the events occurred. This literary style forces the reader to remain focused on the age of the narrator during these traumatic experiences. The novel leaves little room for interpreting the effect of the narrative structure, and perhaps this is one reason why few scholars have written about its structure.

Scholars also praise Keller’s use of language as a means of addressing the objectification of women and acknowledging sexual violence. Patricia Chu claims that Comfort Woman “repeatedly associates language itself with the objectification of women, even when the speakers are admiring boyfriends, husbands and fathers.”46 To this I would add that Keller’s writing style enacts two different experiences of alienation from oneself. Although the portrayals of rape in both novels share similar diction, their distinct use of sensory details and abstraction lead the reader to two distinctly different acts of reading/witnessing. To contextualize these claims, it is necessary to look at brief excerpts from the novels to see how Keller’s writing style works in each text. First, it is clear that, in both novels, diction is manipulated to avoid eroticism. Sexual violence in both novels is described as “cutting,” “stretching,” “bleeding,” and “splitting.” In general, abstraction and the incorporation of auditory, tangible details define the prose style of Comfort Woman and set a mood for the novel rather than portraying the actions of characters. These effects can be seen in the description of Aikiko’s wedding night:

I knew what it felt like to stretch open for many men, and I knew about blood with the first and with the hundredth, and about pain sharp enough to cut your body from your mind. I could not form the words, but I must have cried out for the minister husband pushed his lips against my head and said, Don’t worry, sweetie, my little lamb. I will be gentle, he said, and then he bit my neck. . . . When he pushed me into the bed, positioned himself above me, fitting himself between my thighs, I let my mind fly away. For I knew then that my body was, and always would be, locked in a cubicle at the camps, trapped under the bodies of innumerable men.47

This narrator uses a variety of sensory details to portray the rape scene. Akiko recalls what it feels like in her body to be raped, and she hears what her


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husband says to her during the experience. Her tangible experience leads into a description of “pain sharp enough to cut your body from your mind.” This results in an abstraction on two levels: Akiko’s mind is metaphorically severed from her body, but the subject of this separation is also abstracted from the first person perspective to a second person perspective. Akiko thereby places the reader within her experience. This abstraction both distances the reader from the physical experience of rape while at the same time making the tangible experience feel more intimate because of its elaboration. This affects the reader’s experience by slowing down the action of the scene and removing the reader from a position of visual witnessing. The reader cannot visually imagine the rape without withdrawing from the visual experience to process the metaphorical experience and construct its relationship to the actions in the plot. Readers of Comfort Woman often mention their ability to “feel” what Akiko experiences, and this could refer both to the tangible and emotional experiences expressed through metaphor and abstraction; but ultimately, I would argue that readers are further removed from the action of rape.

In contrast to the prose style in Comfort Woman, visual, literal descriptions characterize the prose style of Fox Girl. Like Akiko, Hyun Jin describes her first experience with prostitution in terms of a mind/body separation through the metaphor of flight. But Hyun Jin’s narrative is more visual and less abstract:

I finally understood what Sookie told me about letting the real self fly away.

From far away, the real me watched [the American G.I.s] open the shell of my body, ramming and ripping into every opening they could. I watched them spread the legs open, splitting the inner lips wide enough to fit two of the men at the same time. I watched them bite at the breasts and poji till they drew blood, and saw them shoot themselves into and over the belly, take breaks, then come at it again.48

This passage begins with the metaphorical idea of “flying away,” but the actual rape is described in visual terms throughout. Instead of positioning the reader in her own experience with the use of the second person, Hyun Jin aligns herself with the reader; she watches the rape as we watch the rape. This visual barrage of description also refuses the audience any removal from the immediate situation of the rape. We cannot take a break from voyeurism in order to process the pain abstractly, as the reader is allowed to do in Comfort

Woman when the narrator takes a step back to reflect on her emotions. Instead


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of describing the experience of separating her “real self” from her body, Hyun Jin focuses on describing the rape itself. As a result, the reader is aligned with both Hyun Jin and the soldiers, and it is important to recognize the difference between their positions; Hyun Jin is forced to abandon her body as a means of survival; the position of the soldier is one who sees Hyun Jin’s body as an object onto which violence can be enacted because her body is alien to the soldier. The reader, also outside of Hyun Jin’s emotional understanding of the rape, is in the position of bystander, similar to that occupied by the one U.S. soldier in the scene who does not want to participate in the rape but cannot escape it.

The focus on visual description, the lack of abstraction, and the position in which these techniques place the reader may explain professional reviews of Fox Girl that describe the novel as a “no-holds-barred story”49 that is “stark, disturbing,” and “unsentimental in portraying the callousness of human nature.”50 Fox Girl is said to “spare no sensibilities” in a “rare, honest picture of a marginal society.”51 As with professional reviews, Amazon.com reviews rarely discuss the literary style of Fox Girl, but those that do comment on the “realistic,” “graphic” nature of the novel. This writing style can also be perceived, in the words of one Amazon.com reviewer, as “simplistic and juvenile.” While “juvenile” might mean that the writing style is not complex, it could also refer to the “juvenile” speaking style of Hyun Jin, who narrates as a child for a significant portion of the novel. While the visual, literal nature of Hyun Jin’s narration style is fitting for a young, uneducated narrator, and is thus intentional rather than an effect of poor or haphazard writing, ultimately the Amazon.com reader does not appreciate a “simplistic and juvenile” style of writing for its literary merit.

Although these comments are critical of the literary style of Fox Girl, they are often mentioned alongside reader judgments about a character’s morality. As Jennifer Ho astutely notes in her review, “whereas the themes in Comfort

Woman emphasize the strength of the mother-daughter bond and bloodlines as a means of salvation, Fox Girl questions the entire notion of traditional family relationships and their ability to heal or help when survival is the main imperative.”52 As a result, readers respond negatively to the characters and to the novel as a whole.

Fox Girl offers readers three different approaches to family relationships through three different characters, and readers favor the characters who embrace traditional family bonds over those who reject family as a means of sustenance. Readers and reviewers empathize most with the narrator’s pimp, Lobetto, the only character who holds out hope that the traditional family structure will save him from the poverty and violence he faces in Americatown. Son of a Korean prostitute and a black American G.I., Lobetto hopes that one day his father will return to Korea to take him and his mother to America.


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Reviews seem to favor the “doomed” Lobetto, describing his desire for his father as “pathetic” and his story as “heartbreaking,” even though he is willing to pimp out his mother and his friends in order to earn enough money to go to America in search of his father.53 Sympathy for Lobetto stems from the fact that his social position and his inability to leave Americatown are beyond his control.

Reviews are less sympathetic towards Sookie, who is described as morally ugly. But this perceived moral ugliness stems from her cynicism—she believes that she has no way out of Americatown or prostitution. Sookie shows no shame about her occupation, nor does she show any motherly feelings for the daughter she abandons. Casey of Pittsburgh, Pennsyvlania, finds “Sookie’s absence of feeling and remorse . . . amazing,” and Audrey describes Sookie as “the attractive person we all know, the one that doesn’t seem to think in quite the same morals that you do.”54 Sookie, unlike Lobetto, is judged because of her occupation and her denial of motherhood. Her exploitation, unlike that of the “comfort woman” is seen as a choice, something Sookie chooses because of an unnatural “lack of feeling” or because she is “attractive” and uses her appearance to gain power. In all of these comments, prostitution is seen as the path of the morally corrupt, rather than as sexual exploitation fostered by American military occupation and poverty.

Hyun Jin, the novel’s narrator, fares slightly better in reviews, where she is generally characterized as strong and determined to survive. Casey of Pittsburgh reads Hyun Jin as “a little selfish, except for when it comes to the baby” and E. Smiley claims that Hyun Jin is “an insensitive friend” who “bullied other kids.” But Marissa Ocampo sees her as “strong” and C. Joan Villanueva describes Hyun Jin as “someone with a typical situation but a headstrong attitude.”55 Amazon.com readers were evenly divided in their responses to either Hyun Jin in particular or the characters as a group. Four out of thirteen readers wrote of Hyun Jin in positive terms, and four out of thirteen either disliked Hyun Jin or wrote vaguely about the poor portrayal of the characters. Those who were vague about their dislike made comments such as “the author seemed to be going out of her way to make them [the characters] seem unpleasant, which made it hard for me to care about their struggles”; or “the main criticism for me was that the characters never really came alive and felt real . . . their relationships with each other never really rang true for me.”56 The uneasiness of these readers is hard to explain. It could be that the characters were poorly rendered or that they made life-decisions that the audience did not find redeeming or humanizing. Interestingly, of the four reviews that expressed a dislike of the characters, two claimed that Hyun Jin overcomes their dislike because of her actions for/toward her adopted daughter. This implies that Hyun Jin’s selfishness, though caused by poverty and sexual exploitation, is redeemable only when she plays the role of the selfless mother. This archetype is probably familiar to readers, especially in the context of novels


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portraying Asian women who immigrate to the United States. For these readers, Hyun Jin’s redemption comes not because of her determination to live and to transcend Americatown but because her actions support the idea that a traditional mother-daughter bond inspires the mother to escape violence and poverty.

Although not explicitly referenced in reviews, it is possible that dislike of these characters may stem from the way victims are represented in Fox Girl. While Sookie and Hyun Jin are exploited and terrorized by American soldiers, they are not without agency. Sookie’s “lack of remorse” might be a refusal to see herself as a helpless victim of circumstance; it is a defense mechanism she uses to appreciate the only life she imagines she can have. Hyun Jin escapes Americatown by following a madam to a brothel in Hawaii where she continues to prostitute herself until she can escape. This act is redeemed only because she continues selflessly in prostitution for the sake of her daughter, unlike Sookie, who is a prostitute in order to better her own life.

My exploration of the reception of Comfort Woman and Fox Girl suggests that several factors influenced the responses of American readers to a novel centered on the stories of Asian and Asian American women. To gain approval, the novel must be delivered in a comfortable, formulaic narrative that fits in with reader expectations of Asian American women’s writing, and readers must feel that they are in a position to sympathize with the historical and political situation of Asian women. Additionally, readers such as “A Customer, 1999,” praise Comfort

Woman for the way it “greatly personalizes and brings out the real lives of one of those comfort women,” and judge texts according to their expectations of the author as well as their perceptions of their own responsibilities as readers. The desire for a novel that is “shocking, moving, and requires much of the reader”57 leads to an appropriation of another’s suffering that allows the reader to remain uncritical of the consequences of this appropriative act. Readers simultaneously feel intimacy with a victim’s experience and imagine themselves as outside the conditions that create pain and suffering for the characters in Comfort Woman and Fox Girl. In this study, I have examined relatively small reading formations. If the responses of American readers and professional reviewers to other Asian American authored texts are similar to the responses examined here, reception study has important implications for Asian American literary studies and the way we imagine the political impact of literature.

notes1. Song, Min. The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 8. See Song for a list of prestigious

American literary awards earned by Asian American writers, many of which were

bestowed during the 1990s.


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2. Tony Bennett, “Texts and History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts,”

in Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, edited by James L. Machor

and Philip Goldstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 64.

3. I use the term “Asian American” to discuss Keller’s work rather than “Korean

American” because professional and Amazon.com reviews often subsume

discussions of authors, characters, and literature under the terms “Asian” and

“Asian American.” In using this term, I recognize how readers cross national and

ethnic boundaries in these discussions.

4. I place the term “comfort woman” in quotes, following the work of scholars such

as Laura Hyun Yi Kang and Kandice Chuh, who do so in order to emphasize the

euphemistic naming of these women by the Japanese military, who forced women

into sex slavery during Japanese occupation.

5. Terry Hong, “The Dual Lives of Nora Okja Keller,” Bloomsbury Review, September/

October 2002, 14.

6. Patricia P. Chu, “To Hide Her True Self’: Sentimentality and the Search for an

Intersubjective Self in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman,” in Asian North American

Identities: Beyond the Hyphen, edited by Eleanor Rose Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 63.

7. Laura Hyun Yi Kang, “Conjuring ‘Comfort Women’: Mediated Affiliations and

Disciplined Subjects in Korean/American Transnationality,” Journal of Asian American

Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 25–55. See Kang’s work for a thorough discussion of

American art inspired by “comfort women” and how artists attempt to “give voice”

to silenced women.

8. Young-Oak Lee, “Nora Okja Keller and the Silenced Woman: An Interview,”

MELUS 28, no. 4 (2003): 155.

9. Michiko Kakutani, “Repairing Lives Torn by the Past,” New York Times,

March 25, 1997, B8.

10. “About the Before Columbus Foundation,” Before Columbus Foundation, last

modified 2011, www.beforecolumbusfoundation.com/about-bcf.html 2011.

11. Chu, “To Hide Her True Self,” 62.

12. Kandice Chuh and Laura Hyun Yi Kang discuss the appeal of the novel to

Americans, both within and outside of the text.

13. Kakutani, “Repairing Lives Torn by the Past,” B8.

14. Kandice Chuh, “Discomforting Knowledge, Or, Korean ‘Comfort Women’ and Asian

Americanist Critical Practice,” Journal of Asian American Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 13.


16. Six of these fifteen reviews give equal weight to both the mother-daughter tale and

Akiko’s “comfort woman” narrative.

17. “Comfort Woman,” reviews of Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller, Amazon.com,

last modified 2013, http://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Woman-Nora-Okja-Keller/

product-reviews/0140263357/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showVi

ewpoints=1&sortBy=byRankDescending Amazon.com. See the reviews written by

A Customer, 2000, and Alexandra Mack.

18. Nine of thirty-three reviews focus on the mother/daughter tale in their plot

summaries; ten of thirty-three reviews focus on the story of Akiko’s experience in


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the comfort camps; six of thirty-three summaries discuss both plot lines, and ten of

thirty-three reviews were inconclusive.

19. “Comfort Woman,” Amazon.com.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., emphasis added.

29. Scholars Kandice Chuh and Patricia P. Chu, as well as professional reviewers,

read the marriage as a critique of U.S. imperialism, but Amazon.com reviews only

mention the United States in relation to the immigrant status of Akiko.

30. Chuh, “Discomforting Knowledge,” 7. These themes in Fox Girl work against an

American narrative that constructs the United States occupation of other countries

as liberatory.

31. Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 107.

32. Ibid., 94.

33. Ibid., 7.


35. “Fox Girl,” Review of Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller, Publishers Weekly, January 2002,

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-670-03073-6.

36. “Fox Girl,” Review of Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller, Kirkus Reviews, February 2002,

http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nora-okja-keller/fox-girl/.

37. Hong, “The Dual Lives of Nora Okja Keller,” 13.

38. Kang, “Conjuring Comfort Women,” 32.


40. “Comfort Woman,” review of Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller, Kirkus Reviews,

February 1997, http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nora-okja-keller/

comfort-woman/.

41. “Comfort Woman,” review of Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller, Publisher’s

Weekly, March 1997, http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-670-87269-5.

42. “Fox Girl,” Publishers Weekly.

43. Ibid.

44. Chuh, “Discomforting Knowledge,” 18.

45. Patti Duncan, Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of

Speech (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 184.


47. Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman (New York: Viking, 1997), 106.

48. Nora Okja Keller, Fox Girl (New York: Viking, 2002), 154.

49. Shirley N. Quan, “Fox Girl,” review of Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller, Library Journal,

March 2002, 108.


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50. “Fox Girl,” Publishers Weekly.

51. Ibid.

52. Jennifer Ho, “Fox Girl,” review of Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller, Amerasia Journal 30,

no. 1 (2004): 117.

53. These opinions about Lobetto are expressed in both “Fox Girl,” Kirkus Reviews, and

in “Fox Girl,” Amazon.com.

54. “Fox Girl,” Amazon.com.

55. The negative descriptions are from “Comfort Woman,” Amazon.com. The positive

descriptions of Hyun Jin can be found in all three of the following sources:

Quan, “Fox Girl”; “Fox Girl,” Publishers Weekly; “Fox Girl,” Kirkus Reviews; and “Fox

Girl,” Amazon.com.

56. “Fox Girl,” Amazon.com.

57. “Comfort Woman,” Amazon.com.



Copyright © 2015



Park, PA

Encountering the Islamic Other in Printstudents’ readings of christiane bird’s neither

east nor west: one woman’s journey through

the islamic republic of iran

perry l. carter abstract: This article presents the results of a content

analysis and a thematic analysis of undergraduate students’

essays on the Middle East, specifically on the nation of

Iran. The students were all members of a world regional

geography class taught at a public west Texas university

during the Fall of 2002. These students’ writings provide a

particular regional view of the Islamic world post-

September 11, 2001. The essays are responses to Christiane

Bird’s travelogue Neither East nor West. Bird’s book,

published before the September 11, 2001, attacks, offers a

balanced if not positive view of Islam in general and Iran

in particular. The written narratives produced by students

afford an aperture into their imagined geographies and

figured worlds of the Middle East and the Muslim world.

To speak of “Islam” in the West today is to mean a

lot of the unpleasant things I have been mentioning.

Moreover, “Islam” is unlikely to mean anything one

knows either directly or objectively.1

A recent Gallup opinion poll report entitled Religious

Perceptions in America: With an In-Depth Analysis of U.S.

Attitudes Towards Muslims and Islam found that 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable perception

Reception_7_07_Carter.indd 83 15/06/15 9:25 PM

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of Islam. Of the religions about which inquiries were made—Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—Islam was the most negatively viewed. In the same survey, a majority of Americans (63 percent) admitted knowing little to nothing about Islam.2

As a teacher of the course World Regional Geography, these responses did not surprise me. Upon taking my course, most students’ knowledge of the world outside the United States is either lacking or distorted. This is particularly so with Southwest Asia (the Middle East) and the Muslim world. Because of their lack of knowledge of the region and its predominant religion, the attacks of September 11, 2001, perplexed most students. They did not fit with their imagined geography of the world, an imagined geography where the Middle East is mapped as a contentious and benighted place distant in both space and relevance, while conversely mapping the United States as a powerful and influential nation. The attacks generated, for a brief time, an interest in the Middle East and Islam; they provided an opportunity to examine students’ thoughts about the region. If we assume that students’ attitudes, beliefs, and feelings represent the attitudes, beliefs, and feelings of the adults in their lives, the attacks of September 11, 2001, additionally provided a view into American perceptions of a region that most encounter only through popular media and Judeo-Christian religious texts. This study is an exploration of these perceptions. More precisely, this study uses students’ responses as conveyed in their essays on Christiane Bird’s travelogue Neither East nor West: One Woman’s Journey

through the Islamic Republic of Iran (2001) to gain an understanding of their beliefs, attitudes, and feelings about Iran, the Middle East, and Islam. Just as important, this study gauges students’ awareness of the region and the religion.

Writing as Data; Writing as Method

Geographers have typically used written narratives as the raw material in their cultural retracings of place.3 This can be seen in recent works using travel writing in critical studies of place representation.4 This mostly historical and cultural field of study owes a great deal to the works of Foucault and Said.5 Work in this field assumes that texts, their objects of analysis, present nontransparent and problematic depictions of cultures and places.6 This genre of historical and cultural geography traces the writer through his or her writings and in doing so illuminates the situated regimes of knowledge in which authors reside. Works in this subfield focus as much on the place of the writer as they do the places described within writers’ narratives.

Increasingly over the past fifteen years in disciplines such as psychology, health science, and sociology, the written narratives of research participants have been


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used as raw materials in researchers’ investigations of the “subjective versions of truth” that participants hold.7 Harris, in her study of women who self-harm, used email correspondence as her primary data source.8 In her work, the distance between the writers and the reader shielded writers from the risk of humiliation, therefore encouraging them to engage in noncensored self-disclosure.

One of the first social science proponents of writing as a method of inquiry is the feminist sociologist Laurel Richardson.9 Richardson’s work focuses on academic writing, but she describes aspects of writing that go beyond the academy:

• People who write are always writing about their lives. . . . No writing is untainted by human hands, pure, objective, “innocent.”

• Writing is a method of discovery, a way of finding out about yourself and your world.

• Writing is always done in socio-historical . . . [as well as a] specific local historical contexts. [Writing is located in certain times and places.]

• Language does not “reflect” social reality but produces meaning, creates social reality.10

While Richardson highlights the unique properties of writing, she does not explicitly address the reasons why the spoken word, in the form of the interview, has gained preeminence in qualitative studies. Excluding historical work, over the course of the past thirty years the interview has become the dominant means of data collection in qualitative social science. As Colyar points out, because of the indirect presence of the audience, the writer must be more deliberate and more explicit in the construction of narratives than the speaker.11 Writing is a more immersed engagement with words and the ideas they represent than speech.

Students composed the essays that form the foundation of this study, and they did so in order to receive a grade. In all likelihood, few students would have read the book had they not been assigned to write an essay on it. Though impelled to write, if Richardson is correct, students produce narratives that will reveal not only deliberate calculation but also, in spite of themselves, will reflect the place, time, and cultural roots of their authors. This study hinges on the assertion that all written narratives are unavoidable acts of self-display. This being the case, this paper concerns identities, both personal and collective, and relationships, both local and global. At its simplest, it is a paper about reading and writing about Iran in west Texas.

The Context and Text

Texas Tech University is located in Lubbock—in far west central Texas, relatively isolated from the rest of the state. In Gumprecht’s paper on the Lubbock and west Texas music scene, he describes “[w]est Texans as . . . ultraconservative and


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deeply religious.”12 That Lubbock was, until May of 2009, the largest city in the United States still prohibiting the sale of alcohol within its city limits highlights its cultural conservatism.

At the time this study took place, fall 2002, Texas Tech University (TTU) had an enrollment of 21,092 undergraduates. The majority of students attending TTU at the time came from small, mostly rural west Texas communities. Most of the rest came from high schools in the Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan areas. The ethnic composition of the student body at the time was 82 percent white, 3 percent African American, and 11 percent Hispanic.13

The students in World Regional Geography are representative of TTU’s undergraduate population. Of the 122 students enrolled in the two World Regional Geography classes taught during fall 2002, 96 agreed to have their essays used for this study. Of these 96 essays, 30 were randomly selected for this study. The chosen essays were scanned and converted into a computer readable format. One essay was dropped from the study because it was very short (only half a page) and of very poor quality. Females wrote 18 and males 11 of the remaining 29 essays. Freshmen authored seven essays, sophomores eleven, juniors eight, and seniors three. Table 1 presents student participants by academic major. Despite being skewed toward freshmen and sophomores, female students, and early childhood development and education majors, this sample of students represents every level of student class standing and a wide range of academic majors. The responses of early childhood development and education majors are of particular interest. These are individuals whose views could potentially influence multiple generations of future students.

table 1 student participants by major

Majors Number of Students

Biology 1

Business 1

Computer Science 1

Early Childhood Development 8

Education 6

Engineering 6

French 1

Geography 1

History 1

Political Science 1

Social Work 1

Telecommunications 1


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This course required students to read three instructor-selected books, first person narratives set in locations outside the Western world. For each book students had to write a two-page essay. Each essay accounted for 10 percent of students’ grades. Students were told that they should voice their opinions and feelings about what they read and that it was appropriate to use the first-person pronoun “I” in the essay. Suggestions were provided as to what issues they might want to address in their essays. For Neither East nor West it was suggested that they examine:

• Gender roles in Iran. Specifically, women’s lives within the Islamic Republic;

• The use of technology in Iran;• Globalization—how Iran is linked to the world and how the world is

linked to Iran;• The role of Islam in Iranian life;• Iran’s rather contradictory relationship with the West, particularly with

the U.S.;• The effect that the Iran/Iraq war has had on Iranian society;• The youth of Iran;• Art and literature in Iran;• Oil;• Iranian families and Iranian family life; and• The Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 and the Shah’s, Khomeini’s, and

the U.S.’s role in it.

As a child in the 1960s Christiane Bird spent three years in the Iranian town of Tabriz, where her father worked as a doctor. Bird’s book Neither East nor

West chronicles her return to Iran for three months in 1998. Bird, a journalist, returned to Iran in part to get beyond its one-dimensional representation in Western media:

Partly because of my family’s history and partly because of my own reading, I didn’t trust the many negative news reports that had come out of the Muslim world. . . . As others, most notably the scholar Edward Said, have written before me, Muslims are the last group in our politically correct culture that it is still all right to defile. Most of the world’s approximately one billion Muslims are ordinary, peace-loving citizens, and yet Islam is a dirty word in much of the West, synonymous with fanaticism and violence.14


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The Iran she knew as a child had changed. Gone was the Shah and his Westernized and secular Iran. In its place stood an Islamic republic that coupled paradoxically the modern and the medieval. In a country where separation between mosque and state is nonexistent, Bird found illegal television satellite dishes, illegal drinking, rebellious youth, and Iranians who loved Americans, though not the U.S. government, while being at the same time discontented with their own government.

The extended passage below displays these seemingly conflicting positions. Bird had been in Iran for only a few weeks when she visited Sa’dabad, the Shahs’ former palaces, with Lona, her new Iranian friend. Bird, being a foreigner, had to pay $10 more than Lona to enter the complex. The following passage encapsulates the tenor of Neither East nor West:

Before leaving Sa’dabad, Lona insists on stopping into the front office. I had my suspicions as to why, and sure enough, as soon as the appropriate manager appeared, she launched into a long tirade about the price of my ticket and what had turned out to be a near complete lack of English-language signage in the complex. As I listened to her rant at the unhappy-looking official, I thought about the Western stereotype of Muslim women as meek, cowering, and repressed, and grinned.

The manager turned to me with an apologetic shrug.“She is right,” he said in heavily accented English.

“We must do better. Many, many tourists are coming here now and they want English signs.”

“How many tourists?” I said, surprised at what sounded like hordes of visitors.

“We had two French groups here this morning, and an Italian one yesterday. You are Italian?”

I shook my head.“Russian?”I shook my head.“American?”I nodded, and his apologetic look dissolved into a

wide grin.“Welcome, welcome!” he said. “We love the

American people. We have always loved the American people. . . . It is only the American government we don’t like. Our governments, they are just”—he picked up two


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glasses on his desk and placed them far apart—“like this.” He placed stacks of books around the glasses. “They build many walls to separate themselves. But the people”—knocked the books aside and clasped his hands tightly together—“they come together, they love each other. There is only one master of the people and that is God.”15

Bird’s representation of her experiences in Iran generates a chain of interpretations: the first link is Bird’s particular experience of Iran; the second, students’ interpretations of her experiences; and the penultimate, my interpretations of students’ interpretations of Bird’s narrative. The final link attaches you, the reader, via me, this paper’s author, to Bird’s narrative.

Because I am a link in this chain of interpretations, I should situate and identify myself. At the time that this research was conducted I was forty-two years old and was a year and a half into my first tenure-track job as a professor. At the time I felt that Lubbock was a rather racist place (I still do). I say this because the racism I experience here was so taken-for-granted and unconscious: racism without intent.

There are many examples of this taken-for-granted racism but one of the most memorable occurred a few semesters after these student essays were written. In my World Regional Geography class I asked my students to go to the Atlantic Monthly website and read an interview with Peter Bergen, author of the book Holy War, and write a brief summary. As often happens, three students did not completely follow the directions. In that same issue of the Atlantic Monthly was an interview with Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy discussing his new provocatively titled book, Nigger. The three students wrote their summary about the Kennedy interview instead of the Bergen interview. When I received these mistaken summaries, I returned them and asked the confused students to read the Bergen interview and redo their summaries. Two of the students turned in the correct summaries while the third dropped the class.

I doubt that these were deliberate acts of racism. I imagine what happened went something like this: They followed my written direction up until the point where they came upon the issue’s table of contents. They saw the Nigger interview and they assumed that because I am raced that I wanted them to read an interview about race (racism without intent). I also doubt that if I were a white professor they would have made this mistake. This is because people of color bear the burden of race while whites are unencumbered by it. This phenomenon has been observed and written about in other classroom contexts.16 Race exists for many whites only when they are in the presence of nonwhites—that is, the raced.


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I bring this issue up because it is likely that, in some way unknown to me, my being raced affected what students chose to write and chose not to write. More directly, my annoyance with being raced by my students, despite my best efforts at objectivity, probably worked its way into my presentations of them within this paper. The reader should keep this in mind when reading what follows.

Method: The Words They Used

This study utilizes two methods of inquiry. It begins with a content analysis—a counting and noting of the words used in students’ essays. The analysis then changes scales from recurrent words to recurrent narratives.17 Used in tandem, these approaches capture simple repeated units of meaning (words) as well as more developed repeated lines of thought. Both methods aid in understanding U.S. students’ imagined geographies of Iran.18

Table 2 shows four selected words greater than four characters in length found in students’ essays. The word that occurred most often was “people” (328 times). The examples shown on the right side of the table are not necessarily representative of most students’ attitudes; rather they were selected because of the distinctness of the opinions expressed as well as the personal nature of these opinions.

The two examples shown in the table use “people” as a way of showing that they (Iranians) are like us (Americans). When speaking of foreigners, students (and Americans in general) frequently modify the word “people” with the pronoun “those” to other, and at times to dehumanize, the stranger. This is not the case here largely because Bird depicts Iranians as they are—that is, as people most Americans would find familiar. As students get to know Iranians and their culture through encountering them in the reading, it becomes difficult for them to maintain two-dimensional stereotypes. This transformation of opinions is seen in the first example where the student states that he or she thought that Iran was a place “where the women are slaves and armies are constantly killing innocent people” as well as in the second example where the student suggests that this book tells the truth about the people of Iran—that they are “a lot like Americans.” Apparently, before reading Neither East

nor West these two students held negative opinions about Iran, and, it can be assumed, negative opinions about the Middle East as a region and about Islam as a religion.

Another word that occurred often was “women” (292 times). At least three possible reasons exist for its frequency. Intentionally or unintentionally, Neither

East nor West comes across as a feminist text—almost unavoidably feminist


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table 2 selected reoccurring words of five characters or more from

student essays

Word Count Percent Examples

People 328 2.08 The book Neither East nor West has opened my eyes and shown me the great hospitality and the love the people have in the country Iran. It is not the country I once though to believe where the women are slaves and the armies are constantly killing innocent people in the streets.Even though the book in not one I would recommend for pleasure reading I would suggest it to people who would like to read and get the truth about how Iran really is. How the people are a lot like Americans.

Women 292 1.85 Gender roles in Iran are very different than in the United States and there are fewer freedoms for women than that of men. women always had to wear proper coverings and were supposedly at the beckon call of a man.I never really considered the fact that the hejab helps women in the work force since their appearance, both in the physical body and the clothes worn, is not a factor due to the covering provided by the manteau. Discrimination is reduced, which lets the women show that they are in the position they hold thanks to their thinking abilities and not their physical appearance.

American(s) 137 0.87 Whereas the first american impulse is often to trust—sometimes stupidly so—the first Iranian impulse is often to distrust—also sometimes stupidly so.I commend Christiane for going to a foreign country such as Iran, where americans usually think that they are not overly welcome. I would be leery myself of going there.

Government 123 0.78 An American who has grown up knowing separation of church and state will not easily understand the operations of a government headed by religious leaders.It was interesting to read how so many people are constantly looking over their shoulder worrying whether or not people are watching them or whether or not the people they come in contact with are spies for the different government organizations.

Total 860 5.58

Number of words ≥ 5 characters

15,776 100.00

in that it is a story about a woman traveling alone in a country in which many Americans, regardless of their gender, would fear to travel. One student made this explicit point in her essay. Another possible reason for the frequency of “women” is that it was a suggested topic in the essay guide; however, “globalization,” “the Iranian Revolution,” “Iranian youth,” and “Islam” were also suggested as potential topics and all were scarcely mentioned in students’ essays. Probably the principal reason why this word made its way into so many essays is that when most Americans think of the Middle East they imagine veiled women and presume their repression as displayed in the first example given in table 2. Many students, as well as Americans in general, assume that sexism is largely a thing of the past in the United States. They view blatant forms of sexism as emblematic of backward cultures, yet they tend not to


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interrogate or are blind to much of the sexism embedded in their own culture. This is a view of the world rooted in this place (the United States) at this time (early twenty-first century). A few students began to view veiling and the position of women in Iran differently after reading the book. This is seen in the second example: “I never really. . . .” Here the student comes to see the hejab not as an instrument of oppression but as a device for negotiating sexualized public spaces.19

Veins of nationalism appear in students’ use of “American” and “Americans” in their essays. The positions highlighted in the examples are contradictory. Americans are “trusting” and Americans are “leery.” Perhaps these are not so much contradictions as they are indicative of when the essays were written. The United States likes to characterize itself as an open, confident society, yet that openness, as well as confidence, was shaken by the attacks of September 11, 2001. By 2002 it had become a “leery” country.

Unlike the responses using the word “people,” there is a distinction being made in these responses between Iranians and Americans. The student who evokes trust refers to the fact that some Iranians inform on other Iranians to the government when they feel that religious laws have been violated. This danger is real, even though at several points in the book Bird points out that Iranians’ distrust is not directed at American citizens. The author of the second example, in contrast, appears to be dubious of Iranians’ intentions toward Americans. He or she sees Iran as a place where Americans do not belong. There is a sense of fear in this student’s response.

As depicted in the media and at times in Bird’s book, the Iranian theocracy appears concurrently baffling and frightening. As one student states, it is difficult to “understand the operations of a government headed by religious leaders.” As the postpresidential election riots of June 2009 reveal, many Iranians also do not understand nor particularly care for how the theocracy governs the nation. Unlike the examples for the word “people,” both of the examples for “government” reflect a difference vis-à-vis the United States. Being governed by a fundamentalist theocracy differs from anything native-born American students have experienced. These two sample passages make apparent students’ confusion about the political situation in Iran. Also understandable is my students’ uneasiness about a nation (Iran) and a region (the Middle East) of whose existence, until reading this book, most were largely ignorant.

These recurrent words in the student essays are akin to camera flashes. They capture moments that the photographer perceives as significant. These words that students use capture their surprise at connections between Iranian and American life. They also capture a continuing sense of American superiority as well as a continuing fear of an Other that some students still struggle to place


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within their geographic imaginations. These and other words are the building blocks of their narratives about place.

Method: Place Narratives

When examining student essays at the scale of the sentence and the paragraph, five themes emerge: (1) fear and loathing of the Middle Eastern Other, (2) a feeling that “the media lied to us,” (3) gender segregated spaces, (4) assertions that “we are lucky to live in the land of the free,” and (5) a critique of American consumption and materialism. The expressions of fear, focus on gender segregation, and claims that “we are lucky to live in America” were expected. The ideas that the media misled us about Iran and the Middle East and the questioning of America’s culture of consumption and materialism were unforeseen. These two themes seemed to have emerged through students’ engagement with the text. The reading caused students to question what they know and how they live. The three passages below from students’ essays highlight these five themes.

In Iran, which is under Islam[ic] ruling [sic], men and women are very segregated. To this day, women are at a disadvantage compared to the men. For example, women sit behind the men during prayers and they also sit in the back of the bus. While both the men and the women are praying the men are allowed to talk but the women are to whisper so that they will not be heard above the men. At the airport Christiane noticed that there were two separate entrances. One entrance was for the men and the other for the women. . . . This entire situation above is what bothers me the most about Iran. I think that it is absolutely terrible to separate the men and women the way that the Islamic Republic does. The Iranian people are stripped of almost all of their freedoms. Women are looked down upon by society [female, freshman, early childhood development].

Keep in mind when considering this passage that six months before writing, the author had been in high school. The writer takes a feminist stance. The fact that space is gender segregated in Iran outrages her; she finds it offensive that these women have been stripped of “almost all of their


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freedoms.” However, this student’s assertion is not reflective of the analysis of Iranian gender relations presented in Bird’s text. In her account Bird provides examples of how the Iranian revolution has empowered women in various ways and affirms that women in Iran enjoy a higher social status than in most Middle Eastern countries. Bird talks to women who seem to be comfortable with this segregation as well as those who chafe under it, with the split arrayed mostly along class lines—upper- and middle-class women objecting to the hejab; working-class and poorer women viewing it as an essential part of their religion. This student’s reaction is likely due to projecting herself into these women’s situations. She has never experienced gender segregation, and she is having a difficult time imagining herself living in such a society. In her mind, women have a right to occupy any space that they choose. Other students who commented on this gendered segregation compared it to the Jim Crow era in United States history. Students have learned about the wrongs of “separate but equal” throughout their schooling, and here they come to a syllogistic conclusion that if racial segregation in the United States was an unfair act of racial discrimination, then gender segregation in Iran is an unfair act of gender discrimination. They are asserting that people’s rights to spaces should not be abridged by their skin color or their gender.

Another response addresses the issue of American materialism vis-à-vis Iranians’ family-centered orientation:

Iranians think that Americans think way too much about money, which is true. They think we’re very materialistic and artificial, but they think it’s because we’re afraid of loosing [sic] our jobs and being out in the street. They don’t think we take care about [sic] our families like they do in Iran. . . . I think that is very true about us being materialistic, and I think that is why everyone hates us is because they think we’re such an artificial country. I think that’s one reason everyone wants to attack us [female, sophomore, mechanical engineering].

This student is directly responding to a statement by Mina, an Iranian-American visiting family in Tehran:

“People think too much about money in the U.S.,” Mina interjected. “They’re very materialistic and artificial, but I think it’s because they’re always worried


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they’ll lose their jobs and be out on the streets. They don’t have family to take care of them like we do in Iran. Things are more real here. You don’t realize it until you go away.”20

Mina’s view of America seems to resonate with this student. She states that her culture is materialistic and that it views the family as a secondary or tertiary concern, and then she comes to a conclusion not found in the book. Though her reasoning in this passage is unclear, the feeling behind it is strong: our materialism is “one reason everyone wants to attack us.” By “attack,” it is assumed that the student is referring to the attacks of September 11, 2001. She appears to be saying that the United States deserved, at least in part, what happened to us. This statement is probably more a product of fear and bewilderment than of actual belief. She wrote this assertion fourteen months after the attacks. She and most Americans were baffled as to what had happened to them. What this student along with most Americans knew about Iran and/or the Middle East, if anything, probably came from movies and television. This is ironic given that Bird’s book suggests that Iranians’ knowledge of the United States comes largely from the same media sources. One student meditates on the mediated knowledge gap in her response:

Bird’s book cleared up several misconceptions that I had of Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. I am not exactly sure where I picked up these ideas of the culture and ways of life; perhaps from travel shows on TV or what others have said about the people there. . . . I was under the unreasonable impression that Iranians were lazy, sloppy, completely uncivilized, and pretty much in the Dark Age. I thought that they were uneducated and, well, for the most part dirty. Every image I have ever seen of their country was of an arid, dusty, miserable landscape. It seems illogical for me to say these things about Iranians and their country but I’m sure that I am not the only one [who] thinks this. The media among others have placed this idea in our minds it seems to sort of condition us into hating these people [female, junior, French].

Media distortion is a theme that emerged frequently in students’ essays, but this student states it the most bluntly. This line of thought proceeds as follows: “Middle Easterners [presumably Arabs] are loathsome barbarians; we know this


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because the media tell us this; Bird presents them as people just like us; ergo, the media must have lied to us.” This was the most unexpected theme to arise from these essays, surprising because of my assumption that most Americans have grown up in a media-saturated environment and thus are critical, if not cynical, consumers of media. I mistakenly presumed that students realized that any media presentation elides as much as, or more than, it reveals. “Media lied to us” responses suggest that at the very least U.S. youth, and perhaps Americans in general, are uncritical consumers of media.

Discussion: The Imagined Geographies and Figured Worlds of Islam

In his survey of more than one thousand films portraying Arabs, Shaheen found the vast majority presented debasing representations.21 Shaheen also notes that during the Iranian hostage crisis “70 percent of Americans wrongly identified Iran as an Arab country.”22 Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins also argue that Americans tend to conflate “Arabs,” “the Middle East,” and “Islam.”23 This conflating and debasing is encompassed by the term Orientalism. Orientalism infuses an imagined geography of Asia, and in particular, of Arab and Islamic Asia. Imagined geographies are “universal practice[s] of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs’ . . . a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary.”24 Orientalism works to designate an identity, one constructed in the West vis-à-vis its imagined Other: the Islamic world.

While the concept of imagined geographies comes from Foucault via Said, in parallel evolution is the theory of figured worlds.25 Figured worlds are self-composed, largely unconscious, unreflective narratives of how the world operates—repeated stories “peopled by recognizable characters with identifiable actions.”26 These narratives emplace us in the world and hence provide us an identity in reference to others. Orientalism is a Western figured world peopled by imagined Muslims.

What is the provenance of these imagined Muslims? Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, there has been a spate of work inquiring into how the media frame Muslims, Arabs, and the Middle East.27 Framing organizes pieces of day-to-day experiences in ways that enable us to make the world knowable.28 Frames transport unrecognizable phenomena and unfamiliar narratives into our realms of comprehension. They function as archetypes employed to make the world meaningful, yet are just as capable of distorting it. How frames can distort can be seen in films such as American Ninja 4 (1991), Beyond Justice (1992), Bloodfist

VI (1995), Bravo Two Zero (1999), Chain of Command (1993), Delta Force One (1999), Desert Thunder (1998), Navy SEALs (1990), Operation Delta Force (1999),


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and Rules of Engagement (2000), where Arabs and Muslims are referred to as “animals,” “barbarians,” “brown devils,” “camel drivers,” “cockroaches,” “devil worshippers,” “dogs,” “fanatics,” “filthy Arabs,” “filthy dogs,” “heathens,” “lowlifes,” “ragheads,” “sand niggers,” “savages,” “sneaky Arabs,” “stinky,” “terrorists,” “towel-heads,” and “worthless.”29 Most of the students in this study would have been between eight and nineteen years of age when these films premiered; it is likely many viewed one or more of them; it is also likely that these films as well as other entertainment media provide the frames to their understanding of the Middle East, Arabs, and the Muslim world. The fantasy Arabs and Muslims peopling these media-imagined Middle Easts may very well have shaped the figured worlds of students.

Ample evidence exists within the essays to validate this assertion. This evidence derives from the clash of Bird’s (counter-) narrative with the narratives constituting students’ figured worlds. The most conspicuous example of this clash is “the media lied to us” theme that appears in essay after essay. It is also evident in statements such as “The book Neither East nor West opened my eyes” and “I never really considered the fact that the hejab helps women” (table 2). In addition, there are examples of students’ resisting Bird’s counternarrative while maintaining the correctness of their figured worlds. This can be seen in students’ disapproval of the segregated gendered spaces in Iran and in their continued distrust and fear of Iran and Iranians.

Most interesting is the student who reiterates the materialist narrative of one of the Iranians in Bird’s book, and from it comes to the conclusion “I think that’s one reason everyone wants to attack us.” This student appears to be trying to construct or reconstruct a figured world that makes the attacks of September 11, 2001, comprehensible. Her response suggests she possessed a circumscribed and/or fallacious figured world (imagined geography) of the Middle East and the Islamic world, one that did not prepare her to imagine that some individuals in the world might (reasonably) view her nation, and by extension herself, as an object of hatred. Her response hints that she, and probably other students and many Americans, have a difficult time imagining a world beyond the borders of their nation, peopled by people with legitimate, as well as illegitimate, needs, hopes, wants, desires, and grievances—a world peopled with people like themselves.

notes1. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We

See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 10.

2. Religious Perceptions in America: With an In-Depth Analysis of U.S. Attitudes

toward Muslims and Islam (Gallup, 2009), 8, http://www.gallup.com/

strategicconsulting/153434/ENGLISH-First-PDF-Test.aspx.


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3. Trevor Barnes and James Duncan, Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in

the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992); Felix Driver, “Distance

and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration and Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century,”

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2004), 73–92; Matthew Farish, “Modern

Witnesses: Foreign Correspondents, Geopolitical Visions, and the First World War,”

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 14 (2001): 273–87; Sheila Hones,

“Text as It Happens: Literary Geography,” Geography Compass 2 (2008): 1301–17;

Nedra Reynolds, Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference

(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); Joanne Sharp, “Towards a

Critical Analysis of Fictive Geographies,” Area 32 (2000): 327–34.

4. James Duncan and Derek Gregory, Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London:

Routledge, 1999); Jeanne Guelke and Karen Morin, “Gender, Nature, Empire:

Women Naturalists in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Literature,” Transactions

of the Institute of British Geographers 26 (2001): 306–26; Cherl McEwan, “Paradise

or Pandemonium? West African Landscapes in the Travel Accounts of Victorian

Women,” Journel of Historical Geography 22 (1996): 68–83; Miles Ogborn, “Writing

Travels: Power, Knowledge and Ritual on the English East India Company’s Early

Voyages,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (2002): 155–71.

5. Ben Daley, “Writing from Above: Representations of Landscapes, Places and People

in the Works of Antoine de Saint-Exupery,” Journal of Cultural Geography 26 (2009):

127–47; Juha Ridanpää, “Laughing at Northerness: Postcolonialism and Metafictive

Irony in the Imaginative Geography,” Social and Cultural Geography 8 (2007): 907–

28; Joanne Sharp, “A Typology of ‘Post’ Nationality: (Re)mapping Identity in The

Satanic Verses,” Cultural Geographies 1 (1994): 65–76.

6. David Tavares and Marc Brosseau, “The Representation of Mongolia in

Contemporary Travel Writing: Imaginative Geographies of a Travelers’ Frontier,”

Social & Cultural Geography (2006): 299–317.

7. Vivienne Elizabeth, “Another String to Our Bow: Participant Writing as Research

Methods,” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research

9 (2008), http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/331;

Lauren Guy and Jane Montague, “Analysing Men’s Written Friendship Narratives,”

Qualitative Research 8 (2008): 389–97; Vanessa May, “‘Good’ Mother: The Moral

Presentation of Self in Written Life Stories,” Sociology 42 (2008): 470–86.

8. Jennifer Harris, “The Correspondence Method as a Data-Gathering Technique,”

International Journal of Qualitative Methods 4 (2002): 1–9.

9. Laurel Richardson, Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life (Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press, 1997); Laurel Richardson, “Writing: A Method of Inquiry,”

in Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln

(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 5514–26.

10. Laurel Richardson, “Getting Personal: Writing-Stores,” International Journal of

Qualitative Studies 14 (2001): 33–38.

11. Julia Colyar, “Becoming Writing, Becoming Writers,” Qualitative Inquiry 15 (2009):

421–36.

12. Blake Gumprecht, “Lubbock on Everything: The Evocation of Place in Popular Music

(A West Texas Example),” Journal of Cultural Geography 18 (1998): 61–81.


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13. Texas Tech University’s Office of Institutional Research and Information

Management, 2003.

14. Bird, Neither East nor West, (New York: Washington Square Press, 2002), 4.

15. Ibid., 50

16. Katherine Hendrix, “Black and White Male Professor Perceptions of the Influence of

Race on Classroom Dynamics and Credibility,” Negro Education Review 49 (1998):

37–52; Katherine Hendrix, “Students Perceptions of the Influence of Race on

Professor Credibilitiy,” Journal of Black Studies 28 (1998): 738–63; Ronald Jackson

and Rex Crawley, “White Student Confessions about an African American Male

Professor: A Cultural Contracts Theory Approach to Intimate Conversations about

Race and Worldview,” Journal of Men’s Studies 12 (2003): 25–42; Ahlam Muhtaseb,

“From Behind the Veil: Students’ Resistance from Different Directions,” New

Directions for Teaching and Learning (2007): 25–33.

17. Catherine Riessman, Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences (Thousand Oaks,

CA: Sage, 2007).

18. Carol Grbich, Qualitative Data Analysis: An Introduction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,

2007).

19. Anna Secor, “The Veil and Urban Space in Istanbul: Women’s Dress Mobility and

Islamic Knowledge,” Gender, Place and Culture 9 (2002): 5–22.

20. Bird, Neither East nor West, 59

21. Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Northampton, MA:

Olive Branch Press, 2009), 35.

22. Ibid.

23. Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1993), 135.

24. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 54; emphasis original.

25. Dorothy Holland, William Lachicotte, Debra Skinner, and Carole Cain, Identity

and Agency in Cultural Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);

Stephen Legg, “Beyond the European Province: Foucault and Postcolonialism,” in

J. Crampton and S. Elden, Space, Knowledge and Power (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,

2007), 265–89.

26. Kevin Learner and Kelly McKin, “Tracing the Everyday ‘Sitings’ of Adolescents on the

Internet: A Strategic Adaptation of Ethnography across Online and Offline Spaces,”

Education, Communication & Information 3 (2003): 211–40.

27. Carl Boogs and Tom Pollard, “Hollywood and the Spectacle of Terrorism,” New

Political Science 28 (2006): 335–51; Simon Dalby, “Warrior Geopolitics: Gladiator,

Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom of Heaven,” Political Geography 27 (2008):

439–55; Douglas Kellner, “September 11, the Media and War Fever,” Televison

& New Media 3 (2002): 143–51; Lila Kitaeff, “Three Kings: Neocolonial Arab

Representation,” Jump Cut (2003), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc46.2003/

kitaeff.threeKings/; Mahmood Mamdani, “Good Muslim: A Political Perspective

on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 766–75; Debra

Merskin, “The Construction of Arabs as Enemies: Post-September 11 Discourse of

George Bush,” Mass Communication & Society 7 (2004): 157–75; Nel Ruigrok, Wouter

Van Atteveldt, and Rens Vliegenthart, “Shifting the Terror Frame: How 9/11 Changed


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the Framing of Terrorist Events,” Media, War, and Conflict (Milwaukee, WI, April

19–20, 2007); Michael Ryan, “Framing the War against Terrorism: U.S. Newspaper

Editorials and Military Action in Afghanistan,” Gazette: The International Journal

for Communications Studies 66 (2004): 363–82; Les Switzer and Michael Ryan.

“Reflections on Religion, Media and the Marketing of American Wars,” International

Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 1 (2005): 41–46.

28. Robert Entman, “Framing: Towards Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal

of Communication 43 (1993): 51–53; Erving Goffman, Frames of Analysis: An Essay on

the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Jim

Kuypers, Marilyn Young, and Michael Launer, “Composite Narrative, Authoritarian

Discourse, and the Soviet Response to the Destruction of Iran Air Flight 665,”

Quarterly Journal of Speech (2001): 305–20; Dietram Scheufele, “Framing as a Theory

of Media Effects,” Journal of Communication 49 (1999): 103–22.

29. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs, 579–83.



Copyright © 2015



Park, PA

book

reviews

Beverly Lyon Clark. The Afterlife of “Little Women.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 288 pages. $44.95 (cloth).

Over two decades, Beverly Lyon Clark has attained a familiarity with the reception of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women that is unparalleled. In 1999, she and Janice M. Alberghene coauthored an introduction that addressed the novel’s critical and popular reception in their coedited “Little Women” and the Feminist

Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays. For The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia (2001), Clark contributed a substantive entry on the nineteenth-century critical reception of Alcott’s works. She addressed the shifting position of children’s literature in the American canon in Kiddie Lit: The Cultural

Construction of Children’s Literature in America (2003), devoting a chapter there to “Jo’s Girls.” In 2004, she compiled the most wide-ranging collection of published appraisals to date in Louisa May Alcott:

The Contemporary Reviews. For The Afterlife of “Little

Women,” the culmination of these and other scholarly pursuits, Clark draws from an astonishing breadth of resources to demonstrate compellingly the extent to which Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, and their creator, have maintained a presence in American culture.

Clark organizes her data into four chronological chapters. In “Becoming Everyone’s Aunt, 1868–1900,” she situates the novel within its Civil War context, arguing that “Little Women portrayed the reunification of a family stressed by war and also metaphorically represented the reunification of the country as a whole” (26). She moves beyond sales figures to study why Alcott was “besieged more than most” American authors (20), concluding that readers desired a personal connection with her for a variety of reasons, among them Alcott’s status as an unmarried

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woman, her publisher’s shaping of her public persona, and changing attitudes toward privacy in the era following the publication of Little Women. Elsewhere, Clark critiques May Alcott’s original illustrations for the novel as well as Frank Merrill’s 1880 illustrated edition. She accounts for the way elites came increasingly to disparage Alcott’s works because of grammatical errors and class markers, among other issues, and documents the predilections of editors for “boy stories” by male authors over “girl stories” by female authors.

The second chapter, “Waxing Nostalgic, 1900–1930,” shows how changing attitudes toward literature for children affected the critical reception of Alcott’s work even as its popular reception peaked in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. After surveying an extensive range of polls, surveys, sales and circulation figures, and other resources, Clark considers Marian de Forest’s 1912 Broadway adaptation and William Brady’s “lost” 1919 silent film, drawing on newspaper announcements and advertisements, trade and fan magazines, store displays inspired by the film, other information about the director, producer, and cast, and reviews—not only from major newspapers but from obscure publications such as The Mohave County Miner and Our Mineral Wealth—to situate these adaptations in relation to Alcott’s novel, author biographies, and earlier theatrical adaptations. Clark also addresses at length Gabrielle E. Jackson’s four-volume Three Little Women spinoff series (1908–1914) and reports that in this period, “Alcott may have been excluded from the academic canon, but she was a lively presence in the library and education canons” (51). Those who lauded Alcott often highlighted what they perceived as her domestic rather than her intellectual or artistic talents.

In the third chapter, “Outwitting Poverty and War, 1930–1960,” Clark identifies aspects of Little Women that particularly resonated with Depression and World War II-era readers, even though this period was “the heyday of scholarly dismissal of Alcott” (102): “Long associated with nostalgia for a traditional past, Little Women now was sometimes seen as carrying hints of women’s independence, perhaps of women working to overcome poverty” (110). Clark draws on a wealth of contemporary reviews and responses as well as more recent scholarly analyses as she delineates the perspectives of the 1933 RKO and 1949 MGM films, along with the 1958 television musical, on independence, artistic ability, and courtship. The U.S. Department of Education and the NCTE recommended Little Women, and a range of juvenile and general biographies enshrined Alcott’s place in American culture, while artifacts such as stamps, dolls, fashions, and other commodities proliferated. By the 1950s, the novel was still mentioned in polls and surveys, but there was less widespread enthusiasm for it, although this is the period in which figures such as Ursula Le Guin, Gloria Steinem, Laura Bush, Patti Smith, James Carville, and others read and appreciated it.


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The final chapter, “Celebrating Sisterhood and Passion since 1960,” acknowledges exponential growth in literary criticism about Little Women, particularly after the reprinting in the mid-1970s of Alcott’s thrillers. Clark notes that post-1960 scholarship on Little Women “focus[es] on the passions raging beneath the apparent calm and decorum” (145), and she suggests that by the 1980s, feminist engagement with poststructuralism facilitated appreciation for the novel’s contradictions: “A work becomes powerful if it captures key cultural conflicts and does not fully resolve them: a disjunction between overt and covert messages can be valued as a source of power” (147). This chapter focuses on popular more than critical reception, though, including a range of film, television, ballet, and opera adaptations, particularly Mark Adamo’s 1998 chamber opera, which, unlike previous theatrical and film/television adaptations, “construct[ed] a classically plotted narrative that wasn’t based on heterosexual romance” (164). Elsewhere, Clark finds Mark English’s illustrations for the 1967 and 1989 Reader’s Digest editions of the novel “stunning and evocative, although in at least one of their subtexts, their embrace of the patriarchal, and indeed in their very artistic independence, they may implicitly constrain and belittle Alcott’s text. They don’t so much replicate the text as work in parallel with it, allude to it, raise questions, perhaps provoke it” (197). The chapter culminates in a survey of the numerous fictional/literary reworkings of Little Women’s plot and characterizations, with some attention to fanfiction and online discussion group responses to Alcott’s novel.

In each chapter, Clark draws on an imposing range of resources, identifying along the way the digital archives through which she accessed this information. A single observation will refer to newspapers and magazines, sermons, letters, and other resources from twelve states, the District of Columbia, and two foreign countries. Throughout, Clark attends to international as well as domestic reception, citing evidence to support her analysis of the way Alcott’s novel has been received throughout Europe as well as Turkey, Israel, Thailand, India, China, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, among other countries. In less accomplished hands this much data could overwhelm, but Clark retains command throughout the volume. She perceptively addresses attitudes toward independence, authorship, courtship, talent/genius, sentiment/sentimentality, and more, and she boldly confronts long-held “truths” about Alcott, such as her supposed denigration of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tracing this claim to Thomas Beer’s The Mauve Decade and noting that Beer’s assertions regarding Stephen Crane have been proven to be fabricated (103). She often concludes paragraphs with tart corrective observations, for example, noting in response to a Philadelphia review of a 1913 theatrical production, “[s]omeone who found the book more sentimental than the play must not have read the book in a while” (80). In response to composer-lyricist Richard Adler’s


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comment in his 1990 memoir that the 1958 television production was a great success, Clark deploys quotes from numerous reviews to reveal that “[a]ctually, the production was panned” (135). Readers might wish that she had provided a final chapter in which she imparted more explicit conclusions about why Little Women has been and continues to be such a significant American text and phenomenon, but those conclusions are present, if dispersed throughout the volume. Though there are a very few errors—for example, Meg attends the opera when she visit the Moffats, not the Gardiners (166)—Clark’s attention to detail and accuracy is most commendable.

Anyone who has ever wondered what Teddy Roosevelt, J. K. Rowling, or others have said about Alcott and Little Women will find that information tracked down, cited, and contextualized here. Further, Clark offers insights on American literary history and popular culture that readers will savor, whether they are new to Alcott’s novel or seasoned scholars. Her readings of the theatrical, film, and television productions are compelling, and her interpretations of the illustrated editions are especially exciting, contributing not only to Alcott scholarship but also to emerging conversations across disciplines about the role of illustration in nonpicture books. Even as new Alcott-oriented scholarship, adaptations, and other artifacts appear, The Afterlife of “Little Women” will continue to be essential to Alcott studies and a model for reception scholars.

Anne K. Phillips, Kansas State University

Kimberly Chabot Davis. Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and Anti-Racist Reading. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 272 pages. $95.00 (cloth). $30.00 (paper).

Kimberley Chabot Davis’s new book Beyond the White Negro: Empathy and

Anti-Racist Reading argues that engagement with diverse authors can make for more empathetic and politically transformative white readers. Davis’s book is a timely analysis of the relationship between audience reception and antiracist action in the context of efforts like We Need Diverse Books to diversify publishing and reading practices as a way to enable empathy and equality. Davis’s argument goes beyond the claim that educating whites in African American history and culture can lead to antiracist reading practices to say that antiracist reading is one part of white engagement with African American culture more broadly.


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Furthermore, she argues that such engagement has the capacity to generate antiracist cultural production of its own. Davis’s book valuably crosses media forms to discuss consumption and production of music, film, and literature. Her methodologies range from the analysis of works themselves to ethnographic research with book clubs and the analysis of reader responses in both online forums and within a classroom setting. Across this range of media and sites of engagement, Davis locates the antiracist reading she argues for in an empathy that “creates the possibility for self-alienation by encouraging viewers to read themselves and to critique their own social position and alliances” (11). In other words, Davis seeks to resuscitate empathy as a politics that enables a process of disidentification from whiteness on the part of white viewers/listeners/readers, with the potential to generate antiracist activism and movements.

At the heart of the distinction is what Davis calls a “chicken or the egg question”: “Does politicization follow from reading, or vice versa?” (106). This question of causation, however, remains underexplored in the body of the book. Davis poses this question about whether engagement with African American literature has helped politicize the elderly women of a particular book group or whether their already-present progressive politics has led to their reading practices. It would seem impossible to argue that it is one instead of the other, as both reading practices and politics surely interrelate. However, in terms of Davis’s larger thesis that an “empathetic perspective can be acquired by sustained reading and viewing of black-produced texts that provide a critical lens to examine white privilege and institutional racism” (152), it seems critical to argue for the literature’s direct impact on the politicization of white audience members.

Davis’s title nods to the emphasis on appropriation in discussions of white consumption of black culture. Whether celebrating the liberation provided by such appropriation or condemning it, such discussions tend to privilege white experiences. Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” famously argued that young white men were looking to black culture in the postwar era to address the nihilism and fear of the early Cold War and atomic age. In that essay, Mailer celebrates black culture for its transgression of social norms, arguing that it represents an ironically greater freedom because structures of white supremacy exclude blacks from full participation in society. Because of this, white “hipsters” gain freedom through their embrace of black culture. As Davis notes, Eric Lott famously described the relationship between white performers and white audiences with black culture and black people as “love and theft.” Similarly, black writers such as Greg Tate have argued that white hip-hop listeners and performers take on “everything but the burden” of being black in America.

Davis inserts her book into this larger discourse to push against arguments focused on problematic aspects of the relationship between white performers and consumers and black cultural production. In contrast, she argues that


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privileging such arguments imagines a monolithic white audience and forecloses legitimate avenues of antiracist reading and engagement. Or, to put it as Davis does at one point, too much of the investigation into the dichotomy of “love and theft” focuses on appropriation and neglects the real transformations that can be generated through the “love” that Lott also identified. In particular, Davis argues that while Lott identifies “love” with “desire rather than identification,” she sees “love” as a crucial emotional response which “foster[s] anti-racist coalitions” (4).

Davis specifically locates herself within the still relatively small field of “whiteness studies,” which seeks to understand and articulate the complexities of whiteness in American culture both historically and in the present. In doing so, the field accomplishes the important task of racializing whiteness, which is so often taken as a universal or a given. On the other hand, and as Davis directly points out, whiteness studies often risk recentering whiteness. However, while Davis is sensitive to the potentially “paternalistic” focus on “white empathy” (8), she strongly argues “progressive scholars cannot afford to give up on empathy’s promise of fostering cross-cultural understanding and a desire for social justice and equality” (9).

Building on such claims, Davis’s book speaks to a utopian desire for literature. In this formulation, not only does the engagement with black culture not simply mask the reinscription of present racial hierarchies; it can produce an empathetic response that leads to antiracist activism. On this point, Davis’s book provides quite solid evidence that sustained study of racist power structures and African American cultural production can lead to more sophisticated analysis of the same by white students. In her fourth chapter, Davis documents both introductory and upper-level courses in which she taught Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Paul Haggis’s Crash. She found that her students who had already taken several African American literature courses and for whom she provided contextual readings in African American history and intellectual thought all provided more sophisticated readings of the films that delve into the films’ position within the structures of American racism.

However, the ambiguity of what constitutes antiracist reading makes problematic the book’s more sweeping conclusions. Throughout the text, Davis asks critical questions, and she is certainly right to assault the assumption of the monolithic white reader. On the other hand, she builds on John Jackson Jr.’s argument for replacing questions of “authenticity” with “racial sincerity” to argue that white allies can demonstrate “social solidarity” with black people in the same way that Jackson argues other black people can (29). However, this sincerity, which Davis, following Jackson, locates in “feeling,” “internal identifications,” and “political and social commitments,” is poorly defined (29). The hinge case study seems to be Danny Hoch in the book’s first chapter. After ultimately dismissing Eminem for his lack of political engagement with issues


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of race despite his explicit disidentification with whiteness, Davis qualifiedly praises Hoch for making the politics of race, especially the self-critical variety, central to his work. She maintains this praise despite enumerating instances in which Hoch bristled at charges of having stolen his act from Anna Deveare Smith and the occasionally problematic ways in which his imitations of individuals of different races could yield to charges of minstrelsy. Davis draws a distinction between Eminem and Hoch rooted in her reading of cultural production as a “reception document in itself” (21). Davis’s analysis of the two performers suggests that a progressive antiracist empathy encompasses moving beyond individual consideration of one’s racialization and relationship to black culture toward a more sustained institutional critique. For example, Hoch refused a role on Seinfeld that would likely have raised his profile as an actor and playwright because it required him to perform a racist caricature of a Latino character. In doing so, he revealed that his investment in antiracism goes beyond Eminem’s, even if some of Hoch’s work is problematic in the ways Davis details. However, Davis’s book prompts the question of whether the reading and consumption practices she documents can promote the coalition and movement building that can promote the structural transformations necessary to overturn the hierarchy and privilege she highlights. Questions such as this, which Davis raises, make her study valuable in considering the implications of diversity in publishing and reading practices within such institutional settings as colleges as well as throughout people’s daily lives. By integrating reception study with literary criticism and insights from sociology and psychology on political movements and empathy, Davis reminds readers that for all the problematic aspects of white consumption of African American culture, such consumption has the potential (even if only occasionally) to sow the seeds of antiracism among white audiences.

Cameron Leader-Picone, Kansas State University

Sarah J. Jackson. Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press: Framing Dissent. New York: Routledge, 2014. 206 pages. $140.00 (cloth).

Sarah Jackson’s Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press: Framing Dissent, the second book in the Routledge series “Transformations in Race and Media,” analyzes the framing by both mainstream media and the black press of events


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over the last sixty-five years involving African American celebrities expressing political dissent in spaces unsanctioned in the dominant public sphere. With the fires of Ferguson, Missouri, still smoldering—barely a year after the Trayvon Martin tragedy—Jackson’s book is a critically important addition to our understanding of the way that the media have responded to and constructed discourses about African American dissent.

Jackson devotes chapters to Paul Robeson, Eartha Kitt, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Sister Souljah, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and Kanye West. She selected these celebrities “because of their explicit critiques of American inequality and the non-traditional spaces and discourses they used to publicize such critiques” (2). Her aim is to recover the agency of these individuals in the discursive field of an African American counterpublic space, despite the attempts to discredit or dismiss their dissent in the dominant public sphere. In this comparative study of mainstream and African American news media, Jackson employed a quantitative content analysis to uncover the frequency of the appearance of specific characteristics/terms connected with cultural values as well as a qualitative discourse analysis to reveal the larger ideological frame offered to readers to guide their reception. This comparative analysis reveals that the relationship between the mainstream media and the black press was one-sided, with the black press consistently reacting to a dominant public discourse that ignored counternarratives.

The chapter on Paul Robeson focuses on the news coverage of the riots that occurred in Peekskill, New York, in 1949, on the occasion of Robeson’s concerts. By then labeled as a “Communist sympathizer,” Robeson inspired fear in the mainstream news, with such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times framing the events as battles between “anti-communist demonstrators” and those who supported “singer Paul Robeson, advocate of Communism,” and further connecting Communism to the civil rights movement. Although Robeson’s reception in the black press presented a counter discourse with a more nuanced and complex analysis of the events, these journalists were still cowed by McCarthyism and ended by disavowing Robeson for being too radical. Jackson establishes in the case of Robeson what would become a recurring pattern in the press’s harsh reception of black celebrities who attempted to step outside of their roles as cultural spectacles for audience consumption to challenge the hegemonic status quo.

Jackson’s study of Eartha Kitt’s appearance at a White House luncheon in 1968 hosted by Lady Bird Johnson, in which Kitt denounced the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, demonstrates the way in which gender combined with race in the media’s response to the event. Mainstream media castigated Kitt as rude and impolite, while African American newspapers, which praised her truth telling, engaged in sexual objectification, referring to her as


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“sultry” and a “sex kitten.” As with Robeson, she was politically threatening in her public denunciation of American imperialism, but additionally she was criticized for failing to display the qualities of ideal femininity—a double threat. Hounded by the CIA and the FBI for her political dissent, she had to leave the U.S. for a decade to continue her career in Europe.

The fascinating chapters on the U.S. medal winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and NBA player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf explore the media’s responses to and depictions of dissenting African American athletes. As was the case for the black entertainers Robeson and Kitt, these men were expected to conform to the protocol of the black spectacle, perform brilliantly for their country, display the right kind of patriotism, and keep their mouths shut—or open, in the case of Abdul-Rauf, who refused to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at NBA games. The appearance of Smith and Carlos on the medal podium in their stocking feet to symbolize black poverty and upraised fists to indicate power and unity of black America is one of the most memorable images in professional sports. Their show of solidarity, which white journalists connected with a growing black militancy and political radicalism of young whites in the United States, created a firestorm of disapproval. Almost all mainstream media sources pilloried the two athletes as militant racists who insulted the host country and the United States and contaminated the so-called pure space of the international games. As Jackson points out, this mainstream myth that sports is “naturally apolitical” also implies that sports is “a bastion of equality.” Although there was a discernible generational divide among black journalists in the response to the Smith and Carlos dissent, even members of the older generation who complained of the method and occasion of the dissent did not question the legitimacy of the black athletes’ experiences of racism nor the imperative for social change.

A significant component in Jackson’s analysis of Sister Souljah and Kanye West is the role of rap music in contemporary political dissent and social protest. Souljah became instantly notorious for a 1992 interview with a Washington

Post reporter in which she reacted to the reporter’s request that she explain the mindset of the “rampaging rioters” following the acquittal of Los Angeles police involved in the brutal beating of Rodney King. She replied that she was baffled by questions about acts of rebellion against whites by blacks in a city and a country in which black people die in large numbers everyday as a result of white power and privilege. She pointed out that only when the violence is targeted at whites do events become the object of media obsession. In the context of the cultural ascendance of rap and mainstream media’s anxious response to this ascendance, the rapper Souljah touched a nerve, prompting presidential candidate Bill Clinton to accuse her of spreading “racial hatred.” Souljah posed a triple threat as a female rapper speaking truth to power, prompting the


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predominantly white, male mainstream media journalists to demand that she shut her mouth. The import of Sister Souljah’s message was lost as she became merely a pawn in the political power struggle between Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson. Although Sarah Jackson’s example of Souljah demonstrates that not much had changed over the decades in the reception of black political dissent by the mainstream press, what was different in this case was the more positive response by the black press in its complex analysis of rap’s cultural and political role and Souljah’s contributions to the African American community.

By the time of Kanye West’s 2005 indictment of George Bush’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, rap music had become thoroughly assimilated in popular culture, securely locating West as a media celebrity. Mainstream journalists refused to take seriously his comments as political dissent, instead accusing him of petulance and bad faith as he profited mightily in a capitalist system and a political environment that he criticized. Jackson uncovers layers of complexity in the response of the African American media, which also rendered West’s dissent as entertainment. Unlike the militant threat of Sister Souljah, West’s comments gave black journalists—now influenced by the pervasive ideology of neoliberalism—the opportunity to call for African American self-sufficiency in the belief that the government no longer has a responsibility to address the particular needs of the black community. Despite this neoliberal reception, Jackson points out that West’s dissent was the first by a black celebrity to have an impact in the dominant public sphere. Although Kanye West was rendered politically impotent and used as a shining example of personal success in the ideology of a neoliberal postracial world, the cultural capital of rap enabled it to serve as a vehicle for addressing relevant issues that he raised.

Jackson traces the historical evolution of the agency of black celebrity dissent, carefully and scrupulously detailing the limits that result from entertainment spectacle rather than from political power. Her book offers a valuable supplement to our understanding of media responses and the influence of resistant narratives in a counterpublic sphere. In addition, the book contains an extensive bibliography that is a treasure trove for research and teaching. However, the quantitative content analysis of media discourse over the course of the chapters begins to feel repetitive and too granular; readers may find themselves wanting more qualitative analysis, a more fleshed-out big picture. Also, by ending with Kanye West in 2005 and acknowledging the celebrity status of Barack Obama only as a footnote, Jackson’s study feels too hastily concluded for a book published in 2014. But these are quibbles. Because this study is foundational, it will certainly inspire other scholars to continue the analysis of racial politics in the reception of black celebrity dissent.

Molly Abel Travis, Tulane University


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David Kinney, The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 256 pages. $25.00 (cloth).

The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob by Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Kinney represents an intriguing contribution to the body of literature examining reception but developing outside academia. Kinney profiles a wide variety of Dylan fans in the book, all of which add up to a compelling, quasiethnographic investigation of one of popular music’s most devoted, sustained, and evasive fan communities. Although the book is not a scholarly investigation (Kinney self-identifies as a Dylanologist), his approach—in particular the insider perspective—represents a significant, popular application of Henry Jenkins’s concept of the Aca/Fan. There is much to recommend in Kinney’s methods, yet the sum total of the book offers a cautionary example of reducing reception to yet another way to reveal the “true” meaning of that which is being received. While Kinney’s investigation offers occasionally revelatory insights, he too often uses Dylan fans to better understand the elusive focus of their attention, Bob Dylan himself.

One of the unique challenges Kinney faces in his investigation is that Dylanologists, as a community, are not very cohesive or supportive of one another. They are fiercely competitive, each believing he or she (but more often he) has a deep and complete understanding of Bob Dylan. In some ways, the lack of congeniality makes sense because being a “serious” Dylan fan, Kinney implies, necessitates a certain degree of self-loathing, as Dylan has made a career of frustrating those who follow him or his songs too closely. Going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, for example, was one of the defining moments of popular music, yet Dylan did what he did not to change the world but, in a very deliberate way, to frustrate his acolytes and benefactors within the post-World War II American folk revival. Emphasizing that throughout his career Dylan has attacked his most ardent fans, Kinney argues that many of Dylan’s career moves have been executed as much to defy the expected reception of his music as they have been to express anything that might be burning within Dylan himself. In interviews, Dylan has said hateful things about his fans, telling them, in no uncertain terms, to “get a life.” Nevertheless, his fans keep coming back for more, a phenomenon shown most clearly in the final chapter of The Dylanologists, in which Kinney discusses those who continue to follow Dylan on his tours, most of whom concede that the once-great performer’s shows have become rather sad affairs with predictable set lists and inferior musicianship. Such dour assessments, however, do not stop these fans from


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lining up hours or days in advance to secure a spot “on the rail,” hoping to get as close as possible to the center of their universes.

Among the book’s more significant contributions are the examples of expressive culture within Dylan fandom. There are, for instance, endless parody songs composed and performed by Dylan fans, sometimes mockingly, sometimes lovingly, often competitively. That impulse to demonstrate that one is the biggest, most knowledgable Dylan fan is ever present. Likewise, an immense amount of what university academics would likely call amateur scholarship exists within the Dylan fan community. Countless zines devoted to Dylan and his music have come and gone throughout the singer/songwriter’s fifty-year career, a few of which have managed to survive Dylan’s many transformations and continue to thrive today, developing from mimeographed newsletters sent to a dozen or so diehards to comprehensive websites accessed thousands of time daily around the globe. Indeed, even though Dylan scholarship is quickly gaining momentum in scholarly journals, academics are frequently “scooped” by relentless armchair theorists like Chris Johnson, a high school teacher who is tracking Dylan’s late-career experiments with plagiarism. While some reviewers caught a few of Dylan’s borrowed phrases on his last three albums, Johnson has gone on to show that perhaps a majority of Dylan’s recent bursts of creativity, including those last three albums and his acclaimed memoir Chronicles, have been lifted from all manner of outside sources. The intelligence and rigor of such amateurs raise profound questions about the future of cultural criticism, showing that the deepest, most incisive and engaging analysis of one of the era’s most significant artists is coming from untrained—or at least not formally trained—critics.

As may be expected from a popular book about a popular figure, The

Dylanologists often treats the reception of Dylan and his music, the ostensible subject of the investigation, as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Kinney approaches the fans and their fandom as a sort of back door into understanding Bob Dylan, the inscrutable moving target that so enchants Dylanologists (this despite every indication that Dylan is a self-styled, unsolvable puzzle). For the most part, these forays into Dylanology within The Dylanologists are not particularly illuminating, yet there are moments, as when Kinney recounts a story about Dylan touring the childhood home of his contemporary and occasional rival John Lennon. Dylan had signed up for the public tour as if he were just another visitor, and it was not until he was recognized (a difficult thing to do considering Dylan’s facility with disguise, both on stage and off) by someone on staff that he was given a private tour of Lennon’s family home. The anecdote is charming, as it allows readers to see Dylan himself as a fan, maybe not a fan of the same things, but as someone else connected to yet disconnected from a source of meaning and inspiration. Kinney’s tendency to bring the


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focus back to Dylan, however, enacts the popular belief that fans are adjuncts to creative expression rather than a meaning-making force in themselves, further marginalizing the constitutive power of reception and, by extension, reception studies. Among the bigger opportunities missed within this book was a chance to discuss more completely the expressive traditions and customs of Dylanologists, whose creativity is surely worthy of its own interrogation. Indeed, it becomes abundantly clear throughout the book that the meaning of Dylan’s music and life is generated through, rather than in spite of, his fans’ reception of it.

Todd Richardson, University of Nebraska at Omaha

Clifford R. Murphy. Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 202 pages. $45.00 (cloth).

Academic publications are generally evaluated in words suggesting objectivity and even disinterest on the part of the knowledgeable reviewer. Sometimes, however, it is difficult both to appear objective and to refer exclusively to facts when a publication is unusually enjoyable. Yankee Twang by Clifford Murphy falls into this desirable category. Seldom has a book about music been so delightful and so deserving of recommendation to lovers of American music everywhere. In clear, vigorous, sometimes slightly contentious prose, Murphy investigates issues involving not only popular musical styles and their social (rather than spoken or written) reception, but also the ongoing global/local debates associated with late capitalism and the rush to commodify culture(s) everywhere. His investigations may upset those regionalists who value “their” realms above all others. At the same time, his work demonstrates that every part of our nation can and does partake of country-western music in its own distinctive way.

For readers of Reception, however, a caution: Murphy’s monograph deals with reception as a social phenomenon. For him, an ever-changing kind of music, largely associated with the Southern Highlands, the Ozarks, the Wild West, and so on, made a home for itself in places such as Boston and, in the process, helped New England artists and their audiences cross existing social boundaries, especially (but not exclusively) prior to the post-World War II years. But Murphy does not discuss this phenomenon in theoretical terms. Instead,


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he discusses reception as production, reception enacted rather than pondered; he deals with people and sounds colliding in the social-cultural spaces surrounding them. Referring, for instance, to a dance he and his wife attended in East Greenwich, Rhode Island—an event described in some detail at the opening of Chapter 3—Murphy explains that the Hayloft Jamboree welcomed him, an outsider, as “the gentleman from Brown University,” dedicated a song to him, and urged him and his spouse to join in. As an outsider, he goes on to observe, the event “forcibly disperse[d] our feelings of social discomfort or awkwardness by making our unusual presence there the focal point of the moment” (106–7). The simple truth is that musicians, through their “moments,” their performances, tend to talk less and play more. It is through playing music that they build bridges between themselves and the audiences that listen to them.

In his book, Murphy presents two explicit theses, the first of them somewhat stridently. “New England country and western musicians and fans do not need me or anybody else to justify their cultural authenticity to anyone” (11). Nevertheless, he works hard to justify the sincerity and cultural significance of his region’s nationally inflected music. He even acknowledges that justification has long been part of New England’s country-western musical landscape. “No wonder,” he observes, “the idea of ‘alternative country’ has taken root here,” associated with the likes of Jimmie Barnes, Dick Curless, and Cattle Call (171). All this suggests that Murphy’s book may be of interest especially to those men and women who live or have lived in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont and who enjoy or once enjoyed local country-western on its own terms. Fortunately, Murphy is broad- rather than narrow-minded. He is a local enthusiast with global insights, awareness, and a fondness for spontaneity. Like many ethnographers, he believes that “first foray[s] into the field” are often “the most revealing” (107) (an opinion I share, based on my own experience). His descriptive passages are revealing, rich in information, and enjoyable to read. Above all, Murphy the anthropologist as well as Murphy the ethnomusicologist and student of musical cultures not only embraces the importance of social capital—what Pierre Bourdieu, from a somewhat different perspective, calls “the field of cultural production”—but praises its contributions to localized community construction and sustainability during the later twentieth-century’s deindustrialization of New England and the disenfranchisement of many of its workers and their families.

Murphy’s second thesis—that Yankee Twang “aims to revive the notion that country music is, at its foundation, a traditional social music that, nationally, encompasses many regional styles”—seems milder and more carefully considered (12–13). A large part of his volume is devoted not only to the history and variety of country-western music in the New England states, but to its national rather than merely regional roots. In other words, Murphy embraces country-western


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music as a socially and even nationally unifying style, not a collection of individual practices or practices necessarily regional and therefore geo-culturally exclusive.

Consider his essay on the careers of Boston brothers Vincent and Joseph Calderone—who, after renaming themselves Jimmy and Joey Cal, joined a “western group based in East Boston called the Colorado Ramblers” (141). Murphy points out that “an Americanized ‘cowboy’ name could potentially leapfrog . . . ethnic prejudices and greatly enhance the likelihood” of a welcome reception of a country-western musician in 1930s New England (142). Decades ago, similar decisions on the parts of other “Italian, Irish, German, Greek, Portuguese, and French” musicians helped them mingle “traditional dance music” with “standard country and western” fare during public performances (143). Doing so also unified the communities in which such music mingled.

Here we encounter an aspect of American musical history often overlooked or deliberately downplayed by many experts: the sheer number and variety of places—one might almost say “scenes”—that have contributed and still contribute to the creation of an ever-changing national musical culture. True, scholars have acknowledged the importance of African American and Italian American artists to what we Western Virginians know as “old-time,” “bluegrass,” and “mountain” music. Unlike some of his colleagues, however, Murphy argues for the existence of an emerging national music that encompasses dozens of regional and individual creative and performative styles, and that acts socially (rather than intellectually or aesthetically) to work its transformative magic. Rather than merely valorizing popular music in the New England region, which he also does, Murphy argues in favor of New England as but one of many country-western melting pots, each filled with stews of sources and styles that America’s entertainment industry everywhere serves up and profits from.

In his sixth and final chapter, entitled “The New England Cowboy: Regional Resistance to National Culture,” Murphy asks whether, “when we discuss ‘country’ music we are as often talking about music of pastoral nostalgia as we are about a national (and nationalistic) music of and about the United States” (170). Like all stereotypes, there is some factual basis for the former attitude, at least if by “pastoral nostalgia” we privilege homemade performances over mass-produced products disseminated through radio broadcasts and sound recordings. “In New England country and western music” of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as Murphy explains, “the personal appearance was the engine that drove the profession” (154). This kind of music-making did of course exist and still does, even though many country-western fans listen today to digitally enhanced studio recordings and prefer them to “the real thing,” whatever that might be. Furthermore, “musical memory,” as Murphy reminds us, “is stunningly short-term, always shifting and expanding


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forward, shedding stylistic phrasing, repertoire, and tastes like the many skins of an undying yet ever-traveling snake” (12). We know this has always been true everywhere in the United States, but too often we remember only the most recent events and concern ourselves only with the latest styles, especially those associated with—or pointedly opposed to—the Nashville music machine. Murphy reminds us that things were not always thus.

Yankee Twang tackles our careless regional and social prejudices and drags them down. Its author takes us back to the pre-Nashville days of homemade sounds, even as he works to shake us out of our relentlessly commodified—and theorized—contemporary musical stupors. If all this were not enough, there is a wealth of material in Murphy’s book drawn from a host of interviews conducted by Murphy himself and identified in his references.

Michael Saffle, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Jonathan Rose. The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. 528 pages. $35.00 (cloth).

Every year yields a cornucopia of new books on Winston Churchill. This has never been truer than in the run up to 2015, which marks the 50th anniversary of the great man’s death. The market seems to have developed a hunger for relatively vacuous books on Churchill. A quick online search might yield countless books on Churchill’s wit, Churchill’s dining habits, or the way Churchill’s leadership style can be used in twenty-first-century business situations. There is also a surplus of Churchill biographies that seem to rely entirely on Martin Gilbert’s official biography and its companion volumes, rather than actual archival research. These books do a disservice to Churchill’s legacy because they further remove Churchill from historical scholarship and place him in a swamp of hagiography. However, a new trend in Churchillian historiography has been to place Churchill in his social and cultural contexts, treating him as serious historical subject rather than a cottage industry for amateur historians.

Jonathan Rose’s book certainly belongs to this new Churchill historiography. In fact, The Literary Churchill is a brilliant and very interesting volume. As a very well-written, original account, it is a refreshing change from many of the Churchill tomes that flood the market. With the exceptions of David


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Reynolds’s magisterial account of Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World

War (2005) and Peter Clarke’s Mr. Churchill’s Profession: Statesman, Orator,

Writer (2012), his prolific authorial output has remained a relatively under-researched aspect of Churchill’s life. Rose further distinguishes himself by following Churchill’s relationship with literature through his entire life, distinct from Reynolds’s focus on Churchill as a historian and Clark’s on Churchill as a professional journalist.

Furthermore, Rose’s methodology sets him apart. While the book is structured as a biography and treats “political history as literary history” (x), it embraces Churchill as a serious literary figure, which departs from the typical approach to Churchill’s life. This approach includes exploring Churchill’s role as a reader. Examining Churchill’s exposure to ideas and the ways they later manifested themselves in Churchill’s own work, whether literary or political, undoubtedly took a meticulous level of research. The evidence of this is clear from the author’s use of rarely examined archives such as the Charles Scribner’s Son’s collection at Princeton, the Mass Observation Archive in Brighton, and the H. G. Wells papers. These and other more traditional collections go on to reveal that Churchill “adapted” his famous phrase “blood, toil, tears and sweat” from Giuseppe Garibaldi and that he spent some time trying the exact phrase in various forms. Rose also illustrates the importance of Churchill’s enjoyment of the science fiction of H. G. Wells by linking Churchill’s fascination with air power to Wells’s The War in the Air (1908) and Churchill’s interest in developing the tank to Wells’s short story “The Land Ironclads.” The Literary Churchill is full of such details, and this is the area in which Rose’s work shines.

Rose’s exploration of Churchill as an author is fascinating and informing as well, in part because he examines this aspect of Churchill’s life across its various incarnations. Everything from Churchill’s speeches and journalism to his histories and biographies are touched on. Churchill’s only novel Savrola (1899) is also included in the survey. Another strength of Rose’s book is its contextualization of Churchill’s authorship in the political situation of the day. It is thus made clear that the publication of My Early Life (1931) was no coincidence in coming during Churchill’s political campaign to deny home rule to India. This contextualization is bolstered by Rose’s use of contemporary reviews and reflections of key figures in British politics—for instance, Stanley Baldwin’s remark that Churchill had “become once more the subaltern of the Hussars of ’96” (220). Rose adopts the traditional argument that Churchill wrote history “from the top down” (149) and that he embraced the great man theory of history, with the result that “science, industry, literature, and philosophy are . . . mostly ignored” in A History of


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the English Speaking Peoples (1956–58). However, Rose refutes the idea that Churchill never grappled with the nature of history itself, which challenges the thesis of Bill Deakin, Churchill’s literary assistant. Rose’s argument here is slightly peculiar and not entirely convincing because he places Churchill’s theoretical approach to history, not in Churchill’s whiggish English Speaking

Peoples, but rather in his biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough.

The most problematic elements of Rose’s thesis occur in the construction of Churchill as an actor. Here again, the book embraces traditional arguments up to a point. There can be little doubt that Churchill enjoyed the theatre of the House, especially in Parliamentary debates. Moreover, Churchill’s construction and use of language were dramatic and were born from his passion for words. Rose quotes Churchill’s political ally during the People’s Budget 1909, Charles Masterman, who said Churchill “is in the Greek sense a rhetorician, the slave of the words which his mind forms around ideas” (114) and Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who noted that Churchill’s real tyrant “is the glittering phrase” (357). Rose also underlines Churchill’s love for the melodramatic theatre of his youth and his penchant for the coup de theatre, a device that Churchill certainly employs in his memoirs of the Second World War.

However, Rose is determined to go beyond these particular accounts to claim that Churchill sought to put himself in the centre of a melodrama, thus making the Second World War itself Churchill’s “greatest literary work” (363). According to Rose, Churchill’s view of Hitler was informed by his similarities to Antonio Molara, Churchill’s villain in Savrola. This linkage, combined with the level of what was at stake, provided an opportunity for Churchill to frame the world conflict in melodramatic terms. Unfortunately, Rose’s tactic of finding a literary core to every aspect of Churchill’s life creates a significant flaw in the book’s thesis because the author’s points tend to get lost in exaggeration. Churchill’s understanding of the danger of Hitler and the Nazis was surely more informed by world events than Churchill’s predisposition for melodrama. But in Rose’s defence, he does warn his audience that that “This does not explain everything” (xi). There are other minor issues with the book. Rose often tries to link Churchill to figures that were only peripheral to his experiences, such as Oscar Wilde and Jack Kennedy. Such moves are distracting and add little to the book’s argument.

Ultimately, The Literary Churchill is a well-researched and original account of Churchill’s literary life. While its central thesis is perhaps flawed by exaggeration, Rose’s book is a highly welcome addition to Churchillian scholarship.

A. Warren Dockter, University of Cambridge


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Hiesun Cecilia Suhr, ed. Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts. New York: Routledge, 2015. 173 pages. $140.00 (cloth).

There is no question that issues of emerging online evaluation as practiced on websites and social media platforms are highly relevant for those interested in digital/new media communication and culture. Suhr and the other eight authors of essays in this collection seek to trace out the social and economic implications of what is known as “the reputation economy,” increasingly based on “likes” and “retweets.” The authors interrogate discourses of aesthetics, popularity, taste, and value that largely determine the peer rating and ranking of those who share their photos, enter music and design contests, offer make-up tutorials, or want to determine how much “influence” they have across social media platforms. These new regimes of visibility and continual assessment blur boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity, quality and quantity, amateur and expert, and personal and professional. The authors also raise concerns about the exploitation of free labor, as well as the potential for gaming and manipulation of ratings and rankings systems for self-promotion and marketing.

Although theoretically solid, one of the collection’s shortcomings is the limited number of digital contexts that it explores: only eight content chapters have been included. Even then, the focus is not clearly delineated. In the introductory chapter, Suhr claims to be offering an exploration of “creative communities and their online evaluation cultures” (2) and references the work of Henry Jenkins on participatory fan culture. Yet the mention of “the Arts” in the book’s title, in combination with references to “artists” and a discussion of aesthetics and criticism in art, suggests a more traditional, narrower definition of creativity. While the chapters on photography, the visual arts, and music fit this definition, the bulk of the chapters are concerned with applied or professional arts: fashion and design. This focus is never explicitly acknowledged. Neither is the relationship of the applied arts to the fine arts addressed. The inclusion of Chapter 4, on video games, and Chapter 6, on makeup tutorials, however, signals the broader definition of creativity and draws attention to a striking and surprising absence: there is no chapter on fan production and evaluation. After all, fans have been producing art, music, fiction, and “vids” well before the advent of the web and social media and today maintain a highly visible presence in cyberspace.

The second shortcoming of the collection is its organization or lack thereof. Although there is a chapter outline in the introduction, Suhr does not provide an overview of each chapter. She identifies five general themes of the book, but the chapters do not follow this thematic order. In fact, there appears to be no logical


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order for the arrangement. The first three content chapters introduce different creative and evaluative contexts: Chapter 2 (by Joseph Reagle) concerns negative criticism on a photography discussion forum; Chapter 3 (by Erin Duffy) critically examines positive feedback and support on a fashion bloggers’ discussion forum; and Chapter 4 (by Aaron Trammell) examines design competition of an online game-design forum. Chapter 5 (by Linda Vigdor) seems most logically paired with Chapter 2, since Vigdor discusses visual arts, comparing a studio “crit” in a postsecondary degree program with two online sites devoted to critique of visual art produced and shared by its members. Chapter 6 (by Ramon Reichert) on makeup tutorials by teenage girls posted to YouTube is the “outlier” of the collection as noted above. Chapters 7 (by Helen Kennedy) and 8 (by Suhr herself) return to the theme of online contests, the first in relation to the (interior) design industries and the second in relation to popular music. Chapter 9 (by Alessandro Gandini) takes the albeit implicit applied arts and design focus in an interesting direction with a critical examination of an app called Klout, used by freelance “creatives” in the design industry to produce an aggregated score of one’s “influence” across social media platforms.

Since an edited collection is more than the sum of its parts, those parts deserve to be evaluated on the basis of their own merits. Chapter 3 (Duffy), Chapter 7 (Kennedy), and Chapter 8 (Suhr) are the strongest, presenting theoretically informed case studies. Duffy argues that the norms of providing feedback among fashion bloggers involved “active participation and reciprocity; critique in the form of positive feedback and forms of self promotion that were thinly veiled as expressions of ‘sincerity’ or ‘authenticity’” (47). While she links these practices to capitalist cultural production, she also demonstrates that they also serve to build social relations among members. The only weakness is the author’s failure to link this emphasis on positive feedback and discouragement of negative feedback and overt self-promotion to normative femininity, behaviors, and values, which Duffy contrasts with the “revenge rating” and “self-inflation” on photo.net, where the site creator and the majority of the participants appear to be male, given the low ratings assigned to or lack of interest in the flower images and the popularity of the images of female nudes. Similarly Suhr discusses the role of peers in judging music competitions on the social networking site, Indaba. While it serves to democratize evaluation to a degree, it creates another set of “gatekeepers.” Peer feedback is valued by the participants for its learning potential but concerns are expressed about success being more about marketing abilities than talent as well as the impossibility of judging music without bias, even by the “professionals.” Kennedy provides the most critical view in relation to a form of design competition known as “spec,” where one produces work to secure a contract without any guarantee of getting paid (not unlike academic competitions in which candidates are asked to prepare


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a course syllabus). In response to the exploitative nature of crowd-sourced digital competitions, antispec websites and blogs have sprung up, Kennedy concluding that the main criticism is not the obvious monetary issues but the failure to acknowledge the value of design. In working with a designer in the context of a home renovation, I wholeheartedly agree with the view of the participants that design should begin only after extensive discussion with the clients. Both Kennedy’s and Suhr’s chapters would have benefitted from the use of more data samples to support their claims. As for the remaining chapters, the contexts discussed are interesting, but they read like first drafts of manuscripts that require revisions to the central argument, methodology, and/or data analysis/presentation.

In sum, this is a rather slim volume that does not carve out a sharp focus or cohere particularly well. The readership can be the judge as to whether there is enough content of interest to merit further investigation. Or is there an app or algorithm for that?

Rhiannon Bury, Athabasca University

Christopher V. Trinacty. Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 266 pages. $74.00 (US)/£47.99 (UK) (cloth).

Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry is primarily a study of the tragedies of the Latin author Seneca the Younger (4BCE–65CE), although the first chapter also reads some of his moral-philosophical Epistles. It argues that Seneca’s tragic poetics depend on a system of intertextual references to the works of the Augustan poets who were considered canonical by Seneca’s lifetime—in particular, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Trinacty gives many detailed examples of Seneca’s reworking a quotation from an Augustan poet over the course of a tragedy, recontexualizing the original until its meaning is irrevocably altered; “intertextuality,” he writes, “works hand in hand with Seneca’s tragic poetics to interrogate the very meaning of the language itself” (185).

Over four chapters, the book demonstrates that the characters, plots, tragic universes, and metapoetic programs of Seneca’s dramas are constructed and developed through quotations from, allusions to, and reworkings—


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or “rebrandings”—of key moments in the Augustan poetic canon. Thus Senecan characters appear to be aware of, and to intervene consciously in, the process of their own literary construction. His Medea seeks to surpass the evils she is already famous for, and famously proclaims nunc Medea

sum (“Now I am Medea”), meaning both that she has recovered from the madness of love that had temporarily possessed her and that she is living up to her literary reputation as an exemplar of feminine evil. Similarly, the plots of Senecan tragedies are shown to hinge on generic as much as interpersonal conflict, as when Phaedra uses the language of Augustan love elegy to describe herself, in a genre-based misreading of her situation that ultimately brings about her downfall. Characters in Senecan tragedy, from Phaedra to Oedipus and Cassandra, are situated, partial, and fallible readers, who misread the ambiguous signs of the world around them. Tragic discourse and intertextuality work together; Seneca puns on the Latin fata—Fate, but also “things that have been said”—to create a tragic universe in which a character’s fate “consists, in part, in his previous literary representations” (232).

Overall, then, Trinacty’s book makes a strong case for seeing Seneca’s tragic poetics as inseparable from the metapoetics of allusion. The elements of his argument, however, are not new, and this book is mainly notable as a synthesis of two strands of classical scholarship. On one hand, its understanding of tragic discourse as structured around the ambiguity of language and the partiality of individual readings relies, as Trinacty makes clear, on Vernant and Vidal-Naquet’s important 1972 book Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (translated into English in 1986 as Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece). On the other hand, Trinacty’s reading of Seneca as a “self-aware, clever, competitive and questioning” appropriator of Augustan poetics (235) is part of a broader scholarly move to rehabilitate Seneca. Indeed, Trinacty frequently uses the words of another scholar to conclude his own arguments, positioning himself as contributing to, rather than challenging, the growing consensus on Seneca. Seneca, along with his fellow “Silver Latin” poets, was once seen as a derivative and decadent author, but over the last twenty or thirty years, classicists such as A. J. Boyle, Michael Comber, and Alessandro Schiesaro have been rereading his work via contemporary literary theory and discovering a sophisticated metatheatricality and an aesthetics of belatedness.

Trinacty builds on this work and adopts an associated vocabulary, notably using intertext/uality over allusion. In fact, the latter term appears very infrequently in the book. Classical scholarship over the last twenty-five years has discussed the difference between intertextuality (defined as an irreducible system of linguistic relations between texts, and associated with poststructuralist theory) and allusion (defined as a conscious authorial practice


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of quotation or reference to another text, and associated with traditional philological methods), and the distinction is still a live one today. Trinacty does not touch explicitly on the debate, but the rhetoric of his book—in particular, the prominence of the terms reception and intertextuality—situates him on the poststructuralist side of the methodological divide. In practice, however, his own critical methods derive more from the philological side, which would more usually refer to allusions. Indeed, Trinacty consistently uses intertext to mean allusion, even substituting the former where only the latter would work syntactically, as when he claims, “Seneca brings together different genres through intertexts to their Augustan practitioners” (185). Thus, despite its rhetorical focus on intertextuality, which suggest an interest in the ways in which meanings are produced between and across texts and readers, this book is, in fact, a highly traditional, author-centered work of classical scholarship aimed at evidencing Seneca’s “distinctive vision” (61), his “purpose in writing” (236), and his “artistry as a poet” (235).

There is some irony here, in that one of Trinacty’s key theoretical touchstones—the work of Vernant and Vidal-Naquet on Greek tragedy—is best known to nonclassicists through its appearance in Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author.” In that essay, Barthes famously proclaims that the death of the author makes way for “the birth of the reader,” and it seems to me that the most serious limitation of Trinacty’s work—and of one strand of classical reception studies in general—is its lack of a sufficiently robust conception of reading. The term reader appears in the title of two of the book’s chapters, and the epilogue to the book claims that “much of this study has been to unearth Seneca’s own predilections as a reader” (235). Nowhere in the book, however, is there an analysis of what I would understand as reading, that is, of the ways in which Seneca makes sense of earlier texts, of the sociocultural systems within which he interprets them, or of the meanings he attributes to them.

Instead, Trinacty invariably concludes his discussions of Seneca as reader with claims about Seneca as author. For example, the chapter entitled, precisely, “Seneca as Reader” concludes that “his tragedies . . . exploit literary tropes and language for the fullest expression of his distinctive tragic vision” (61). The language of reading and reception is appropriated for a highly conventional study of authorship-as-mastery. Reception, which appeared as a radical theoretical intervention into classics in the 1990s and has come to have transformative reverberations still being felt elsewhere in the discipline, has been incorporated in Trinacty’s book into traditional philological practice, and in the process has been thoroughly domesticated.

Ika Willis, University of Wollongong, Australia


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Ming Xie, ed. The Agon of Interpretation: Towards a Critical Intercultural Hermenuetics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 336 pages. $65 (cloth).

The Agon of Interpretation is a collection of fourteen essays devoted to the increasingly important topic of communication and understanding across cultures. The collection brings the resources of Western hermeneutic traditions to bear on the problem of interpretation and understanding of cultural differences, in particular, across the differences between Western and non-Western cultures. In her introduction and afterword, Ming Xie emphasizes that intercultural hermeneutics must necessarily be critical. That is, the work of cross-cultural understanding has to include critical self-reflection on the cultural elements each party brings to the process and an openness to recognizing and appreciating alternative points of view.

The collection is divided into three parts. Part One reviews the various theories of interpretation offered by the leading European and North American philosophers who have addressed the topic, including Heidegger, Husserl, Gadamer, Ricouer, Habermas, Levinas, Derrida, Jauss, Rorty, Taylor, and Bernstein. Part Two explores complications that arise with more concrete approaches to interactions across cultural difference. Part Three considers additional topics, such as violence, empathy, human rights, and the conditions for the legitimacy of critical intervention.

The essays in Part 1 address familiar debates and issues, and as a group they offer a concise and cogent introduction to Western theories of interpretation. However, all the contributors, except R. Radhakrishnan, are European (or, at least eurogenic); the same is true for all the texts discussed, except for brief, tantalizing references to Gandhi and to the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro. Part One is clearly a conversation among Western writers from within their own cultural traditions, addressed primarily to readers who are expected to be conversant with that tradition. Reading the essays in this section, it occurred to me that theoretical abstraction does not transcend the cultural context. On the contrary, abstraction exacerbates the problem to the extent that it facilitates the universalization of latent cultural intuitions and prejudgments and identifies its specific logic with human reason itself.

The considerable time and labor invested in producing and reproducing the Western traditions is evident in the essays in this section, as is the minuscule investment in the acquisition and presentation of knowledge about and from other cultural traditions. In The Racial Contract (1997), Charles Mills has


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asserted that an “epistemology of ignorance” about race is a key element of the American “racial contract.” Something like an epistemology of ignorance about other cultures is evident in the Western hermeneutical theories represented in the first section of The Agon of Interpretation. The effects of this negative epistemology can be counteracted only by the application of due diligence in acquiring and incorporating knowledge about and from other (non-Western) cultures.

However, some essays in Part 1 do reach out in the direction of non-Western knowledge. In “The Commonality of the World and the Intercultural Element: Meaning, Culture, and Chora,” Suzi Adams ends her essay with a brief discussion of Nishida Kitaro’s (1870–1945) concept of basho. The “logic

of basho” or “place” can be understood as an “early version of a-subjective phenomenologically sensitive philosophy.” “Kitaro’s logic was accompanied by an ontology of ‘absolute nothingness.’ ‘To be’ for Kitaro means ‘to be within.’” The “absolute nothingness” is not an absence of being, but a “field of dynamic, creative, active movement that is world creative” (77). Alas, that is the extent of Adams’s gesture toward Kitaro.

The “main subjects” of R. Radhakrishman’s “World, Home, and Hermeneutic Phenomenology” are Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but Radhakrishman begins his essay by citing Gandhi’s image of India as a “house with open windows all around so that the winds of influence may flow in from wherever” but adds his warning “that he would not be left a beggar in his own house” (99). Gandhi’s words suggests the role force and unequal power often play in intercultural exchanges: “How . . . are we to balance phenomenological openness in the name of all Being, or Being with a capital B, with the need to protect ourselves against hermeneutic aggression or violence?” References to Gandhi and other Indian texts are threaded through Radhakrishan’s essay, but he does not give us a substantial discussion of any of them.

Part 2 contains two essays that incorporate more substantial information about a non-Western culture—in this case, China. “Understanding, Misunderstanding, and Hermeneutics” by Zhang Longxi offers a historical perspective on the cultural interactions between China and the West, which began in earnest in the seventeenth century with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries. The Jesuits, led by Matteo Ricci, adopted an “accommodation approach” that sought to make sense of Catholicism in terms of an already-existing and well-developed Chinese tradition. They learned Chinese, studied classical Chinese texts, and collaborated with Chinese scholars in translating European texts into Chinese and Chinese texts into Latin and other European languages. Unfortunately, this promising beginning was short-lived. Pope Clement XI condemned Chinese rituals and the use of Chinese terms for god. Ricci was accused of conceding too much to a culture whose


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“secret philosophy is pure materialism” (148). The result is the dichotomous construction of the Chinese mode of thought as fundamentally different from the Greek or Western one. Zhang shows how this invidious dichotomy continues to have repercussions in contemporary China studies.

In “Reconciling the Tension between Similarity and Difference in Critical Hermeneutics,” David B. Wong proposes a method of analogical thinking applicable to the interpretation of three features of the Confucian ethic: the concept of xiao or “filial piety”; the emphasis on harmonious relations as a central part of ethical life; and the aesthetic dimension of the Confucian conception of a good and worthwhile life. Wong elaborates on these elements by citing specific texts (from the Analects) and by giving examples of how they work in practice. Then he uses American analogues that render the Chinese concepts both intelligible and different.

It is interesting that Wong includes a section that examines intercultural encounters in the context of power. He cites the example of Lin Zexu, the Imperial Commissioner of Canton, who tried to persuade the British of the rightness of the Chinese imperial government’s ban on opium trafficking. With the help of a missionary, Lin studied a textbook on international law, from which he learned that every state has a right to ban the entry of foreign goods. As we know from history, Lin’s efforts to speak to the British in terms they might honor were unsuccessful.

In Part 3, “Intercultural Understanding in Philosophical Hermeneutics” by Lawrence K. Schmidt discusses Gadamer’s theory that understanding requires reflective awareness of the inherited prejudgments that shape one’s horizon of meaning. Schmidt sets his discussion of Gadamer against his own experience as a foreigner on a Chinese train, as a philosopher reading Chinese philosophy, and as a professor teaching Confucius to American freshmen. “Making Sense of Critical Hermeneutics” by Richard Shusterman and Wojciech Malecki includes a brief discussion of the reception of pragmatism in Japan and China. Two essays, “Critical Interventions: Towards a Hemeneutical Rejoinder,” by Lorenzo C. Simpson, and “Empathy, Dialogue, Critique: How Should We Understand (Inter)Cultural Violence” by Hans-Herbert Kögler, discuss the issues of interpretation and moral judgment that are foregrounded in discussions of practices such as female genital mutilation.

The Agon of Interpretation shows the strength of Western theories of interpretation, but I am skeptical about its adequacy as a theoretical framework for intercultural hermeneutics. What does Asian or African philosophy and criticism say about the problem of interpretation? How would reading and interpretation be treated in the context of non-Western knowledge traditions? Perhaps Western theories indeed provide the best framework for critical


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intercultural hermeneutics, but absent sufficient knowledge of non-Western approaches and texts, it is impossible to say so.

David Wong cites Donald Davidson’s idea of triangulation as a model for producing understanding, where two people, with different perspectives, and standing on different locations, seek to gain mutual understanding of a common object. I cannot derive my understanding of, say, the Chinese ideal of “filial piety” entirely from my ideas or my imagination of how family relations work. I need to hear what a Chinese person says about it. But it is not enough to engage one Chinese person, or even many Chinese people. The model of triangulation sets me up as the privileged addressee and shapes the dialogue in terms of what I am able and willing to understand. I also need to learn to observe and listen to Chinese conversations with each other. The editor and authors of The Agon of Interpretation are right about the critical need, in our increasingly globalized world, to develop strategies for cross-cultural understanding. This project requires an enormous amount of work; Xie’s book is a step in the right direction.

Patrocinio Schweickart, Purdue University



Copyright © 2015



Park, PA

Armstrong, Guyda. The English Boccacio: A History in Books.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Bien, Gloria. Baudelaire in China: A Study in Literary Reception.

Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013.

Breed, Brennann W. Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical

Reception History. Bloomington: University of Indiana

Press, 2014.

Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2014.

Caines, Michael. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century. New

York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Carpentier, Nico, Kim Christian Schrøder, and Lawrie Hallett,

eds. Audience Transformations: Shifting Audience

Positions in Late Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Drouin, Jennifer. Shakespeare in Québec: Nation, Gender, and

Adaptation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.

Duran, Angelica, ed. The King James Bible: Across Borders

and Centuries. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University

Press, 2014.

Emerson, Lori. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to

the Bookbound. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2014.

Glynn, Tom. Reading Publics: New York City’s Public Libraries,

1754–1911. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

Guentner, Wendelin, ed. Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-

Century France: Vanishing Acts. Newark: University of

Delaware Press, 2013.

Holt, Jennifer, and Kevin Sanson, eds. Connected Viewing:

Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in the Digital Era.

New York: Routledge, 2014.

Lardinois, Andre, Sophie Levie, Hans Hoeken, and Christoph

Lüthy, eds. Texts, Transmissions, Receptions: Modern

Approaches to Narratives. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2015.

Lubey, Kathleen. Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading

in Britain, 1660–1760. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell

University Press, 2012.

McCaughey, Martha, ed. Cyberactivism on the Participatory

Web. New York: Routledge, 2014.

McCue, Maureen. British Romanticism and the Reception

of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840. Burlington, VT:

Ashgate, 2014.

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Mendelsund, Peter. What We See When We Read: A Phenomology. New York: Vintage-

Random House, 2014.

Oliver, Mary Beth, and Arthur A. Raney, eds. Media and Social Life. New York:

Routledge, 2014.

Palmer, Ada. Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2014.

Patriarche, Geoffroy, Helena Bilandzic, Jakob Linaa Jensen, and Jelena Jurišic, eds.

Audience Research Methodologies: Between Innovation and Consolidation. New York:

Routledge, 2014.

Parry-Giles, Shawn J. Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American

Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Santana, Cintia. Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel

(1975–1995). Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013.

Schorb, Jodi. Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American

Punishment, 1700–1845. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014.

Shaw, Adrienne. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Game

Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Sillars, Stuart S. Shakespeare and the Victorians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Smith, Jeff. Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Urbancic, Anne. Reviewing Mario Pratesi: The Critical Press and Its Influences. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2014.

Wheeler, Katherine. Victorian Perceptions of Renaissance Architecture. Burlington, VT:

Ashgate, 2014.

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Copyright © 2015



Park, PA

contributors

perry l. carter is associate professor of geography at Texas

Tech University. His research and scholarship center upon

the coevolution of race and place, with a specific emphasis

on the African American experience. He is coeditor of the

forthcoming volume Social Memory and Heritage Tourism

Methodologies.

philip goldstein is the founding director of the

Reception Study Society and emeritus professor of English

at the University of Delaware. He is the author or editor

of six books, including, most recently, New Directions in

American Reception Study (2008) and Modern American

Reading Practices: Between Aesthetics and History (2009).

allison layfield is a Ph.D. candidate in

twentieth- century literature at Purdue University. Her

research focuses on the relationships between multicultural

education, editorial practices, and the reception of young

adult literature. Her most recent publication on The Hunger

Games appears in The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on

Children’s Literature.

lydia brown magras, who received her Ph.D. in 2014

from Purdue University, is a lecturer in English at Chicago

State University. Her research interests include American

women writers and spirituality, cognitive literary studies,

and African American literature. She has presented her work

at the National Conference on Black Studies, the American

Literature Association Conference, and the Reception Study

Society Conference.

patrocinio schweickart is professor emerita of English and

women’s studies at Purdue University. Her research is in the

area of theory and cultural studies. She has coedited Reading

Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response and Gender and

Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts.

Reception_7_10_Contributors.indd 130 15/06/15 9:28 PM

contributors131

matthew james vechinski is assistant professor of

Focused Inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University. His

recent articles include “Kathy Acker as Conceptual Artist:

In Memoriam to Identity and ‘Working Past Failure’” and

“The Design of Fiction and the Fiction of Design.” He is

completing a book on the American short story cycle that

explores magazine stories revised to create fiction collections

resembling novels.

m. genevieve west is professor of English and chair of

the Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages

at Texas Woman’s University. Her book Zora Neale Hurston

and American Literary Culture examines the reception of

Hurston’s writings between 1919 and 1995. Her article

“‘Youse in New Yawk’: The Sexual Politics of Zora Neale

Hurston’s ‘Lost’ Caroline Tales” is forthcoming in African

American Review.

Reception_7_10_Contributors.indd 131 15/06/15 9:28 PM

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