Christina Milletti on women's innovative fiction
"How, after all, do we "classify" women's fiction?" asks Christina Milletti in her introduction to "Everything Begins with a Yes: Innovative Fiction by International Women," the issue focus she edited for the September/October 2009 issue of American Book Review.
Milletti, an assistant professor of English at the University at Buffalo and author of The Religious and Other Fictions (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006) approaches what she calls "an ongoing discomfort" with the question of "difference"--to be more precise, the relation of "gender" to "genre"--with taxonomic rigor:
Is [women's fiction] a subdivision of the greater rubric "fiction? A [subjugated] "literary subculture"...given the "statistical majority" of women? Is women's fiction a "minor" literature, a "political" literature, a literature "of its own"? What is its object? Representation, for instance? Readership? Resistance?...And who writes it? Is women's fiction written by women, or is it a literature about women? Is it a feminist literature (if so, whose feminism?) Does it represent a "tradition"? (If so, whose tradition?) Finally, what do we mean by women's innovative fiction anyway? Innovative...compared to what?
Milletti's unwillingness to permit unexamined assumptions about women's writing go unchallenged leads her "to examine the role of language itself within this tangle of thorns." While conceding that ""strategies for approaching innovative writing by women have settled in two camps: those who propose the feminine is revealed in experimental works through specific stylistic devices--i.e., a fluidity of prose, the nonlinearity of narrative elements, a decentered or nonhierarchical plot structure--and those who are more hesitant to connect gender with [technique]," she writes:
It would appear, in short, that even when we hope to showcase the work of women, how the idea of the feminine is used and deployed (even with optimistic intentions) is itself at issue. I'd therefore like to propose the following: that we begin to create forums in which the idea of the "feminine" is also at stake--not merely designated as a simple condition of inclusion. That we begin to question who, exactly "we" is: how are "we" a "collective" body of women writers? What conditions connect us? What conditions keep us isolated from one another? How can we speak together, if not strictly, as one? After all, do all innovative women writers agree on the wealth of meanings the terms "woman" or "innovative" invoke?...What we may very well discover is that women's innovative fictions are not founded in gender--so much as in the critique of gender.
Writing about the enigmatic Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star (1977), Milletti writes, "[It] is, on one level, the story of a humble (and humbled) girl. Yet it is also a narrative that investigates how (as [Judith] Butler might say) girls are 'girled' --how the question of gender comes into being--by the language that represents them...in Lispector's fictions (as well as those by many other innovative fictions by women), a challenge to gender--as well as a critique of gender's operations--arises."
Among the women writers whose recent work is reviewed in the focus section of the issue are Mary Caponegro (All Fall Down), Lydia Davis (The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis), Rikki Ducornet (The One Marvelous Thing), Janet Frame (Towards Another Summer), Bhanu Kapil (Humanimal, a Project for Future Children), Christine Montalbetti (Western), Lynne Tillman (Love Sentence) and Magdalena Tulli (Flaw).
In the recent past, American Book Review has typically made the content of its issue focus sections available online, but that isn't the case here. If you want to read Milletti's introductory essay and the reviews in the issue focus section, you'll have to visit your local bookseller or your favorite library.
--R.D. Pohl
