Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography.

Donaldson, Susan V.

Edited by Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. xiv, 328 pp. Illustrations. $32.50.

This interesting collection of ten essays on individual Louisiana women writers, accompanied by a provocative introduction and an extensive bibliography, offers not so much a comprehensive survey of women's writing in Louisiana as a prolegomenon to future scholarship on Southern women's literature. While a good many of the essays tend to focus on biographical and plot summaries rather than close readings or theoretical issues, the contributors collectively accomplish the general aims of the editors, Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell, who seek "to foster a broader appreciation for an overlooked literary tradition of the past"-- Louisiana's rich and enormously complex artistic heritage--and to underscore the diversity of that heritage. Individual essays, along with the introduction and the bibliography, will prove useful tools for scholars intent on mining the richness of the state's literary legacies and exploring future avenues in the study of Southern women's writing.

The introduction, written by Barbara C. Ewell, does an unusually effective job of framing the essays that follow by underscoring the highly ambivalent nature of place for Louisiana women writers--and for Southern women writers in general. As Ewell observes, "women's relationship with place, intimate though it be, is usually not one of defining, but of being defined. Their place remains in the home, but the homeplace belongs to someone else." Hence women who write about place, Ewell concludes, frequently concentrate on "a discovery of boundaries and confinement--a recognition of the way in which their lives and vision are constrained by the familial rules that constitute female experience." There is also the issue, Ewell adds, of Louisiana's ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity, complicating and problematizing "typical" Southern assumptions about race, class, and gender. The result, Ewell notes, is "the peculiar otherness" of Louisiana women's writing, reflecting as those texts do the status of white women and women of color at the margins of regional life and the role of Other traditionally played by the South and particularly by Louisiana in the American imagination.

Following Ewell's introduction are essays by Clara Juncker on Sarah Morgan Dawson; Linda S. Coleman on Grace King; Ellen Peel on Kate Chopin; Alice Parker on Sidonie de la Houssaye; Patricia Brady on Mollie Moore Davis; Violet Harrington on Alice Dunbar-Nelson; Elizabeth Meese on Ada Jack Carver; Merrill Skaggs on Katherine Anne Porter; Elzbieta Oleksy on Shirley Ann Grau and Margaret Mitchell; Sylvia Patterson Iskander on Berthe Amoss; and J. Randal Woodland on Ellen Gilchrist, Sheila Bosworth, and Nancy Lemann. Of the ten contributions, the most substantial are by Juncker, Peel, Parker, Meese, and Woodland. In the opening essay Juncker makes a persuasive case for Civil War diarist Sarah Morgan Dawson as a "feminist deconstructionist" bristling against the boundaries of gender and the male script of war in which she found herself. Within the "more permissive world" of her journal, Juncker asserts, she discovered "the Other within," the "monstrosity evoking her difficulties adapting to her region's ideal of womanhood. Submitting Chopin's widely anthologized story "Desiree's Baby" to a semiotic and political reading, Peel argues that Desiree's blankness in the story threatens to disrupt semiotic order but nonetheless fails to dislodge any hierarchy of political power: Parker concentrates on the motif of passing and quadroon mistresses in New Orleans in Sidonie de la Houssaye's 1890s novel Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orleans and argues that de la Houssaye "both reproduces and subverts the inherited story: the Other may have neither legal nor political power but is still threatening (like the repressed, which can return in unforeseeable ways) as siren and witch." Meese in turn concerns herself with Ada Jack Carver's 1920s prize-winning stories about conflicting racial cultures in the state's Cane River country. Focusing his sights on three contemporary writers, Gilchrist, Bosworth, and Lemann, Woodland examines their confrontations with the "accumulated tradition" of New Orleans and their cautionary tales about the way a ... old stories maintain their vitality only by ensnaring new victims and perpetuating their curse."

These five essays in particular probe the subversiveness underlying the texts of ostensible conservatives like Sarah Morgan Dawson and Sidonie de la Houssaye as well as the ideological barriers preventing these writers from fully scrutinizing the confining web of race and gender. At their best, then, the essays as a whole point toward new readings of Southern women's literature based on theoretical developments in poststructuralist theory, feminist criticism, and African-American theory. At their worst, some of the contributions rely heavily upon biographical portraits, plot summaries, and reiterations of past critical assessments.

Still, the editors of this volume have done students of Southern literature and culture a genuine service in making these essays available and in compiling the invaluable bibliography of some two hundred women writing in English over the past century and a half--the one exception being Sidonie de la Houssaye, who wrote in French. Focusing more on primary than secondary sources, the bibliography will prove very useful to scholars interested in the Louisiana connections of such well-known figures as Katherine Anne Porter and Zora Neale Hurston and in up-and-coming young African-American writers like Brenda Osbey, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory and Mona Lisa Saloy.