AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons
Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut Edited by David Simmons Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech By Dianne L. Chambers The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682 1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion By Denise Mary MacNeil Norman Mailer s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest Edited by John Whalen-Bridge Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction By Christopher Kocela Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities By Mary Jane Hurst
Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction American Voices and American Identities Mary Jane Hurst
LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND COMMUNITY IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION Copyright Mary Jane Hurst, 2011 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11045-8 All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-29289-9 ISBN 978-0-230-11826-3 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230118263 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hurst, Mary Jane, 1952 Language, gender, and community in late twentieth-century fiction : American voices and American identities / Mary Jane Hurst. p. cm. (American literature readings in the 21st century) Includes bibliographical references. 1. American fiction 20th century History and criticism. 2. Communities in literature. 3. Language and languages in literature. 4. Gender identity in literature. 5. National characteristics, American in literature. 6. Multiculturalism in literature. I. Title. PS374.C586H87 2011 813.709355 dc22 2010035923 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2011
For Dan, Katherine, and Chris
Contents Preface Acknowledgments ix xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Finding One s Place by Finding One s Voice in Ernest J. Gaines s A Lesson Before Dying and Alice Walker s Possessing the Secret of Joy 21 3 Language and Gender in the Academic Communities of Ann Beattie s Another You and John Updike s Memories of the Ford Administration 51 4 Balancing Self and Other through Speech and Silence in Chang- rae Lee s Native Speaker and Amy Tan s The Hundred Secret Senses 77 5 Love, Destruction, and Wounded Hearts in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris 103 6 Contours of the Future in Denise Chávez s Face of an Angel and Rudolfo Anaya s Alburquerque 139 7 Twenty- First- Century Reflections on American Voices and American Identities 171 Notes 185 Bibliography 193 Index 219
Preface Art provides the means not only to express and experience the emotional and intellectual range of human capacity, but also to escape finite boundaries and seek awareness beyond that which already exists. The literary arts, especially in narrative forms, appeal to us in part because they portray ways of perceiving, organizing, and understanding the world, thereby enabling or inspiring readers to perceive, organize, and understand the world anew. In reading fiction, we are able to observe and engage in a process of discovery about the characters, plots, settings, and themes created by the author. Through literary criticism, we continue that process of discovery and extend it to the discovery of process; that is, we aim to enhance the discovery of texts that authors have created and, in addition, we aim to develop understandings of the processes that flow into and out of the creation and interpretation of texts. Both the ease and the difficulty of approaching recent or contemporary fiction lie in the familiarity of the discoveries and of the processes. But, like all literary art, recent fiction and criticism offer opportunities for new and renewed insights about literature and about life. Language, which is one of the distinctive features making humans human, is the medium of literature and the means of communication between and among authors, characters, and readers. Gender has always been a basic organizing principle in life, of course, but acute questioning of assumptions about gender and gender roles is a primary feature of recent and contemporary cultures. The place of the individual with respect to the surrounding community has been an essential tension in American culture and American literature since the founding of the United States, but a variety of factors heightened sensitivities about personal and group identities in the 1990s at the approach of a new century and a new millennium. Language allows for the construction and performance of gender and for the construction and performance of individual and community identity. In fiction across the many American communities of the 1990s, the universal themes of language, gender, and
x PREFACE community are intertwined in interesting, instructive, and sometimes inspiring ways. Recognizing and exploring these themes offer opportunities for processes of discovery and for discoveries of process about American voices and American identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Acknowledgments I am most grateful to all my teachers, colleagues, students, friends, and, especially, family members, who recently, in the past, and over many decades have influenced my understanding of literature, language, and life in expected and unexpected ways. Any and all shortcomings in this volume or in me are, of course, my own, and I apologize for them. I appreciate the long periods of other work that kept me from this project, for such time allowed me to reflect more deeply and at greater length about the issues. I appreciate the brief but crucial research leaves that allowed me time first to commence and then to conclude this project. Though I have not had the privilege of meeting them in person, I thank the wonderful writers whose novels are discussed here. I acknowledge with fondness and appreciation LASSO, the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, as some of my early thoughts about language, gender, and community formed my presidential address to the association and were printed as such in the 1998 Southwest Journal of Linguistics.