Content area
Full Text
Elaine Showalter, A JURY OF HER PEERS: AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS FROM ANNE BRADSTREET TO ANNIE PROULX. New York: Knopf, 2009 (pap., Vintage, 2010). 608p. bibl. index. $30.00, ISBN 978-1400041237; pap., $16.95, ISBN 978-1400034420.
Elaine Showalter is a feminist icon - a pioneering figure in women's studies and literary theory and a self-admitted intellectual product of the American 1960s and 70s. She was at the cutting edge of feminist criticism in the 1970s academic world, and is well-known for such works as The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, which she edited in 1985, and A Literature of Their Own: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, a survey of British women writers (published in 1977 and revised in 1999), in which she posited four stages of women's writing: feminine, feminist, female and FREE. Showalter discusses these stages again in her introduction to A Jury of Her Peers to help delineate the cultural and societal paths of American women writers.
A Jury of Her Peers proposes to create a literary canon of American women writers and seeks to recognize a literary heritage that can serve as a basis for theory and criticism. Emphasizing women as writers rather than as readers, Showalter includes only published authors in this survey - diaries, journals, and the like are not listed or discussed. Women's more private writings do help to form the bedrock on which her analysis is based, however, since they have established a woman's place in the cultures of various chronological periods.
The title of this new work aptly illustrates Showalter's blending of literary analysis with cultural and political history. Susan Glaspell's 1917 story, from which this book takes its title, is about a woman, Minnie, who is accused of strangling her husband. The story examines the different perspectives brought to the examination of Minnie's house by a couple of local officials and their wives. The men search for hard evidence of murder; their wives are there only to pick up clothing to take to Minnie in jail, but as they look around they begin to notice domestic details that point to Minnie's having been in a very disturbed state. The men mock them for putting such stock in trivial details, but the wives...