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(Mis)representations of violent women

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(Mis)representations of violent women

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Content (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENT WOMEN by Nikole Alexa Senecal A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) December 2 002 Copyright 2002 Nikole Alexa Senecal Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3093911 UMI UMI Microform 3093911 Copyright 2003 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA The Graduate School University Park LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 900894695 T h is d is s e rta tio n , w r itte n b y Nikole Alexa Senecal U n d er th e d ire c tio n o f A .e x . D isserta tio n C om m ittee, a n d a p p ro v e d b y a ll its m em bers, has been p re s e n te d to a n d accep ted b y The G rad u ate School , in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t o f req u i rem en ts fo r th e d egree o f D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y o f G raduate S tudies December 18, 2002 D a te D lSSERTATi01Jy £O M M rT T E E i J ^ Chairperson, <L=_ O Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to my family: To my husband Peter (Ph.D.) who kept me at it through his good example. To my father who taught me to be an alternative politi cal thinker—even though our politics seem diametrically opposed. To my mother who at just the right point in my life told me I could walk away from this dissertation and leave it incomplete, which allowed me to finish it. To my sister Samantha who taught me about sisterhood literal and figurative. And who always makes important political choices whether she acknowledges them or not. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgment s I would like to acknowledge the members of my committee for their words encouragement, their high expectations, and their kind assistance. I wrote this dissertation under the direction of Ron Gottesman who did all he could to motivate me. Alice Gambrel 1, near or far, made insightful comments. Judith Grant helped me through the process, explaining the anxieties that never disappear completely and offering sisterhood. Hilary Schor helped me make time to write this disser tation in my full-time schedule. I have enj oyed work ing with all of them. I wish to acknowledge too my dissertation group—Eliza beth Archer, Michael Frisoli, Valerie Karno, and Peter Stokes—who gathered together and showed me their work, critiqued mine, sent me to the doctor, and generally rooted for me (or charged me $10) . And there were other special friends who have read the thing, supported me, called to my attention important work, and offered criticism tempered with friendship: Kimberly Manner, Mike Reynolds, Kate Lonsdale, and Kiki Jamieson. Marisa Bourgoin did all of those things and iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. spent a dismal week in Syracuse helping me do research. I have been fortunate to have made and kept such won derful friends. I offer thanks too to the archivists of the Margaret Atwood papers at the University of Toronto and the Joyce Carol Oates papers at Syracuse University, espe cially Kathleen Manwaring. All were generously inter ested in my dissertation. Randy Souther, who I have met only virtually, provides us all with excellent on line resources on Joyce Carol Oates; they were invalu able and let me know that at least one other person out there thought this was important work. "It's been a long hard drag . . Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract vi Introduction: Violence and Feminism 1 Chapter 1: Literary Reputation and the Woman Writer of Violence: Atwood, Morrison, and Oates 2 8 Chapter 2 : Sisterhood is Troublesome 7 4 Chapter 3 : Reading Maternal Ambivalence 12 8 Chapter 4: Medea's Daughter-In-Law: Reading Motherhood in News Reports of the Susan Smith Case 163 Bibliography 2 02 v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract My dissertation reexamines the issue of women's violence from a feminist perspective that is open to the idea of such aggression redefining "femininity" in helpful ways. Rej ecting the positions of both conser vative forces and those feminists who believe that a woman is naturally nonviolent, I undertake a more nu- anced reading of the violent woman. I argue that open ing and continuing discussions of women's violence al lows scholars to critique fully the ideals of womanhood and to explore all options for women's equality. This study focuses on works by contemporary North American women writers Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates. In the first chapter, I examine the ways that the threat of women writing violence leads contem porary reviewers to represent the authors themselves as violent or as victims of violence. Cultural attitudes, especially the prevalent myth that woman are naturally nonviolent, as offered by the book reviewers, often prevents serious engagement with these authors' works. Beginning a more complex reading of the works, chapter two examines the connections between sisterhood and violence. As represented in the fiction examined here, vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. groups of women sometimes form to combat oppressive social forces but these women do not always act in the interest of feminism, nor are they always successful. In chapter three, my focus turns to Morrison's mothers who kill, especially Sethe in Beloved and Eva Peace in Sula. Using psychologist Roszika Parker's theory of maternal ambivalence, this chapter considers the ways in which these stories of maternal violence are liber ating for both the novel's characters and readers alike. Finally, I turn my attention to the representa tion of real mothers who kill focusing on the case of Susan Smith who drowned her sons in 1994. Legal and media portrayals of this and similar cases seek to ex plain the problem of filicide by treating them as in stances of individual pathologies, but until we can read women's stories of violence as connected to social circumstances and thus challenge the gender stereotypes at work in our culture we will not move forward in changing women's lives. vii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction Women and Violence "The woman who is violent announces not only that things are intolerable. . she also an nounces that we are not who they say we are. . . Women's violence . . . sometimes serves women, sometimes not."1 Carol Anne Douglas "That women are individuals, difficult to cor ral, a motley and uneasy sisterhood; that femi nism is often hard going and hard won, sabotaged from within as well as without; that in the war between the sexes there are collaborators as well as enemies, spies, refugees, spectators, and conscientious objectors—all this has been brilliantly dramatized in Ms. Atwood's work . . . Goodness, what a richly hued tapestry of women the world has woven! That this should in any way still be news tells us something of the condescension and categorical thinking of that world."2 Lorrie Moore These epigraphs come from very different sources: the former, an academic book on feminist theories and the latter, a review of Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride which appeared in the New York Times Book Review. Both reflect the impetus for this project. Although Carol Anne Douglas does not spend much time examining the women she dis cusses here, she does raise the important idea that violent women's actions serve both as an objection Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to their social conditions and as evidence that these women are indeed good women. For those who are familiar with certain anti-pornography femi nists and their work with conservatives on the is sue of pornography, it will not be surprising that some feminist and most conservative forces tend to use similar language to describe women's violent behavior. Both groups have dual narratives of the good versus the bad girl. For essentialist and maternalist feminists who embrace the division of masculine and feminine traits, the violent woman has somehow been oppressed to the point where her "natural"—whether a result of nurture or nature— nonviolence can no longer function. On the other hand, for conservatives the woman who commits such an act has somehow become unnatural: corrupted by men, mental illness or feminist ideas. Both ac knowledge that violent women exist, usually to de scribe the ways in which this is unnatural behav ior . Douglas's remark suggests that this behavior is not unnatural at all. Lorrie Moore asserts that women are neither natural enemies nor natural allies, and they have a variety of motivations for their actions. As she says, it seems unbelievable that we must continue Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to make such declarations, but when the media, courts and others are faced with violent women, their analytical capabilities seem hampered. Women's multiple motivations for murder throughout the history of the United States are outlined in Ann Jones's book Women Who Kill (1981). In this work, using evidence from newspapers, court documents, diaries, and prison visits, Jones docu ments murders committed by women and the punish ments they received between 163 8 and 1980. She does this in part to raise awareness that women have committed such crimes before the women's move ment began in the 1960s,3 and in part to debunk the myth that women are naturally non-violent. In many ways Jones succeeds in making feminist history. As Jones and others have argued, there has long been a complicated relationship between femi nism and the criminal woman. As early as the nine teenth century women's movements, feminist women have been linked to violence, as a shorthand for masculinity. These women are often considered mas culine because of their desire to change conserva tive views of womanhood. In wanting to be differ ent kinds of women, feminists have found themselves unjustly redefined as aggressive by their patriar Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. chal societies, through the press, and by social scientists. Feminists have also been tied to criminal women in their attempts to change the con ditions of women in prison, which man British suf fragettes did as a result of their arrests; to change the criminal justice system, as in the case of Lucy Stone who argued Lizzie Borden could not be tried by a jury of her peers if women were not al lowed on the jury; or to redefine crime as with the work of the current battered women's movement, to cite an very small sampling of examples. Some of the more militant protofeminist's at tempts to be heard lead them to take violent ac tions. As law professor Lucia Zedner reports: "In 1906, the Women's Social and Political Union em barked on the more militant phase of their cam paigns, leading activists committed often violent, criminal acts in its pursuit."4 Although the best known act of suffragette violence may well be Emily Wilding Davison's death at the 1913 Epsom Derby when she was trampled after running on to the course, much of the British Suffragettes' criminal activity was committed against property, from acts of graffiti and window breaking to arson and bomb ing . According to author Emily Hamer, between Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. April and mid-July 1913 there were more than 42 major cases of suffragette arson, for example an arson at Yarmouth Pier destroyed a concert pavilion and caused £2 0,000 of damage.5 Hamer's article goes on to explain that the Victorian patriarchal institutions responded in kind, increasing the length of women's sentences and force-feeding suf fragette hunger strikers, which she likens to rape. While these violent undertakings were occurring in England, American suffragettes' activities were confined to peaceful protests, although they did divide over the issue of militancy. There was one incidence of American suffragettes being arrested after chaining themselves to a fence; however the courts ruled that the jailing was unconstitutional, according to historian Lois Banner.6 I include descriptions of the protofeminist English to con firm that Victorian woman were not universally peaceful, even if American suffragettes seemed to be. As Carol Douglas asserts in the epigraph to this introduction, modern feminism has also had a complicated relationship to violence since the New Left Movement—primarily a socialist movement that worked against imperialism and oppression—erupted Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in the 1960s. While some Movement women were be ginning to formulate feminist ideas, others in the Movement—women as well as men—were fighting those same ideas which they labeled racist (in a differ ent context) and divisive. White women's com plaints were seen as disruptive to the collective fight for socialism, for civil rights, and against imperialism.7 When socialism was implemented femi nist goals would necessarily result, they argued. Some women, who countered that the Movement itself was sexist, were often driven to form their own groups. Once feminist women formed these groups, some felt that violent political action was neces sary to change the System, while many others re jected violence. As Alice Echols reports in her book Darina to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. "while women's liberationists did not object to violence per se, they did object to the machismo which accompanied Movement militance."8 Given the feminist women's rej ection of the Move ment at this time, most renounced violent actions for the most part. After the women's liberation movement sepa rated from the New Left Movement, some women again began to advocate violence. In the early 197 0s, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. for example, Echols recounts that a Chicago group "considered going underground, not because they were guilty of any illegal activity, but because they had come to believe in the necessity of armed struggle" (Echols 227). In 1971 Robin Morgan pro posed six week training camps for women in which they would learn the necessary skills for "the revolution" including using weapons, learning self- defense techniques, and performing abortions, among other pursuits which would aid in making the neces sary changes to American society. This "basic training," they believed was warranted at the time because of the violence the government was using against political agitators. Morgan felt it was necessary for oppressed peoples to learn to fight against the oppressor (in this case, the state), since that oppressor had removed the possibility of violent action by keeping the oppressed uneducated or unable to use violence to retaliate. "At a cer tain point it is contingent upon the oppressed to seize knowledge and skill for themselves, in order to free themselves."9 At the same time however, some feminists saw advocating violence as evidence of an individual's involvement with the government (Echols 227). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Still other anti-violence feminists argued that women were naturally peace loving and nurtur ing. In 1973, Jane Alpert, a feminist and former Weatherwoman, published "Mother Right" which argues that women's biology, specifically the ability to reproduce, results in a women's culture: For centuries feminists have asserted that the essential difference between men and women does not lie in biology but rather in the roles that patriarchal societies (men) have required each sex to play. . . . However, a flaw in this feminist argument has persisted: it contradicts our felt experience of the bio logical difference between the sexes as one of immense significance.1 0 Morgan took up Alpert's "new feminism," and out of radical feminism grew cultural feminism. Cultural feminism argued that the revolution, when it came, would begin with the individual and spread: from each individual gaining self-respect and yes, power, over her own body and soul first, then within her family, on her block, in her town, state, and so on out from the center, overlapping with similar changes other women are experiencing, the circles rippling more widely and inclu sively as they go. (Morgan 77) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Echols comments that this move, this "vision of social change was profoundly individualistic and far removed from the collective impulse that in formed radical feminism" (Echols 251). In effect, this branch of feminism covered up early feminist (leanings toward) violence. Not only were women now understood as being incapable of violence, the coalitions that had formed to commit such acts were now passe as well. In the 1990s, an explosion of writing about women's violence occurred. Women's participation in violent, formerly all-male sports gained media coverage: although women had been boxing since 1872, they won legal support for the sport in 1993 (Mallov v. USA Boxing) . In 1997, Gini Sikes' s 8 . Ball Chicks appeared, covering the realities of young women's lives as gangmembers in Los Angeles, San Antonio and Milwaukee. That same year, Yxta Maya Murray's fictionalized account of this world appeared: Locas. Many scholarly and popular works in the 1990s focused on women who killed their lov ers , husbands, and children and the literary repre sentations of these women. Several of these works are reviewed here in order to situate this disser tation . Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Virginia B. Morris, writing in Double Jeop ardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction (1990), examines the motives for murder possessed by women characters in English novels of the nineteenth cen tury . Although this current project considers North American texts and contemporary works and Morris's book examines English works set "firmly within a historical context—the nineteenth-century debate on 'the woman question'," the aim is similar enough to warrant consideration. Morris finds that almost all of these characters who kill commit "more or less justifiable homicide"1 1 often re sponding to abuse. The authors of such novels did not aim to make cultural heroines of such women, but Morris argues that these novelists implied that, to an extent, women murderers were seeking relief from personal or social oppression. She demonstrates that by creating motives for sympa thetic women murderers, Victorian novelists seemed to advocate lawbreaking. Because of their ambiva lence toward this immoral position, novelists con structed texts which did not allow these guilty characters to enjoy the benefits of their actions: they were made to suffer in the courts, by commit ting suicide, by withdrawing from society or by Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. going insane. The novelists sought to maintain contemporary gender-role expectations. Victorian criminal women were seen as "doubly damned" because they were censured for both their illicit actions and their crimes against their own natures. I ar gue that this double damnation continues today. No Angels: Women who Commit Violence (1996), edited by Alice Myers and Sarah Wight, considers the ways media and legal discourses construct vio lent women like Lorena Bobbitt, Betty Broderick, and Myra Hindley1 2 among others. The editors as sert that "when a woman commits an act of criminal violence, her sex is the lens through which all her actions are seen and understood; her sex is the primary 'explanation' or mitigating factor offered up in an attempt to understand her crime."1 3 The chapters examine carefully the representations of violent women—real and wholly or partly fictional- on television, in print media, and in court cases. They conclude that "a climate must be created in which women's violence can be seen for what it is: as complicated and dependent on individual circum stances as men's, in which being a woman is neither an asset nor a liability in the courts" (xvi). This project considers carefully the particular Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. circumstances of a female filicidist in an attempt to create such a climate. While Myers and Wight create a feminist look at women's crime, the following year saw the publi cation of a book that can only be considered a step backwards: Patricia Pearson's book When She was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence (1997) seems to have been written exclusively to discredit feminism and academia. Her popular work argues that members of these two groups have ignored and suppressed information about women's violence in order to protect their own agendas. Although she does make some arguments that work hard to return agency to the female offender, this is a by-product rather than a goal of this project. This book is not well researched; for example, Pearson states: Women commit the majority of child homi cides in the United States, a greater share of physical child abuse, an equal rate of sibling violence and assaults on the eld erly, about a quarter of child sexual abuse, an overwhelming share of the kill ings of newborns and a fair preponderance of spousal assaults .1 4 She sites no support, and in fact several of these claims are undermined by the U.S. Department of Justices's Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 1998, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. women experienced an estimated 876,340 rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault and simple assault victimizations at the hands of an intimate, down from 1.1 million in 1993. In both 1993 and 1998, men were victims of about 160,000 violent crimes by an intimate partner.1 5 This contradicts Pearson's assertion that women commit "a fair pre ponderance of spousal assaults." Her claim that women commit a quarter of child sexual abuse of fenses is not borne out: Nearly all of the offenders in sexual as saults reported to law enforcement were male (96%). Female offenders were most common in assaults against victims under age six. For these youngest victims, 12% of offenders were female compared with 6% for victims ages six through twelve and 3% for victims ages twelve through seventeen. Overall 6% of the offenders who sexually assaulted juveniles were female.1 6 Finally, Pearson's claim that women kill children more often cannot be supported. According to a report in the Juvenile Justice Bulletin. "Women are responsible for 43 percent of the deaths of chil dren under age 12 who are killed by identifiable persons, a percentage that has been relatively stable since the 1980s. "1 7 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This work is a part of the backlash against feminism. Pearson blames feminists for concealing women's violence (16, et al). She is especially bothered by the way "feminists" "equate political weakness with moral innocence" (20). She argues that the feminist academic agenda has prevented further exploration of women's violence: "To oth ers, most notably academics, [women's violence] is too alarmingly 'anti-feminist' to even suggest" (31). She does not take into account that women commit, according to FBI statistics, roughly twenty percent of violent crimes, and so may not warrant the extensive research given over to aggressive men. She also suggests that feminists mask women's participation in violent crime, "keep it to themselves" (122), so that men will not be able to use this information against women (she does not discuss which men, nor in which ways they would use this knowledge against women). And yet, in this book, Pearson analyzes such data from academics. In fact, the author uses feminist critics' work, but neutralizes it. For example discussing Susan Brownmiller's work: "Critics decried this thinking [that no woman was safe from domestic violence] as a dangerous assault on women's agency" (12 6); she Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. uses the work of feminists with which she agrees, but does not identify these critics as feminist. Because academics and feminist analysis has focused on men's violence, Pearson claims, we have masculinized the notion of violence; that is, we define violence only by men's behaviors. In her study, Pearson presents as revolutionary the idea of "indirect aggression" which she defines as a "kind of social manipulation: the aggressor manipu lates others to attack the victim, or, by other means, makes use of the social structure in order to harm the target person without being personally involved in the attack" (17). Pearson implies that this is uniquely feminine, but this description seems to include crimes committed by the mafia, where a boss would direct an underling to commit murder as well as violence committed by the state (war). This dissertation shares with When She Was Bad the attempt to undermine the sexist belief (still employed in contemporary American court houses, newspapers, and police stations) that women are naturally innocent. However, I attempt to un dermine these beliefs without sharing Pearson's anti-feminist agenda. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Intrigued by "the recurring, and shape-shift ing, trope of violence, "1 8 Amy S. Gottfried exam ines , in Historical Nightmares and Imaginative Vio lence in American Women's Writings (1998), Gayl Jones's Correaidora (1975), Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl (1989), and Leslie Marmon Silko's The Almanac of the Dead (1991) . Her materialist feminist analysis sees these authors doing "violence to master narratives" (6). She particularly has chosen the work of mi nority U.S. writers,1 9 especially those that recog nize "[contemporary women's literature's] potential for changing women's lives. . . narratives [that] also recognize a 'useful' violence, one that over turns old histories and offers startling new models for remembering and telling those histories" (6). She sees violence as necessary to spark authors to reinvent American history"; her definition of vio lence includes "remembered psychic and physical violence" as well as imaginative violence (5). She concludes that these books "emphasize the need for fluidity in reclamation of [a] violent historical and personal past" (9); that is, the experimental forms of the fiction demonstrate that history it- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. self is open to revision. The works she examines also "envision a future that encompasses a recogni tion of the past, thus exploring a balance between the claims of history and the need for moving for ward" (10). "Finally, these works address the readers often reluctant roles as witness . . .these narratives must grapple with their audiences' un willingness to learn and to remember" (10). Like Gottfried, my main focus is on fictional works, but I focus more closely on violence committed by women actors, while Gottfried considers male agression represented by women writers. In Male Raae, Female Furv: Gender and Violence in Contemporary American Fiction (2000) Marilyn Maxwell examines the ouevres of Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison, con sidering the ways in which they represent violent women. Her introduction argues that "'violent' women are by far less overtly aggressive and less comfortable with their momentary gestures of fury than are their male counterparts. "2 0 Not only does Maxwell believe that when women are aggressive, they are less aggressive than men, she also argues that violence is mostly a means of control over women. She asserts that most of the violence that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the women in these novels commit is in response to the white male oppressor. Her feminist work is representative of the kind of analysis that Pearson claims is the only sort being done by academics. This exploration upholds old stereotypes about women and their capacity to act as aggressors, a study my work counters. James Giles authored Violence in the Contempo rary American Novel: An End to Innocence (2000) in response to criticism of his earlier work which examined the naturalistic inner-city novel. He studies the following novels: William Kennedy's Quinn's Book (1988) , Caleb Carr's The Alienist (1994), Richard Price's The Wanderers (1974), John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990), Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1994), Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (1992), N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1999), and John Rechy's The Miracu lous Dav of Amalia Gomez (1991). He argues that these books "give voice to the marginalized and seemingly voiceless 'others' of America's inner cities."21 Giles argues that the violence in these works is never liberating; actions are never taken against the oppressors; the violence in these nov els occurs within ethnic and racial groups or Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. against other "others." In contrast, I seek to examine the extent to which fictional representa tions of violence by women can be read as liberatory. Many of the aforementioned texts fail to de fine what they mean by violence. Patrick Shaw, author of The Modern American Novel of Violence (2000) goes so far as to point out that Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, editors of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (1979), a seminal collection in American violence studies, do not offer a definition either. While this strategy may have some use in that it does not limit the writer, the reader should demand such a definition. In this study, I focus primarily on representations of individual women and groups of women who commit criminal injury against people (and occasionally property). It is primarily physical, although in the case of Cat's Eve, it is also emotional and psychological. In most cases, the violence is fictional, but I do include a dis cussion of one real case. Although these cases are often represented as individual crimes, as occur ring without social context, my goal is to tie these crimes together, to show the underground con- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nections between crime and social order, and to demonstrate the ways in which societal mores lead to such crimes. The chapters of this work focus on the author, on sisterhood, and on motherhood. This organiza tion follows from feminist history itself. In early feminist theory, scholars and practitioners sought to revise ideas about sisterhood and mother hood; achieving sisterhood became one of the clear goals of feminist praxis, and revising ideas about motherhood—ranging from Shulamith Firestone's re jection of maternity in Dialectics of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (197 0) to Adrienne Rich's attempt to recuperate motherhood from patriarchal subterfuge in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as an Expe rience and an Institution (197 6) to Sara Ruddick's attempt to create a theory of peace using maternal ideals Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1989). Such an organization is not without problems. In "How to Satisfy a Woman 'Every Time'," Judith Roof argues that: while the act of telling the revised his tory of sisterhood and maternity appears to perform some political action, the repro- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dilative narrative that defines them both tends to perpetuate a patriarchal status quo by preserving the narrative dynamic—the familial, heterosexual conj oinder—in the present and throughout history while seem ing to allow specific elements to change.2 2 However, by focusing on these patriarchal models of women's life history while introducing the anti- narrative of violence my study gets at the very heart of the problem of women's naturalized non violence . By examining what Roof and others con sider to be the most patriarchal of life narratives and showing that even in such narratives women are violent, I demonstrate that it is not only the "other" woman—lesbians, prostitutes, the childless— who is violent. These "other" women are expected to be violent because they are not properly femi nized.23 Because the "proper woman"—sister, mother—is defined as feminine—a definition which precludes aggression, injury, anger and the like— her violence is all the more disruptive. The idea for this dissertation began with an exploration of reviews of Joyce Carol Oates short story collection Heat. In expanding that essay to look more broadly at Oates's reception, I noticed that many critics thought that her writing was Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. overly-violent. They often connected this criti cism with an evaluation of Oates as a feminist. That is, reviewers felt that the violence of her writing masculinized it—or her—to the extent that she could not be a feminist. Connected to some of her earlier writings where she claims that one's own gender is not the primary focus of the (women) writer, engaging with violence may make Oates seem anti-feminist. But this assessment requires a nar row interpretation of her oeuvre. Drawing from this beginning, Chapter One evaluates the effect of creating violent texts on the reputation of the central authors of this study: Oates, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison. Here the misreadings of book reviewers demonstrate that they are made uncomfortable by, not only women's violence, but also by the woman writing such fic tions . This criticism focuses mostly on Oates, but nega tively affects Atwood to a lesser degree. Morrison, it seems, has an audience most willing to accept violence depicted in her work. Although it is incredibly difficult to make the negative argument, I attempt to show how this missing criticism may be tied to race. In the second chapter, I focus on the relationship of sisters to violence. Violence creates sisterhood among girls and women—both among the victims of such violence 22 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and among the aggressors. This section defines feminist uses of violence. For example, Atwood's Cat's Eve shows that even though violence is used by women, they are agents of the patriarchy seeking to "rehabi1i tate" one of their less traditional sisters. Atwood further links the girls' coercive violence with feminism and sisterhood, but I argue that this violence is not feminist violence be cause it works against the goals of feminism by enforcing patriarchal norms of femininity. In contrast, Oates's Foxfire: Memoirs of a Girl Gang shows how a girl gang challenges the ideas the male authorities hold about women who forge a sisterhood to fight violently for their rights. The gang acts on its own, not as an auxiliary to a male gang; thus their society has no way of understanding them. This chapter also attempts to reestablish feminism's early connections to violence. Although many feminists have considered how mother hood functions to create identity for women, few have considered motherhood as a violent occupation. The third chapter, "Reading Maternal Ambivalence," examines the "unfit" mothers who are often portrayed in the works of Morrison, especially Sula and Beloved. Most of the narra tives of violent motherhood are ones of anti-nurturing or neglect. Here, I consider filicide as potentially nurtur ing (for the mother, at least), but definitely a signal of 23 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ambivalence rather than hatred. Using psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker's work, I suggest that these novels operate in a way similar to the acts committed by Parker's pa tients ; their imagined violence allows them to find new ways of coping with the conflict caused by the (underval ued) position of mothers in our society and their (impor tant ) job as mothers. These novels tell a far different tale than those narratives examined by feminists who be lieve mothering conditions people toward peacefulness. I examine how in an attempt to maintain the fiction of ma ternal identity even violent actions undertaken in the name of love are recuperated. My final chapter moves from fictional representations to the media and legal representations of real maternal crime, focusing on the case of Susan Smith who drowned her two sons. I analyze how Smith's story was represented, regulated, and employed. Narratives created by the media explore but ultimately mystify rather than explain Smith's brutality, insisting on preserving the comfortable posi tion of uncritical outrage. I examine how the media con structs the filicidal mother; they argue that this form of murder cuts across class, race, and gender lines but at the same time describe the typical perpetrator as poor, "crazy," and female. 24 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. FBI statistics indicate women's participation in violent crimes was up 200 percent in 1996; the actual numbers of women participating in violent crime, however, remains quite small. The recent explosion of media cover age of women's acts of violence would suggest that we should examine the politics of the cultural desire to depict such violence. Notes 1 Carol Anne Douglas, Love and Politics: Radical Feminist and Lesbian Theories (San Francisco: ism Press, 1990) 283. 2 Lorrie Moore, "Every Wife's Nightmare," rev. of The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review 31 Oct 1993: 1. 3 In the second wave of feminism, it was not uncommon to believe that women's demands for equality would result in increased criminal be havior by women: "If women were going to demand equality [an English judge] claimed, and were moving into the traditional fields of male endeavor, then we should not be surprised to find women committing more crime, especially violent offenses" (Helena Kennedy in her fore word to Doubly Deviant. Doubly Damned, ix). Indeed this was a view held during the first wave as well: in his book Crime and Criminals (1899) Sanderson Christison argued that women's emancipation produces women criminals (in Jones, 236). 4 Lucia Zedner, Women. Crime, and Custody in Victorian England (Ox ford: Clarendon Press, 1991) 72. 5 Emily Hamer, "Fighting for Freedom: Suffragette Violence Against their State," in Myers and White, 76. 6 Lois Banner, e-mail to the author, 20 Aug. 2002. 7 Although some African American women of this period were inter ested in women's liberation, I cite Toni Morrison's article "What the Black Woman Thinks About Women's Lib" which indicates that at least some black women saw white women's liberation as suspicious, as not seeking goals that were shared by black women. 8 Alice Echols, Darina to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967- 1975 American Culture 3 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 132. All other references to this book will be made in the text. 25 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9 Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York: Random House, 1977) 135. All other references to this book will be made in the text. 10 Jane Alpert, "Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory," Ms August 1973: 90-91. 11 Virginia B. Morris, Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction (Lexington, Ky: U of Kentucky P, 1990) 3. All other refer ences to this book will be made in the text. 12 Lorena Bobbitt was accused of committing "malicious wounding" by cutting off her husband's penis in 1993. In 1989, Betty Broderick killed her ex-husband and his new wife in San Diego. Her story has been retold in the made for television movies A Woman Scorned: The Bettv Broderick Story (1992) and Her Final Furv: Bettv Broderick, the Last Chapter (1992) . Myra Hindley was the accomplice of Ian Brady; together they were involved in the serial sex murders of children in England beginning in 1963. They were arrested in 1965. 13 Alice Myers and Sarah Wight, eds., No Anaels: Women who Commit Violence (London: Pandora, 1996) xii. All other references to this book will be made in the text. 14 Patricia Pearson, When She was Bad: Violent Women and the Mvth of Innocence (New York: Viking, 1997) 7. 15 United States Dept, of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Crime and Victim Statistics: Crime Characteristics. <http:// www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bj s/cvict_c.htm#relate>. 16 United States, Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statis tics, Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforce ment: Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics by Howard N. Snyder, (July 2000) 11. 23 Aug. 2002 <htto://www.oio.usdoi.gov/bis/ abstract/savcrle.htm>. 17 United States, Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Programs, "Homicides of Children and Youth," by David Finkelhor and Dick Ormrod Juvenile Justice Bulletin Oct. 2001: 9. 23 Aug. 2002 <http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/New Releases Pubs.html>. 18 Amy S. Gottfried, Historical Nightmares and Imaginative Violence in American Women's Writings (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998) 3. All other references to this book will be made in the text. 19 She includes Robinson's work as "minority" in its representation of "homelessness." 20 Marilyn Maxwell, Male Rage. Female Furv: Gender and Violence in Contemporary American Fiction (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 2000) xii. All other references to this book will be made in the text. 21 James R. Giles, Violence in the Contemporary American Novel : An End to Innocence (Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, 2000) 6. All other references to this book will be made in the text. 26 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 22 Judith Roof, "How to Satisfy a Woman . . . Every Time," in Elam and Weigman, 63. 23 See Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aaaression (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994) . 27 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter One Literary Reputation and the Woman Writer of Violence: Atwood, Morrison, and Oates As long as women have been writing about violence, they have been criticized for it. The very first book published by an American woman—The Sovereignty and Good ness of God bv Mary Rowlandson—is replete with explana tions meant to preempt such criticism. Some readers in New England felt she was seeking glory in her victimhood. The Preface to the Reader, widely attributed to Increase Mather, takes pains to explain that the "Narrative was penned by the Gentlewoman her self." (65) Not only was it believed unlikely that a woman could write such a book, critics felt it was unseemly for a woman to do so. Other readers felt too that it was unlikely that a woman taken by Indians would be able to preserve her virtue. The preface writer opines, "I hope that by this time none will cast any refletion upon this Gentlewoman" (66). Indeed, how could a woman spend so much time among brutal natives and not be compromised? When Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wall Paper" was published in book form in the late 1800s, some critics questioned whether such a story was appropriate. "It certainly seems open to serious question if such literature should be permitted in print" (MD "Per- 28 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ilous Stuff," Boston Evening Transcript 8 April 1892: 6 in Dock.) "[The story] grows and increases with a perfect crescendo of horror. It is almost uncanny to come upon [Charlotte Perkins Gilman] in the act of making literature of this sort--she is so interested, heart and soul, in such other things as women's economic status, and so iden tified with the philosophical assertion of sex indepen dence" (Anne Montgomerie, "The Yellow Wall Paper," The Conservator 10 (June 1899) 60-61) in Dock.) This reviewer objects that the horror of "The Yellow Wallpaper" detracts from Gilman's "serious" writings. These sorts of reviews are not confined to the past, unfortunately. When women write about topics which are unexpected (at least by some) they are injudiseiously critiqued. As Charlotte Templin argues in Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jona (1995) : In making a judgment that a novel is a success or failure in aesthetic terms, readers react strongly to the content of the novels. Readers who relate positively to a given novel in terms of such things as ideological affinity, shared life experience, and common literary tastes describe the novel as a coherent artistic entity and judge it to be a success. . . .Similarly, the interrelated factors that together make up the way of apprehending the novel also cause the foregrounding of certain features—often the sexual explicitness—of works that are experi enced as unsuccessful.5 29 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The case of Joyce Carol Oates, for one, parallels the problems Tempiin explores in her study of Jong, especially if we add violence to the list of "certain features" that change a critic's or reader's assessment of a novel. Writing about murder, blood, rape, torture causes readers to think that her writing is bad, unfit, and unladylike. Although Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood enjoy better reception generally (recognized as authors of "Litera ture, " wdll-liked, read and written about in academia) when they write violent scenes they also suffer. My in tention is to demonstrate that depictions of violent women are still seen as transgressive—to the degree that when women writers create scenes of a mother killing her child or burning her adult son in his bed, scenes of a serial killer fatally wounding his victims while attempting to lobotomize them, scenes of rape, murder, mayhem, or muti lation they themselves are depicted as behaving violently. And their work is criticized in gendered—even in sexual- ized—ways for committing these transgressions. I examine reviews of their most violent works, or novels that contain the goriest or most repulsive depic tions that, when taken as a whole, may not be seen as violent. I concentrate on reviews from sources that are understood to have the most influence on a writer's repu tation : the New York Times and its Book Review, the Times 30 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Literary Supplement.New York Review of Books. This chap ter is not a reputation history, but rather includes se lected and representative responses to the authors' writ ing careers. Oates's reputation is the most bloodied by her depictions of maiming and mayhem, but there is some sympathy for Morrison's use of violence—especially the filicide and child abuse in her works—which seems out of character in a culture like ours where mothers who kill are considered to be the worst monsters of all. Atwood's perceived class as a producer of capital-L-Literature— serve to protect her from critiques about the cruelty and bloodshed which can be found in some of her later works including Cat's Eve. Robber Bride, and Alias Grace. In reviews of Oates's work, her gender identity will be questioned and remade, especially through making her appear to be hyper-feminine or, perhaps more disturbing, by making her hyper-sexualized. On the other hand, Oates's reviewers also try to reassure readers by making her writing—and Oates-the-person—masculine. This matters because many in our culture believe that women have achieved equality with men, but this rejection serves to underscore the ways in which women are still treated less- than-equitably. What's more, this dissonance has caused some to perceive Oates's work as not feminist. 31 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Readers familiar with the work of Joyce Carol Oates will not be surprised to learn that critics most often focus on her intense and forceful descriptions of brutal ity and injustice. One of the most common themes in the reviews of Oates's work is the claim that violence is her "usual subject matter."6 This classification often serves as shorthand to criticize the novels as unpalatable, un readable, or unworthy of consideration. Writing about Zombie (1995) the New York Times reviewer, Steven Marcus, the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Colum bia University, claims that "[The novel] represents the continuation of Ms. Oates's long-standing interest in the extreme, the gruesome, the bizarre and violent in American life,"7 pigeon-holing Oates's oeuvre as others have done before. Marcus goes on to give a fair and accurate de scription of Oates's novel which traces the life of a serial killer who wants to make a homosexual love slave for himself; Quentin P believes he can do this by creating a lobotomized zombie using only an ice-pick. Marcus then claims: her murderous narrator is supposed to signify for us a number of important tendencies and truths about contemporary American society . . . In other words, Ms. Oates's aberrant protago nist seems to be, on one side, little more than an individualized and monomaniacally focused version of what American society itself is ca- 32 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pable of on its legitimate scientific and medi cal side. (13) This assertion is not supported in the critique nor by the narrative Oates creates, but serves to mark this work as unworthy of consideration. He takes his claim further: "to go on and imply that America today is functionally the social equivalent or cultural analogue of a psychotic monster and serial murderer is to make an unsupportable allegorical suggestion" (Marcus 13). But this is not in fact Oates's suggestion or purpose; Marcus critiques the work for something that it does not do. What Oates does is portray the ways in which the thought processes and actions of serial killers are not far from those of the sane (the exception, of course, being murder). Oates depicts the ways contemporary American culture produces the serial killer. Her suggestion that American violence, the medical profession, fast food and television are— possibly—part and parcel of this experience does not equate the culture with the serial killer as Marcus as serts; rather, Oates underscores the ways in which Ameri cans can escape the violence of the culture. That is, almost every American is exposed to the institutions Marcus lists: television, fast-food, violence, but only in incredibly rare circumstances are serial killers born (made) in this society. Oates's analysis seems original 33 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in American literature and among the most worthwhile com mentaries on the phenomenon of the serial killer. Marcus complains that the novella is "quite horrible and almost equally tedious because of its nonincremental and unremitting repetitiveness" (13). But this repeti tion, arguably, creates for the reader a replica of the one-track mind of the killer—to distinguish (to an extent) the sane who are capable of a variety of ideas from Quentin P who is obsessed with "EYE CONTACT". No doubt the work is unremitting, but the violence of a serial killer continues and escalates until the moment of cap ture ; the work, like the serial killer, is unremitting. Like Lehman-Haupt, Marcus will not consider the purpose Oates has in structuring her novel this way. But this is not the only objection Marcus has to Oates's message: "The idea of this narrative—that the uncaught serial killer is somehow peculiarly representative of our current condi tion—is more interesting that its execution, which like the writing in which it is embodied, is fluid, fluent, inflated and, finally, neither convincing in itself nor successfully dramatized as fiction" (Marcus 13). His assessment of the writing as inflated and unconvincing recalls again Russ's assessment of many sexist book re viewers . Marcus reads a book he thinks rather than the one Oates wrote. He refuses to consider the book on its Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. own terms and takes his displeasure out on the "inflated writing." But other critics, though often repulsed by the sub ject matter have found the writing worthwhile. In his New York Times Book Review article on We Were the Mulvanevs. David Gates, a Newsweek writer, called Zombie "note per fect"8 implying that the writing achieved precisely the necessary tone for the story. Other reviewers, although their work appeared in less important newspapers, agreed. Novelist Michael Upchurch, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner Book Review, claims that Oates has written "a sinewy, sarcastic tale that convinces even while it repulses"9demonstrating that one can embrace the story while rejecting the protagonist's actions. Dan Cryer in Newsdav calls her prose "exhilarating" and "gut churning,"1 0 disputing the idea that the writing is "in flated. " In any event, one feels that Marcus is reluctant to allow a woman writer entree into the*world of horror lit erature ; The creation of monsters in literature belongs to a long and important tradition. From Frankenstein's monster to Dostoevsky's under ground man to Kafka's Gregor Samsa, to such less impressive characters as Humbert Humbert and John Fowles's collector, monstrous beings . . . have often conveyed something important to us about humanity. (Marcus 13) 35 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In this list of horror writers which includes Kafka, Knowles, Mary Shelley is absent. The fictional creator Frankenstein is substituted for the (woman) writer as though the character created his own story. Perhaps then, the critic is not so unwilling to accept Quentin P's sta tus as a monster, but rather he is unwilling to accept Joyce Carol Oates as a creator of such a character, con tinuing to erase women from the tradition he claims to care about. This last strategy is one we may expect in critiques of Oates's early works; in these we are reminded that Oates is a woman, and we should not be surprised. Her writing career began in the early 1960s. One need only review Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1969), or Russ's How to Sup press Women's Writing (1983) to recall the sexist approach to reviewing women's art that was evident in the world of literature at that time. For example, a critic reviewing With Shuddering Fall (1964) in the New York Review of Books warns Oates that she may fall into a trap typical for American women writers: after initial strength impulse, genuine lyri cism, they become precious, fussy prose- preeners. When the careers of American men writers falter, it is often because of a failure in material, a disconnection from a bloodstream (sometimes caused by success). With American women writers, it is usually a choking of the 36 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. garden with too many pretty little flowers. (Kau ffmann 22) Although he does not accuse Oates of straying down this path, Oates's sex rather than her work is highlighted for criticism. The reviewer seems to offer a critique of Oates's future work. (Interestingly, in this review, the failure of American (men) writers is linked to success; while the failure of American (women) writers seems to be tied to fecundity and aging.) In 1976, when she published Childwold the.review world had changed only little; Oates is still being com pared unfavorably to men, but reviewers now understood these types of critiques were flawed. "It would be wrong to encourage Miss Oates to think with a male rigour, but a little detachment in editing, a little more precision in writing would not have compromised her" (Redmon 41). Al though the critic is correct in pointing out Oates's some- times-sloppy prose, he does it in such a way that the mastery of the male writer is still the yardstick against which Oates is judged. In addition to an expectation of a masculine rheto ric, reviews and interviewers expect women writers who compose violent stories to seem capable of violence them selves . Interviewers who meet Joyce Carol Oates spend time contrasting her appearance with the content of her 37 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. work. Perhaps for these writers her thinness translates into more than the anorexia she has battled. "It's hard to believe this is the voice directing the stories that tell of sons who murder their mothers, of religious lead ers who gouge out their eyes, of medical students who cannibalize cadavers" (Windsor Star C12). Oates is de scribed as being soft-spoken, as if women who write about murders, self-inflicted injury, and cannibalism must be hearty, loud women capable themselves of such acts. "Joyce Carol Oates is small and slight, wispy and whis- pery. She avoids alcohol, coffee and tea, finding them too strong for her constitution. I spent the first part of the interview worrying that I might have broken her writing fingers with an everyday introductory handshake" (Lawson). Again, the interviewer focuses on the quiet Oates—heightening his description with the whispering consonance of s's and w's, giving the illusion that she is made, perhaps, from paper. He compounds this description by telling the reader of her delicate constitution—making her seem like a Victorian paper-doll. It seems as if Oates needs to be protected from her own work, as well as the "everyday handshake" of an eager reporter. Indeed, this reviewer calls her small despite her above average height. The focus on Oates's fragility is repeated in an interview/review of Black Water: "Despite her height, 38 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Joyce Carol Oates seems tiny and infinitely fragile, with a ribcage as narrow as a child's, within which one imag ines a nervous, racing heart" (Lambert). This interviewer goes so far as to compare Oates to a child, despite what he knows to be true about her: that she is a tall profes sor of English. Interestingly, Lambert focuses on Oates's heart and pictures it as racing; she suffers from the heart disease tachycardia—and abnormally rapid heart rate- caused by malformation of a heart valve.11 What's more, Oates has exhibited signs of anorexia nervosa, which might account for her fragile and slight appearance.12 But nei ther of these conditions would preclude Oates from writing violent work. The interviewers' perceptions clearly mark beliefs that readers have about those who create violent novels: they are men, or if they are not, they are mascu line having a robust appearance, strong health and charac ter. "Some people, critics mostly, think Ms. Oates has no business writing a book like Zombie. After all, she's a timid-looking professorial type, who's soft-spoken and unerringly polite. "1 3 But it is her foray into the world of boxing—the ultimate show of masculinity—that draws the most sexist criticism. Gary Wills writing in the New York Review of Books calls Oates a "Jenny Wren." Jenny Wrens were women who sat in sections of a boxing audience reserved for 39 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. women at the turn-of-the-century. The presence of these women was used to demonstrate that boxing was not "too violent" as to be dehumanizing; that is, it wouldn't turn its viewers into brutes. Calling Oates a "Jenny Wren" puts her in the same position; she becomes the moral voice in a world of violence, despite the fact that she also creates this world. In characterizing the author in this way, the reviewer calls attention to her gender. This attention to her gender turns into a focus on sexuality when Wills explains Oates's attraction to the blood sport. Wills remarks that Oates "is honest about 14 what appeals to her in boxing. It's the blood" (Wills 7). Although this conclusion seems to be true from the passages he uses to support his point, he then repositions Oates from a broad-who-can-stand-blood to a vixen, seduced by the manliness of the boxer represented by the blood; "like 'Vicki' in Scorsese's movie, she is ready to kiss the cuts above the fighter's eyes" (Wills 7). This new characterization of Oates sexualizes her relationship to boxing in a way that is simply not evident in the book- length essay. Her sortie into boxing makes Wills (and others) uncomfortable. Because of her sex, Wills feels Oates cannot share his bloodlust; through his writing, he turns her fanaticism for the sport into a sexual lust for the athletes. By creating this hypersexualized character 40 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and calling her Joyce Carol Oates, Wills undermines Oates's authority as a boxing aficionado. He recasts her in the only role he understands for the woman who enj oys boxing—the fighter's lover. In sharp contrast to the critics who focus on Oates's femininity and fragility are the reviewers who find ways to masculinize her. The most jarring of these appeared in the Financial Times. Michael Thompson-Noel's review of On Boxing changes her gender entirely, performing a sex change operation in the course of a sentence. "In some quarters, On Boxing has been judged a shade psuedy . . . yet passages like that do no particular harm, for Ms Oates 15 possesses balls." Of course, Joyce Carol Oates does not possess balls, rather she has an exceptional interest in boxing and has an incredible amount of knowledge about the sport. However, this knowledge and interest are not enough to make Oates an expert worth reading. Her entree into the men's club that Thompson-Noel provides, that is, her new balls, allows Oates to compete as a true analyst of what is often considered the most violent of sports. Oates's writing has successfully competed with that of the best (male) writers on boxing-even Norman Mailer claimed that her articles on the sport were so good he could have written them. In order for some male readers to accept her expertise she must be recategorized. This device 41 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seems to toughen her, to allow her writing to stand up to criticism and even to protect the more pretentious aspects of her writing on a topic that should clearly only be written about in a straightforward manner. (To wit, re viewers who believe "her ladylike prose often makes a 16 piquant contrast to her bloody subj ect matter." ) This recategorization appears too in Russ's work. "She couldn't have written it . . .she's really a man" (36). Russ outlines the denial of agency highlighted in reviews of such disparate authors as the Duchess of Newcastle and Mary Shelley. To suggest Oates has balls implies that she's really a man and only men are capable enough to write about masculine themes like boxing, blood, and guts. To critique a woman writer in such a way relies on the assumption that only men should write about certain topics. If a woman does, it is not good until she is 17 proven masculine enough to be up to the task. There are yet other ways in which Oates's capabili ties are called into question. For instance, "it is very much the usual world of Joyce Carol Oates intensified in this case by an abiding sense that much of the material in 18 You Must Remember This is autobiographical." The sug gestion that Oates must turn to her own experience implies two criticisms of the writer: first that she is only tal ented enough to write about what happens to her—that is, 42 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to merely record her own experiences. Secondly, this assessment implies that, as a woman, she can only interact with violence as its victim. Both send subtle sexist messages about the woman writer. Critics imply that Oates lacks imagination by supposing that a (woman) writer can only write convincingly about that which has happened to her. Russ calls this strategy used by reviewers the "double standard of content"; women writers, when they write outside their supposed realm of knowledge find their works misinterpreted. For example, Russ tells about the shifting interpretation of Emily Bronte's Wutherina Heights. When it was believed that a man had written it, "the author [was] called a 'rough sailor' who did not understand women and did not see them as they were" (Russ 42). When the second edition made the sex of its author widely known, the "novel [was] called a love story and stressed 'the youthfulness of.the author' [whom one critic likened . . . to a little bird fluttering its wings against the bars of its cage]" (43). As Russ explains, "a woman cannot write about evil like a coarse Yorkshire boatment (sic), therefore she did not; therefore the novel must be a love story . . ." (43). In the case at hand, a woman cannot write about violence convincingly unless she has experienced it herself. Such criticism insinuates that because women are more often the victims of, rather 43 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. than the wielders of violence any encounters women have with brutality must be as its victim; this experience is the only way that a woman could manage to write about such a subj ect. Neither should it come as a surprise that reviewers doubt Oates's power, again because of her sex. Surveying one of Oates's earlier novels, Expensive People (1968), a writer for the New York Times asserted: "it is doubtful whether the author has the necessary steel edge to her pen. She is essentially a lyrical writer, a creator of mood and atmosphere. She is not, on the evidence of this IS novel, easily at home with satire or the satirical." Here the strength and durability of steel is contrasted with the lyrical; Oates's writerly abilities are con trasted with the content of her work. The critic is unsure whether Oates is tough enough to satirize—she is either too feeling to ridicule others or not quite smart enough to show readers how to examine the vices and fol lies of others. One cannot help but suspect that this problem is tied to the violence of the book, which begins, "I was a child murderer" and chronicles the events leading up to matricide. Robert Adams, writing in the New York Times Book Review concurs with Lask's assessment of the author's satirical ability. "Expensive People was a dis tinct misstep; she doesn't have the delicacy of touch 44 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. required for satire, or the cool control necessary to 20 manipulate successfully a vein of irony." On the other hand, Lask concludes that Oates's project is worthwhile but doubts her capacity: "The tar gets the author aims at are worth going after, but I don't know whether she has the right armament to bring them down" (Lask 45). He draws on imagery of soldiering and mastery of weaponry, masculinizing the proj ect of writing satire. Armament, synonymous with groups of weapons like guns, sounds like yet another euphamism for male genita lia . This critic seems as though he were criticizing Oates for lacking a penis. If we need further evidence that the woman writer who examines violence in her work, like Oates, is held even today to different standards, we need only examines the work of Michiko Kakutani, book reviewer for the New York Times. She has had such a remarkable relationship with Joyce Carol Oates that, according to biographer Greg Johnson, Oates's publisher has stopped sending her review copies (Johnson 345). Kakutani regularly savages Oates's works, even those that have received critical acclaim elsewhere—including Pulitzer Prize nominations. She dis likes Oates's use of violence finding it melodramatic, contrived, often manipulative and perhaps too easy. Kakutani seems to dislike Oates's work because of the 45 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. violence. Her reviews of Oates's work are repetitive, the same criticisms are voiced over and over again: violence proliferates in Oates's work—even when it doesn't; she is enamored of the Gothic; and she includes "an unspeakable turn of destiny." Kakutani certainly believes Joyce Carol Oates's work repetitively seeks the violent aspects of contemporary culture. She categorizes Oates's novels by the killing, brutality and mistreatment they contain. In her first review of an Oates novel, Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), a work of detective fiction, Kakutani creates a list: In addition to the actual murders—which are described in rapturous, bloody detail—there are slaughtered lambs, obscene letters, mummified babies, several poisonings, at least one rape, a malevolent painting and, of course, all those standard Gothic artifacts—a gloomy house with dark rooms, mysterious women dressed in veils and wildflowers, and ghosts and apparitions who haunt deserted swamplike places. One hopes that violence—poisonings at least—would be a part of a novel described, justly, as detective fiction. It is not this review alone, but rather Kakutani's oeuvre that indicates a distaste for the woman who creates vio lence . Three years later, she describes the details of You Must Remember This (1987). The list she provides, includ ing car accidents and thoughts of suicide, seems to be 46 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. more a fulfillment of Kakutani's wish for violence than Oates's provision: As in much of Ms. Oates's previous fiction, acts of emotional and physical violence proliferate throughout the text. Grandfather Stevick walks out on his wife and children to take up with a showgirl, then blows his brains out in a hospi tal bed. His illegitimate son, Felix, will think about running head on into an abutment on the expressway; his other son, Lyle, will con template hanging himself, and in the opening pages of the novel Lyle's daughter Enid Marie will try to kill herself by taking an overdose of aspirin. In addition to these suicide at tempts , there are several beatings, an abortion, an incestuous rape, a terrible boxing mishap and a couple of car accidents. Thoughts of suicide are not entirely violent, and Stevick's affair with a showgirl seems hardly as horrify as descriptions of rape, poisoning, and mummified babies presented in the earlier review. In fact, You Must Remem ber This, a work of realism, seems rather tame, except in Kakutani's vehement desire to find fault with Oates's use of violence. In addition to creating lists which seem more fantasy than reality, Kakutani, in a review of American Appetites (1989), condemns one of the ideas Oates holds about her own work. The reviewer writes "Indeed an 'unspeakable turn of destiny,' to use Ms. Oates's own gothic language, is about to overtake their lives dividing it forever into a before and after" (Kakutani, "Gloom" C33). Kakutani 47 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. regards these moments with derision, feeling that they are both manipulated and manipulative. This criticism and these very words will be used again in her reviews of Black Water (1992), Foxfire (1993), and Man Crazy (1997) . In her review of Black Water, Kakutani muses: Presumably Ms Oates was attracted to the story because it embodies so many of the themes that have obsessed her throughout her career: the violence and randomness of modern life; the intersection of private and public nightmares; the "unspeakable turn of destiny," as she once called it, that can instantly shatter an individual's hopes and dreams. (Kakutani "Tak ing" C31, emphasis added) One senses that Kakutani is using this classification—"the unspeakable turn of destiny"—far more pejoratively espe cially in connection with other books. The quoted para graph continues "once again, once again, once again." The reviewer feels that Oates is being repetitious, focusing again on violence and the underbelly of American life. One senses Kakutani believes the author has taken the easy way out by fleshing out a story that has already been told. She even concludes "that a writer as generously gifted as Ms. Oates would produce such a book is a sur prise. The reader can only surmise that her rapid rate of production has left her without a story to tell" (Kakutani "Taking" C31). This novel was nominated for the Pulitzer 48 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Prize and won wide critical acclaim. Where Kakutani saw no story of Oates's own, others found the recreation of a drowning imaginative and unique. In her review of Foxfire. Kakutani's quote appears thus: Oates's 20-odd novels . . . have all shared a preoccupation with certain recurrent themes: the violence and predictability of American life; the undercurrents of guilt, passion and jealousy that run beneath the seemingly placid surface of daily life; the role that fate and simple acci dents play in the shaping of ordinary lives. (Kakutani, "Girls" 029, emphasis added). Again, the reader should not be surprised that Kakutani passionately hates the novel. She feels the central char acters are stereotypes; the male characters not "remotely believable," "cartoons." The novel, she concludes, is "a dud. " In the New York Review of Books, however, John Crowley rebuts Kakutani's analysis: "Joyce Carol Oates's new novel is an essay in myth creation, in Romantic tale- telling, as strong as it is unlikely, which is as it 26 should be" . Kakutani sees "contrivance" and "portention," seemingly critiquing the novel as though it were realism. Crowley, on the other hand, reads the book as mythology; expecting a different king of story, he is able to approve of the book on its own terms. Lorna Sage, TLS reviewer, argues that "it reads as though, in fact, 49 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. she's articulating the fantasies of a whole generation— 27 putting into words what they didn't quite do" . Sage seems willing to suspend her disbelief, understanding that Foxfire is not a historical novel. Kakutani also critiques the book because the feminism it espouses did not exist in the 1950s. Both Kakutani and Diane Johnson (writing in The New York Review of Books) recognize aspects of Thelma and Louise in the novel, but Johnson is much happier with the novel's ending which clearly allows for many possible stories for women on which to model their lives: Literary endings are rarely perfect, but Oates has come close to finding one by allowing the more prosaic sisters, who marry and/or go to college, to identify with and exult in the more mysterious and possibly glorious destiny of Legs, who is spotted in an indistinct photo of 28 people around Castro. Kakutani finds the ending to be overly-reminiscent of the Ridley Scott film. She finds these politics and the mes sages of the book simplistic, a "clumsy allegory about the victimization of women and their revenge through sister hood and violence" (Kakutani "Girls" C29). Kakutani seems to be unwilling to read Oates's work in any way but as historical realism, and rejects the revenge fantasy that Oates explores. Finally in Man Crazy, one of Oates's lesser novels: 50 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The reader familiar with even part of Joyce Carol Oates's enormous oeuvre can immediately recognize her fictional trademarks: a penchant for mixing the mundane and the Gothic, the ordi nary and the sensationalistic; a fascination with the dark undercurrents of violence, eroti cism and emotional chaos in American life, and a tendency to divide her characters' lives in a Before and After with one "unspeakable turn of destiny."2 9 (emphasis added) Time and time again Kakutani of.fers extremely similar reviews of Oates's novels that have been well received elsewhere. Whether the novel is good, popular, or just plain miserably bad (like Man Crazv), Kakutani's reviews read extremely similarly. This plot device that Oates uses—the "unspeakable turn of destiny" which separates the story's trajectory into a before and an after—which Kakutani finds so central to Oates's novels, is not remarked upon by other review ers , even those who have reviewed (and presumably read) many of her novels. Indeed, neither Black Water nor Foxfire has a clear "before" and "after" moment which Kakutani describes as marking Oates's work. Black Water is told entirely in flashback, "after" Kelly and the Sena tor crash. In fact, the "after" is rather contracted—just the hour or so it takes Kelly to die. In Foxfire, the book is written after the demise of the gang, and although we see Rita harassed "before" and blossom "after" the gang 51 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. is formed, so much time has passed to make these "before and after" moments rather beside the point. Margaret Atwood The career of Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood has recently been rewarded with a Booker Prize for her tenth novel (and thirty-eigth book) The Blind Assassin (2000) . Like Oates, Atwood is a rather prolific, popular author, but unlike Oates, Atwood has achieved status as both a feminist author3 0 and one suitable for academic study. Atwood's works have also focused, to a lesser degree than Oates's, on violence. Her work, especially recently—in Cat's Eve (1989), Robber Bride (1996), and Alias Grace (1998)—has explored women's capacity for vio lence in an effort, it seems, to write against a certain strain of feminism. She has addressed this concern with the agressive woman in an essay, "Spottyhanded Villain- esses," as well. Bodily Harm (1982) was Atwood's first explicitly violent novel. In it, free-lance writer and breast cancer survivor Renne Wilford decides in an effort to escape her problems to visit the Caribbean to write a travel a re view. There she encounters a revolution and revolutionar ies and ends up in jail. The novel focuses on more mun- 52 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dane contemporary dangers for women including rape, por nography, and disease. John Leonard, book critic for the New York Times. calls the work "unpleasant," claiming that "it chooses to be so"31 (so much for the author's choices . . .) .3 2 It is briefly compared to Oates, and several other works by women authors that examine the gothic in our world, because of the victimization the central char acter faces: she returns home one day to find that someone has broken into her house, between this violation, her recent mastectomy, and the breakup with her somewhat sa distic boyfriend, Rennie feels vulnerable. This combina tion of menace and vulnerability, one supposes, puts the critic in mind of the other writers. However, in the end, Leonard feels that a tough, uncompromising Atwood has been successful in her work: "[the novel] wouldn't have worked if Miss Atwood had been lyrical" (21). He concludes, "There is no way to like such a novel; it is impossible not to admire its uncompromising author" (21). Although the work is different from what may be expected from Atwood (and a woman writer?)—lyrical, pleasant—the reviews don't seem to focus nearly so much on the gore in this novel—including scenes of rape and pornography—as the reviews of Oates do. The point of such an examination of Atwood, to demon strate that she is treated differently from the somewhat 53 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. more violent Oates, but that the violence in her work is generally more accepted, is a difficult one to make con clusively . However, the fact that many reviewers ignore the violence in Atwood's work suggests an effort to sani tize her work, to make it more palatable to the potential reader. Bodily Harm is one of Atwood's goriest and creepiest novels. Rennie's editor asks her to do an ex amination of pornography; the police show her-and Atwood shares the grim detail with readers—a videotape where a rat emerges from a woman's vagina. This image is repeated in one of Rennie's dreams. In addition, her friend Lora is raped repeatedly in j ail. This novel examines the stuff of nightmares, but is well-reviewed in the New York Times Book Review because the writing is as it should be— uncompromising, not lyrical, unflinching. On the other hand, this book was not as widely reviewed as some of Atwood's previous work; additional reviews can be located only in MacLean's. Commonweal. and Newsweek. Whereas her previous novel, Life Before Man. was reviewed in Ms, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker, in addition to the reviews in MacLean's, New York Times Book Review, and Newsweek. The writer is, however, in some small way considered by the reviewer to be violent herself. Leonard feels that aspects of the novel are left for "the bruised reader to 54 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. contemplate" (21). The author has created a novel that leaves the reader wounded; Atwood becomes a bruiser. As we saw in the examination of Oates's reviews, there is a tendency to want to connect the woman writer to the violence in her work. In Cat's Eve (1989), the story of Elaine Risley's torture by her "best friends," novelist and critic Robert Towers sees "an intensely personal novel, much of which reads like a barely mediated autobi ography ."3 3 Perhaps Towers feels this way because "there is no real plot [in Cat's Eyel," much as in life. Al though Towers seems to respect Atwood's work, this sugges tion dredges up ideas discussed earlier—that the woman author who writes about violence must have experienced it herself. However, he ultimately declares the section of book that deals with Elaine's torture, "sluggish to the point of dullness" (50). He does admire it for its lucid ity and accuracy, damning it with faint praise. The vio lence in the text—the emotion torture and physical brutality—is erased. Towers's praise is reserved for the parts of the book that explore Risley's "middle years" in art school and her first marriage; passages other critics have found to be more tedious and vaguely drawn. This tendency to connect the writer to the violence in her work continues: Camille Peri, writing in Mother Jones, finds that Atwood's refusal to discuss the connec- 55 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tion between her work and her life "dictate[s] the terms of an interview. "3 4 Though Atwood weaves elements of her own life through those of her heroines—nearly all of whom had unhappy childhoods—she feels that discussing her work in relation to her life encourages readers to view it as autobiographical. "I believe in artistry," she says. "I believe there's a difference between true confessions and writing a novel." (Peri 31) Peri claims the victim position for the author—in this case, making Atwood the sufferer of an "unhappy child hood ." When Atwood refuses to be lumped in with her char acters , Peri responds by claiming that Atwood is "dictato rial " and providing additional evidence of Atwood's re fusal to cooperate with other interviewers. This marks Atwood as transgressive, both literally and figuratively. Peri describes the way in which Atwood comes to stand next to her towards the end of the interview. For Peri, the face to face style of interviewing is normal, but crossing this place, as when Atwood stands next to her, defies the authority of the interviewer. Peri also alleges that some (feminist) women simply aren't going to like Cat's Eve because of the ambiguity with which it treats women. Despite the fact that Atwood is most often described as a feminist writer, this article dredges up the conflicts between Atwood and some Canadian 56 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. feminists: "Her fiction is often attacked for what critic Barbara Godard [feminist scholar at York University] calls 'a failure to envision a world where women are not down trodden '" (Peri 44). Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Kathy Mezei is quoted too, saying, "Her fe males tend to be victims and problematic characers and she doesn't deal with why" (Peri 44). However, feminist crit ics of this book, including New York Times reviewer Caryn James, comment specifically on the violence the little girls enact, which precisely deals with why her female characters are victims. These reviewers praise the novel as adding ambiguity to the representations of girls and women in contemporary fiction. Novelist Alice McDermott feels that Cat's Eve is "vintage Atwood" because she por trays the "sense of the ordinary transformed into night mare, the quiet desperation of characters trapped, si lenced, utterly alone."3 5 Erasing the violence in the text is highly problematic. It revises such complexity right out of the novels and their reception. This turn toward examining the complex motivations of women and their capacity for violence continues in two of her more recent novels The Robber Bride (1993) and Alias Grace (1996). The Robber Bride examines the relationship between four women who met at college: Tony, Charis, Roz, and Zenia. Zenia has drawn the other three together in a 57 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. friendship based on their shared victimization at Zenia's hands. Writer and critic Gabriele Annan claims in the New York Review of Books that "The Robber Bride has been hailed as a break-through exhibiting the latest, improved model of female liberation, with women having the right to be bad."3 5 It seems, however, that Annan disagrees with the possibility that what Atwood offers is an improvement on feminism: "The Robber Bride is ultimately a soap opera for moderate feminists" (Annan 16). By describing the novel as soap opera, Annan implies that it is mindless, repetitive, and melodramatic. The designation "moderate," when applied to feminism, is not usually thought of as a negative epithet, but here it appears to be so because Annan ultimately finds the answers to the questions that The Robber Bride asks to be "too obvious" (Annan 16). The sketch of the moderate feminist this reviewer draws is of a slightly dim-witted woman who is swayed by melodrama. What's more, she shies away from the cruelty and agreesion that comic novelist Lorrie Moore embraces in her review. Thus, Annan rejects both the feminist possibility of this work and its violence as well. In Moore's review for the New York Times Book Review, she celebrates, in typical Moore prose styling, the blood, guts, and torture Atwood provides in this novel. She calls Zenia "inscrutable evi1:" "She is Richard III with 58 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. breast implants. She is Iago in a miniskirt. She manipu lates and exploits all the vanities and childhood scars of her friends . . .; she grabs at intimacies and worms her way into their comfortable lives, then starts swinging a pickax."3 7 Moore's language celebrates the violent woman by characterizing Zenia in a comic way. Her sentence eventually becomes breathless indicating the excitement generated by not only such a character, but such a charac terization : That women are individuals, difficult to corral, a motley and uneasy sisterhood; that feminism is often hard going and hard won, sabotaged from within as well as without; that in the war be tween the sexes there are collaborators as well as enemies, spies, refugees, spectators, and conscientious objectors—all this has been bril liantly dramatized in Ms. Atwood's work. (Moore 1) Moore admires Zenia, and elevates her by arguing that she drives the plot: "that we never actually figure her out, or understand the mysterious, cartoonish extremity of her pathology, or even for a moment get her point of view is disappointing" (Moore 22). Although Moore is slightly disappointed by the work, her celebration of Zenia's vio lence, stands in sharp contrast to Annan who focuses on the feminist failure of Atwood's work while ignoring the possibility provided by Zenia's destructive force. 59 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Atwood's next work, Alias Grace, explores the case of Grace Marks a sixteen year old immigrant who was convicted of abetting a double murder. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, after setting out Atwood's description of the case, re views the book as if it were a romance between Grace and Dr. Simon Jordan, the psychiatris who hopes to have Grace released. "Because they are both attractive and intelli gent , you expect Simon and Grace to fall in love with each other. And in fact they do, in a sense."3 8 Lehmann- Haupt does not seem interested in the questions about women's capacity for violence that are implicit in this novel. His review seems to miss the point; other review ers do not focus on the love story, rather they consider the more interesting questions Atwood raises about women. For example, novelist Francine Prose's review in the New York Times Book Review begins "There's nothing like the spectacle of female villainy brought to justice to revive the ancient, tired, apparently endless debate over whether women are by nature saintly or demonic."3 9 What is to be gained by Lehmann-Haupt's vision of the novel? Again by ignoring the content—the possibility that a pretty sixteen year old abetted (or carried out!) a double murder— Lehmann-Haupt begs the question about women's capacity for violence. In this case, Atwood's novel is not about women's violence, but a "complex vision of human motive 60 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and self-awareness" (C19). Interestingly, in a novel that directly questions women's motive, this reviewer neuters the central character by adopting the universal "human." The self-awareness that Lehmann-Haupt focuses on is the capacity for flirtation, manipulation, and story-telling. Compare this strategy to novelist Hilary Mantel's review in the Mew York Review of Books: she delves into women's capacity for violence quoting the 1843 Times Mir ror regarding contemporary women's viewing of Grace's accomplice, James McDermott's, hanging. She continues: "female violence is still [in our time] thought worse than male violence because it is 'unnatural;' and women should be natural creatures."4 0 This essay wants to engage with the novel on its own terms. Nonetheless, Mantel is not above comparing the novelist to the violent woman: "[Atwood] digs her unifying images deep into the flesh of the book" (8). This image reminds the reader of a hand with clawlike fingernails digging into flesh. Has Atwood been turned into some sort of crone? Again, the content of the novel seems to reflect negatively on the behavior of the author. 61 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Toni Morrison Of the three novelists considered here, Toni Morrison has published the fewest novels—a respectable seven to Atwood's ten (with five collections of short stories) and Oates's incredibly prolific forty-three novels (and twenty-six story collections). What's more, her papers have yet to be deposited in a public archive.4 1 This has made collecting reviews of her work somewhat more chal lenging—and there are simply fewer of them. As a result, this section is by necessity a bit shorter than the previ ous ones. Just as the sexism evident in criticism of Joyce Carol Oates's early work should not surprise us, the rac ism evident in the reviews of Morrison's works should be expected as well. Morrison's first book, The Bluest Eve, was published in 1970, within recent memory of the race riots of the 1960s. Although no overt racist statements appear in the reviews, there is a sense that the reviewers are looking to Morrison's novels to offer sociological examination rather than creative exploration. This seems especially true regarding her second novel, Sula (1973). This novel tells the story of two friends growing up in a rural black community. Nel embodies the small town ethos of her neighbors, and the eponymous Sula provides a dra matic counterpoint by personifying evil and decadence. 62 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sula kills a neighborhood child by throwing him in the river (accidentally?), and she watches her mother burn to death with fascination. In the New York Times, Christo pher Lehmann-Haupt finds the story "underwritten," adding "my suspicion is that she is fictionalizing material from her own life . . . "i2 Yet again the desire to connect the woman writer to her stories serves to undermine the author's creativity. One wonders which aspects of the novel strike him as autobiographical: Eva sacrificing her leg for money with which to raise her family? Hannah's "wanton sexuality?" Sula's "evil" nature? Other critics also put Morrison into the role of the sociologist: in the New York Times Book Review, short story writer Sara Blackburn declares "Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life."4 3 Despite the attempt to acknowledge Morrison's skills, the notion that somehow Morrison "only" "records" life equates her with the surveyor of group social relations. Not only is her writing assumed to demonstrate what "life is really like for blacks," she merely sets down in writing that which already exists. The narrative is not one she constructs but rather the author reconstructs the world in written form. In fact, this type of critique so disturbed novel ist Alice Walker wrote to the New York Times to respond: 63 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "As I read over Ms Blackburn's review I began to discern why, as a reviewer, she seems so untrustworthy: it is because she, like so many reviewers before her, is inca pable apparently of experiencing black fiction as art but must read it instead as sociology. "4 4 Even as late as 1992, with the publication of Jazz critics (or at least one critic) rely on the old stereo type of violent African American behavior. In the New York Times. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wonders: "What are the real motives behind this passionately violent behavior [both Joe's and Violet's]? One almost hesitates to ask . . . the narrative does keep circulating back to Joe's and Violet's childhoods and to the histories of their ances tors back into the 19th century."4 5 For Lehmann-Haupt, Joe and Violet must have some better—"real"—reason for killing Dorcas and assaulting her corpse. Isn't passion enough of a reason in the world of fiction? Sadly, for this critic the answer lies in some racialized history of violence that Joe and Violet trace back to their slave ancestry, neatly codified in this review as "the 19th century." This sort of assumption, by many of the white reviewers—that all African American violence originates in slavery—seems to contradict much of what Morrison attempts to do in her writing. She is not writing a sociology of contemporary African Americans; she is not "telling us the 64 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. [only] truth about blacks" as demonstrated by the some times sexist attacks of black male writers, like Ishmael Reed, who critique the popularity of black women writers. Fiction writers construct fictive worlds. The critics who insist on these sorts of readings sell short not just an author, but an entire people. Their underlying expectaion of violence in the work of Toni Morrison stems from the fact that she is an African American and must be writing "the black experience." Where Oates's exploration of violence raises some eyebrows, knowing looks were shared when Morrison entered similar terrain; the novels are referred to as "sociology" and the sociology of the post- 19603 black writer is the legacy of race riots, even if that legacy is tempered by an understanding of its roots in slavery. Other critics embrace the idea that Morrison's works provide for the white reader a glimpse into lives they would not normally apprehend. This is especially evident in Diane Johnson's Mew York Review of Books article on Sona of Solomon (1977): It is interesting to notice that despite the chorus of rightly admiring remarks about the talent and power of [Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones], little attention has been paid to what they actually seem to be saying, as if the mere execution of work as poetic and vigorous as this—by women, and black women at that—were sufficiently remarkable without the complicating features or meaning or moral commitment . . . it 65 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seems that meaning may have been overlooked out of embarrassment, because they write about things whites are afraid other whites may be lieve blacks do.4 6 There is at once in this review a fear that racist whites will use Morrison's novels as "evidence" against the race, and at the same time a type of racism that ignores the potential problems caused by the content of these works. Johnson seems terribly worried that the occasion for mis reading by whites does exist: "the white reader may ex press a few self-doubts. Can a non-black reader under stand [these books]? Are blacks really like this? Are these works artistically but not literally true?" (Johnson 6). Even as late as the end of the seventies, critics are harboring subtle and overt racist tendencies in the re views of Morrison's works. Other reviewers do in fact harbor these fraught ques tions. In the New York Times review, Blackburn says of The Bluest Eve "socially conscious readers—including my self—were so pleased to see a new writer of Morrison's obvious talent that we tended to celebrate the book and ignore its flaws" (Blackburn 3). This strange construc tion seems to say that readers were so happy to read sto ries by a black woman who could write well they did not critique the book as a result. The phrase "socially con scious readers" only seems colorblind. Other markers in this review demonstrate that the phrase refers specifi- 66 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cally to white folks who are hip enough to read black books. Morrison's talent was "obvious" to all. This sets Morrison up as unique among her peers; suggesting that black women are not usually that talented. The idea that this book was read by the "socially conscious" also sug gests that most black literature is sociological; the white reader was able to get in touch with black people through literary studies. Now that Morrison has written her second book, Blackburn can transcend her earlier sur prise at Morrison's work and her unique abilities; she is able to offer this critique of Morrison's first novel: "its language was unique, powerful, precise and absolutely convincing, both spare and rich," although the outline of The Bluest Eve is "familiar" (6). One supposes that it is familiar, linked as it is to Ralph Ellison's earlier novel Invisible Man. However, Morrison makes the story unique by focusing on the young girl who is the victim of incest rather than on the victimizer. The focus on the language of The Bluest Eve is in fact widespread: The tone of much black writing is forensic, a public tone that speaks across ethnic and po litical gaps, that at one time or another has been used to persuade or frighten whites into action and to cajole or exhort other blacks into solidarity and revolution. . . [Mrs. Morrison] (sic) has found a way to express [political] consciousness in a novel instead of a ha rangue .4 7 67 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Again there is the turn to sociology, particularly crimi nology; this time in the description of the language as "forensic." This scientific categorization implies the black writer must plead her case, R.A.S. then likened her tone to a big stick, which persuades or frightens those in power. The comment on the tone of Morrison's novel seems backhanded: she is making a political statement—and again, the spectre of the sociological survey of black life is raised—but it's one that white readers are willing to listen to because of the way it is packaged. Even the normally liberal Nation seems threatened by the implica tion of Morrison's early work: "This feeling gives Sula a portentiousness that makes it perhaps an inadvertant prophet, whose prophecy is that all our old assuptions about morality are disintegrating before a particularly black assault against them. "4 8 The violence of Morrison's work may also be masked by her use of language. Darryl Pinckney "wishes for the fierce concentration, the radical economy of the novels of Gayl Jones as they describe the inner world of black women in language that is harsh, disturbing, and utterly unsen timental . "4 9 Taken with Diane Johnson's review of Soncr of Solomon (where she argues that "little attention seems to be paid" to what Morrison and Jones "actually seem to be 68 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. saying" (6)) a forceful argument is made in the late 1970 and early 1980s that violent content written in a "lyri cal" style gets read not as violent but as both poetic as well as personal. Does language change content? That is must harsh realities be written in harsh language to be understood as unpleasant? One of the more interesting aspects of Morrison's work is how willing we are to feel sympathy for her characters who kill, like Sethe in Be loved (1987) and both Eva and Sula in Sula. It may not be the case that language causes readers to "misinterpret" characters. They may not comprehend what they are reading simply because the situations they are reading about are outside their expectations. This could be the case for the New York Times writer Lehmann- Haupt. In his piece on Sula. he classifies her feelings: "Sula herself is stricken when she causes a playmate to drown" (29). The critic seems seduced by Sula; he mis reads Morrison's description of her reaction. In both this case, and in the firey death of her mother, Sula enjoys watching people die. Lehmann-Haupt offers a read ing of how he believes Sula should feel rather than how she is portrayed as feeling. Other reviewers seem capabl of distinguishing Morrison's meaning: "[She] present(s) [women and girls] as cleverer, more interesting, and even 69 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tually more homicidal than men" (Johnson 6). Johnson toys with the idea that the power of Morrison's writing allows misunderstandings to occur around certain types of con tent—especially women's violence. Although Morrison's language is powerful, and nearly unanimously judged "lyri cal," the persistant misreading, as exemplified by Lehmann-Haupt, stems from cultural attitudes toward women, especially those who believe women are naturally non violent . Notes 1 Wendy Lesser, "The Shopping Mall Wars," rev. of Heat and Other Stories, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review, 4 Aug. 1991: 4. 2 Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, "Time and Her Sisters," rev. of Solstice, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review, 20 Jan. 1985: 4. 3 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, rev. of Solstice. by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times. 10 Jan. 1985: C21. 4 Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (Austin: U Texas P, 1983) 20. 5 Charlotte Templin, Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputa tion: The Example of Erica Joncr (Lawrence: UP Kansas, 1995) 20. 6 The sheer number of reference to this classification is overwhelm ing. A selection: about 1973's Do With Me What You Will. "[Oates is] our leading collector of social scar tissue, cross-referencing the noisy sorrows of a sub-country-club culture with gestures from the static professional world" (Murray), and "We first think we are in familiar Joyce Carol Oates territory. Do With Me What You Will opens with a child's abduction and near death at the hands of her crazed father" (Clemons 107, emphasis added). About Unholy Loves (1979) "The wonderful thing is Joyce Carol Oates has done it [written about academic life], and the really wonderful thing is that Unholy Loves is just as complex, as dour, as septic, as violent as any of her previous novels" (See) . Angel of Light (1981) : "Power, excess, sav agery and extravagance are increasingly emerging as Joyce Carol Oates's main themes" (Keefer 105), and "From her early novels I know there will be violence in this dark terrain—and lightening-flash brilliance" (Hobson 44). A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982): " The tale 70 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. [the narrator] must tell is one of unmitigated sex and violence. In other words, Oates is at it again" (Sinkler 6, emphasis added). You Must Remember This (1987) review from the New York Times: "As in much of Ms. Oates's previous fiction, acts of emotional and physical vio lence proliferate throughout the text" (Kakutani, "Books" C20). An assuaged reviewer of Because it is Bitter and Because it is Mv Heart (1990) writes, "because the reader is programmed to expect violence in the realistic fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, it is nearly a relief to have it occur immediately" (Milan) . Foxfire (1993) : "Both setting and content marked it out as typical Oates: much of her work is set in the previous American decades (a process she has called 'memorialisation') and critics have often commented on the amount of violence in her writing" (Lawson 16, emphasis added). We Were the Mulvanevs (1996): "It is this portion of the story that is most con ventionally Oates-like—a warped loner is obsessed with violence" (Mabe, emphasis added) and "At first We were the Mulvanevs seems like just another Joyce Carol Oates novel about an unthinking girlhood in upstate New York suddenly and violently interrupted by rape, repres sion, self-doubt and destruction. Yet this journey into familiar Oates territory captivates the reader's interest" (Goldenberg, empha sis added). 7 Steven Marcus, "American Psycho," rev. of Zombie. by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review 20 Jan. 1985: 13. 8 David Gates, "American Gothic," rev. of We Were the Mulvanevs, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review 15 Sept 1996: 11. 9 Michael Upchurch, rev. of Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates, San Fran cisco Chronicle and Examiner Book Review. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. 10 Dan Cryer, rev. of Zombie. by Joyce Carol Oates, Newsdav. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse Uni versity Library. 11 See Greg Johnson's biography Invisible Writer pages 60, 65, 227, 295, 305, 325, and 396. 12 See Johnson, 67, 172-176, 280. 13 Shea 14. To his credit, Shea does continue to explain that this is a veneer. 14 Garry Wills, "Blood Sport," rev. of On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books 18 Feb 1988: 7. 15 Michael Thompson-Noel, "Lady's Straight Lefts," rev. of On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates, The Financial Times 4 July 1987. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. 16 Norman Snider, "Blood Rites of the Ring," rev. of On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates, MacLeans 6 Apr. 1987. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. 71 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17 For example: "But ultimately it is the incongruity of the feminine psyche trying to get to the heart of the masculine enterprise that gives this volume its puzzling insubstatiality." (Allen W. Fletcher, "A Meditation on Boxing," rev. of On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates, Sunday Telegram 5 Apr. 1987. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. 18 John Clute, "Collisions but No Marriages," rev. of You Must Remem ber This. by Joyce Carol Oates, TLS 19 Feb. 1988: 186. 19 Thomas Lask, "Open Season on Suburbia," rev. of Expensive People, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times 7 Dec. 1968: 45. 20 Adams 5. 21 Michiko Kakutani, rev. of Mysteries of Winterthurn. by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times 10 Feb. 1984: C25. 22Michiko Kakutani, rev. of You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times 10 Aug. 1987: C20. 23Michiko Kakutani, "Gloom Under the Gleam of Suburbia," rev. of American Appetities. by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times 21 Dec. 1988: 33. 24Michiko Kakutani, "Taking the Plot from the News, Even Old News," rev. of Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times. 24 Apr. 1992: C31. 25Kakutani, Michiko, "Girls Who Hate Men and Treat Them Accordingly," rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times 16 July 1993: C29. 26 John Crowley, "Outlaw Girls on the Rampage," rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review 15 Aug. 1993: 6. 21 Lorna Sage, "Girl Gangs Reclaimed," rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates, TLS 13 Aug. 1993: 19. 28 Diane Johnson, "Supergirls," rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books 2 Dec.1993: 25-26. 29Michiko Kakutani, "Like Mother, Alas, Like Daughter," rev. of Man Crazy, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times 29 Aug. 1997: B27. 30 Surfacing is regarded by feminists as feminist even though the "work is not politically feminist." (Marilyn French, rev. of Life Before Man. by Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review 3 Feb. 1980: 1.) 31 John Leonard, "The Heroine: A Contraption of Attitudes," rev. of Bodily Harm, by Margaret Atwood, New York Times 21 Mar. 1982: 3. 32 Another denial of the author's agency: it wrote itself. See Russ 21. 72 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 33 Robert Towers, rev. of Cat's Eve, by Margaret Atwood, New York Review of Books 27 Apr.1989: 50. 34 Camille Peri, "Witch Craft," Mother Jones. Apr. 1989. 31. 35 Alice McDermott, "What Little Girls Are Really Made Of," rev. of Cat's Eve, by Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review 5 Feb. 1989: 1, 35. 3 6 Gabriele Annan, "Donna Giovanna," rev. of The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood, New York Review of Books 16 Dec. 1993: 14. 37 Lorrie Moore, "Every Wife's Nightmare," rev. of The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review 31 Oct 1993: 22. 38 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Did She or Didn't She," rev. of Alias Grace. by Margaret Atwood, New York Times 12 Dec 1996: C19. 39 Francine Prose, "Death and the Maid," rev. of Alias Grace, by Mar garet Atwood, New York Times Book Review 29 Dec 1996: 6. 40 Hilary Mantel, "Murder and Memory," rev. of Alias Grace, by Marga ret Atwood, New York Review of Books 19 Dec. 1996: 8. 41 Margaret Atwood's papers are held at the University of Toronto and Joyce Carol Oates's are at her alma mater, Syracuse University. 42 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Underwritten and Overwritten," rev. of Sula, by Toni Morrison, New York Times 7 Jan. 1974: 29. 43 Sara Blackburn, "You Still Can't Go Home Again," rev. of Sula. by Toni Morrison, New York Times Book Review 3 0 Dec. 1973: 3. 44 Alice Walker, letter, New York Times Book Review 20 Jan. 1974: 27. 45 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. "2 Voices as Far Apart as the Novel and the Essay." Rev. of Jazz and Plavincr in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison. New York Times. 2 Apr. 1992. 46 Diane Johnson. "The Oppressor in the Next Room." Rev. of Soncr of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. New York Review of Books. 10 Nov. 1977: 6. 47 R.A.S. Rev. of The Bluest Eve, by Toni Morrison. Newsweek. 3 0 Nov. 1970: 96. 48 Jerry H. Bryant. "Something Ominous Here." Rev. of Sula. by Toni Morrison. The Nation. 6 July 1974: 23-24. 49 Darryl Pinckney. "Every Which Way." Rev. of Tar Babv. by Toni Morrison. New York Review of Books. 30 Apr. 1981: 25. 73 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Two Sisterhood is Troublesome "Sisterhood is powerful—it kills sisters."1 —Ti- Grace Atkinson "Must we call every woman sister?"2 —bell hooks Ti-Grace Atkinson's quip indicates both the centrality of sisterhood to the feminist project and the violence inherent in sisterhood, when it demands, as it sometimes does, sameness. Other concerns about violence surfaced in these early stages of contemporary feminism. In 1971, a meeting was convened by feminists in New York to discuss the possibility of using violence in the women's movement:3 what avenues should be taken when the FBI and CIA infiltrated and enacted vio lence on those in support of women's liberation? Should women respond to violence with violence? Some women saw violence as patriarchal and felt that women were naturally non-violent thus to act in a violent manner would be to act in an unac- ceptably masculine way, and others believed that violence was a necessary form of self-defense 74 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. against the oppression women were subj ect to. Atkinson's speech that night attempted to connect the possibility of women's violence with other violent movements (especially the mafia). Very 4 few records of this meeting exist; the ones that do emphasize non-violence. The silencing of the opposing arguments advocating violence—in addi tion to the media coverage of feminist movements like Greenham Common—gives the impression that the second wave of feminism was mostly anti-vio lent despite women like Robin Morgan or Valerie Solanas who advocated violence. Elaine Showalter, Princeton professor of English, re ports, "if it achieved nothing else, The Violence Meeting certainly ended any further feminist dis cussions of violence, and that was a good thing."5 Opening and continuing discussions of women's violence, however, allows scholars to critique fully the ideals of womanhood and to explore all options for women's equality. While considering feminist acceptance and rejection of sisterhood, I define feminist uses of violence. I argue that violence can create community among girl children, female adolescents and women. While violence can work against the goals of 75 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. feminism by serving to reinforce patriarchal norms of femininity, women' s violence can serve as a challenge to the ideas that "authorities" hold about women. Rather than finding violence to be anti thetical to community, we see in these narratives how violence can be the impetus for community. Two of the books which describe women's community examined here, Margaret Atwood's work Cat's Eve (1989) and Joyce Carol Oates's Foxfire: Confes sions of a Girl Gang (1994) , have underground and unofficial communities of violent women as their central protagonists. The surrounding society's tacit approval of the malicious group of girls in Cat's Eve suggests as much about the social con text in which it was written as the disapproval of and even disregard for the girl gang in Foxfire does. The books reflect two moments in feminism and the kinds of women's communities envisioned in both. Cat's Eve reflects the back lash of the 1980s identified by Susan Faludi and well-represented in the reactionary concept of post-feminism. Oates's work, on the other hand, reflects the moment of "girl power" that fol lowed, despite the book's 1950s setting. In the 76 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. early 90s a sort of punk-feminism was born from the riot grrl movement and watered down for popu lar consumption, the movement evolved focusing on girls and what they were capable of. This set ting seems to indicate a desire to return to those heady times when "girls" were first getting power in the mid-to-late-sixties. At the same time, this novel seems to announce that we took a wrong turn in the past 35 years which resulted in young girls declaring their own separate but equal feminism today. The novels are not en tirely determined by the popular feminism contem porary with them, but both novels do see girls as the main agents of violence—a violence which seems to be in conflict with the community of early feminist theory. Community was central to second wave feminism's belief that women could change women's position in society. The notion of sisterhood was both a cause and an effect of this belief.6 Almost immediately, however, black women and black feminists, lesbian feminists, and anti- feminists began to challenge this concept of sis terhood . Black women didn't see themselves in the descriptions, for example, of protected wom- 77 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. anhood that white feminists described. Lesbians knew that their oppression stemmed from heterosexist beliefs whether it originated from men or women. The notion of sisterhood, supposed to be inclusive of all women, seemed to be ex cluding more than it was including. Soon sister hood seemed to be a liability rather than a strength of feminism. bell hooks's question, used as an epigraph to this chapter, seeks to limit the notion of sisterhood, and suggests we rethink both sister hood and therefore feminism itself. If some women' s actions can be read as anti-feminist, should they not be denied access to the feminist label? Should their behavior be received as a critique of the universalizing notion of sister hood? What should we make of women's anti-femi nist actions? Where does women's violence fit in feminist theory? Atwood takes up all of these questions in Cat' s Eve. In this novel, a recollection about a Canadian girlhood, Atwood attacks the notion that women's community is always a positive means to a positive end. Like Ti-Grace Atkinson who wrote in the 1970s "Sisterhood is powerful—it 78 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. kills sisters," (#) Atwood takes as her central theme the destructive nature of some "sister hoods . " In a brief interview with the Mew York Times shortly after the novel appeared, Atwood emphasizes the importance for women of the friendships they made in their pre-teen years. But Atwood also feels that this socialization can be damaging; the way girls policed each other into becoming acceptable members of mainstream society can be quite tyrannical. The novel ex plores the injurious sexualization methods of little girls—those methods that enforce not only the gender norms of the culture but also, and especially, the norms of sexual identity. This ( process is described in Frigga Haug's Female Sexualization (1987); "the process of [women's] individual socialization is synonymous with the 7 sexualization of the body and its parts." That is, through same-sex socialization girls' bodies are constructed within a sexualized culture, (like Western popular culture) by other girls. This socialization process suggests that sister hood can be limiting, even violent towards the individual. Although feminists embraced the con cept of sisterhood, not all sisterhoods can be 79 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. read as feminist, as Atwood implies in her novel and argues in some interviews. She sees girls' relationships as a particularly fruitful context in which to examine the limitations of sister hood . In the novel, fortyish Elaine Risley returns to her hometown of Toronto for a retrospective of her paintings. This return has triggered for Elaine memories of her childhood, and the novel is interspersed with these stories. When Elaine turns eight, her parents decide to quit their mostly-nomadic lifestyle and settle down. The family has until now accompanied the father on his entomological expeditions. The children have been home-schooled and encouraged to use their imaginations when they play; because her brother is older, he sets the parameters of their games, and the two often engage in war games, hunting expeditions, and other activities classified as boyish in the Canada of the 1940s in which this part of the book is set. As a result, Elaine has grown up active and is a bit of a tomboy. Her home life has left her free of the usual social ization for girls in that period. She has not been taught to sit "right" (knees together) nor 80 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to care for her appearance—not only because her own mother seems to ignore these conventions but also because her circumstances (wearing her brother's hand-me-downs and sleeping in a tent, for example) call for another type of behavior. When she reaches "civilization" her life changes. Because she has not been a part of the more strictly gendered society, she is not aware of the rules of that society. Because she has been playing with her older brother for the first eight years of her life, she is not prepared for girls: So I am left to the girls, real girls at last, in the flesh. But I am not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don't know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.8 Elaine understands the world of boys but she is mystified by the games—literal and figurative- little girls play. For her there is nothing natural about girlhood; she is conscious that there are unwritten rules that must be learned. The little girls who become her friends are all too happy to re-socialize her, to help her become more properly feminine. They introduce 81 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. her to new games, unlike those she played with her brother, which include cutting pictures of household items from the Eaton's catalog. The object of this game, it seems to Elaine, is to "cut frying pans out of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I' ve done it badly" (Atwood 57) . The girls cut and paste their pictures and then must compliment the other girls while disparaging their own abilities. The games the girls play prepare them for feminine roles—in this case specifically to be consumers and to be self-deprecating. Elaine, our native informant, is capable of recognizing the unspoken rules of this game, but at the same time knows that her uncritical participation in this behav ior is necessary in order for her to be accepted by the others. In other interactions with her friends, she is taught about twin sets and cold waves. These items are also connected to gendered socialization; they are not only women's goods, but the clothing and hair styles they rep resent serve to improve the looks of women. The need to be fashionable and good looking is part and parcel of the sexualization process examined here. 82 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Elaine feels like an impostor in this world, "Playing with girls is different and at first I feel strange as I do it, self-conscious, as if I'm only doing an imitation of a girl" (Atwood 55) . The little girls seem to sense her anxiety. Her friends, Cordelia especially, punish her for her "incorrect," that is, unfeminine, behavior. But instead of showing her the way she "should" behave, they leave her to guess what she has done incorrectly—they are teaching her to police her self . "I worry about what I' ve said today, the expression on my face, how I walk, what I wear, because all of these things need improvement. I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me. Grace and Carol will help me too" (Atwood 125) . This "help" falls in the category of Haug's "sexualization of the body and its parts. " The girls point out when Elaine is hunching over and swinging her arms when she walks or when she is not being polite enough. "Posture, external ap pearance and movement are adjusted by women them selves in their attempts to conform to and rein force the status quo" (Haug 79) . Elaine' s 83 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. friends begin to make her aware of the ways she is on display as a woman, as a sexualized object. In their efforts to improve Elaine, the girls are cruel to their "friend;" they are even physically violently. One day when they are playing, Elaine is made to be Mary Queen of Scots: "They pick me up by the underarms and the feet and lower me into the hole. Then they ar range the boards on top. The daylight air disap pears , and there' s the sound of dirt hitting the boards, shovelful after shovelful" (Atwood 112) . Elaine is buried alive, as part of a punishment that is continual. Elaine's situation in this scene parallels that of Mary Queen of Scots who was, although related to Queen Elizabeth, a prisoner and out sider in England because she was a Catholic and a threat to the throne. Elaine is imprisoned by her desire to be a part of the girl group, but she is outside the gender socialization. In this way, Elaine also offers a threat. Because she does not act the way she is "supposed to, "—in a feminine way—Elaine threatens the rules of the middle class. Ironically, the girl group's vio lent behavior is usually not considered to be 84 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. feminine either. However, because the girls are enforcing the social norm, this violent behavior is acceptable, as indicated by the adults who know how Elaine is being treated but do not in tervene . The girls, identifying with their op pressors , enforce the rules of the patriarchy requiring Elaine to behave in a ladylike way (and indeed to learn to identify what this behavior is) . Mrs. Smeath, Grace's mother, who is charac terized as a sort of values gatekeeper, is aware of how the girls treat Elaine, but believes "It's God's punishment. . . . It serves her right" (Atwood 191) . Mrs. Smeath also believes that Elaine's outsider behavior needs to be corrected, perhaps especially because Elaine is also an atheist. Elaine can make no appeal to authority to counter this violence because of the rules the girls have made—her silence is required; this silence mirrors the options women have in the society as well. Elaine's lack of sisterhood, at first lit eral—she has only a brother—becomes figurative as well; her friends are not her "sisters" in the sense of recognizing and acting on their common alities ; Cordelia, Grace, and Carol do not iden- 85 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tify with Elaine. In fact, there are some days when Cordelia does not use her power over Elaine but rather over Carol. On these days, Elaine does not identify with Carol: "At these times I don't pity Carol. She deserves what's happening to her, because of all the times she' s done the same things to me. I rejoice that it's her turn instead of mine" (Atwood 127). The objection to sisterhood Atwood raises here is to the univer salization and the naturalization of sisterhood— that all girls must necessarily form a bond based on sex and shared experience. Although young Elaine's interactions with women are hostile, and thus discouraging, the adult Elaine does have encounters with groups of feminist women. At a particular meeting in the sixties, she learns that women who she "thought were stupid, or wimps, may simply have been hid ing things" (Atwood 361). That is, Elaine thinks she has by now learned how to read women, but she has not, as this glimpse into a different kind of sisterhood demonstrates. She begins to suspect her attitudes toward women cause her to be dis connected, but she cannot or will not work against these ideas; ultimately, she cannot es- 86 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cape her beliefs about the treachery of women that she developed during her childhood. Even among feminist groups, Elaine feels "whatever I do say might be the wrong thing. I have not suf fered enough, I haven' t paid my dues, I have no right to speak. I feel as if I'm standing out side a closed door while decisions are being made, disapproving judgments are being pro nounced, inside, about me" (Atwood 361) . This fear of saying the wrong thing stems from the cruelty of her young friends who point out when she speaks or acts inappropriately or looks "wrong." The feeling of standing outside a room while others judge her directly recalls another scene in the book. "I'm standing outside the closed door of Cordelia's room. Cordelia, Grace, and Carol are inside. They're having a meeting. The meeting is about me. I am just not measuring up, although they are giving me every chance" (Atwood 123) . Elaine' s inability to feel com fortable with women has deep roots. Later in life, when Elaine has left her first husband, she encounters other groups of feminists. She believes that "they have a cer tain way they want me to be, and I am not that 87 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. way. They want to improve me" (Atwood 399) . It is difficult to tell how reliable a narrator Elaine is when she describes the behavior of the women she meets as an adult. Because these women's actions are not adequately described, Elaine' s assessments of them seems to say as much, if not more, about the terms in which she has learned to interpret all groups of women as it does about these specific groups. Elaine's beliefs echo one particular criti cism of feminism. Many people understand femi nism to require sameness, that "political cor rectness" defined by the right-wing as demanding, thought-control. Although early feminist con sciousness raising groups did attempt to create an environment in which all women would feel com fortable speaking, these feminists did not mean for rigid ideology to shackle women. Writing in 1971, Kathie Sarachild, an early proponent of consciousness raising describes: "The importance of listening to a woman's feelings was collec tively to analyze the situation of women .... It was and is the conditions women face . . .we 9 want to change" . But she acknowledges that no single correct way to "raise consciousness" ex- 88 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ists. Consciousness raising was not immune to dogma, as Sarachild acknowledges critically in "Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon" (1978). "There have been a number of formalized 'rules' or 'guidelines' for consciousness-raising which have been published or distributed to women's groups with an air of authority as if they repre sented the original program of consciousness- raising" (Sarachild "Radical Weapon" 148). Such guidelines led many to believe that feminism re quires fascistic adherence to correctness, but Sarachild explains that this is not the case. Finally though Elaine does experience posi tive sisterhood at the gallery's retrospective of her work. Charna, the gallery owner, approaches Elaine the night of the opening. "'We are all very proud of you.' This is so much like what a family would say, a mother or an aunt, that I'm thrown off guard. Who is this family and who' s family is it?" (Atwood 433) . This feminist fam ily surprises Elaine because the sisterhood she has experienced in the past is so different. The gallery women are the sisters that Elaine fears she does not have. She expects that women like her childhood friends will appear: "soon the door 89 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. will open, and in will crowd a horde of snide and treacherous little girls" (Atwood 432) . But what greets her instead is a receptive crowd of femi nist women. She feels, momentarily, brought into the circle that she felt did not exist. The positive feminism she experiences at the gallery, however, is open to her critique. The gallery owners have arranged an interview with a young feminist journalist. In the interview, Elaine seems to rej ect current feminist theory. She is disappointed that the journalist is seek ing stories about her career that will support a feminist agenda: "people my age are supposed to have stories of outrage; at least insult, at least put-down. Male art teachers pinching your bum, calling you baby, asking you why there are no great female painters, that sort of thing. She would like me to be furious. . (Atwood 94) . Elaine does not reveal these stories not because they do not exist—her art teacher did sleep with his protegees, for example—but because she acknowledges her own agency in some of these events, and she wants to offer her own narration of them. Elaine's first marriage, for example, contained violence but she does not want to be Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. portrayed as a victim of that violence or of the other sexist events she has overcome. She wants to be sure that her own part in that violence is spelled out: her husband, Jon, threw things at her but they were harmless objects (cereal boxes) thrown with accuracy. Elaine retaliates by throwing more harmful objects (a crystal ashtray, a television) with no precision. So, although Elaine could lodge complaints against the men in her life, she knows doing so in the interviewers terms would present an incomplete story. She is still unwilling to be socialized for the inter ests of a group but she does not recognize that this new group can be qualitatively different, or different in its goals from the previous one. When the interviewer asks her specifically what feminism has done for her—people call her a feminist painter—her response is, "'What indeed,' I say. ' I hate party lines. I hate ghettos. Anyway, I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all' ?" (Atwood 94) . Once again, Elaine finds ways to put herself out side of the group. This fiction of a feminist "moment, " of being the right age, and somehow Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. better prepared to accept feminism, at the right time, is fairly pervasive.1 0 The reader must wonder if the appellation of "feminist painter" is appropriate for Elaine. As Judith Grant has argued in Fundamental Feminism (1992), feminist activity must take place with feminist awareness (182), and Elaine seems to reject such feminist consciousness. On the other hand, people with feminist perception, such as the gallery owner, do interpret Elaine's work as feminist. They believe that her work demystifies domestic objects. Her work also includes others and outsiders. Such subject matter could be de fined as feminist in that it represents "women's things" and the margins of society which have arguably been previously unrepresented and unrepresentable. These two ideas would seem to suggest that there is indeed feminist content in Elaine's work. In the end, the interviewer reads the painter as "post-feminist." Elaine classifies this remark as "obligatory, " and in the context of the rest of the review provided, it seems to indicate Elaine's unwillingness to cooperate with 92 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the author's feminist agenda. The journalist gets in a few digs as payback: Eminent artist Elaine Risley returns to hometown Toronto this week for a long overdue retrospective. . . Elaine Risley looking anything but formidable in a pow der-blue jogging suit that's seen better days, nevertheless can come out with a few pungent and deliberately provocative comments on women today. (238) "Postfeminist" is a label which has often been used to obscure a backlash against feminism especially in the mid- to late-eighties when Atwood was writing this novel.1 1 Postfeminism usurps the feminist label, while the prefix suggests that feminism is no longer necessary. This term was used to undermine feminism as early as 1983, when Time magazine heralded the "postfeminist" move in literature. According to J. D. Reed, former creative writing professor at the University of Massachu setts, the writers discussed in the article1 2 have "outdistanced feminism" (Reed 60) . "Postfeminist writing" according to the article is "character ized by less dogmatic treatments of both men and women, and with themes expanded to include fam ily, children, and political events" (Reed 60) . Reed means to separate this new "feminism" from an older feminism which is unyielding and ex- 93 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. eludes femininity from its vision. But the femi nisms and the feminist literature extant before 1983 do consider (and even embrace) family, chil dren, and political events, so it is unclear why women who are now writing about these issues have "outdistanced feminism." This article contains many inconsistencies, however. Reed quotes Joyce Carol Oates as an ticipating "novels by women that are not women' s novels," but later quotes a Harper's editor who says "women not only have a subj ect but they have a sense of necessity about it. They want other women to know about this awareness, this knowl edge" (Reed 61) . Where Oates seeks to move be yond the category "woman writer"1 3 and "woman's novel" the article reinforces the gender of the writer and of the writing. Reed implies, by in cluding the Harper's editor's quote, that women writers have special knowledge that is intended for women readers thereby reinforcing the notion of the "woman" writer, and placing the woman writer in opposition to The Writer—who is obvi ously male. In fact, Reed quotes Oates (out of context) to demonstrate that feminists were sounding a tired note: "At the end of the 197 0s, 94 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Joyce Carol Oates was hardly alone in wishing for more than a feminist monotone from a number of American Women writers" (60) . But a knowledge of Oates's essays about writing suggests that what she means to do here is urge critics and publish ers to move beyond focusing on gender and imply ing that books by women are only about, for and of women; Oates wants recognition as a writer whose literary purview can, does, and should ex tend beyond "women's issues. "1 4 The declaration of the postfeminist era, despite a seeming lack of evidence, signals the magazine's ant i-f emini s t behavior and reminds us of the backlash against feminism, which was especially evident just prior to the writing of Cat' s Eve and in the book it self . A later, and more thoroughly researched, definition of "po s t f emini sm"—whi ch gives better insight into Atwood's portrayal of the artist—is found in Tania Modleski's Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a Postfeminist Age (1991). Postfeminism, according to Modleski, is "actually engaged in negating the critiques and 15 undermining the goals of feminism. " It seems the interviewer in Atwood's novel who calls 95 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Elaine "postfeminist" is speaking of Elaine's attitude toward feminism (or at least her reluc tance to answer questions concerning feminism) rather than the subject matter of her art. Elaine, however, because of her past oppression by women refuses to participate in feminism. Her perspective serves to "undermine the goals of feminism; " one of which would be to form sister hood—Elaine ' s response shuts down this possibil ity . In her work Sororoohobia (1992), Helena Michie considers the difficulty of negotiating differences among women in a world where "the equation of 'other' with 'woman' that makes all women other threatens to make all women the 16 same." She wonders "why should the concept of sisterliness not include, among other elements, competition and envy" (9) like real sibling rela tionships do. Feminism, she concludes, must op erate between the sameness and differences of women; that community should be given over to coalition. Atwood's novel takes us to the depths of women's difference—to violence and cruelty—to demonstrate that not all women easily fit into the "sameness" feminism seems to create. 96 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In Cat's Eve, women's violence undermines feminism's embrace of sisterhood. The violence committed by the little girls, and by Elaine's imagined art critics, is not feminist; the girls are seeking to reestablish societal (patriarchal) values. Feminist violence, on the other hand, would be that violence undertaken by people with some kind of feminist consciousness who had femi nist goals.1 7 Feminist violence may result in self-actualization for the offender, help reject essentialized ideas about women, defend against or overthrow patriarchy, or resist men's vio lence . Joyce Carol Oates's 1993 novel, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang presents violent women seeking many of these ends. Because the gang's violence is not ultimately and completely suc cessful, we can also find in this representation where feminist violence ends and how. Oates's novel opens with a scene of both self-actualization and resistance. The gang of the novel's title forms in order to take revenge on Rita 0' Hagan' s harasser. Rita is a chubby, clumsy girl who cries easily when others make fun of her. She is picked on by children and teach ers alike. In some ways, she is the impetus for 97 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the gang. Legs Sadovsky, the gang's leader, "sees in a dream" that action must be taken to help Rita fend off the sexual harassment1 8 she receives from the math teacher, Mr. Buttinger. As the book's narrator and the gang's historian, Madeleine "Maddy," Wirtz recounts, "it was a time of violence against girls and women but we didn't have the language to talk about it then; "1 9 de spite the fact that this harassment cannot be named, they develop a strategy to combat it, namely the gang. At first some of the other girls don't want to respond to the harassment—"it's her fault, she lets them get away with it, " they complain. But Legs explains, "When that sonuvabitch picks on Rita you better tell yourself he's picking on you 'cause the fucker sure would if he could" (46). This statement affirms Legs's understanding of the feminist concept the "personal is political"— what the others see as Rita's personal problem, Legs demonstrates is a problem for all women. The statement also confirms that the girls must create a group identity; they cannot combat the harassment individually, unlike Elaine in Cat's Eve. for instance, who always insists on her sta- 98 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tus as an independent individual. The move to create a group identity, coupled with Legs's na scent feminism, begins to indicate the book's feminist center. On New Year's Eve 1953, several girls invited by Legs—Maddy, Rita, Goldie Siefried, Lana Maguire—gather to form a gang. Although gangs are not unknown in the girls' en vironment-working class, rural New York in the 1950s—girl gangs are unheard of, and as I will discuss later, unimaginable to the community. The girls, then, must define their own gang. The girls arrive wearing a cross as they have been told. After all take their seats in Legs' room, they each take a shot of whiskey. They repeat the oath Legs has written and commit to each other: Do you solemnly swear to consecrate yourself to your sisters in F0XFIRE...to consecrate yourself to the vision of FOXFIRE... to think always of your sis ters as you would they think of you...in the Revolution of the Proletariat that is imminent in the Apocalypse that is imminent in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and under torture physical or spiritual...never to betray your FOXFIRE sisters in thought or word or deed never to reveal FOXFIRE secrets, never to deny FOXFIRE in this world or the next, above all to pledge yourself to 99 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. FOXFIRE offering up all fidelity and courage and heart and soul and all fu ture happiness to FOXFIRE...under penalty of death...so help you God...forever and ever until the end of time. (39-40 & 108) Based on religious vows, the language of revolu tion, and vows from popular music, the girls have cobbled together a promise to each other. The pledge to FOXFIRE is especially an allegiance to other girls and women (" think always of your sis ters as you would they think of you") . The vows from popular music, "for ever and ever^ until the end of time, " underscore the sexual, as well as the sisterly, love the girls share. As this vow makes evident, they do not achieve this new iden tity by rejecting what they already know. Their vow illustrates the idea of the ambiguity of an authentic self in feminist confession presented in Rita Felski's work Bevond Feminist Aesthetics (1989) .20 "The more, frantic the search for an in ner self, for a kernel of meaning untouched by a society rejected as oppressive and alienating, the more clearly subjectivity is revealed to be permeated by and dependent upon those very sym bolic constraints from which it seeks to liberate Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. itself" (104) . In this novel, we see a sister hood forged by violence—both the societal vio lence that attempts to prevent the girls from creating a new identity and the violence that the girls commit which connects them in secrecy. The pledge illustrates the problem of negotiating a new identity when the subject is so closely cir cumscribed by the class, race, and gender poli tics of her society. Their oath then, derives from the culture they are seeking to rej ect. The sexuality of the vow is made explicit in the celebration that follows the initiation. Af ter the girls make this promise, they tattoo themselves with an ice pick. When Maddy prepares to tattoo herself, she cannot; "she heard her voice pleading softly, 'Legs do it to me'" (40). The double entendre of "do it" is made more ex plicit by Maddy's recollection during her tattoo ing of sharing her bed with Legs "as no one had ever done and no one ever would" (40) . As the tattoos bleed, the girls mingle the blood from the tattoos—to become "blood sisters"—by rubbing their chests together. The girls take off each others' shirts and begin kissing and fondling each other. Coupled with the vow to consecrate 101, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. themselves to FOXFIRE, which later becomes a vow to shun all relationships with men, their actions reflects ideas espoused by lesbian feminist sepa ratists . Although the language of the pledge is bor rowed and confused, it still constitutes a rheto ric of community and violent anti-individualism. The group's focus on creating this community of women and its commitment to the group itself is a tribute to the Left movement of the United States in the sixties. We know Legs has been influenced by Marxism (even if it is second hand from an alcoholic priest) . The commitment to the group grows so strong that those girls who will not follow the gang's rules are eventually asked to— or forced to—leave. Several weeks after the initiation, the gang takes its revenge on Buttinger. Although some of the girls still resist the idea that they must help Rita, the action serves to cement their col lective identity. This bond begins with Rita's response to the plan: "what if we get in trouble," verifying the group's identity with her choice of pronoun. Armed with red paint and slo gans , the girls deface the car of Rita's sexual 102 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. harasser, when he next holds Rita for "disci pline . " On the car, they paint, "I AM NIGGER LIPS BUTTINGER IM A DIRTY OLD MAN MMMMMM GIRLS! ! ! I TEACH MATH & TICKLE TITS IM BUTTINGER I EAT PUSSY...FOXFIRE REVENGE! FOXFIRE REVENGE! " (31) . The slogans21 are painted on the right rear side of the vehicle, so Buttinger does not see them when he gets into his car. But the response of the townspeople as he drives down the main street gives him an indication something is wrong. He arrives at school the next day in a taxi, but since his secret—that he sexually harasses his girl students—has already been revealed, he can not continue to conceal his behavior. He is forced to retire, and he moves away from the town. It is, as one of the girls describes, al most like they killed him (50) . The girls' purpose in exposing him is to resist the power he holds; once the townspeople "know," once his behavior becomes public, he will be (and is) punished. Initially, he gets away with his harassment because the individual girls he harasses cannot or will not tell. This strat egy—the creation of a public consciousness and memory of the acts coupled with the anonymity of 103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the act—indicates an awareness the girls have about making knowledge public. By publicly nam ing Buttinger and his crime, the girls are able to stop him; they are able to control the situa tion—his situation (literally and figuratively; he loses his job) and take power for themselves. They get to rewrite his history. Although the girls' gang is secret—they pledge never to reveal FOXFIRE secrets or to betray the other gang mem bers—their actions work because they are public. This fictional representation of collective action and the transformation of its members can be read as sympathetic response to both the New Left movement and the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As Todd Gitlin de scribes, "The movement didn't simply demand, it did. By taking action, not just a position, it affirmed the right to do so; by refusing to de fer, it deprived the authorities of authority itself. "22 As an outgrowth of the New Left move ment , the women's liberation movement also sought to take collective action. In this spirit, the concept of sisterhood served as an organizing principle for early feminists; as one early femi nist describes, "sisterhood meant that we recog- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nize that women are a class and that gave us com mon ground and reasons to unite politically."2 3 It served as a method for further unifying women, recognizing, as Legs does above, that what men do to one woman some of them would do to any woman: for example, Buttinger's habit of fondling girl students probably did not begin and end with Rita 0'Hagan. According to many women's liberation histo rians , one of the first steps involved in women' s liberation was recognizing that women had similar experiences; this was accomplished through con sciousness raising. Small groups of women would gather together to discuss their experiences. The more they talked about topics that had been forbidden at one time—dissatisfaction with mar riage and motherhood, for example—the more they realized that these were feelings that were shared with other women. Consciousness raising also served as a starting point for theory, and theory led to action. Specifically, as one early feminist explains "consciousness raising actions. .[were] brought to the public for the specific purpose of challenging old ideas and raising new ones."24 Although consciousness-raising has often 105 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. been derided as "therapy, " most groups took ac tion based on these findings by founding women's health collectives, legal centers, battered women's shelters, and rape counseling centers. Sarachild explains that social change had always been the goal. In fact, she criticized many of the groups who took action without thought as well as those groups who allowed consciousness- raising to become simply therapy, "fixing [cor recting] the individual." The problem that arose from this mistake was to shift feminism from fo cus on a group to focus on the individual. If the individual's attitude could be adjusted, or if individuals could succeed in previously closed professions or other segments of society, femi nism had succeeded. Compounded by capitalism's focus on individual success, some obstacles iden tified by feminism seemed to disappear; the prob lem was they only disappeared for a select few. Because there seemed to be evidence that feminism had succeeded (women MBAs, business owners, and senators, for example), the collective aspect of feminism had been diminished. Oates reminds us of this bygone collective action by focusing on Rita's participation in 106 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. this empowering act of destroying Buttinger. Rita becomes a new girl; her friends now call her "Red" or "Fireball." She loses her frightened demeanor and becomes fierce and violent: Now that FOXFIRE had come into her life . . . Rita was changing. Conspicuously changing. Still a plump little butter- ball with wiggly breasts and hips but not fat, still shorter than most of the neighborhood girls and boys her age but not short, no longer so crippling-shy, nor so meek: not even the crudest boy would have called her "Dumbo" or "Half wit" any longer. (72) Rita's participation in labeling Buttinger allows her to escape the labels that have been applied to her. Her response to abuse by men is also dif ferent now. For example, when Maddy's uncle attempts to get her to exchange sexual favors in return for a discarded typewriter, it is Rita's idea to "kill him"—by which she means teaching him a lesson about his sexist behavior by using violence against the uncle and in doing so to procure the typewriter. No longer does Rita put up with ha rassment by men. But Rita, it is emphasized, should not read only as an individual. "We are all Rita," Legs reminds Maddy—and Maddy reminds 107 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the reader. In attacking Maddy's Uncle "Wimpy" Wirtz, the girls strengthen their own sense of identity by reversing the story that leaves them victims. They are aware of the looks Wirtz gives them: as [Maddy] passed by he' d whistle thinly through his teeth, not recogniz ing her apparently, as he'd whistle at other girls and young women in the neighborhood: not jeeringly exactly, in fact rather softly, but not in a way that would make you feel proud. Maddy guessed that at such times, Uncle Wimpy didn't see her—she was just something female to him. . . (63) His attempt to get Maddy to exchange sex for the typewriter, signals the power that men have over women. In response to this power, the gang sets up Wirtz, by asking Maddy to agree to his demands. When Maddy goes to her uncle's store, he closes the shop believing he will be able to garner sexual favors from his niece. But FOXFIRE sur prises him by gaining access through a window. The girls then beat him instead. " [Rita] tugs Wimpy' s trousers of f, manages to get the man' s boxer shorts down past his thrashing naked thighs, knees, ankles, feet, and off, in 10 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. singleminded fury kicking him as he kicks. . . " (77) . Here Wirtz is reduced to his body parts as he has reduced the girls before. The girls upset gender categories to exact their revenge, and they manage to make off with the typewriter that will be used to chronicle the gang' s activities. The girls continue their crusade for justice for some time before they are caught. Their crimes go unreported because of the nature of their transgression. They attribute this to the men's humiliation in having to admit that a group of girls got the better of them; this ensures their victims' silence where before the girls are the ones who are silenced. This upsetting of the usual roles cannot be named, and as a result, the men have no vocabulary for reporting the crimes. Feminist violence, then, can be read as a rejec tion of essentialized ideas about women. Commit ting this violence helps the girls to see the power they do have, however limited. Working together allows them greater strength and creates a greater sense of group identity; the novel's portrayal of the group shows the limitations of individualism. 109 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The creation of the FOXFIRE gang further parallels the burgeoning idea of sisterhood, if we define sisterhood as a "refuge from and a challenge to . . .patriarchy" (Palmer 126) which also "emphasizes love between and unity among women" (Michie 21). The book itself represents a literal refuge from patriarchy—there are nearly no fathers in this book. Two of the girls lost their fathers in WWII, and Legs is removed from her father's custody at the beginning of the novel. Additionally, the gang and their house also act as a refuge from patriarchy—the gang members seek to protect women, especially those who are victims of domestic abuse. FOXFIRE pro tects these women from being silenced and from submitting to patriarchy's rules about women and women' s behavior. The book is not simply a uto pian creation of a world in which patriarchy ex ercises no power, however. The nature of the police, of the correctional institute Legs is sentenced to, and the marriages which "save" Rita and Violet after the collapse of the gang, in addition to Maddy's rape, reinsert a patriarchal presence, so to speak. 110 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Nonetheless, the gang does serve as a chal lenge to patriarchy. Most importantly, FOXFIRE's existence as a "girl" gang challenges the police notions of gang-hood. Following their joyride in a stolen car that ends in an accident, the police bring in Legs for questioning. They want to know which gang FOXFIRE is the "auxiliary" to. But the girls, a gang in their own right, do not give the answers the police are looking for. "It wasn't FOXFIRE they cared about in the slightest— but only male gangs—males" Maddy reports with disgust (145). Although the gang's existence relies on secrecy, the girls want to be recog nized as a gang, even if that means risking pun ishment. They are disappointed because they are not recognized by the police as a girl gang—the police don't have the idea of girl agency and thus cannot recognize the gang. The girls are also disappointed because when they are finally punished gender crimes play a significant role. Legs is sent to Red Bank State Correctional Facility for Girls, and the other girls are put on probation, for subverting their 1950s working-class culture's gender categories. Legs is charged with: 111 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. grand larceny; driving without a li cense ; reckless driving; speeding; en- dangerment of life; refusing to obey a police officer; malicious destruction of property; disorderly conduct; pos session of a concealed weapon; posses sion of an illegal weapon; attempted felonious assault with a deadly weapon; habitual truancy; being a "disciplinary problem" in school; being an "incorri gible minor"; being a "promiscuous mi nor" (132, emphasis added). Despite the laundry list of charges, the violence that the girls commit is invisible (most of it goes unreported), what is visible is a fictional unruly sexua1ity—the only promiscuity acknowl edged in the confessions is the girls' tentative lesbianism. Legs is, in fact, anything but pro miscuous . The charges fix Legs because she is not punished on her own terms. She is sent to Red Bank to be resocialized to be properly "femi nine" rather than to be punished for violent crimes; after all, we are reminded, only girls can be guilty of promiscuity. Although Legs is punished individually, the gang's continued commitment to unity is apparent. First, several of the girls articulate their wish to go to Red Bank in Legs' s place. When Legs is released, the whole gang rides to the facility to 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pick her up. Finally, and most importantly, Legs and the gang move into their own house after Legs's sentence is served. This house becomes a "refuge from and a challenge to patriarchy" as well. "Girls and/or women not actual members of FOXFIRE would be invited to the house to stay for a night, for days" (222) . Some of these women are escaping abusive relationships; the house then, functions as a proto-battered women's shel ter—a refuge for women—as in the case of the sis ter of one of the new FOXFIRE initiates, who was: being beaten by her damn drunk of a hus band and her life threatened and the Hammond cops wouldn't lift a finger to protect her, naturally she was made wel come and hidden away by [the gang] for as long as required for after all this was a matter of life and death and at such ex tremities all women are sisters" (222, emphasis in original). Because the police—who are the literal protectors of patriarchy as we have seen in their dealings with the girl gang—wi 11 not protect a woman being beaten by her husband, the gang feels it must step in. As we can imagine, the girls have difficulty operating their house with only three girls (Legs, Goldie and Lana) earning money. The girls begin "hooking" to pay for the house they rent. 113 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hooking here is not quite the same as being a prostitute; it involves extorting money from men rather than exchanging money for sexual favors. The venture begins when Legs answers a newspaper ad for "young men between the ages of 19 and 26 with INTELLIGENCE, INITIATIVE, 'WINNING' PERSON ALITIES Sc SALES POTENTIAL" (225) . Legs dresses in drag2 4 to answer the notice, recognizing "she isn't a young man but she' s fed up with the kinds of jobs available in Hammond for young women with her qualifications" (225). During her interview with her potential employer, B. J. Rucke, she becomes aware of "the way Rucke's gaze drops as if involuntarily to her feet . . . then lifts slowly, it might almost be said caressingly, to her face" (228) . When he offers her the job and begins to photograph her then fondle her, Legs pulls a switchblade and cuts him. He begs her not to call the police, offering his camera, his ring and all the money he has in his home. Legs returns home with 1116 dollars—and a new way of solving "FOXFIRE FINANCES." Legs sees the power that young people poten tially hold over older, more powerful—and wealthier—adults. The girls devise a scheme to 114 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. increase their assets by exploiting older, mon eyed men. The girls will pretend to offer them selves for sex to men who look "likely to have money" (240) . Once the hook is sunk, the girls reveal their ages and the men then offer them money to keep the incident quiet. They seem to make a good deal of money. The girls participate in order to fulfill Legs's dictum, "from each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs" which she has learned from Father Theriault, Legs's homeless, Marxist mentor (238). Maddy, who is rather plain and young looking, wants to contribute, although many of her sisters doubt her ability to attract men and to be as brave as the situation merits. Her hooking ex periment goes terribly awry. Too nervous to re member all of the "rules" for hooking, she chooses the first man who approaches her, Chick Mallick. She allows him to walk her out of sight of the other girls who are there to protect her. As Maddy recounts the tale, it is clear that Mallick has his own scheme. He leads her away from the populated area they are in, then rapes her. While he is still on top of her, the gang descends on Mallick. Legs hits him with an iron 115 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pipe. This time killing him for real, it is sug gested. Although, in the past, violent actions have held the gang together, the murder committed here seems to begin to unravel the gang. The success of hooking relies on the men's adherence to tradition. They seek the girls be cause they desire to break rules, but once they begin to initiate sexual contact, the girls rely on their "fish's" sense of right and wrong. While the men must desire the girls in order to "take the bait, " the men must also have a sense that what they are doing is morally or ethically wrong. They pay the girls in lieu of a public punishment. In contrast to the way the gang makes Buttinger's harassment public, here the girls do not make the older male's advances pub lic. By taking these bribes, the girls indicate that they are returning to more traditional roles—ones where they only have sexual power and societal traditions on their side. Although hooking was "hit-or-miss but mainly profitable" Legs yearns for "one big hook" (248) and hatches a plan for the gang' s big score—to kidnap a very wealthy man and ransom him for one million dollars. Legs believes that they can be 116 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. successful without killing their kidnap victim. The girls kidnap someone Kellogg, give his rela tionship to Legs. Unfortunately for the gang, their victim will not cooperate with them; for example, he won't speak on the phone to his wife. For five days, he refuses to do the things the gang asks. Then, while Legs is threatening him with a gun, he kicks out and manages to kick the gun from Legs' s hand. "W", one of the newer initiates, picks up the gun and to protect Legs, shoots at Kellogg. She hits him in the chest. Although he does not die, it is the end of FOXFIRE. The girls must disband to avoid being prosecuted. Legs, Goldie, W, and Lana flee Hammond while the others return home. Goldie and Lana are caught years later, but the fate of Legs and W remains unknown. Ultimately, the gang's violent center cannot hold. Once the girls stop using violence to pre vent or expose abuses directed at women, and be gin using violence to extort money, the gang falls apart. That is, once the violence of the gang serves the same purpose as the violence of the oppressor, the gang can no longer serve its purpose of liberating the women of Hammond. 117 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Furthermore, Maddy begins to have ethical problems with violence as a tactic. We see this when the gang is called upon to save Maddy from a rapist. "You saved my life but I was afraid of you having seen you hit him the way you did. And the others. My sisters. So wild, frenzied. Striking with fists, boots. Slamming him with lengths of iron pipe, anything they could snatch from the ground" (253). The parallels between this attack and the attack on Uncle Wimpy are not lost on Maddy. In contrast with the attack on Uncle Wimpy where the girls fight with their bare hands, the attack on Chick Mallick is more brutal and probably results in his death. This escala tion in violence concerns Maddy, and she can no longer participate in the violence. Because she refuses to write the ransom note, Maddy is also asked to leave. Oates scholar, Iowa State Uni versity Professor, Brenda 0. Daly argues Maddy's ethical refusal signals that "when women take power, they must not simply identify with it but 25 redefine it" . When the violence works to sub vert gender roles and inequity, the gang suc ceeds . But when they turn to violence to make a profit—as in the kidnapping scheme—they fail. 118 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Unsurprisingly the agent of the gang's end is W —who Maddy will not even name because of both her agency in the end of the gang and her intrusion on Maddy's relationship with Legs. W represents the expansion of the gang; she is one of the four new girls inducted midway through the novel. This expansion leads to a loss of connec tion between the girls and a reinterpretation of the gang' s code; it changes the gang, and some of the original members resent this change. These changes in the structure and function of the gang may be equally responsible for the gang's demise. The loss of connection is probably best repre sented by W's spying. By this time in the gang's existence, only a very few of the girls still attend high school. When they are in school, W spies on them to make sure that no one breaks gang rules as she interprets them. Al though the girls do pledge to "offer [ ] up all fidelity and courage and heart and soul," this does not necessarily imply that they rebuke rela tionships with men; this interpretation is popu lar among the new girls, however. W offers evi dence that Rita is dating a boy and as a result, Rita is "x-iled. " Maddy feels a sense that 119 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. these new girls do not understand Rita's position in the gang; originally it is her woes that cause the gang to form. These new recruits do not have the same experiences, especially experiences with violence, as the original members have, and the rift between them is magnified in Maddy' s text. Spying also implies that the gang senses a loss of control of its members; that is, some members no longer share the gang's goals. Without a shared sense of purpose, the gang cannot function as it originally intended. It becomes necessary for someone to monitor the gang members. Oates's novel emphasizes the difference be tween current feminisms, especially radical and post-modern. In the novel, the new gang girls represent a more radical feminism. Radical femi nists feel that post-modern thinking has led to a death of the individual just as these individuals are getting the power to name themselves,2 6 and so often have a militant attachment to sisterhood. What the radical feminists fail to see, then, is how all identities are a necessary fiction; who we are depends not so much on our shared experi ences, but rather on how we agree to interpret these experiences.2 7 In one particularly marked 120 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. example of this conflict, much of the evidence of the fragmentation of women in contemporary cul ture cited by radical feminists Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne (especially fertility treatments) which they attribute to postmodernism could equally be read as fragmentation caused by capi talism and by patriarchal ideals of womanhood— which postmodern feminists also revile. Radical feminists who critique postmodernism are correct in thinking that postmodern theories allow for shifting between identities because identity is not fixed. But rather than being a negative aspect of feminism, this shifting hear kens back to coalition building of the New Left Movement, and indeed early radical feminism. Sometimes it behooves us to identify with one group one day and another group on another day because an individual human being has contradic tory beliefs—or beliefs that contradict with their own needs. In "The Idea of Community and the Politics of Difference," Iris Marion Young argues that community tends to suppress differ- 28 , . ence. Her solution is to give political repre sentation to group interests, but she acknowl edges, "subjects have multiple desires that do 12 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. not cohere" (310) . Some of the arguments that feminist theorists are having over the future of feminism might be resolved by considering a re turn to giving shifting groups political repre sentation, as in the days of coalition building. Sisterhoods of coalition also based on vio lence are prominent in the work of Toni Morrison; I will focus here on Baby Suggs's family and the greater community of former-slaves in Beloved which help the reader consider the possibility of a revised political representation. In Beloved, a transitory relationship exists between Sethe and Baby Suggs and their community. Although all are former slaves, when Baby Suggs becomes too proud, as indicated by the lavish party she throws, the other women reject both Sethe and Baby' Suggs. For instance, they do not warn the women that Schoolteacher is coming for her, al though they have sounded similar warnings for others: [the party] explained why nobody ran on ahead; why nobody sent a fleet-footed son to cut 'cross a field soon as they saw the four horses in town hitched for watering while the riders asked ques tions. Not Ella, not John, not anybody ran down or to Bluestone Road, to say some new whitefolks with the Look just 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. rode in . Nobody warned them, and he'd always believed it wasn't the ex haustion from a long day's gorging that dulled them, but some other thing—like, well, like meanness—that let them stand aside, or not pay attention, or tell themselves somebody else was probably bearing the news already to the house on Bluestone Road... (157) When Sethe kills her third child, the former slaves, some of whom have even committed filicide, again refuse to help. They do not comfort her when she is taken off to jail because she does not ask for this assistance, as the community members deduce from her body language: Was her head a bit too high? Her back a little too straight? Probably. Other wise the singing would have begun at once, the moment she appeared in the doorway of the house on Bluestone Road. Some cape of sound would have quickly been wrapped around her, like arms to hold and steady her on her way. (152) The coalition, once severed, even unknowingly, requires repair. When Denver finally asks for this help, acknowledging that she and her mother need the community, they give their assistance willingly. The women work together to nourish Denver and Sethe, exorcise Beloved's spirit, and 123 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. prevent Sethe from killing Mr. Bodwin. Something more is needed than the shared experience—of vio lence or other events—and similarities of race, class, gender, religion, or region in order to form a sisterhood. Morrison's novel suggests that something is choice and respect. Both Beloved and Foxfire suggests that sis terhood (or any coalition) works best as a tactic (a short-term, subversive practice) because not all women have the same goals all of the time; not all feminist positions work for all women. Rather than having permanent and unchanging sis terhoods as a goal, women need to acknowledge that sometimes the greatest feminist good may not be served by sisterhoods, as Atwood suggests. What both Oates and Morrison offer in the place of sisterhood is a coalition—a sisterhood that is temporary—a tactic rather than a (more permanent) strategy. Using sisterhood in this way would recover the community spirit lacking in much "post" feminism (postmodern, post-structuralist, and post-colonial feminism) while avoiding the sometimes violent adherence to sisterhood repre sented in Atwood's work. 124 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In this realm of limited sisterhoods, vio lence can be removed as being necessary for iden tification. The limited nature of sisterhoods (coalitions) suggests that violence can be a tac tic—a temporary tool. Oates's girl gang seems to have learned this as well, allowing us a peek at feminist violence and its possibilities. Notes 1 Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odvssev. New York: Pantheon, 220. 2 bell hooks, "A Feminist Challenge: Must We Call Every Woman Sis ter?" Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. 79-86. 3 See Amazon Odvssev and Flying. 4 Atkinson reproduces the speech she gave at the Violence Meeting in Amazon Odvssev: Kate Millett discusses it briefly in FIvina: and Elaine Showalter refers to it in "Rethinking the Seventies." 5 Elaine Showalter, "Rethinking the Seventies: Women Writers and Violence," Women and Violence in Literature: An Essay Collection, ed. Katherine Anne Ackley (New York: Garland, 1990) 244. 6 See Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne "Reclaiming Sisterhood" in Desperately Seeking Sisterhood, Ang-Lygate, Corrin, and Henry, eds. 7 Frigga Haug and others. Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory, trans. Erica Carter (London: Verso, 1987) 203 8 Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eve. (New York: Doubleday, 1989) 50. All other references to this novel will be cited in the text. 9 Kathie Sarachild, "Consciousness Raising: A Radical Weapon," Femi nist Revolution, eds. Redstockings (New York: Random House, 1978) 141. 10 In September, 1996 a few weeks of discussion took place on the Women's Studies listserve about feeling "too young" to have lived the feminist moment or finding feminism at the wrong time, that is, being "too old" to contribute. The idea hinders coalition building among feminists (by creating a feminist hierarchy), and leaves the indi viduals who feel this way outside of potential communities. 11 The term "postfeminist" has evolved to indicate the meeting of feminism and postmodernism, poststructuralism, and post-colonialism. 125 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. See for example Ann Brookes, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory, and Cultural Forms. New York: Routledge, 1997. 12 Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Ann Beattie, Fran Lebowitz, Anne Tyler, Gail Godwin, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Ursula LeGuin in order of appearance. J. D. Reed, "Postfeminism: Playing for Keeps," Time Magazine 10 January 1983: 60-61. All other references to this article will be cited in the text. 13 In "(Woman) Writer" Oates argues that women who write do not think of themselves as women when they are alone; their gender, she main tains, is placed on them by an outside world where all of the writers are men, unless they are "women writers" (27). 14 Further, Reed says of Oates, "She has not identified with feminine fantasy since childhood. 'I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice"." Reed, confusing feminine for feminist, takes this to mean that Oates wants to be a man. But in "Stories that Define Me" from which the Carroll quote is taken, Oates clearly states that being Alice was undesirable because her story gets told for her. Oates, a prolific writer even in child hood, identifies not with the little girl, but with the storyteller— not surprising, and certainly not anti-feminist. 15 Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a Postfeminist Acre (New York: Routledge, 1991) 3. 16 Helena Michie, Sororoohobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1992) 3. 17 See Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminism. 18 Since the novel's action takes place in 1950s upstate New York, when I call Buttinger's activities "sexual harassment," I am using language and concepts unavailable to the girls at that time. 19 Joyce Carol Oates, FOXFIRE: Confessions of a Girl Gang (New York: Plume, 1994) 100. All other references to this novel will be cited in the text. 20 The subtitle of the novel is "Confessions of a Girl Gang." The girl gang of the title is ambivalent about this confes sion since their desire for autobiography—to recreate their identity—necessitates confession. "Never never tell," they warn Maddy (3). As an outlaw gang, their existence depends upon secrecy to avoid prosecution. But on the other hand, confession, as Felski argues, allows the girls to "disclose the most intimate and often traumatic details of [their] life . . . to elucidate their broader implications" (88). Maddy's goal in now revealing the gang's secrets seems to be just this. Their efforts to create a "self" are unusual—the self under construction is a group identity, which is something a feminist confession seeks, according to Felski. Felski writes about the desire for the female self to connect with other women, but the effort to create a self in the novel is 126 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. literally a group identity. The novel serves as a way of rewriting the gang into existence. At the end of the novel— the end of the gang—the dissipation of the group identity leads to the dissipation of the memory. But, by re-membering for the readers, Maddy recreates identity and draws the fe male reader into this identity. 21 Tellingly, these slogans are racist. They foreshadow the diffi culty Legs will face as she attempts to integrate Foxfire, after she has become friends with some of the black girls in Red Bank. This opposition to integration parallels the difficulty the women's lib eration movement faced. Lesbians and black women found themselves outside the movement and often openly unwelcome. 22 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hone. Davs of Racre (New York: Bantam, 1987) 84. 23 Brooke, "The Retreat to Cultural Feminism," In Redstockings. 81. 24 Maddy's description of Legs's drag "Dressed in men's clothes, her hair combed back and up from her forehead in a pompadour, mock side burns, no makeup of course and her voice gravelly-low, Legs is a guy, in a manner of speaking" (225, emphasis added). In keeping with the gang's efforts to undermine social views about what girls are capable of, Maddy's transformation of Legs into a guy "in a manner of speak ing" underscores Maddy's inability to separate her own thinking from society's, foreshadowing her own return to society when she leaves the gang. 25 Brenda 0. Daly, Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Jovce Carol Oates (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996) 217. 26 See Barbara Christian in "The Race for Theory", and Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne in "Reclaiming Sisterhood: Radical Feminism as an Antidote to Theoretical and Embodied Fragmentations of Women," among others. 27 See Joan Scott, "Experience," Feminists Theorize the Political Eds Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, (New York: Routledge, 1992) 22-40. 28 Iris Marion Young, "The Idea of Community and the Politics of Dif ference, ' ' In Nicholson, ed. 300. 127 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Three Reading Maternal Ambivalence "We cannot fall back on the reassuring thought that all maternal cruelty is perversion—we have to admit that mothers can be cruel."1 -Rozsika Parker As a culture, we are generally unwilling to believe mothers are anything, but nurturing. Feminists have explored and attacked the control ling binary of the good and bad mother. In try ing to account for anger and violence as part of motherhood, I extend these discussions by consid ering how fictions, specifically Sula (1973) and Beloved (1987), offer new models of motherhood and disrupt—by denaturalizing—old models. I con sider a spectrum of violence that begins with maternal ambivalence and moves to murder. By accepting ambivalence as a positive force, I show how the actions of an ambivalent or violent mother redefine motherhood in positive ways. British psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker found, in researching ambivalent mothers, that a mother's perceived transgression led her to po- 128 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lice herself; her perception about such "trans gressions" stem from long unexamined cultural ideals. Parker finds these ideals about mother hood "ha[ve] remained curiously static": In fact, the faster women's lives change, the more ossified and stereo typed become dominant representations of ideal motherhood. Despite changing beliefs about babies' capacities and thus childcare priorities, the repre sentation of ideal motherhood is still almost exclusively made up of self- abnegation, unstinting love, intuitive knowledge of nurturance and unalloyed pleasure in children. (22) This feminine ideal creates pressure for mothers to behave in certain normalized ways. Addition ally, like the norms of sexuality addressed in the previous discussion of Cat's Eve, this behav ior involves self-policing—mothers internalize these absolute standards and measure themselves against the perceptions they have about other women, especially other mothers. Parker argues that this pressure, combined with what she sees as naturally occurring feelings of ambivalence, creates in some women an increased difficulty in coping with their children; the children may be seen as a source of unrealistic demands. This 129 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. difficulty results in the mother imagining or committing maternal violence. Even though maternal violence is doubtless more often imagined than carried out, such fanta sies are themselves regarded as criminal or po tentially criminal. My aunt was away from her family when she had her first child; her husband was stationed in Louisiana, about 1000 miles from home. When she wrote letters to my mother, she mentioned that Stephanie, the new baby, was driv ing her crazy with her crying, and that she felt like throwing her out of the window. So unac ceptable was this confession that my grandmother urged my mother to visit Louisiana. The distress caused by my aunt's remarks links real and imag ined violence; in our culture, mothers who imag ine violence against their children, like my aunt, are thought to be on the verge of real vio lence. Although my aunt never threw her daughter out of a window (nor took any violent action against her children) , her relatives responded to imagined maternal violence as though it were real. But as Parker argues, the imagined vio lence helps the woman doing the imagining by pro viding a response to the absolute demands of 130 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. motherhood in our culture. Through these fanta sies the woman can assert her identity and agency in the face of cultural demands for self-abnega tion. At the same time outsiders' interpreta tions of this violence—like my grandmother' s in terpretation—serve to put pressure on the mother to behave normally; the absolute standards of motherhood demand that women police each other. Perhaps a more accurate term for this imag ined violence is the term used in psychoanalysis: ambivalence. "Violence" implies criminality whereas ambivalence, as Parker describes in Mother Love/Mother Hate (1995), is "the experi ence shared variously by all mothers in which loving and hating feelings for their children co exist" (1) . She considers it inherent to the construction of motherhood. Ambivalence, Parker shows, is a positive influence which "spurs moth ers on to struggle to understand and know their baby" and "can promote thought" (7) . Among its other positive outcomes ambivalence "is vital for the project of separation" (101), helps the mother know and understand herself, and provides consciousness of her prescribed situation so long as the ambivalence remains manageable. Unfortu- 13 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nately, Parker feels that often external reality— the social and political position of mothers— "militate[s] against maternal ambivalence remain ing manageable" (218). The sexist culture in which we live constructs expectations of "Good Mothering" that mothers cannot attain. In the end, this pressure causes the mothers not only to see themselves as unfit, but also to no longer be able to use their ambivalence to serve their own ends. The breakdown of a healthy ambivalence, however, does not necessarily lead to physical abuse of the children. But when it does, Parker argues, we must see such violence not as iso lated, monstrous acts of an individual but as part of a spectrum—"encompass[ing] everyday acts of unkindness as well as gross cruelty" (221). She believes that an understanding of maternal ambivalence allows us to find separate categories for the unkind mother and the perversely abusive mother, breaking down the oppressive binary of good and bad mothering. Ambivalence is not a new idea. Parker re fers to the many psychoanalysts who have gone before her and explored maternal ambivalence; she situates her work on ambivalence among that of 132 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Freud, Melanie Klein, W. R. Bion, Sandor Ferenczi, Dinora Pines, and Joan Raphael-Leff. Parker, however, focuses on the mother rather than the child in her study, and her goal is feminist: to celebrate the women's resourceful ness in redirecting their ambivalence. Other feminist thinkers have discussed the idea of ambivalence. Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born (197 6) and Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking (1988) both acknowledge maternal ambivalence. Rich seems to positively revel in ambivalence, especially her own. She often writes of the am bivalence ishe felt about mothering in the six ties. Of Woman Born opens with a quote from Rich's journal: "My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experi ence . It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alteration between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness" (21) . She describes these feel ings as a cycle: It began when I had picked up a book or began trying to write a letter, or even found myself on the telephone with someone toward whom my voice betrayed an eagerness, a rush of sympathetic energy. The child (or children) might 133 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. be absorbed in busyness, in his own dreamworld; but as soon as he felt me gliding into a world which did not in clude him, he would come to pull at my hand, ask for help, punch at the type writer keys. And I would feel his wants at such a moment as fraudulent, as an attempt moreover to defraud me of living even for fifteen minutes as my self . My anger would rise; I would feel the futility of any attempt to salvage myself, and also the inequality between us: my needs always balanced against those of a child, and always losing. I could love so much better, I told myself, after even a quarter-hour of selfishness, of peace, of detachment from my children. (23) Rich, with a candidness that is still unusual, describes unabashedly the emotional and physical drain caused by her children. She openly resents them for the very claims on her attention that popular culture endorses as their absolute right. Indeed, my sense that she "revels" reveals the positive light in which she sees her own attempts to remain separate from her children—to maintain her own identity as a person rather than simply as the boys' mother. Rich does, however, foretell Ruddick and her argument which she warns: "it can be dangerously simplistic to fix upon 'nurturance' as a special 134 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. strength of women, which need only be released into the larger society to create a new human order" (283) . Ruddick, in her work, raises this issue of ambivalence only to undermine it en tirely. She claims that " thought provoking am bivalence is a hallmark of mothering" (emphasis 3 added). Although she claims that ambivalence is a characteristic of mothering, her exploration of this attribute is dropped. Rather than examining the ways in which ambivalence is a part of mater nal thinking, it is dismissed a priori—maternal love conquers all. In fact, What to Expect When You're Expecting (1984) has only one paragraph that explains that while rare, the urge to kill your child does sometimes occur in relation to postpartum depression (400) . The book does rec ommend that in order to avoid postpartum depres sion, one should get out of the house, put on make-up, and relax with a cocktail (399) . The underlying expectation is that women will in fact not feel ambivalent. In her book Mother Without Child: Contempo rary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood (1997), Elaine Tuttle Hansen considers the variety of mothering experiences from lesbians who wish to 135 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. mother to biological mothers who have lost chil dren to divorce, given the children up for adop tion, sent them away, abandoned or killed them (16) . She feels that "by considering the mother without child we can come closer to seeing mater nal points of view more fully, hearing maternal voices more clearly and variously, understanding maternal subj ectivity more deeply and com- 4 plexly. " She situates her project m the ongo ing feminist dialogue about motherhood that began in the seventies with a repudiation of mothering (Firestone, et al. ) and moved to a recuperation of the relationship (Ruddick and Chodorow among others) to an emerging critique of repudiation that coexists with ongoing efforts to employ re cuperative strategies. That her study takes plage within the field of fictional studies has its place as well. It should go without saying that violence in fiction allows us to explore this idea without harming children. Despite some angry responses by critics, violence expressed in fiction does not have material effects on a real body. Toni Morrison' s Eva Peace can burn her son, her Sethe can cut her child's throat; but in the end, no one gets hurt.5 Because real chil- 136 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dren matter, it is difficult to make critiques of motherhood without appearing to desire child en- dangerment. Fictional maternal ambivalence and violence can offer a way to critique the institu tional oppression of women which is still carried out through motherhood twenty-five years after Rich's Of Women Born. Stories like Morrison's undermine the naturalized ideas contemporary cul ture has about motherhood and help us redefine women's roles. In Toni Morrison's Sula (1973), for example, Eva Peace takes several notable maternal actions as defined traditionally: she takes the last of her meager food to cure her baby; she trades her leg for money to care for her children; she takes in foster children; and she dives through a win dow to save her burning daughter. These actions, however, are juxtaposed with another violent act: Eva commits filicide by burning her son in his bed. She symbolizes the maternal ideal that our culture has embraced: she doctors her children with "instinctive" home remedies, cares for the children when her husband leaves, is self-sacri ficing, and by taking in foster children, shows her capability to embrace other (and others') 137 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. children. The death of her son, Plum, however, identifies Eva as an ambivalent mother; the filicide suggests that even a woman capable of the most extreme unselfish acts can maintain the fiction of ideal motherhood. One example of Eva's unselfishness occurs when Eva's husband, BoyBoy, leaves her, and she is left with three children to care for. For a while, she is able to depend on her neighbors who give her food and milk. But as the winter ap proaches , Eva fears she will "run her welcome out" (32). She begins to consider her options for supporting herself and her children: She would lie in bed with the baby boy, the two girls wrapped in quilts on the floor, thinking. The oldest child, Hannah, was five and too young to take care of the baby alone, and any house work Eva could find would keep her away from them from five-thirty or earlier in the morning until dark—way past eight. The white people in the valley weren' t rich enough then to want maids ; they were small farmers and tradesmen and wanted hard-labor help if anything. She thought also of returning to some of her people in Virginia, but to come home dragging three young ones would have been a step one rung before death for Eva. She would have to scrounge around and beg through the winter. (32-33) 138 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Caring for her children is difficult; before she finds a job, Eva must consider the effects her employment will have on them. Their very exist ence prohibits her from considering most posi tions because they are too young to be left alone. Although Eva is a proud woman (she will not take her children back home to be cared for) , in order to sustain her children she must deny herself by scrounging and begging. Eva displays her nurturing "maternal in stincts" when Plum is ill that winter. First, she tries to cure him by massaging his stomach. Then she turns to her neighbor for help. When the castor oil does not work, and when Plum's pain increases to the point where it seems "as thought he was strangling to death" (34), Eva brings him to the outhouse. Using the "last bit of food she had in the world" (34) , she frees his bowels. This medicine, which indeed cures the baby, is clearly instinctive: And now that it was over, Eva squatted there wondering why she had come all the way out there to free his stools, and what she was doing down on her haunches with her beloved baby boy warmed by her body in the almost total darkness, her shins and teeth freezing, her nostrils assailed. She shook her 139 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. head as thought to juggle her brain around, then said aloud, "Uh uh. Nooo." (34) Her bewilderment indicates that this cure is one she cannot understand; she behaves intuitively— she doesn't know why she has gone all the way to the outhouse. This display of intuition defines her as a traditional mother. When Eva returns to the house, while her children sleep, she reconsiders how she will take care of them. She leaves Pearl, Plum, and Hannah in the care of a neighbor promising to return for them the next day. Although Morrison's text is unclear about what happens next, Eva returns eighteen months later with money, but missing a leg. It seems that she has traded this leg for the money to care for her children. They never seem to want for food or shelter again. Eva has provided for her children by committing the most selfless of acts by violating herself. Eva, however, is unable and unprepared to respond to Plum's demands after childhood. When Plum returns from war addicted to heroin, his mother, sister, and niece welcome his return. He is not himself, and his actions alienate him from 140 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. his family. He steals from them and does not participate in family events. One night, Eva makes her way to his room; she sits with him and rocks him, " [she] let her memory spin, loop and fall" (46) recapturing the loving moments with her son. She gets up, drenches her son in kero sene, and sets him on fire. This does not seem to be a maternal act from a woman capable of mothering many different children. Eva demon strates , as I will discuss momentarily, through conversations with her daughter Hannah that her act is a result of maternal ambivalence and an attempt to separate herself from her adult child. As a mother, she is torn between her job to so cialize Plum to be a part of society (clearly the industrial war machine has undone this), to pro tect and care for her son, and to fulfill her own goals and desires. These conflicting positions for mothers are further discussed by Hannah and her friends when they complain about their children. The women negotiate their feelings. One woman says her son minds his father but not her and that she' 11 be glad when he' s "growed and gone. " Hannah re plies , "Shut you mouth. You love the ground he 141 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pee on. " She replies, "Sure I do. But he still a pain. Can't help loving your own child. No matter what they do." The second friend pipes in "Well, Hester grown now and I can't say love is exactly what I feel." Hannah clarifies the dif ference for her: "Sure you do. You love her, like I love Sula. I just don't like her. That's the difference" (57). Hannah's belief that one loves one's child but does not have to like one' s child opposes Ruddick's idea that one of the goals of motherlove is to train a child by raising her to be someone whom the mother can "actively appreci ate" (104) . As Hannah points out, this apprecia tion is neither necessary nor always possible. The difficulty of training a child, as Rich, Ruddick, Parker and other feminists acknowledge, is the negotiating the conflict between control ling a child and allowing the child to grow. So cialization processes which train the child can sometimes conflict with the child's need to de velop her own sense of self. Hannah's friend whose child only minds his father, for example, realizes that the child's behavior undermines her authority. He' s a "pain" that she can't help 142 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. loving. Her friend's retort—"can't say love is exactly what I feel"—raises the distinction be tween loving and liking. Ruddick argues that part of training is to raise a child we like as well as will be liked in the community, but she points out these two goals can conflict (105). These difficulties circumscribe the power of the mother in society. Sometimes the mother must socialize the child against her better judgment so the child will be accepted by society. This conversation also shows the way in which women police themselves in order to main tain social goals. The mother who "can't say love is exactly what she feels" displays anxiety that she is not sure she is fulfilling these goals. Here, rather than resocializing the woman, Hannah and her friend show her how she does fit into the norm: she doesn' t have to like her child to love her. But Hannah, herself, isn't sure about her own mother' s love for her and her siblings be cause of Eva' s filicide. . She asks her mother if she ever loved them. Eva replies, "No. I don' t reckon I did. Not the way you thinkin' " (57) . Eva clarifies that she kept the children alive 143 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and kept herself alive for them. Hannah wants to know, however, "did you ever, you know, play with us" (68). Eva responds: "I'm talkin' 'bout 18 and 95 when I set in that house five days with you and Pearl and Plum and three beets, you snake-eyed ungrateful hussy. What would I look like leapin' 'round that little old room playin' with youngins with three beets to my name?" "I know 'bout them beets, Mamma. You told us that a million times. " "Yeah? Well? Don't that count? Ain't that love? You want me to tinkle you under the jaw and forget 'bout them sores in your mouth? Pearl was shittin' worms and I was supposed to play rang-around-the-rosie?" (69) Hannah insists on wondering if there wasn't ever time for play (love) , and Eva retorts that keep ing them alive and staying alive for them was love. Hansen argues that "If 'play' is a 'non- purposive state' it might indeed be incompatible with maternal thinking, which, as revealed by those theories like Ruddick's, have to be under stood as highly goal-directed behaviors" (Hansen 14) . Eva was motivated to demonstrate her care by surviving and helping her children survive. Insofar as Eva was, during her children's devel opmental stages, unable to offer more, she exem- 144 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. plifies this hierarchy: survival first, growth (or development) through play further down the scale of importance. Because this hierarchy is one foist upon Eva by her society, blaming Eva for not playing is a position fraught with diffi culty . (Although neither Morrison nor her critics offer this blame, such blame is placed on women in positions parallel to that of Eva—welfare mothers, for instance, or the working poor—and by having a specific person to blame, in the end no real protection is offered either to the mother or the child.) Literature which portrays such characters then offers a place to reexamine the cultural pressures placed on mothers. Eva's epithet against her daughter, "you ungrateful hussy," in this conversation does not signal an refusal of love. Instead, Eva acknowl edges that there are some aspects of her daughter's character that are difficult to love; she is, after all, a rather promiscuous woman.. She asserts her own identity as a woman and de fends her own values. Hannah's insistence on play—an idea that Eva argues was anachronistic judges her mother in a way that Eva refuses to be judged. She raised her children the best she 145 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. could, and this way cannot be scrutinized by new fangled ideas. What drives Hannah's inquiry, however, is not the desire to test her mother's love; she asks so that she can understand Plum's death. Her question, "did you love us?" is followed by another: "But what about Plum? What did you kill Plum for, Mamma?" (70) . Eva explains that she couldn' t carry him any more. She insists that he was trying to get back into her womb; his inabil ity to function as an adult makes her life impos sible . Again Eva asserts her separate identity from her children. "Would have let him if I' d' ve had the room but a big man can't be a baby all wrapped up inside his mamma no more; he suffo cate" (72). Eva tries to help him separate, but he refuses. She must kill him to save herself. "I had to keep him out so I just thought of a way he could die like a man not all scrunched up in side my womb, but like a man" (72) . Following this confession, Eva cries and calls his name while she thinks about him. Hannah, is made "elated" by this discussion—both proud and joy ful . Another of Morrison's daughter-of-a- filicidal-mother, Denver, in Beloved, wonders if 146 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. there is "something else terrible enough to make her [mother] do it [kill] again" (Beloved 205), this time to her. Hannah' s curiosity may arise from a similar fear. But Eva's explanation must make Hannah believe there is not something that will make her mother kill again. Hannah comes to understand that despite killing Plum her mother loved her brother. Initially, in Hannah's mind, love is opposed to hate; a mother must have to hate her child to kill him. This construction is paralleled in our ideas of the "Good Mother" discussed earlier. Eva shows her how love can be tied to hate. This concept is confusing in a culture where the defi nition of the maternal focuses on love. Rich characterizes such patriarchal cultural beliefs about motherhood thus: "Mother love is supposed to be continuous, unconditional. Love and anger cannot co-exist" (Rich 46) . This conversation between Eva and Hannah denaturalizes the love/ hate binary; Eva doesn't have to hate Plum to kill him. In fact, it is her love for him that drives her non-maternal actions. Additionally, Eva doesn' t hate all of her children simply be cause she killed one of them. As Eva murders to 147 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. individuate herself, she can view each child on his own terms. In the novel, Eva shows her love the next day through her attempt to save her daughter, who catches on fire, by throwing herself out of the third story window. Clearly this effort at pro tection can be understood through their previous discussion: that she kept her children alive and stayed alive for them. But once Hannah has been taken from her, it seems Eva would rather die. Hansen posits that examining a mother who has outlived her child allows us to focus on the mother, and in doing so "to see her as a multi faceted and changeful subject" (22). With Hannah's death we can read that, although Eva wants to maintain her own self apart from her position as a mother, Eva still desires to have and be with her children. The chapter ends "Eva mused over the perfection of the judgment against her." Her inability to save Hannah—both by not being able to read the signs and by failing to quash the flames—is the punishment, as she sees it, for burning her son. Eva's desire to die results from the love she had for her daughter. Eva has kept herself alive for her children, but 148 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. without them there is no need to go on. Her po sition is one of ultimate ambivalence: wanting her children separate from herself but missing them when they are gone. It is possible to see Eva's relationship with her foster children as part of her maternal ambivalence. Although each boy is an individual of a different age, who—at least initially—looks different from the others, Eva refuses to distin guish between them. She renames each of the children "dewey." The lowercase suggests a nominalization of the children. Rather than hav ing a proper name indicated by a capital letter, each child is made into an object, a dewey. When the first dewey is school-aged, all of the deweys are sent to school despite the fact they range in age from three to six. This homoginization fur ther dehumanized them. Eva's molding of the deweys can be seen as another type of maternal ambivalence in that she tries to recast the ma ternal role itself. In the first group of her 7 children—Hannah, Pearl, and Plum—despite her self-abnegation and her intuitive nurturing, in the end she was unsuccessful: two of her three children still lived at home, still relied on 149 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. her, that is, had not separated from their mother and both preceded their mother in death disrupt ing the "natural" order of life. With the next group, she seems to be trying to redefine the mother/chiId relationship to preserve her self. What will happen if she remains unmaternal, or does not offer preservative love; does not foster her children's growth; and works to make them unacceptable? If one of the functions of mothering as Ruddick defines is to instill values and habits that will make the child acceptable to the soci ety in which she lives, and also to make her a person the mother can like, Eva undoes this "mak ing acceptable" with the deweys. For example, they refuse to bathe more than once a week and their favorite game is "chain gang" where they pretend to be prisoners. Because they act out anti-social roles, this game inverts the usual goals children perform when they play, the ones parents try to instill in their sons. Their re fusal to bathe also contributes to society's re jection (although lots of children are averse to soap and water) . Another way Eva makes the trio unsuitable is by creating three boys with one 150 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. identity; this goes against the individualist American norm. In fact, when one mother comes to retrieve her child, she can no longer iden tify her own son. Eva seems to be separating from these boys before they are prepared for it. While she may believe she is caring for them, their retarded development proves she is not. In an effort to preserve herself, Eva obstructs the growth of the boys. As "bad" a mother Eva seems to be, her neighbors find her admirable. She has dutifully provided for her family, and she has extended her care to the community. This respect over turns the predictable castigation the bad mother usually receives. Like we will see in Beloved, the fictional community provides something the real cannot. She has the respect of all members of the community except for Sula. Although Hannah comes to terms with Eva's filicide, Sula holds it against her grandmother. According to the citizens of the Bottom, however, Sula is one who cannot judge: she is evil incarnate. Sula helps the town define themselves as good. "When she returns after attending college, their con viction of Sula's evil changed them in account- 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. able yet mysterious ways. . . . They began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes and in general band together against the devil in their midst" (117- 118) . Despite Sula's judgment against her grand mother, the townspeople respond against the cul tural norm; they read Eva as a heroine who suc ceeds despite the larger, oppressive (racist) society in which she lives. Beloved Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Be loved (1987) has at its center a former slave's act of infanticide. Sethe's position as a slave forces the reader to recognize the external forces present in the institution of motherhood. In this setting, we cannot deny what Rich has also argued: motherhood is controlled by patriar chal institutions. That is, because Sethe's life (and by extension her children's) is controlled by others, Morrison portrays the societal forces acting on all mothers. Although individual responsibility is not abdicated, the effect of external forces on the ability of women to mother are clearly exposed. This novel certainly has a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. significant place in the present study. So much has been written about the murder of Beloved, that it is fruitful to consider the representa tion of Sethe' s attempt to keep her children out of slavery. In the world of Beloved, the characters are also divided over Sethe's filicide. Sethe, after sending her three children North to Cincin nati to her mother-in-law, escapes from the Sweet Home Plantation. As she makes her way North, she is impeded by her pregnancy. She gives birth to her daughter, Denver, along the way. About a month after Sethe arrives in Cincinnati, School teacher, the slave-holder, locates her and tries to reclaim his property. Sethe has removed her children to a shed where she succeeds in killing the "crawling already?"8 baby by sawing through her neck. She convinces the slave-catchers that she has also killed the two boys who have been knocked unconscious. Because they believe three of their objects are dead and the fourth is "gone wild," the slave catchers abandon their efforts and leave Sethe to be dealt with by the law. Sethe is jailed for the murder of the "crawling already?" baby. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Among the most cynical readings of this novel is Marjorie Perloff's assessment that Be loved is not the "great American novel."9 Her scathing critique focuses on white America's em brace of Toni Morrison's work, a gesture she con siders facile: Who, after all, does not now condemn slavery as a barbarous practice? Who doesn't agree that black people suffered terrible injus tices at the hands of white slave owners and that the scars of injustice are still with us? . . . Whose heart doesn't skip a beat for the mother who has lost her "beloved" child, even if the loss was self-incurred . . . (230) Her question about the infanticide, however, does not acknowledge the complexity of Beloved's mur der as it is portrayed in the book nor among its readers. Whose heart doesn't skip a beat? Ella's, although she herself has allowed one of her children to die. Sethe's act is one under stood by the other ex-slave mothers. They are not horrified by the murder, but rather by her failure to ask for help. Sethe' s own mother, it is reported to her, only allowed Sethe to live, throwing her other children overboard. Nor Paul D's, who considers Sethe's response animalistic, evidence that she "loves too much. "10 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Who or what is responsible? Among the book' s critics many focus on the part that the institution of slavery plays in Beloved's murder. Kate Cummings argues "school teacher is ultimately responsible for . . . the killing of Sethe's child."u Laurie Vickroy holds that "slavery warps the most natural of relation ships and the greatest of loves."1 2 Stephanie Demetrakopoulos agrees that "slavery destroys the maternal bond." Her argument however privileges motherhood in an extraordinary way: "all women . .revere especially the more mature bonds of the Great Mother."13 Contemporary cultural views in habit these readings of Beloved, and perhaps they should given that this is a contemporary novel. However, they prevent an analysis of infanticide. Although schoolteacher participates in the event, and his actions have further dehumanized Sethe, both of these assessments rely on the belief that no woman would kill her child. But as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy documents extensively in Mother Na ture (1999) this is a culturally and historically specific interpretation rather than a natural one. Because slavery, which Perloff reminds us is an easy scapegoat, is the unique situation in 15 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. this book, these readers feel it must have caused the crime. It is important to examine the cul tural and environmental conditions of the infan- ticidal mother, Hrdy argues "[w]hen we treat in fanticide as an aberration, and a crime (which, of course in all modern societies, it is) , we are likely to obscure the underlying motivations."14 However, to focus solely on the conditions as the cause, as these reviewers do, we remove agency from the mother; she becomes a conduit through which an institution acts. This oversimplifica tion further undermines our capacity to consider the relationship between the infanticidal mother and her crime. This violent display is read in several ways by the member of the community. This divided opinion helps the reader to consider the differ ing opinions and social forces acting on contem porary mothers. The first group to pass judgment on Sethe's act is the slave-catchers. They find that her action has made her unfit to be a slave; she has "gone wild. " The implication is that once a slave has acted out so violently, she can never be dominated again. Because she will never respond to efforts to change her behavior, in 156 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. their view, Sethe is left to her freedom. Para doxically, by placing herself outside their defi nition of womanhood and motherhood, by rejecting their definition of "civilized," Sethe eventually gains her freedom. In order to prove her human ity she must commit the ultimate act of "inhuman ity . " By unmaking herself as a mother, she makes herself free—which, ironically, also defines her as human. The slavecatchers reconstruct Sethe as crazy. This response imposes the mad/bad di chotomy, traditionally invoked when women have acted in ways that seem unnatural. There have been two ways patriarchy (through the courts, for example) have responded: she's mad (as in the cases of women being premenstrual, battered, or hysterical) and thus too feminine or she's bad (she's evil and can be separated from "normal women, " but not reintegrated into society) and 15 thus not fully feminine (that is, not a woman) . So although Sethe seems able to escape the slavecatchers definitions of her as a slave, she is redefined by them as "mad." Her escape, then, is not a victory because it does not allow her, finally, to be free on her own terms. Sethe' s 15 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "madness" does not result, however, from the usual sources; her "madness" results from her unwilling participation in slavery. The madness is not Sethe's, but rather belongs to the system of slavery. Morrison's tack here is interesting. Most readers would consider the infanticidal mother to have gone crazy—or in schoolteacher's terminology "gone wild"—but by associating this assessment with repugnant characters, she makes it an uncomfortable position for the reader to inhabit. Much like the slave catchers Paul D believes that Sethe's act exposes her animal nature. He argues that the civilized human cannot kill her offspring. On the other hand, he also believes that Sethe has violated the "natural" relation ship between slavemother, and child. He believes that Sethe loved her children too much for a "used-to-be-slave woman." Here Paul D seems to be straddling two definitions of what is natural for a woman simultaneously: a woman would not kill her own child but at the same time certain 16 women shouldn't love their children too much. His position is untenable, but reflects his own position as a former slave. His idea that women 158 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. who kill their children are uncivilized reflect his masters' beliefs. At the same time, his de lineation of the natural relationship for slavewoman and child, reflects his own dehuman ization through slavery. "Paul D doesn't care how It went or even why. He cares about how he left and why. When he looks at himself through Garner's eyes, he sees one thing. Through Sixo's, another. One makes him feel righteous. One makes him feel ashamed" (269) . Garner' s in sistence on identifying his slaves as "men"—the "wonderful lie" (221)—accomplishes several things: it connects him to Garner, removes him from the larger community of slaves, and creates the self-loathing seen here. But Paul D loves Sethe, so attempts to emulate Sixo. By question ing Garner's definition, by questioning the "ani mal " nature of Sethe, he comes to align himself with Sixo—to be proud of himself in his skin. This realization helps him understand Sethe's infanticide as a form of resistance to slavery. Sethe also finds Paul D's initial attempts to understand her crime problematic. When she describes her actions to him, she claims she "stopped [Schoolteacher] . I took and put my 159 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. babies where they'd be safe" (164) . Paul D doubts the efficacy of her actions: "How? Your boys gone you don't know where. One girl dead and the other won't leave the yard. How did it work?" Sethe explains that it worked because her children are not slaves. This position, to some of the books critics, is supremely logical: a mother would kill her children rather than see them suffer at the hands of a racist society. The importance of this discussion cannot be over looked . Although no contemporary American moth ers will face this possibility, the idea that social arrangements exist in which a mother could not picture her children, and so she must kill the child, opens up for the contemporary reader the possibility that a mother killing her chil dren is not the unthinkable act it is often con structed to be. Morrison, by creating a society which, as Perloff points out, all readers can condemn—the slave society—creates space in which discussion of killing one's children can take place. And this space is one in which mothers can confront their ambivalence. Sethe' s ambivalence seems to stem not for a need to own herself, as Eva' s did, but rather 160 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from a desire for her children to own themselves. Eva is operating under the liberal notion of in dividualism in ways that Sethe does not, and, as an ex-slave and victim of the Fugitive Slave Act, cannot. But the notion is clearly not alien to Sethe. She desires for her children to have this experience, even if their deaths are necessary to prevent them from being "owned." Because readers can separate Sethe's violence from her maternal self, they can glimpse a new narrative that con structs filicide. Examining how, in Beloved, the filicide is a result of the environmental condi tions under which Sethe lives, allows the reader to understand Parker's assertion that additional pressures women face from outside the home can exacerbate ambivalence. Notes 1 Roszika Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence (New York: Basic, 1995) 219. Further references will be cited in the text. 2 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as an Experience and an Institution (New York: Norton, 1976) 21. Further references will be cited in the text. 3 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Bos ton: Beacon, 1989) 68. Further references will be cited in the text. 4 Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1997) 20. Further references will be cited in the text. 161 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5 Of course, hundreds of children die at the hands of their mothers and fathers each year; "In 1999, approximately 1100 children died as a result of abuse or neglect." U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families Children's Bureau"Child Maltreatment 1999: Reports From the States to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System" <http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/cb/publications/cm99/ cpt4.htm>. Many more experience abuse; "An estimated 826,000 chil dren were victims of abuse and neglect in 1999. This national esti mate is based on data from 50 States." U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administra tion on Children, Youth and Families Children's Bureau"Child Mal treatment 1999: Reports From the States to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System" <http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/cb/publi- cations/cm99/cpt2,htm>. My discussion of imagined violence against children—and my seeming acceptance of such violence—should not be read as endorsement of violence against children, nor should this argument be taken as a replacement for the research done concerning violence. 6 Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Plume, 1973) 32-33. Further refer ences will be cited in the text. 7 Pearl separates successfully; she marries and moves away. 8 The infant is not named in the book. Although "Beloved" is the name she puts on the headstone, it comes from the minister's oration at the funeral: "Dearly Beloved." Marjorie Perloff, "Great American Novel?" ANO. 5 (October 1992) : 229 . 10 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1987. Further refer ences will be cited in the text. 11 Kate Cummings, "Reclaiming the Mother's Tongue: Beloved. Ceremony, Mothers and Shadows■" College English 52 (1990): 563. 12 Laurie Vickroy, "The Force Outside/The Force Inside: Mother-Love and Regenerative Spaces in Sula and Beloved." Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review 8.2 (Fall/Winter 1993): 30. 13 Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, "Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women's Individuation in Toni Morrison's Beloved." African American Review 26.1 (1992): 58. 14 Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (New York: Ballantine, 1999) 290. Further references will be cited in the text. 15 See for example, Anette Balinger or Elizabeth Stanko and Anne Scully in Myers and Wight, or Joan Smith's Misogynies. 16 For More on Paul D's dual nature, see Cummings (esp 562), Hamilton (439) or Boudreau (458-59) . 162 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Four Medea's Daughter-In-Law: Reading Motherhood in News Reports of the Susan Smith Case Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.1 -Toni Morrison, Beloved Susan Smith came to national attention shortly af ter she reported her children missing from Union, South Carolina on October 25, 1994. She appeared on national news shows pleading for the safe return of her sons, Michael Daniel (3 years old) and Alexander Tyler (14 months) who she claimed had been kidnapped by a black carjacker. Nine days later, Smith confessed to drown ing her boys by driving her Mazda Protege into John D. Long Lake with her children strapped into their carseats. This act generated much cultural discussion about the boundaries of motherhood, offering a definition of the good mother and attempting to explore the range of maternal actions. The New York Times begins its Novem ber 6, 1994 report with the idea that the Susan Smith people knew wasn't the Susan Smith who killed her chil dren : "To the people of Union who grew up with Mrs. Smith . . . it is as if there are two Susans" (Bragg 163 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Al) . Unable to reconcile the Susan Smith they "know" with Susan Smith's actions of October 25, 1994, the townspeople, in talking to the media, are conflicted when discussing the murders of Michael and Alex and their own relationship to Susan Smith. In fact, much of the early news coverage of this case splits both Susan Smi th and the reader into two entities each to create a coping mechanism to help the audience contend with the atrocity (the media's classification) she com mitted, and to preserve a standard of protection in the American family which the caregiver has failed to per form in this specific instance. Not only do news re ports present the idea of "two Susan Smiths" literally they also present it figuratively. Several, often con flicting portrayals of Smith are presented: Smith as unique monster, Smith as average parent, Smith as cal culating, Smith as abused, and Smi th as suicidal. I will then turn my attention to how the media portrays readers of the Smith case because here too the media creates an untenable duality. The problem with the media's approach, the reason it must be studied, is the way it individualizes Smi th's actions making it impossible to see the crime as culturally generated. I posit here that gender ste reotypes , especially beliefs about women's sexual be- 164 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. havior and nurturing instincts, prevent us from reading filicide in a useful way. We must reevaluate the way we represent Smith in order to understand the contribu tion of social circumstances to her crime and thus challenge the gender stereotypes at work in our cul ture, in particular that motherhood precludes violence. Unique Monster At the beginning of the Time article by Nancy Gibbs, Susan Smith is described as "the mother who had surely lost her mind" (43) . Because Time magazine readers—and most people—have certain expectations of motherhood that preclude violence, a reason must be found to explain Smi th's actions. However, whether Smith was sane or not had not been proven at the time this article was written; in fact, she has since been deemed sane. So while Time calls her crazy to differ entiate her from the rest of us, they do not apply any legal or medical standard. Smith must be made unique in order for us to understand this crime "monstrous in conception" (Adler 30) . The idea that Smith is monstrous and crazed seems to lead to comparisons with Medea. In Time the authors begin their article with a quote from Euripedes, and Newsweek claims "we have confronted . an even 165 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. harder lesson about how much evil can lurk in even a mother's heart—something we've known for 2,300 years, ever since 'Medea'" (28). In Greek mythology, Medea helped Jason obtain the Golden Fleece; when his infi delity invoked her rage, she killed her children. This comparison would lead one to think that Smith's crime was indeed "unparalleled in our times"—we have to go back over two thousand years to find such malevolence. But centuries old mythological mothers are not the only ones who kill their children and have "evi 1 in their hearts" (Adler 28) . The articles which remember Medea forget Diane Downs, Waneta Hoyt, and Marybeth Tinning, among other child killers of the late twentieth cen tury .2 The need to rely on past fictions for compari son to modern filicide points to the difficulty our culture has believing that women are capable of vio lence—especially against their own children. And by "forgetting" these other filicidal parents, as well as parents on the entire spectrum of child abuse, the me dia presents Susan Smith as unique and without prece dent . The reference to Medea also implies that modern American killings are similar to two-thousand-year-old fictional murders, suggesting that homicide is the same in all societies and across all periods. The value 166 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. placed on children, however, has changed in fact over time—as has cultural response to the killing of chil dren . For example, some ancient cultures buried chil dren alive with their deceased parents to keep them company, and others left deformed children out to die. In ancient Roman cultures, children were not considered to belong to anyone until they had been claimed, so abandoning one's children did not carry the weight it does today. In the more recent past, children's un timely deaths were seen as a test from God. Even to day, infanticidal murderers are approached differently in America than in other countries: Britain still re lies on vestiges of the Infanticide Act to deal with women who kill their children; developed in the 1922, the act holds that women who kill their children (under twelve months) must be insane and cannot be tried for murder. In Japan, women who kill their children are sent home to their own parents to "recover" .3 The ref erences to Medea elide all such cultural and historical differences. Comparing Smith to Medea also empowers the popular media with the ability to create mythology that Greek drama has. The comparison with Medea makes the story of Smi th's action appear more fictional and more time less . Thus, it gives order—more order than the media 167 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. are willing to grant in other parts of Smith's life—to her life story that creates an ahistorical and unlo cated fiction. As a result, we do not have to consider the ba c kground—Su s an Smi th's or our cultural condition— that would result in problems so great a mother would feel compelled to kill. For example, by maintaining righteous indignation at her lies, we ignore the racism in our culture that encourages the "black carjacker"4 to be blamed. By focusing on the early end to the boys' lives, we ignore the sexism that puts a mother above suspicion, as Smith was initially. Or we deflect our attention from the poverty that causes women to despair over raising their children, or the child abuse and its aftermath that causes some people to be de pressed or dysfunctional. We must read through racism, sexism, and classism in order to understand what Smith's case tells us about American society. The individualization of Smith continues: her crime, "heinous and unnatural" (Van Biema 50) is sup posedly not even typical within the f ilicidal set. The murders of Michael and Alex are described as "not the typical child murder [it was not the result of] an out burst of uncontrollable rage turned accidentally fatal" (Gibbs 44) which we are told is "normal. " Smith was not an abusive mother nor was this crime an accident. 168 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. And in this way she is unlike Medea. Medea is enraged— although not at her children—and her rage causes her to act in an abnormal way that is somehow more comprehen sible. Smith did not act out of rage, and we can't understand that. Because she allegedly thought about it, her crime is different from "simple" child killing. Smith a s Average Parent On the other hand, Smith is also portrayed as no different from other parents. Over and over again Smith is called a good mother in the news reports. Her ex-husband, David, described his wife as "a very dedi cated, devoted mother to those two children. They were her life like they were mine . . . she was very protec tive of them . . . she was always worried about them. She was a great mother" ("SC Dad" 1) . Smith is cred ited with all of the qualities our society praises in a mother: dedication, devotion, protectiveness. Many reporters also confirm Smith's concern for and protec tion of her children—that she strapped them into their car seats before driving them to their deaths has not gone unnoticed by the media. She is, then, like any concerned parent and the epitome of a good mother. The ultimate portrayal of Susan as a "normal" par ent comes from Time: "what person watching—and parents 169 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from the President on down couldn't turn their eyes away—had not felt the sleep-depriving, soul-splitting pressures of parenting and worried about their own ca pacity for violence" (Gibbs 43-44). Apparently, the belief one could commit violence against one's children is not a distant one for parents. I was further troubled by this rhetoric. As a single, childless woman, I had not felt these pressures of parenting; I had never wondered about my capacity for violence against children. But we are all forced into the posi tion of the child abuser by the reporter: "What person watching . . . had not felt the sleep-depriving, soul- splitting pressures of parenting and worried about their own capacity for violence?" Smith is not com pared here to all parents, but to all people including, horribly yet reassuringly, our President; and all of these people are capable of this violence when faced with certain pressures. She is no different from other parents, including her husband, who claims the chil dren were "her life like they were [his] . " But these pressures which allegedly cause violence are not ones that all Americans—or even all people—will face. This distance between our pressures and the pressures that make people actually kill their children helps Time and Newsweek readers separate themselves 170 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from child abusers.5 And this separation helps prevent our society from taking a close look at what contribu tions we make to the conditions that lead to these deaths. The monster/good mother dichotomy present in argu ments about mothers like Susan Smith is ultimately un helpful . For example, Adrienne Rich argues in Of Woman Born that "[t]heories of female power and female ascen dancy must reckon fully with . . . the potentialities for both creative and destructive energy in each of us" (Rich 283) . So long as they do not, she asserts, the institution of motherhood will remain controlled by patriarchy and the individual mother will be the "prob lem. " By assuming that mothers have a capacity for nonviolence, simply by virtue of their motherhood, we remove their agency—their ability to be fully human. Calculating The narrative which portrays Smith as calculating is the one that both the reporters and the interviewed public (we could argue that they are the same) particu larly enjoy telling. We have available a story about Susan Smith that invites some sympathy: Her father shot himself when she was six years old; she was molested by her stepfather at fifteen; she was married and pregnant 171 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. at nineteen; she was separated by twenty-three; she was supporting two young sons on roughly $17,000 per year plus $115 per month child support; she had a boyfriend; they broke up. We can speculate to what extent any of these parts of Smi th' s life could cause her to be so depressed as to attempt to take her life at least twice, once at thirteen and once again at eighteen. But the story that gets told about Smith as calculating is itself calculatingly cynical: "For most of her life, Susan Smith has been able to persuade people to see her as she wished to be seen—as a happy teenager, a con tented wife, a grieving mother" (Levitt 57) . Whatever life story Smith actually lived, it all comes down to an act, according to the media; she portrayed herself, and she portrayed herself as happy, contented, and grief-stricken depending on what the audience expected. But no one acknowledges that the reading of Susan Smith as happy may have suited the purposes of others but not of Susan Smith herself. Her own mother and brother claim, "Susan always seemed to be happy and all her friends seemed to love her" (Hewitt 79) . Later ar ticles report that the judge who heard the molestation case remembered the Russell family as "dysfunctional" and one of Susan's friends said "everyone close to Su san knew" about the molestation (Gleick 61) . This in- 172 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. formation suggests that those who knew Susan also knew her life was not about being happy. Whose story about Susan should we believe? Smi th's claim on national television that she did not know where her children were makes her crime more disturbing, more chilling, and more monstrous, accord ing to reports: she knew what she did but manipulated both the police and the public. This idea of her being manipulative allows us to believe that we can see through her and understand her, especially in light of all the stories we already know about manipulative women, from Eve onwards, whose sexuality is dangerous. In fact, David Smith's book relays the story of his marriage to Susan through this new lens. Each time Susan is quoted, or an action she takes is described, David and his coauthor refigure the observation with heavy foreshadowing. For example, when the story went national, Susan didn't want to be included in the press conferences. "Finally, I said to myself [, ] here was something I could do [participate in press conferences] that would actually help get back my boys. Every press conference, every reporter, every camera would help. But Susan balked." (Smi th and Calef 66) Susan is seen here as suspiciously unreasonable; any mother would want to get her children back, except 173 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. those who had something to do with their disappearance. Because David knows now that Susan is a bad woman, he rereads each of her actions through the belief that she was hypersexual and manipulative. Suddenly I realized what Susan was doing. She had told Donna she was going to aerobics class, and instead had driven to Hickory Nuts [the only local bar] . This was a new level of Susan dealing with her duties as a mother. She was lying to her friends just to get a little time down at the local saloon (Smi th and Calef 159) . Although David claims earlier in his press conferences that he thought Susan was a good mother, in his book he rereads her as the public does: a manipulative woman and a bad mother. Newsweek ends its article with a paragraph ex plaining that Smith was a proficient storyteller. In cluded here is a criminologist's joke about manipula tive culprits, "How do you tell the difference between a sociopathic killer and the innocent person? The so ciopath has a better story" (McCormick 34) . Judged by this criteria, Smith's elaborate tale about being car jacked suggests that she is then a sociopath. As a result women are equated with manipulation and psycho sis . 174 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abuse While it is popular these days to view the "abuse excuse" with cynicism, the outcry against it is another effort to ensure that blame is directed at individuals and not the institution of the family, for instance, or those agencies assigned to regulate the family. The importance of the abuse Smith faced as an adolescent should be examined. When Smith was young she accused her stepfather, Beverly Russell, of sexual abuse saying that he had kissed her (with an open mouth) , fondled her breasts, and placed her hand on his genitals. Her mother dropped the charges, reportedly calling them "blown out of proportion(Hewitt 58). Reports suggest a cover-up because of Russell's position in the commu nity; he was a prominent member of the Republican Party and the Christian Coalition in addition to being the nephew of a former South Carolina governor. At Susan's criminal trial, however, her accusations were verified— Russell confessed. Whatever problems that abuse caused Smith may not explain the death of Michael and Alex; however, it could explain her earlier suicide attempts, especially since her own father had committed suicide. Instead of making her a more sympathetic character though, the press found this abuse made her a more likely and suitable candidate for filicide. Writes one 175 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. popular journalist, "her image wrinkled a bit as rumors surfaced of a troubled past" (Gibbs 45). The allusion to a troubled past reflects here on Susan, rather than on her stepfather who put her into this situation. Ap parently, Smi th's "troubled past" makes her filicide more feasible. Smith's abuse makes her bad, no longer the wonderful mother pictured on birthday videos. As Rich suggests in Of Woman Born, the rigid binary of good mother/monstrous woman is a powerful patriarchal fiction: "In order to maintain two such notions [that the woman's body is impure and on the other hand, as mother, sacred] each in its contradictory purity, the masculine imagination has had to divide women to see us, and force us to see ourselves, as polarized into good or evil, fertile or barren, pure or impure" (34). When Smith lost her standing as "good mother" by admit ting to murdering her children, she had to be reas sessed. No longer the Madonna, a new image for evalu ating Susan was sought. The manipulative and sexual woman was then used; and her past was recolored with this new hue. Thus, Russell's sexual abuse becomes Smith's responsibility. Probably the most extreme sexist position taken on the role of sex abuse in the Smith case, but not en tirely inconsistent with the others, is that of William 176 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. F. Buckley, Jr. He transforms the sexual molestation Smith suffered at her stepfather's hands into a grand affair. In his article published August 28, 1995 in the National Review, this abuse is referred to as the "seduction by her stepfather when she entered her teens" (54). One supposes that Buckley is separating these actions from incest because Russell was not Smith's biological father. But Russell was the only father she had, and she was in effect his daughter; although Russell did not adopt his wife's children, Smith had no other father because of her father's sui cide. Even if one were to take the position, as Buckley appears to, that Smith was "fair game" for Russell because they were not related, her youth should have 1 served to protect her. At age fifteen, Smith was not legally capable of freely choosing and entering into a relationship with a man more than twice her age, and Russell clearly took advantage of his position of authority. In his enthusiasm to portray Smith as a vixen and seductress, Buckley absolves Russell of legal and moral responsibility. Russell admits, "I am re sponsible for and ashamed of what happened. I appreci ate the fact that some of my friends and family have tried to speak up in my defense. But they don't know what I did. I am finally getting the professional help 177 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. that I need" (Reported in Gleick 33) . In addition to taking responsibility for his actions, Russell himself asserts that his actions were legally and morally wrong, but Buckley still chooses to consider them "amo rous . " Buckley's portrayal of Smith as seductress does not end there. He labels her compulsive in her sexual acts which caused her to "submit to sex with her step father" (55) . But in the father/daughter power struc ture , as feminists have argued for years, daughters have no choice but to submi t. In his desire to assert her manipulative control, Buckley prefers to blame her for her submission rather than acknowledge Russell's wrongdoing and patriarchal privilege. He further supports his theory of Smith's "nympho mania" by alleging that her "driving compulsion to love copiously led her to leave her husband" (55) . Since Susan is damaged goods, Buckley seems to reason, she is a whore; this position does not take into account that psychiatrists for the state of South Carolina, who may be least likely to evaluate Susan in such a way to al low an insanity defense, found Susan to have borderline personality disorder (see below) which would result in her seeking solace through sexual means. 178 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Anette Balinger, writing in No Ancrels. argues that violent women are represented as either mad or bad by the popular press and legal discourse in order to main tain stereotyped notions of women's behavior. She shows, by examining two parallel cases, how by clinging to or rejecting "proper femininity" women can be re spectively absolved by reason of insanity or found guilty of similar crimes. Smith is, in this respect, like other violent mothers in the legal system. Smi th' s sexuality, and I use the term with great reser vation in this particular area, is used to portray her as anti-maternal since it serves again to focus on her as an aberrant individual agent. She, the argument goes, is bad because her stepfather abused her. Buckley relies on such outmoded ideas to confirm that Smith "got away with murder" because she escaped capi tal punishment, the ultimate individualizing punish ment . This desire to "blame the victim"6 allows us to ignore what life lessons Susan was taught which may have resulted in the choices she made, including mur dering her children. An examination of these lessons allows us to see her choice as learned, as built-in to our very socialization processes rather than as indi vidual . Smith's mother was aware of the molestation by 179 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Russell, of Susan's suicide attempt, and of her depres sion that the medical establishment identified as re quiring treatment. But her mother refused to follow medical advice to treat Susan's depression when she was thirteen7 allowing her daughter to believe that suicide was a viable option for a depressed or heartsick girl. As feminist critic Barbara Ehrenreich argues, Linda Vaughn Russell made choices that showed her daughter that romantic love is more important than mother love8 . She chose Russell over her daughter when she refused to press charges. "Message to Susan from Mom: 'I'm will ing to sacrifice you—your physical integrity, your self-esteem, if necessary even your life—in order to hold onto this man'" (73) . This message, Ehrenreich argues, is one taught to girls "in songs and soap op eras and romantic novels." Linda Russell's actions, themselves environmentally determined, strengthened those lessons. If the media looked beyond stereotypes, they might find that our culture' s idea of romantic love is itself capable of producing violent mothers. Suicidal Mothers are by current definition caregivers; this is a duty they must not shirk, according to popular opinion. They are never absolved from the care of 180 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. their children—and suicide in this equation equals ne glect . As it is explained in both Time and Newsweek. however, mothers can kill their children as a form of suicide. This is called "boundary confusion" in which the mother "is overly enmeshed in the lives of her children. She doesn' t know where her life ends and theirs begins" (McCormick 31) . .If Susan Smith murdered her "children because she did not know where her life ended and theirs began," she would be the ultimate mother—entirely selfless; the children are her life, as her husband asserted. And by taking their lives she essentially committed suicide, according to this theory. It could conceivably be argued, then, that it is because she was a perfect mother that Susan Smith killed her children. Smith was known to be suicidal; she tried to com mit suicide twice before the deaths of her children and once afterwards. We know that she felt her father' s death very deeply; she is reported to have kept some of his belongings and an audiotape of his voice in her dresser over fifteen years after his suicide. Addi tionally, we know that at fifteen she accused her step father of molesting her. His testimony in her trial confirms that these accusations were true, despite the fact that her own mother called them "unfounded." Her 181 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. mother and brother, claim they found her suicide at tempts inexplicable, maintaining that she always seemed happy and had many friends. It seems as though Smith's brother and mother cannot connect distressing life events with Smi th's actions. The stories I reviewed do not elaborate on the suicide angle. Even though this suicide narrative is available to the reporters whose work is explored here, this is not the story that was told the second week of November. It is as though Smith cannot be offered any sympathy. In the follow-up article in Newsweek. "Why Parents Kill, " they report, "That' s what she had in mind when she drove to the lake: distraught over money and failed romances, unable to take her own life, she found her self rolling the car with her sons into the lake in stead" (McCormick 31) . This language implies that her own failure to take charge of her situation was the cause of Smith's problems. While she does mention love in her confession, finances were not discussed there. Rather than consider the suicide angle in their re ports, writers continue to attack Susan's attitude to ward her children—something to be gotten rid of for her boyfriend, Tom Findlay. This story which is explained or explicable on the level of suicide gets elided. 182 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Her confession—released on November 8, 1994—reit erates her desire to commit suicide: When I left my home on Tuesday, Oct. 25, I was very emotionally distraught. I didn't want to live anymore! I felt like things could never get any worse. . . . I felt even more anxiety coming upon me about not wanting to live. I felt I couldn' t be a good mom anymore, but I didn't want my chil dren to grow up without a mom. I felt I had to end our lives to protect us from any grief or harm. . . . My children, Michael and Alex, are with our Heavenly Father now, and I know that they will never be hurt again. As a mom, that means more than words could ever say. (Confession) Some psychologists, including George Rekers Ph.D. a clinical psychologist who teaches at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, read Smith's confes sion as one more piece of evidence that Smith is ma nipulative . On the other hand, Dr. Halleck, the de fense psychiatrist, believes this language corresponds with a person who has Major Depression. In fact, Rekers, in his book examining the psychological facets of this case, concurs that features of the "confession seem to fit aspects of this profile [Suicide by Proxy] (140) . But he argues that because the defense did not pursue this theory, it must not be applicable. Strangely, this psychologist leaves it to legal dis- 183 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. course to decide what is true about Smith's mental health. But even those trained in psychology have diffi culty understanding Susan Smith. Rekers's colleague, Professor Donald Morgan, M.D., Sc.D., was the lead doc tor who provided the court-ordered mental health evalu ation of Susan Smi th. Because Rekers was associated with the trial, serving as the spokesman to the press but not as Smith's doctor, he could write about the case and claims he has the knowledge of psychology and of the case to provide an adequate interpretation of events. His book attempts to describe what consequence Smith's life experiences would have in the deaths of her two sons. Rekers simplifies Susan's psychiatric life into two main episodes: her father' s suicide and her stepfather's sexual abuse. He analyzes both of these events in order to establish which, if either, caused her to kill her children. In the chapter entitled "The Suicide: Was Her Mind Twisted by Her Father's Death?" Rekers describes, in 9 the voice of omniscient narrator, Harry Vaughn's sui cide . This story complete, he shifts to his voice of the psychology teacher explaining the effects of Vaughn's absence on Susan's development. Using a study by Dr. Mavis Hetherington, which compares girls who 184 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lost their fathers by death and divorce to those who grew up with both a mother and father, he reports that girls who lost their fathers through divorce have a lower opinion of men, but at the same time yearn for male attention, approval, and affection. He argues that Susan's father's suicide approximated the effects of divorce rather than death, because suicide would be interpreted by a young girl as rejection—the father chose to leave. Like the girls of divorce, he shows, Susan married at a younger age to a man with little education. Additionally, she tended to seek male at tention, approval, and affection through several sexual relationships, including one that resulted in her preg nancy at eighteen. He also concedes that Vaughn's suicide contributed to both her own suicidal tendencies and her propensity towards depression. But, Rekers concludes, none of this could cause her to kill her children because other women who have lived with these circumstances have not murdered their own children. He will not grant that any of these personality-shaping events detract from her guilt and our ability to blame her. In the next chapter, "The Incest: Did Sexual Abuse Cause Her Mental Illness," Rekers focuses on the inces tuous relationship Susan's stepfather subjected her to. 185 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. He debunks the reports in the popular media that sug gest that Susan was complicit in the "affair" and that this case is not really one of incest at all. He even points out, in response to the evidence that the incest continued until August 1994, that "there is no ' age of consent' for incest in South Carolina" (47) . Here he seems most conscientious and sympathetic in his evalua tion of Smith. Rekers explains that girls who are sexually abused in adolescence rather than as children may develop con fused feelings of being complicit in the incest. The abuse can lead to impaired self-confidence, depression, a loss of sense of security, and self-defeating behav iors , including promiscuity. The victim of sexual abuse, he maintains, will often have sex to please men. Ultimately, Rekers concludes, the sexual abuse did not lead her to kill her children; "the best research on prevalence rates indicates that 1 in 3 girls in the United States are sexually victimized as minors. But 1 in 3 mothers do not kill their children" (57) . Rekers's conclusion seems hasty; he takes the cases of Smi th's father's suicide and her stepfather's sexual abuse as separate events—as though they did not happen to the same person, and as though in association these two events could not have had more troubling effects. 186 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Even thought he occasionally provides sympathetic nar ratives , Rekers stops short of any reading that de- emphasizes her choice in the matter. Rekers does acknowledge that Smith may suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder; this disorder results from women having self-esteem that is derived almost exclusively from men and causes them to go to extremes to please their mates—one popular explanation for the boys' murders. He even highlights evidence from the trial that may support the diagnosis (144-45) . (See Table 1) 187 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Description of Borderline Personality Disorder "Suggestive Data from Trial" Making frantic attempts to avoid actual or imagined abandonment by another person. "Susan's crime occurred one week after her rejection by boyfriend Tom Findlay." Repeatedly developing intense but unstable relationships with others in which the person vacillates between idealizing the other person and devaluing him or her. Susan reportedly vacillated this way in relation to her husband, David, and may have also 'devalued' her sons with this dynamic. Persisting with a very unstable self-image to the point of having an identity disturbance. Susan desired to escape her lower middle class status and desired a new life in the upper class by marrying her rich boss's son. Reacting very impulsively in a potentially self-damaging manner in more than one area of life. We could possibly view her multiple-partner promiscuity this way. Repeating self-mutilating behavior or suicidal gestures or threats. Susan had two prior suicidal gestures and claimed to feel suicidal the night of her murders of her two sons. Regularly displaying highly unstable and shifting mood states, such as intense displeasure, irritability or anxiety. Susan is reported to blow up with irritability and rage at her husband. Experiencing empty feelings repeatedly. Susan apparently was feeling this way the night of the murders. Having difficulty controlling anger or displaying inappropriate strong anger, extreme sarcasm, enduring bitterness or verbal outbursts. We have described several instances of Susan's explosive anger. Temporary paranoid suspiciousness or dissociative symptoms under periods of stress. Dr. Halleck described some dissociative symptoms in Susan.10 Table 1 188 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. But he seems to refer to this disorder more because it supports the idea that Susan fit the profile of the filicidal parent who was retaliating against her spouse or was manipulative (140) . Rekers may also use the diagnosis because those with Borderline Personality have childhoods that are often marked by "sexual abuse, neglect, physical abuse, early parental loss or separa tion, and hostile family conflict" (146). Most of these events did occur in Smi th's life. But Rekers still concludes that these problems did not cause her to murder her children. Rekers seems to be splitting hairs in an attempt to further vilify Susan Smi th. While few mental disorders cause people to break laws such a mindstate could perhaps contribute to such a crime. Reker's opinion on this is lost because of his singleminded focus on whether each psychiatric disorder caused Smith's crime, rather than considering whether the sum of her experiences made her more likely to com mit such an act. Rekers states that his is an attempt to explain her behavior despite the impossibility of such a ratio nalization : A "murdering mother" is a frustrating oxymoron that in this case, demands much explaining: those two words—"murdering" and "mother"—just don't fit together. 189 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Killing one's own children is an impon derable treachery—indeed, the unthinkable crime. We expect every mother will in stinctively care for and lovingly protect her dependent little ones. (87) Given this dogma, it is no wonder that he demonstrates Smi th's fragile mental state only to return again and again to calling Smith manipulative. For example, he calls her choice "cunningly evi1" (95) . He narrates the events of October 25 from her viewpoint and assigns value to her actions, making his own assessments seem like hers. Rekers writes fiction that claims the au thority of science in order to reaffirm an oversimpli fied but ubiquitous story about mothers. We the people Having shown how we have created multiple, often conflicting versions of Susan Smith, I will now turn to the contradictory audience imagined for this story, an audience both curious about the crime and already in possession of the answers. The narrative created in the Susan Smith case includes us; that is, readers—or a version of us—are created by the media and conflated with the media. My evaluation of an extensive number of print sources shows the media assumes and constructs readers who have faith in people' s goodness, are a bit religious, have certain parental fears, want to under- 190 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. stand but have difficulty, and finally, will never un derstand the Smith case but are willing to mete out the most severe justice. These characteristics may prevent us from reading Smith's filicide productively. By con sidering the assumptions about their "American audi ence" used by the media we can expose our critical blinders. The reader proj ected by the media could have no hope of producing a critique of the ideology which gave rise to Susan Smi th. As long as the audience can insist on their own (confused but) well-meaning good ness by insisting on Smith's badness, they are able to maintain an uncritical outrage. Faith The media takes a consistently tolerant or complicit stance on faith in God, if not on more radi cal beliefs. "God made them cute so we wouldn't kill them, goes the old joke" (Gibbs 43) . God helps protect our own children from ourselves the joke reassures us. But Gibbs's article is also interspersed with Susan Smi th's televised pleas which prove Smith was a good Christian, "I think what' s kept me going more than any thing is the Lord. I pray to Him every day to give me the strength to make it through the day. " The New York Times comments, "nothing . . . will ever explain how a 191 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. woman who seemed to be a perfect mother and so hardworking and devout, could do such a thing" (Bragg Al) . We, the audience, it is understood, have an ethic that understands hardworking and devout people to be good, not killers. That Russell was active in the Christian Coalition all the while sexually abusing his stepdaughter provides its own ironic commentary on the value of piety. Parental Fears "If only to maintain our faith in our families we are honor bound to believe each tearful mother, to pray for the dog-and-helicopter searches and to wear psycho logical, if not literal, yellow ribbons" (Van Biema 50) . The position ironically characterized here con cedes that the family may not be perfect, but insists that faith in the family must be maintained anyway; to question it is a dishonorable betrayal. The stories we tell about crime and the family—despite statistical evidence—relies on this logic. For example, according to one reporter, "the Smith case captured the nation's attention because it played on every parent's fear of a stranger abducting a beloved baby" (McCormick 31) . Despite what we seem to want to believe, that stranger on stranger crime is rampant, an American is more 1*92 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. likely to be killed by someone he or she knows, and most missing children—ninety two percent in the past ten years—are either runaways or were taken by their family members, not strangers.11 According to the De partment of Justice, "an estimated 86 percent of child victimizers reported that a prior relationship existed with the victim" (Greenfeld 10) . Their crimes include murder, rape, negligent manslaughter, and sexual as sault . Three out of four of these offenders, and about a third of child victimizers overall, were the parents or stepparents of the victim. In fact, "in 1994, over 7 0 percent of the murders of infants were carried out by a family member."12 The parental fears reported by the media, then, are less well founded than a fear of parents might be. Can we understand? One reporter for the New York Times asserts ”[Nothing will ever] explain the coldness and cruelty of an act to people who see their babies as the most precious things in life" (Bragg 32) . But he then fol lows this assertion with pages and pages of attempts to explain Smith's behavior. What's more, we are given this information despite the fact that it probably won' t help readers understand anyway: "this consensus 193 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. on [filicide's] social causes . . . enables those who study it to attain a sympathy for potential Smiths and Ziles that may elude other Americans" (Van Biema 51) . This account gives readers an out—we don't need to try to understand filicidal mothers; the problems which lead a mother to kill her children are so incomprehen sible that we need experts to take care of them. In maintaining such a position, the media expects that the reader will not attempt to examine ideological beliefs about motherhood. But perhaps readers can understand. After all, the media also portrays Susan Smith as someone just like us; someone we can understand. An interesting universalization takes place in both the Time and Newsweek articles that deal with filicide more gener ally . These articles show "patterns that help explain the unthinkable" (cite). In Time, the reporter quotes a behavioral scientist who asserts that "[filicide] crosses lines. It' s not black, Hispanic, white, rich or poor;" this quote is given further prominence as the pull quote (Van Biema 51) . But the article undermines that theory. The experts are near unanimous we read: generally parents who kill their children tend to be under a lot of stress. They may be very young and not ready for the demands of parent hood. In all likelihood they are socially isolated and do not have a large safety net. They may have a history of previous violence, 194 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. social isolation, substance abuse and poverty. (Van Biema 51) So a condition that is not-black-white-Hispanic-rich- or-poor is linked with poverty, not only poverty itself but through other circumstances associated with the condition like substance abuse, isolation, youth, and stress. Suddenly a condition which cuts across class- and race-lines looks very impoverished, very lower class. A relief for the white middle class audience of Time and Newsweek; in these circumstances they are not implicated in the problem or its cure. The Newsweek follow-up item, "Why Parents Kill," addresses the issue similarly by isolating those who commit filicide as "crazy." According to Newsweek re porters , a child can die when a parent "loses it:" "Losing it, " of course, can be shorthand for mental illness which comes in a vari ety of forms. Postpartum depression is one. . . . Drug abuse or financial prob lems can also distort a parent's ability to think and act normally. "Any big time stress—a job loss, a death in the family, eviction—can set people off . . . " (McCormick 31) Although none of these conditions applies to the filicidist at hand, Susan Smith, it makes a very nice package for Newsweek's readers. The American middle 195 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. class can (and does) easily separate themselves, in practice and in theory, from these marginalized groups— the poor, drug addicted, or mentally ill—which are de cidedly not the only groups who commit filicide. These articles which explain criminology to us re flect the sexism that is historically part of criminol ogy . Although more feminists are applying their theo ries to criminology, ever since Caesar Lombroso wrote Female Criminal in 1897, criminologists have had diffi culty reconciling women and crime. Not surprisingly, the Time and Newsweek articles, which rely on informa tion from criminologists, make scapegoats of women. Although men kill their children more often than women do,13 ten of the eleven examples of filicide given in both items are stories where women, all white, were responsible. The eleventh case is Joel Steinberg's beating of his illegally adopted daughter, Lisa. The largest photograph accompanying this article, however, is of Hedda Nussbaum, Steinberg's abused wife who was not charged because of the abuse she herself suffered at Steinberg's hand.14 The pictures speak louder than the words of the articles. In addition to this visual misdirection, both ar ticles discuss syndromes that are associated with women: postpartum depression (exclusively a woman's 196 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. disease) and Munchausen's by Proxy. Munchausen's Syn drome is a psychological disorder where women make themselves sick, or manifest the symptoms of an ill ness , in order to garner attention. For example, one young woman told her mother and others that she had breast cancer. She joined a breast cancer support group and shaved her head and dieted to mimic the re sults of chemotherapy. She did not have breast cancer, and was later exposed. In Munchausen's-By-Proxy, a woman makes her child or another person under her care, or even a pet, sick in order to receive attention. Poisons or starvation might be used. Some women with this syndrome have even smothered their children to imitate Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. So the "crazi ness" associated with filicide is feminized, again, contrary to the numbers that demonstrate men kill their children more often. These articles describing filicide also feature the story of the woman who kills to gain the approval of her "new man, " implying that women are unable to resist the lures of lust. Smith is certainly placed in this category. Her ex-lover Tom Findlay's now infamous letter1 5 breaking off their relationship alluded to her children as a problem. He was "not ready to take on the responsibilities" associated with her boys. The 197 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. letter was distilled to this "sound bite" as though the connection between Smith's actions and the letter from Findlay were clear: she drowned her sons to win his love and affection. This sexist assumption relies on notion that women need men and will do anything for them. However, Findlay's letter was much longer than reports would imply—it ran nearly four pages in Rekers's book. In fact, Findlay also referred to the differences in their class and educational backgrounds as reasons that he would not pursue a relationship with her. The reports ignore class differences in the read ing of the letter; this move relies on the sexist sto ries we already "know" about women because it gives credence to the notion that women are manipulative and would kill their children for a man's love. Further, the news magazine writers report that women conceal these murders just a bit differently from men: "if you get a more elaborate cover-up, that' s mainly a female domain" (Van Biema 51) . This asser tion, which is almost impossible to prove or counter, reiterates the stereotype of women's manipulative na tures . 198 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A Certain Kind of Justice Finally, the media claims we readers would under stand the crime if "the mother had gone mad, " but that luxury of understanding is not allowed Smith, because her insanity would not allow the justice we so desire to be meted out. One woman who is supposed to be rep resentative of the good people who trek to John D. Long Lake to remember the boys says, "I got a car just like Susan Smith's. If they want to bring her out here and handcuff her to it, I'll drive her off the ramp" (Riddle 10) . Our desire for revenge—no matter how closely it may seem to resemble the original crime—does not seem to help decipher the complexity of the case. This lack of understanding, however, provides its own gratification. Women who kill their babies are incomprehensible and monstrous, but with enough expertise and imagina tion we can explain filicide. Nonetheless, even the reporters who have access to the experts are only will ing or only able to tell the stories that their audi ences will accept. The lurid details substitute for the facts, and we get a subtext that overwhelms the text. How can we begin to deal with the problems re lated to women's violence when we insist on repeating 199 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the same familiar stories irrespective of the particu lar circumstances of women's violent crime? Notes 1 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1988) 132. 2 Diane Downs of Eugene, Oregon reported in 1983 that a stranger had demanded her car on an isolated road, and when she refused he shot her three sleeping children: Danny (four), Cheryl (seven), and Christy (eight). Cheryl was killed, Danny permanently paralyzed, and Christy suffered a stroke. Downs was convicted on the basis of Christy's testimony. Waneta Hoyt of New York was convicted in 1995 for the murders of her five children between 1965 and 1971; she has been sentenced to seventy-five years. Marybeth Tinning of Schenectady, New York was convicted of murdering one of her children in 1986, but all nine of her children died mysteriously between 1972 and 1985. 3 See Brenda Barton, "When Murdering Hands Rock the Cradle: An Over view of America's Incoherent Treatment of Infanticidal Mothers," Southern Methodist Law Review 51 (March-April, 1998) :591. 4 The Stuart case in Boston relied on similar prejudices. Stuart drove his BMW into a "black neighborhood" and killed his wife and shot himself. Boston Police rousted black men based on Stuart's description. He later confessed to his wife's murder before commit ting suicide. Similarly, Diane Downs pointed to a "shaggy haired stranger," relying perhaps on stereotypes about the antisocial moun tain man or about hippies. 5 Smith's case demonstrates that she did not abuse her children but her commission of filicide makes the news reports discuss her as if she did. 6 Smith's role as victim here is limited to her own sexual abuse. I am not arguing that she should not be punished for her crime, but rather that we need to consider the background of this crime. 7 Barbara Ehrenreich, "Susan Smith: Corrupted by Love?" Time 7 August 1995: 78. 8 This is not to suggest that mother love is more important. 9 In fact, much of the book is written omnisciently. Rekers provides dialogue for many of the events he describers and even writes an interior monologue for Smith. Clearly, the work is suspect on these points alone. 1 0 Although Rekers's statement implies that only Dr. Halleck described such symptoms in Susan, by his own admission his colleague also de scribed Susan as having these symptoms. 11 USDOJ, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Jointly published with the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 200 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Prevention, Child Victimizers: Violent Offenders and the Victims (NCJ-153258, March 1996). 12 USDOJ, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Jointly published with the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Child Victimizers: Violent Offenders and the Victims (NCJ-153258, March 1996). 13 The Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report Women Offenders (1999) demonstrates that while mothers or stepmothers killed their children at a rate of 10.4% of all murders committed by women, men killed their children and stepchildren at a rate of only 2.2% of all murders committed by men. However, men committed 395,446 murders between 197 6 and 1997 to women's 59,996. Men still killed roughly 2500 more children than women did over that period. Mothers killed a higher share of children during infancy; fathers were more often responsible for the murders of children over age eight. 14 Debates about Nussbaum's culpability exist; many feminists feel that allowing Nussbaum to testify against Steinberg continues sexist reliance on the mad/bad dichotomy for trying violent women, and, ultimately, removes women's moral agency. See Doubly Deviant. Doubly Damned or No Angels for further arguments. 15 One of the few complete reprintings of Findlay's letter can be found in Rekers 130-134. 201 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Bibliography Abeel, Erica. "Outsized Passions, Forbidden Love." Rev. of You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Newsdav. 19 July 1987: 13, 16. Ackley, Katherine Anne, ed. Women and Violence in Litera ture : An Essav Collection. New York: Garland, 1990. Adams, Robert M. "The Best Nightmares are Retrospective." Rev. of them, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 28 Sept 1969: 4+ Adler, Jerry. "innocents Lost." Newsweek. 14 Nov 1994. 26-30. Alpert, Jane. "Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory." Ms. August 1973, x. "American Nightmares." Rev. of Expensive People, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 16 Oct 1969: 1177. Ang-Lygate, Magdalene, Chris Corrin, and Millsom S. Henry, eds. Desperately Seeking Sisterhood: Still Challenging and Building. London: Taylor and Francis, 1997. Annan, Gabriele. "Donna Giovanna." Rev. of The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood. New York Review of Books. 16 Dec 1993: 14. Armstrong, Isobel. "Telling the Chappaquiddick Story." Rev. of Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 16 Oct 1993: 22. Atkinson, Ti-Grace. Amazon Odvssev. New York: Links Books, 1974. Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Blind Assassin. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Bodily Harm. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Cat's Eve. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Edible Woman. New York: Warner, 1969. 202 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Handmaid's Tale. New York: Fawcett, 1985. Ladv Oracle. New York: Fawcett, 1976. Life Before Man. New York: Fawcett, 1979. Robber Bride. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978. Babbitt, Susan E. "Identity, Knowledge, and Toni Morrison's Beloved." Hypatia. 9.3 (Summer 1994): 1-18. Balinger, Anette. "The Guilt of the Innocent and the Inno cence of the Guilt: The Cases of Maria Fahmy and Ruth Ellis." In Myers and Wight, 1-28. Barton, Brenda. "When Murdering Hands Rock the Cradle: An Overview of America's Incoherent Treatment of Infanti- cidal Mothers." 51 Southern Methodist Law Review 591. March-April 1998. Bausch, Richard. "Her Thoughts While Drowning." Rev. of Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 10 May 1992: 1+. Bedient, Calvin. "The Story of Sleeping Beauty and a Love that is Like Hatred." Rev. of Do What You Will, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 14 Oct 1973: 1, 18. Bell, Bernard. "Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past." African Ameri can Review. 26 (1992): 7-15. Bergonzi, Bernard. "Truants." Rev. of Expensive People, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Review of Books. 2 Jan 1969: 40-41. Berland, Laura. "Women." Penthouse. April 1987: 25. Birkerts, Sven. "A Passion for Uncle." Rev. of You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 16 Aug 1987: 3 . 203 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Blackburn, Sara. "You Still Can't Go Home Again." Rev. of Sula, by Toni Morrison. New York Times Book Review. 30 Dec 1973: 3. "Bloody Weapons." Rev. of Wonderland, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 7 July 1972: 765. Boudreau, Kristin. "Pain and the Unmaking of Self in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Contemporary Literature. 36.3 (1995): 447-465. Bragg, Rick. "Life of a Mother Accused of Killing Offers No Clues." The New York Times. 6 Nov 1994. N1+. Brandmark, Wendy. "Little Women." Rev. of Foxfire: Con fessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates. New Statesman and Society. 8 June 1993: 38. Brooke. "The Retreat to Cultural Feminism." In Redstockings, 81. 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"Sleeping Princess." Rev. of Do With Me What You Will, by Joyce Carol Oates. Newsweek. 15 Oct 1973: 107. Clute, John. "Collisions but No Marriages." Rev. of You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 19 Feb 1988: 186. Craig, Patricia. "Philosophical Tale of Gore." Rev. of Mysteries of Winterthurn, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 12 Feb 1984: 7. "Self-fulfilling Destinies." Rev. of American Aooetites, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 15-21 Sept 1989:997 . "Taking Life Seriously." Rev. of Marva: A Life, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 16 Jan 1987 : 55 . Crowley, John. "Outlaw Girls on the Rampage." Rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 15 Aug 1993: 6. Cryer, Dan. Rev. of Zombie. by Joyce Carol Oates. Newsday. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Spe cial Collections, Syracuse University Library. Cummings, Kate. "Reclaiming the Mother's Tongue: Beloved. Ceremony, Mothers and Shadows." 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Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Docu mentary Casebook. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1988. "The Doomed and the Damned." Rev. of Expensive People. by Joyce Carol Oates. Time. 1 Nov 1968: 102. Douglas, Carol Anne. Love and Politics: Radical Feminist and Lesbian Theories. San Francisco: ism press, 1990. Duchene, Anne. "A Local Minotaur." Rev. of Solstice. by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 12 Sept 1980: 983 . Echlin, Kim. "What's a Nice Feminist Author like Joyce Carol Oates Doing at Ring Side?" Rev. and Interview of On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates. Hamilton Spectator. 21 April 1987: 1. Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. American Culture 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Edwards, Thomas R. "The House of Atreus Now." Rev. of The Assassins. by Joyce Carol Oates. The New York Times Book Review. 16 Aug 1981: 1, 18. Ehrenreich, Barbara. "Susan Smith: Corrupted by Love?" Time. 7 Aug 1995. 78. Elam, Diane and Robyn Wegman, eds. Feminism Beside It self . New York: Routledge, 1995. Elkins, Mary Jane. "Oates Impresses, Depresses." Rev. of Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates. The Miami Herald. 26 April 1992: 91. Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Lit erature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. 206 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Firestone, Shulamith. Dialectics of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Quill, 1970. Fleming, Juliet. "Heterosexism." Rev. of What I Lived For, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 22 Dec 1995: 20. Fletcher, Allen W. "A Meditation on Boxing." Rev. of On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates. Sunday Telegram. 5 April 1987. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. French, Marilyn. Rev. of Life Before Man. by Margaret Atwood. New York Times. 21 March 1982: 3. Gardner, John. "The Strange Real World." Rev. of Beliefleur. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 20 July 1980: 1, 21. Gates, David. "American Gothic." Rev. of We Were the Mu1vanevs. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 15 Sept 1996: 11. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. "Murder, She Wrote." Rev. of Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is Mv Heart, by Joyce Carol Oates. The Nation. 20 July 1990: 27-29. Gibbs, Nancy. "Death and Deceit." Time. 14 Nov 1994. 43-48. Giles, James R. Violence in the Contemporary American Novel : An End to Innocence. Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope. Davs of Rage. New York: Bantam, 1987. Gleick, Elizabeth. "It Did Happen Here." Time. 19 Dec 1994. 60-61. . "Sex, Betrayal, and Murder." Time. 17 July 1995. 32-33, 36. Glendinning, Victoria. "In Touch With God." Rev. of Son of the Morning, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 13 Aug 1978. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. 207 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Goldenberg, Judy. "Ms Oates Shares Dark Vision." Rev. of We Were the Mulvanevs, by Joyce Carol Oates. Richmond Times-Pisnatch. 8 Dec 1996. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library.. Gordon, Mary. "The Life and Hard Times of Cinderella." Rev. of Marva: A Life, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 2 March 1986: 7, 9. Gottesman, Ronald. Violence in America: An Encvclonedia. 3 vol. New York: Scribner, 1999. Gottfried, Amy S. Historical Nightmares and Imaginative Violence in American Women's Writings. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Grant, Judith. Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge, 1993. Gray, Paul. "Nice People in Glass Houses." Rev. of American Appetites, by Joyce Carol Oates. Time. 9 Jan 1989: 64. Greenfeld, Lawrence A. "Child Victimizers: Violent Of fenders and Their Victims." Bureau of Justice Statis tics , jointly Published with the Office of Juvenile Jus tice and Delinquency Programs. March 1996, NCJ-153258. Hamer, Emily. "Fighting for Freedom: Suffragette Violence Against their State," in Myers and White, 72-84. Hamilton, Cynthia S. "Revisions, Rememories, Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative." Journal of American Studies. 30 (1996): 429-445. Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. Mother Without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood. Berkeley: U Cali fornia Press, 1997. Hart, Lynda. Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the mark of Aggression. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Haug, Frigga and others. Female Sexualization: A Collec tive Work of Memory. Translated from the German by Erica Carter. London: Verso, 1987. 208 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "The Heavy Mob." Rev. of Do With Me What You Will, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 11 Jan 1974: 25 . Heller, Arno. "Fictions of Violence in American Litera ture : A PRobing into Psycho-Historical Criticism." In Gunter H. Lenz, Hartmut Keil, Sabine Brock-Sallah, eds. Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies Frankfurt: Campus, 1990. 268-284. Hendin, Josephine. Rev. of Childwold, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 28 Nov 197 6: 8, 30 . Herriges, Kate. "So Good. . .But So Painful." Rev. of The Assassins, by Joyce Carol Oates. Minneapolis Tri bune . 16 Nov 197 5: 13D. Hewitt, Bill. "Tears of Hate, Tears of Pity." People Weekly. 54-59. Hilfer, Anthony C. "Critical Indeterminancies in Toni Morrison's Fiction: An Introduction." Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 33.1 (Spring 1991) : 91-95. Hobson, Laura Z. "Oates Country." Rev. of Angel of Light. by Joyce Carol Oates. Saturday Review. (August 1981): 44-45. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist. Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989. Hower, Edward. "A Lighter Joyce Carol Oates." Rev. of What I Lived For, by Joyce Carol Oates. Philadelphia Inquirer. (25 Sept 1994): Ml, M4. Janeway, Elizabeth. "Clara the Climber." Rev. of A Gar den of Earthly Delights, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 10 Sept 1967: 5, 63. Johnson, Diane. "Balloons and Abductions." Rev. of Mys teries of Winterthurn. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 5 Sept 1982: 1, 16. 209 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "The Oppressor in the Next Room." Rev. of Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison. New York Review of Books. 10 Nov 1977: 6. • "Supergirls." Rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Review of Books. 2 Dec 1993: 25-26. Johnson, Greg. Invisible writer : A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York : Dutton, 1998. Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1980. Jordan, June. On Call: Political Essavs. Boston: South End Press, 1985. "Joyce Carol Oates Resurfaces." Rev. of Beliefleur, by Joyce Carol Oates. The Windsor Star. 16Aug 1980: C12. Junod, Tom. "A Ringside Seat with Joyce Carol Oates." Rev. of On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. (5 April 1987) : 12J. Kakutani, Michiko. Rev. of Mysteries of Winterthurn, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 10 Feb 1984: C25. Rev. of You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 10 Aug 1987 : C2 0 . "A Clan of Con Men, Scheming in a Historical Echo Chamber." Rev. of Mv Heart Laid Bare, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 16 June 1998 : B7 . "Girls Who Hate Men and Treat Them Accordingly." Rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 16 July 1993: C29. "Gloom Under the Gleam of Suburbia." Rev. of American Appetites, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 21 Dec 1988: 33. "Held Captive by Secrecy, or at Least Convention." Rev. of I Lock Mv Door Upon Mvself, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 11 Dec 1990 : C19 . 210 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Horrors as No More Than Part of Life." Rev. of Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is Mv Heart. by- Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 30 March 1990: 29. "Like Mother, Alas, Like Daughter." Rev. of Man Crazv, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 29 Aug 1997: B27. "Taking the Plot from the News, Even Old News." Rev. of Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates. The New York Times. 24 April 1992: C31. Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation: THe Mother in Popular Cultura and Melodrama. New York: Routledge, 1992 . Kauffmann, Stanley. Rev. of With Shuddering Fall, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Review of Books. 17 Dec 1964: 21-22. Kemp, Peter. "Rottenness Abounding." Rev. of Angel of Light, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 29Jan 1982: 6. Kerr, Sarah. "Only in America." Rev. of Mv Heart Laid Bare, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 5 July 1998: 6. Knowles, John. "Nada at the Core." Rev. of Expensive People, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Time Book Review. 3 Nov 1968: 5. "A Racing Car is the Symbol of Violence." Rev. of With Shuddering Fall, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 25 Oct 1964: 5. Lambert, Angela. "Meet the Exquisite Ms Oates." Rev. of Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates. The Independent. 28 Oct 1992. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Spe cial Collections, Syracuse University Library. Lask, Thomas. "The Child is the Father of the Man." Rev. of Wonderland, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 16 Oct 1971: 29. "Open Season on Suburbia." Rev. of Expensive People. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 7 Dec 1968: 45. 211 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "The Sins of the Parents." Rev. of A Garden of Earthly Delights, bv Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 5 Sept 1967: 41. Lawson, Mark. "The Rough Stuff." Interview with Joyce Carol Oates. The Independent on Sunday. 8 Aug 1993: 16- 17 . Leader, Zachary. "Star-Crossed Spirits." Rev. of Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is Mv Heart, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 15 Feb 1991: 17 . Lee, Rachel. "Missing Peace in Toni Morrison's Sula and Beloved." African American Review. 28 (1994): 571-583. Lehman-Haupt, Christopher. "2 Voices as Far Apart as the Novel and the Essay. " Rev. of Jazz and Plavincr in the Dark, by Toni Morrison. New York Times. 2 April 1992: "Did She or Didn't She?" Rev. of Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood. New York Times. 12 Dec 1996: C19. Rev. of Anael of Light, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 6 Aug 1981: 19. Rev. of Marva: A Life, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 20 Feb 1986: 20. Rev. of On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 2 March 1987: C14. Rev. of Solstice. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 10 Jan 1985: C21. "Stalking the Eternal Feminine." Rev. of Do With Me What You Will, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 15 Oct 1973: 35. "Underwritten and Overwritten." Rev. of Sula. by Toni Morrison. New York Times. 7 Jan 1974: 29 . Leonard, John. Rev. of Beliefleur. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 21 July 1980: Sec. 3, 15. "We Are the Strangers in Our Mirrors." Rev. of them, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times. 1 Oct 1969: 45 . 212 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "The Heroine: A Contraption of Attitudes." Rev. of Bodily Harm, by Margaret Atwood. New York Times. 21 March 1982:3. Levy, Andrew. "Telling Beloved." Texas Studies in Lit erature and Language. 33.1 (Spring 1991): 114-123. "Life in a Glass House, Scared of Stones." Rev. of Ameri can Appetites. by Joyce Carol Oates. The Scotsman. 18 Sept 1989. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Spe cial Collections, Syracuse University Library. Linden, Robin Ruth, Darlene Pagano, Diana E.H. Russell, Susan Leigh Starr, eds. Against Sadomasochism. Palo Alto, Frog in the Wall Press, 1982. Lutz, Fred. "A Woman's Perspective on Boxing." Rev. of On Boxing. by Joyce Carol Oates. The Blade (Toledo, OH). 8 March 1987. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. Mabe, Chauncey. "Family Matters." Rev. of We Were the Mulvanevs. by Joyce Carol Oates. Fort Lauderdale/Sun- Sentinel. 15 Sept 1996. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, De partment of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. MacKinnon, Catharine. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Laws. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Only Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. Madrigal, Alix. "Girls in Rebellion." Rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates. San Fransisco Chronicle. 29 Aug 1993. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse Uni versity Library. Manley, Rex. "Portrayal of Sex and Brutality." Rev. of With Shuddering Fall, by Joyce Carol Oates. Sheffield Morning Times. 8 Jan 1966. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. 213 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Mansnerus, Laura. "Different Brands of Meanness." Rev. of Cat's Eve, by Margaret Atwood. The New York Times Book Review. 5 Feb 1989: 1+. Mantel, Hilary. "Murder and Memory." Rev. of Alias Grace. by Margaret Atwood. New York Review of Books.. 19 Dec 1996: 8. Marcus, Steven. "American Psycho." Rev. of Zombie. by Joyce Carol Oates. The New York Times Book Review. 8 Oct 1995: 13. Maxwell, Marilyn. Male Racre. Female Furv: Gender and Violence in Contemporary American Fiction. Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 2000. Mrs-Jones, Adam. "Gilding the Unmentionables." Rev. of A Bloodsmoor Romance, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 28 Jan 1983: 79. McClurg, Jocelyn. "Spinning Yarns, Weaving Truths." Rev. of Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates. Hartford Courant. 12 May 1992: C1-C3. McCormick, John. "Why Parents Kill." Newsweek. 14 Nov 1994: 31+. McDermott, Alice. "What Little Girls Are Really Made Of." Rev. of Cat's Eve, by Margaret Atwood. New York Times Book Review. 5 Feb 1989: 1, 35. McDonald, Peter. "Enid's Scars." Rev. of You Must Remem ber This, by Joyce Carol Oates. London Review of Books. 23 June 1988. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. McPhillips, Robert. Rev. of Son of the Morning, by Joyce Carol Oates. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. Messud, Claire. "Upstate Satanic." Rev. of Man Crazy, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 28 Aug 1998: 21. Meinke, Peter. "Romantic Tale Holds Sweet Rewards for Patient Readers." Rev. of A Bloodsmoor Romance, by Joyce Carol Oates. St. Petersburg Times Review. 17 Oct 1982: 3E. 214 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Michie, Helena and Naomi R. Cahn. Confinements: Fertility and Infertility in Contemporary Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997. Michie, Helena. Sororoohobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Milan, Karen. Rev. of Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is Mv Heart, by Joyce Carol Oates. Fort Worth Star-Tele- gram. 22 April 1990. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Depart ment of Special Collections, Syracuse University Li brary . Miller, Jane. Speech for the Speechless." Rev. of Childwold, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 14 Oct 1977: 1185 . Millett, Kate. Flvina. New York: Knopf, 1974. Sexual Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Modert, Jo. "Women's Liberation as Gothic Adventure." Rev. of A Bloodsmoor Romance, by Joyce Carol Oates. St. Louis Post-Disoatch. 3 Oct 1982: 4C. Modelski, Tania. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a Postfeminist Age. New York: Routledge, 1991. Mojtabai, A. G. "Poets and Teachers." Rev. of Unholy Loves. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 7 Oct 1979: 9+. Moore, Lorrie. "Every Wife's Nightmare." Rev. of The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood. New York Times Book Review. 31 Oct 1993: 22. Morgan, Robin. Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist. New York: Random House, 1977. , ed. Sisterhood is Powerful. New York: Random House, 197 0. Morganthau, Tom. "Will They Kill Susan Smith?" Newsweek. 31 July 1995. 14. 215 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Morris, Virginia B. Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction. Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky P, 1990 . Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1987. The Bluest Eve. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970 . Song of Solomon. New York: Signet, 1977. Sula. New York: Plume, 1973. "What the Black Woman Thinks About Women's Lib." New York Times Magazine. 22 Aug. 1971: 14+ Murray, G.E. "Love: The Prisoner in Oates' Dock." Rev. of Do With Me What You Will, by Joyce Carol Oates. Chi cago Daily News. 6-7 Oct 1973. Joyce Carol Oates Pa pers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse Uni versity Library. Myers, Alice and Sarah Wight, eds. No Angels: Women who Commit Violence. London: Pandora, 1996. Nicholson, Linda J. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1990. "Novels in Brief." Rev. of With Shuddering Fall, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 3 Feb 1966: 90. Oates, Joyce Carol. Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is Mv Heart. New York: Plume, 1990. Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. New York: Dutton, 1993. . Heat and Other Stories. New York: Plume, 1991. "How is Fiction Doing?" (14 Dec 1980). Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syra cuse University Library. Solstice. New York: Dutton, 1985. "Why is Your Writing So Violent?" The New York Times Book Review. (29 March 1981) :15, 35 . 216 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "(Woman) Writer: Theory and Practice." (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988. 22-32. Zombie. New York: Dutton, 1995. 0'Hara, J. D. "The Assassins." Rev. of The Assassins, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 23 Nov 1975: 10, 14, 18. Olson, Clarence E. "Passion and the Law." Rev. of Do with Me What. You Will. by Joyce Carol Oates. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 11 Nov. 1973. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. Palmer, Paulina. Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory. Jackson: UP of Missis sippi , 1989. Parker, Roszika. Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence. New York: Basic, 1995. Pate, Nancy. "Overheated Voice Dampens 'Foxfire'." Rev. of Foxfire. by Joyce Carol Oates. The Orlando Senti nel . 1 Aug 1993. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. Pearson, Patricia. When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Mvth of Innocence. New York : Viking, 1997. Peri, Camille. "Witch Craft." Mother Jones. April 1989. 31. Perloff, Marjorie. "Great American Novel?" ANO: A Quar terly Journal of Short Articles. Notes, and Reviews. 5.4 (October 1992): 229-231. Peyser, Marc and Ginny Carroll. "Southern Gothic on Trial." Newsweek. 17 July 1995 . 29. Pickney, Darryl. "Every Which Way." Rev. of Tar Baby, by Toni Morrison. New York Review of Books. 30 April 1981: 25. 217 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Prescott, Peter S. "Varieties of Madness." Rev. of the Assassins, by Joyce Carol Oates. Newsweek. 27 Oct 1975: 99A-100B. Prose, Francine. "Death and the Maid." Rev. of Alias Grace. by Margaret Atwood. New York Times Book Review. 29 Dec 1996: 6. Quinn, Anthony. "Blood and Guts in High School." Rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. by Joyce Carol Oates. Independent. 21 Aug 1993. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse Uni versity Library. Reckers, George. Susan Smith: Victim or Murderer. Lake wood, CO: Glenbridge Publishing, 1996. Redmon, Anne. "Lancelot, Ladies and Lust." Rev. of Childwold. by Joyce Carol Oates. Sunday (London) Times. 18 Oct. 1977: 41. "Redstockings Manifesto," in Sisterhood is Powerful. 533- 536 . Redstockings, eds. Feminist Revolution. New York: Random House, 1978. Reed, J. D. "Postfeminism: Playing for Keeps." Time. (10 Jan 1983): 60-61. Reefer, Mary M. "The Dark Side of the Soul." Rev. of Anae! of Light. by Joyce Carol Oates. Kansas City Star. 16 Aug 1981: 7F, 16F. "She Focuses her Words on Violence, Isolation." Rev. of Son of Morning, by Joyce Carol Oates. Kansas Citv Star. 24 Sept 1978. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. "'Solstice' Probes Twisted Nature." Rev. of Sol stice . by Joyce Carol Oates. Kansas Citv Star. 10 Feb 1985: IF, 8F. Regan, Jennifer. "Oates Burns Brightly with the Power of Women's Revenge." Rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates. The Buffalo News. 19 Sept 1993: H8. 218 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Rekers, George. Susan Smith: Victim or Murderer. Lake wood, CO: Glenbridge Publishing, 1996. Rev. of With Shuddering Fall. by Joyce Carol Oates. Bristol Evening Post. 13 Jan 1966. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse Uni versity Library. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as an Experi ence and an Institution. New York: Norton, 197 6. Ricks, Christopher. "The Unignorable Real." Rev. of New York Review of Books, by Joyce Carol Oates. 12 Feb 1970: 22-24. Riddle, Lyn. "Where Tragedy Occurred, a Coming Together." The New York Times. 22 Jan 1995. N10 . Robson, David. "When Girls Will be Boys." Rev. of Foxfire. by Joyce Carol Oates. Sunday Telegraph. 8 Aug 1993. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Spe cial Collections, Syracuse University Library. Robinson, Marilynne. "The Guilt She Left Behind." Rev. of Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is Mv Heart, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 22 Apr 1990: 7. Roiphe, Katie. The Morning After: Sex. Fear, and Feminism on Campus. Boston : Little, Brown, 1993. Roof, Judith. "How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time . . ." in Elam and Weigman, 55-69. Rowlandson, Mary. The sovereignty and goodness of God: together with the faithfulness of His promises dis played: being a narrative of the captivity and restora tion of Mrs. Marv Rowlandson. Ed. Neal Salisbury. Bos ton : Bedford Books, 1997. Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon, 1989. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. "Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved." American Litera ture . 64 (September 1992): 567-597. 219 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women's Writing. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1983. "S.C. Dad Says He Believed Wife." Associated Press. 16 Nov 1994. 'S.R.A.' Review of The Bluest Eve, by Toni Morrison. Newsweek. 30 Nov 1970: 96. Sage, Lorna. "Girl Gangs Reclaimed." Rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 13 Aug 1993: 19. "Surrender to the Secret Female Tide." Rev. of Mysteries of Winterthurn, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 20 July 1984: 801. Sale, Roger. "What Went Wrong?" Rev. of Wonderland. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Review of Books. 21 Oct 1971: 3+. Samois. Coming to Power. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1981. Sanborn, Sara. "Two Major Novelists All by Herself." Rev. of Do With Me What You Will. by Joyce Carol Oates. The Nation. 5 Jan 1974: 20-21. Sarachild, Kathie. "Consciousness Raising: A Powerful Weapon," in Redstockings, eds. 140-150. "A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising." In Notes from the Second Year. 78-80. Saunders, Kate. "The Haunting Emotions." Rev. of You Must Remember This. by Joyce Carol Oates. Books. (Jan 1988). Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. Schmudde, Carol E. "Knowing When to Stop: A Reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved." College Language Association Journal. 37.2 (December 1993): 121-135. Schuler, Barbara. "Oates Whips up Spicey Story for 'American Appetites'." Rev. of American Appetites. by Joyce Carol Oates. (Fort Lauderdale) Sun Sentinal. 19 March 1989. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. 220 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Scott, A. 0. "Angel of Darkness." Rev. of Man Crazy, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 21 Sept 1997: 10-11. Scott, Joan. "Experience." Feminists Theorize the Po litical . Eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. New York: Routledge, 1992. 22-40. See, Carolyn. "Interracial Love Story from Joyce Carol Oates." Rev. of I Lock Mv Door Upon Mvself, by Joyce Carol Oates. Newsday. 4 Oct 1990. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse Uni versity Library. "For Joyce Carol Oates, It's All Academic." Rev. of Unholy Loves. by Joyce Carol Oates. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syra cuse University Library. Shapiro, Charles. "Law and Love." Rev. of Do With Me What You Will. by Joyce Carol Oates. The New Republic. 27 Oct 1973: 26-27. Shaw, Patrick. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing, 2000. "Shooting Wars." Rev. of them. by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 19 March 1971: 313. Showalter, Elaine. "Rethinking the Seventies: Women Writ ers and Violence," in Ackley. 237-254. "My Friend Joyce Carol Oates, An Intimate Por trait." Ms. March 1986 : 44+. Simmonds, Felly Nkweto. "Who are the Sisters? Differ ence, Feminism and Friendship." in Ang-Lygate et al, eds. Sinkler, Rebecca Pepper. "Oates Serious but Comic Look at Women's Lot." Rev. of Bloodsmoor Romance. by Joyce Carol Oates. ? 20 Sept 1982: 1, 6. "Time and Her Sisters." Rev. of Solstice. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 20 Jan 1985: 4. 221 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sipper, Ralph B. "The Fundamental Bleakness of the '50s." Rev. of You Must Remember This. by Joyce Carol Oates. San Francisco Chronicle. 2 Aug 1987. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse Uni versity Library. Sissman, L.E. "Beginner's Luck." Rev of The Blues Eve, by Toni Morrison. Mew Yorker. date: 92+. Slater, Joyce R. "Sisterhood of Vigilantes." Rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. by Joyce Carol Oates. Chicago Tribune. 8 Aug 1993. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse Uni versity Library. Smith, David with Carol Calef. Bevond All Reason: Mv Life With Susan Smith. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1995. Smith, Paul. "Bouncing Off the Ropes." Rev. of On Box ing, by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 18 Dec 1987: 1412 . Solanis, Valerie. Excerpts from "The SCUM Manifesto." In Morgan, ed. 514-519. Souda, Michele. "A Brooding Family Tragedy from Our Own Angel of Darkness." Rev. of Angel of Light, by Joyce Carol Oates. Chicago Tribune. 16 Aug 1981. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. "Spanned and Splayed." Rev. of A Garden of Earthly De lights . by Joyce Carol Oates. TLS. 4 June 1970: 601. Stark, Stephen. "The Dark Weekend of the Soul." Rev. of What I Lived For. by Joyce Carol Oates. Post. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. Storace, Patricia. "A Home is Not a House." Rev. of Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is Mv Heart. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Review of Books. 16 Aug 1990: 22-24. Stimpson, Mansel. "A Little Truth Goes a Long Way." Rev. of Marva: A Life. by Joyce Carol Oates. The Literary Review. (Jan 1987). Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Depart ment of Special Collections, Syracuse University Li brary . 222 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Susan Smith's Confession--Text." Associated Press. 22 Nov 1994. Taylor, D. J. "Cunning Little Vixens." Rev. of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates. Sun day Times. 15 Aug 1993 : 9. Tempiin, Charlotte. Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong. Lawrence, UP Kansas, 1995. Thompson-Noel, Michael. "Lady's Straight Lefts." Rev. of On Boxing. by Joyce Carol Oates. The Financial Times. 4 July 1987. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. Towers, Robert. "Death in a Glass-walled House." Rev. of American Appetites. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 1 Jan 1989: 5. Rev. of Cat's Eve. by Margaret Atwood. New York Review of Books. 27 April 1989: 50-52. Tucker, Carl. "Looseleaves." Rev. of What I Lived For, by Joyce Carol Oates. Patent Trader. 5 May 1995. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collec tions, Syracuse University Library. Michael Upchurch, Rev. of Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates. San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner Book Review. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. United States Dept. of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statis tics . Crime and Victim Statistics: Crime Characteris tics . chttp://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/ cvict_c.htm#relate>. Updike, John. "What You Deserve is What You Get." Rev. of You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates. New Yorker. 28 Dec 1987: 119-123. Van Biema, David. "Parents Who Kill." Time. 14 Nov 1994. 50-51. Var meulin, Michael. "'Childwold' Grows to Chilling Power." Rev. of Childwold, by Joyce Carol Oates. Chi- 223 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. caao Sun Times. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. Vickroy, Laurie. "The Force Outside/The Force Inside: Mother-Love and Regenerative Spaces in Sula and Be loved ." Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review. 8.2 (Fall/Winter 1993): 28-45. Wagner, Valeria. "In the Name of Feminism," in Elam and Wiegman. 119-130. Walker, Alice. Letter to the Editor. New York Times Book Review. 2 0 Jan 1974: 27. Welldon, Estela W. Mother. Madonna. Whore: The Idealiza tion and Denigration of Motherhood. New York: Guilford Press, 1992. Wills, Garry. "Blood Sport." Rev. of On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Review of Books. 18 Feb 1988: 5-7. Wilson, A. N. "Gothic Prose." Rev. of Beliefleur. by Joyce Carol Oates. Spectator. 14 March 1981: 19. Wolf, Naomi. Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How it Will Change the 21st Century. New York: Random House, 1993. Wolff, Geoffrey. "Miss Oates Loves to Splash Blood on Us." Rev. of Wonderland. by Joyce Carol Oates. New York Times Book Review. 24 Oct 1971: 5, 10. Wyatt, Jean. "Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Sym bolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 108.3 (May 1993): 474-88. Wyatt, Robert. "Oates Return to Realism Succeeds." Rev. of Marva: A Life. by Joyce Carol Oates. Nashville Ten nessean . 9 March 1986. Joyce Carol Oates Papers, De partment of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library. "Xavier, Perdita, and, of course Aunt Georgina." Rev. of Mysteries of Winterthurn. by Joyce Carol Oates. Boston Globe. 12 Feb 1984: B12-13. 224 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Young, Iris Marion. "The Idea of Community and the Pol tics of Difference." In Nicholson, ed. 300-323. Zedner, Lucia. Women. Crime, and Custody in Victorian England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Creator Senecal, Nikole Alexa (author)

Core Title (Mis)representations of violent women

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, American,Literature, Canadian (English),Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest,women's studies

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Gottesman, Ron (committee chair), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Grant, Judith (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-260250

Unique identifier UC11339379

Identifier 3093911.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-260250 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3093911.pdf

Dmrecord 260250

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Senecal, Nikole Alexa

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

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