Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

by Catherine Romagnolo

Overview

In the beginning there was . . . the beginning. And with the beginning came the power to tell a story. Few book-length studies of narrative beginnings exist, and not one takes a feminist perspective. Opening Acts reveals the important role of beginnings as moments of discursive authority with power and agency that have been appropriated by writers from historically marginalized groups. Catherine Romagnolo argues for a critical awareness of how social identity plays a role in the strategic use and critical interpretation of narrative beginnings.

The twentieth-century U.S. women writers whom Romagnolo studies—Edith Wharton, H.D., Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, and Amy Tan—have seized the power to disrupt conventional structures of authority and undermine historical master narratives of marriage, motherhood, U.S. nationhood, race, and citizenship. Using six of their novels as points of entry, Romagnolo illuminates the ways in which beginnings are potentially subversive, thereby disrupting the reinscription of hierarchically gendered and racialized conceptions of authorship and agency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803285002
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	10/01/2015
Series:	Frontiers of Narrative
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	793 KB

About the Author

Catherine Romagnolo is an associate professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Lebanon Valley College. Her work has appeared in Studies in the Novel and Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory and has been anthologized in Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices (Nebraska, 2009).

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Opening Acts

Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

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By Catherine Romagnolo

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8500-2

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CHAPTER 1

No Place for Her Individual Adventure

Motherhood, Marriage, and New Beginnings in Summer

The suppression of maternal power and female agency resides at the origins of many nineteenth-century women's narratives. In novels such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, it is the very absence of a mother figure that opens a narrative space, allowing the heroine's plot to move forward. As Marianne Hirsch asserts, "Maternal repression actually engenders the female fiction" (57). Many conventional narratives of female development help to produce conceptions of female subjectivity that discount or demonize the power of the maternal and reinforce the power of the paternal. As we see in Jane Eyre, where Jane must relinquish her attachment to Miss Temple, Helen, and her female cousins in order to fulfill the social contract and submit to a marriage with Rochester, the absence of the maternal figure and her replacement by a paternal authority seems to be a necessary beginning to full interpellation into language and the social structures that organize society.

The cultural norms associated with heterosexuality, marriage, and motherhood are deeply embedded within these narratives of female development. These stories have played an integral role in the discursive reproduction of heteronormative, patriarchal social structures in which the proper role for women is as wives and mothers, even as these roles are understood to be subsumed under male authority. Feminist scholars studying closure have argued persuasively that the conventional domestic novel, marriage narrative, and female bildungsroman overwhelmingly rely upon a teleological trajectory and a linear narrative pattern that constrain women's endings to three options: marriage, madness, or death. As writers like Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in Writing beyond the Ending, explain, the predominance of the nineteenth-century marriage narrative served to naturalize heterosexuality and marriage as a proper ending for a woman's "story."

But the beginnings of these narratives are at least equally significant. Their clear, bounded openings, predictable causal beginnings, and naturalized chronological beginnings facilitate the repetition and reiteration of a master narrative that subsumes female agency to male authority. In this conventional paradigm, maternal power is relinquished or absent at the discursive beginning. The steady temporal progression from moral and/or social ignorance at the chronological beginning of the story leads to moral growth attained by the acceptance of paternal authority — quite often in the form of the social contract of marriage. This frequently discussed marriage ending is overwhelmingly set into motion by a causal beginning in heterosexual romance and courtship. The Lamplighter, by Maria Susanna Cummins, is a classic example of this type of narrative. It opens with a motherless girl, Gertrude, and proceeds through her education by the paternal figure of Trueman Flint; finally, her development into a moral woman is rewarded in the end with marriage. The clearly delineated borders of this narrative structure suggest a singular natural and unquestionable origin from which the story issues, invoking, in J. Hillis Miller's terms, the notion of "some generative source or authority, on which the development of a new story may be based" (57). The invocation of an authoritative source from which the narrative of female development comes mirrors and reinforces the "natural-ness" of the paternal authority, female submissiveness, and heterosexual romance depicted in this fiction.

Edith Wharton's novel Summer illuminates and critiques the role beginnings play in the divesting of female power by conventional nineteenth-century women's fiction. Although many of Wharton's novels address the representation of the maternal in the literary and social narratives of her time, none do so more directly than Summer. Charity Royall, a displaced and motherless girl, evokes the heroines of nineteenth-century women's fiction, marking and critiquing the conventions that deprecate maternal authority and appropriate female power. Summer illuminates the gendered norms embedded within narratives of female development, exposing the role these stories play in the discursive reproduction of heteronormative, patriarchal social structures.

The significance of the concept of motherhood in Summer has been duly noted by Wharton scholars. But Wharton's critique goes much deeper than her critics have acknowledged, a fact that emerges when we examine the novel though the lens of beginnings. Summer criticism has tended to focus on the ending of the novel, and in particular, on the marriage of the protagonist, Charity, to her foster father, lawyer Royall. Many critics are understandably unsettled by this arguably "unhealthy and incestuous" resolution to Charity's crisis (Ammons 131). Indeed, it seems from Wharton's description of the novel as one of "grim places, ... insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation" that she intended her readers to be discomfited (Backward Glance 294). And yet, despite this bleak characterization, many of Summer's critics have insistently overlooked its darkness. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, for instance, describes the end of the novel as depicting "the only kind of happiness that can span a lifetime, ... a hymn to generativity" (243, 293). David Holbrook claims, "[T]he novel ... celebrates 'life' and 'being' that ... transcend the character's sordid origins" (99), and Carol Wershoven refers to the ending as "a coming home to a union built together ... as equals for good" (10). These critics view the novel as an affirmation of motherhood and heterosexual romance, while missing altogether the suffocating air assigned to these institutions.

A focus on the ending of Summer has sparked significant debate among critics. Many of these scholars accurately depict Wharton's strong critique of patriarchal social structures that contain and appropriate female agency. But many of these same critics also want to see embedded in this critique a type of idealization of motherhood, which has been "depreciated, disdained, and ultimately, destroyed" by the representations of patriarchy in the novel (Elbert 4). Monika Elbert reads Wharton as mourning the loss of "motherhood," represented by the "primeval mother within [Charity]" (7). Viewing the novel as a struggle between "male civilization" and "female nurturing," she argues that "all the excessive productivity and destruction comes as a result of man's rule" (8). This type of reading, which idealizes "motherhood" as an alternative that will redeem an excessively male-dominated world, does not do justice to the complexity of Wharton's critique.

It is easy to understand why critics have been preoccupied with the ending of Summer. As readers, we want to make sense of the way in which the formerly rebellious, resistant Charity has been transformed, "her strength slipping away," "her resistance melting," being led to the altar "as passively as a tired child" (243–44). But, considering Wharton's emphasis on origins — maternal, biological, geographic — the novel actually seems to be exhorting us to examine beginnings. If we shift our focus from endings to formal and conceptual beginnings, the sense of a binary structure, which valorizes an idyllic notion of motherhood over a demonized masculinity, is dislodged. What is revealed instead is that Wharton is as skeptical of an idealization of motherhood as she is of the patriarchal system under which the characters live. While Charity certainly seeks both a surrogate mother as well her own maternal biological origins, these origins are not the ideal she hopes to find. Such an idealized origin is, by its very nature, untenable. Charity cannot reach this "great mother" because she doesn't exist as either the monstrosity of the patriarchal myth or as the "primeval mother."

Starting with its primary discursive beginning, Summer displays a discursive circularity that reflects the oppressiveness of the social milieu of North Dormer. By opening and closing in the same geographic space, the ominous red house in which the protagonist was raised, the narrative transforms the developing agency of Charity into stagnation. The progression traditionally associated with narratives of development becomes stasis, illuminating and revising the teleology of the conventional narrative and challenging the notion of marriage and motherhood as "the happy ending" of female development. Further intervening in conventional notions of female development, the heterosexual romance that serves as the causal beginning of the plot leads not to Charity's fulfillment and self- actualization, but to a depraved marriage and the loss of her mother.

Wharton's secondary discursive beginnings mirror the stasis evoked by the primary discursive beginning. Through an ebb-and-flow alternation between opening images of freedom and of containment, she suggests the futility of Charity's search for liberty and independence. Each of the secondary openings in Summer is presented as an opportunity for a new beginning, and each of these opportunities recedes, overtaken by the more powerful patriarchal social forces of North Dormer. Furthermore, through a repetitive return by the narrative to the chronological beginnings of Charity's story, Wharton rejects the notion of an oppositionally powerful maternal force, which would offer freedom and nurturing to her protagonist. She suggests that Charity's search for her idealized maternal origins is misguided, that the mythical mother Charity seeks does not exist.

Discursive and Conceptual Beginnings: Revising the Bildungsroman Tradition

Summer represents one of Wharton's strongest interrogations of the fluctuating gender roles and shifting social norms that attended the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in the United States. Published in 1917, Wharton's novel responds to the notion of new beginnings implicit in the fact that women's roles, particularly in relation to marriage and motherhood, seemed to be perched on the threshold of a change. The "true woman" of the nineteenth century was refashioning herself as the "new woman," said to embody all of the positive characteristics of "womanhood of past ages." As Winnifred Harper Cooley, author of The New Womanhood (1904), describes her, "The sufferings of the past have but strengthened her, maternity has deepened her, education is broadening her — and she now knows that she must perfect herself if she would perfect the race, and leave her imprint upon immortality, through her offspring or her works" (31). The "new woman" was said to be independent minded, educated, and strong; she eschewed the self-sacrifice and submissiveness associated with "true womanhood," and she was to be socially and politically equal to her male counterparts. But historians tell us that the material and social conditions of women during this period of optimism failed to live up to the ideal. As Estelle B. Freedman explains, despite claims of the emancipation of women, "professional gains were minimal, industrial wages discriminatory, and unionization difficult. Marriage and motherhood brought most women out of the labor force and, supposedly, home to domestic and sexual fulfillment" (393). Wharton, who wrote her novel at a time when one might expect her to be optimistic about the transformation of gendered norms, conveys a deep sense of skepticism about this new beginning for her protagonist, Charity Royall, and for women in general. Looking back on a Victorian ideal of womanhood that railroaded women into marriage and subordinated them to male authority, Wharton's representation of the ideal of new womanhood registers not much difference. Despite the claims of the broadening, empowering effects of motherhood and education, the twentieth-century woman, as critiqued in Wharton's story, is subjected to a power structure dominated by males, in which new beginnings are nearly impossible.

Arranged in part as a quest for maternal origins, in many ways Summer might be said to conform to the conventions of the female bildungsroman. That is, the reader follows a female protagonist on a quest for self-fulfillment, and the success of her quest appears to be posited on the rejection of her maternal origins. Wharton's thematic interrogation of the concept of origins and her formal exploitation of the power of narrative beginnings, however, intervenes in these conventional paradigms of motherhood and illuminates a challenge to a genealogical narrative paradigm in which the paternal always trumps the maternal. Moreover, Wharton refuses to allow the inverse of this pattern — the idealization of the maternal figure — to replace it.

Like many novels in the bildungsroman tradition, Summer's opening prepares the reader for the narrative that follows. Through the symbolic positioning of its main character, the opening foreshadows the transformation she will undergo. But also foreshadowed by this opening is Wharton's revision of the bildungsroman. Unlike the traditional linear plotline, which takes the protagonist through a series of rites of passage and into adulthood and self- possession, Charity's development is not a clear progression toward greater self-knowledge, maturity, and power but a jagged line that begins and ends in the same space. Instead of moving forward toward an eventual and inevitable goal, Summer's progression ebbs and flows; each step Charity makes toward independence and agency is met by a containment of that agency, a pulling back, until finally the novel comes full circle: ending where it began.

As the novel opens, Charity stands on the threshold of lawyer Royall's house, a space marked by a liminality evoked in the very first line: "A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep" (3). The threshold symbolism of this opening highlights Charity's status as a young woman on the edge of sexual maturity and marks her transition into adulthood. While invoking a typical symbol of the bildungsroman tradition, Wharton utilizes and revises its conventions. Charity's threshold does not simply represent a passage into adulthood and individuation; it calls up both the possibilities of this passage and the suppression of those possibilities.

This symbolism is further reinforced by the symbol of Royall's red house, a representation of Charity's burgeoning sexuality, the containment of that sexuality, and more ominously, the threat of her sexual exploitation. While the house represents a place in which Charity "holds sway," it is also the space in which her power is contained, constrained, and finally domesticated through marriage: "She ... looked down on the house where she held sway. It stood just below her, cheerless and untended, its faded red front divided from the road by a 'yard' with a path bordered by gooseberry bushes, a stone wall"(14). The often-emphasized red color of the house suggests its connection to Charity's sexuality. The bushes and stone wall that border the house, however, represent the patriarchal structures that eventually contain Charity's sexual agency, a power marked by duality. It is both the means through which she exerts some control over her surroundings and the means through which the social structure controls and exploits her: "Lawyer Royall ruled in North Dormer; and Charity ruled in lawyer Royall's house. She had never put it to herself in those terms; but she knew her power, knew what it was made of, and hated it" (13-14). Charity's agency is contingent and tenuous, and in an opening moment of foreshadowing, just as she is about to venture out of the red house, she sees Lucius Harney, a visitor from out of town and her soon-to-be lover, and instinctively draws back into the house: "Her heart contracted a little, and the shrinking that sometimes came over her when she saw people with holiday faces made her draw back into the house and pretend to look for the key that she knew she had already put into her pocket" (3–4). The pattern that structures this opening mirrors the overall pattern of the narrative. Each time Charity takes steps toward self-empowerment, she is pushed back by the external patriarchal institutions of North Dormer or by her own internalization of those structures. Harney's association with masculine power instinctively causes Charity to withdraw from the public space of the street and the independence her stepping into this space might imply. She pulls back into the house, which represents her containment, back into the domestic space deemed proper.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Opening Acts by Catherine Romagnolo. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. No Place for Her Individual Adventure: Motherhood, Marriage, and New Beginnings in Summer,
2. Waves of Beginnings: The Ebb of Heterosexual Romance in Paint It Today,
3. Moving in Lofty Spirals: Circularity and Narrative Beginnings in The Bluest Eye,
4. Circling the History of Slavery: Multilayered Beginnings in Beloved,
5. Swan Feathers and Coca-Cola: Authenticity and Origins in The Joy Luck Club,
6. Bordering Yolanda García: Recessive Origins in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

“The field of feminist narratology is growing, but none of these theory-driven books offers the kind of rich, in-depth study of one historical-geographical collocation of texts that Opening Acts does. Any teacher or student of literary theory, of the history of the novel, or of feminist and ethnic approaches to literature would find something of great interest in this book.”—Margaret Homans, professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University and author of Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing

Margaret Homans

"A welcome addition to the field of narrative theory."—Marilyn Edelstein, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature - Marilyn Edelstein

“The subject of narrative beginnings is important to literary criticism in several different fields: national literary traditions as well as comparative literature. . . . Romagnolo seeks to right the course of the early studies in this area by emphasizing feminist and ethnic-studies-inflected readings. Opening Acts contributes an overview of the existing literature, an assessment of what is lacking in that corpus, and an extrapolation of concepts to include often-neglected subjects in this field . . . expanding the established theoretical frame for narrative beginnings.”—Carlos Riobó, chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the City College of New York and author of Cuban Intersection of Literary and Urban Spaces 
 

Carlos Riobó