Search

In a popular antebellum conduct book titled The Young Lady's Friend, Eliza W. R. Farrar advises young female readers of "a custom among young ladies of holding each other's hands, and fondling them before company, which had much better be dispensed with." She instructs, "All kissing and caressing of your female friends should be kept for your hours of privacy, and never be indulged in before gentlemen." "There are some reasons for this," Farrar explains, "which will readily suggest themselves, and others, which can only be known to those well acquainted with the world, but which are conclusive against the practice" (269). The advice contains an interesting paradox: "[K]issing and caressing" between girls is simultaneously encouraged and condemned, innocent and dangerous--innocent for young girls not yet "well acquainted with the world," but dangerous in the eyes of "gentlemen" and mature women like Farrar, who evidently knew better. Only a tenuous line between knowledge and ignorance separates pure "girlish friendship" from its more threatening sexual possibilities (252). The passage is striking for the way it complicates more idealized contemporary images of female romantic friendship. The "custom" to which Farrar refers--"kissing and caressing" between girls--has been well documented in countless letters, diaries, and literary works of the era, leading a number of cultural historians, most notably Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman, to conclude that female homoerotic behavior was condoned and even celebrated during this period. While these historians are correct to caution against ascribing twentieth- and twenty-first-century attitudes about sexuality to the previous century, the dichotomy they create between pre and post-sexology culture overstates the degree to which female homoerotic behavior was casually accepted in nineteenth-century America. While some scholarship has briefly addressed the anxiety over female homoeroticism revealed in conduct books by Farrar and others, the topic warrants more discussion, especially with regard to texts written before the beginning of the medical discourse on homosexuality produced by German sexologists around 1870. (1) One such work is Rose Terry Cooke's 1858 story "My Visitation," (2) which overtly fictionalizes the tension between "girlish friendship" and female same-sex desire that appears in conduct books. The date and mainstream publication of this story, as well as Cooke's popularity, make a particularly compelling case for an expansion of thinking about how women's romantic friendships were perceived by pre-sexology nineteenth-century culture and also for how modern lesbian identities have evolved. Susan Koppelman includes "My Visitation" in "Two Friends" and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers. She finds it surprising that the editors of Harper's New Monthly Magazine published the story because they had specifically called on writers "to exercise moral self-censorship so that nothing in the magazine would 'violate the house policy of printing only material that could be read aloud in any family circle'"; nevertheless, she concludes that perhaps they did so because, at the end, "this woman who so passionately loves another woman, is learning to love a man." Indeed, the lesson of the story is far from subtle. Koppelman suggests the obviousness of female homoeroticism despite a "double remove ... provided by a ghost story and an unreliable narrator" ("Rose Terry" 22); however, Cooke overtly depicts female homoeroticism as the very problem her narrator must overcome. I suggest that Cooke's story presents a model of what Sarah Emily Newton calls "conduct-fiction," a "hybrid" fiction that "combin[es the] behavioral advice" of conduct literature with popular fiction. According to Newton, this fiction, which emerged during the colonial period and continued until about 1900, "develops a mythic model to test female virtue as well as affirm women's entitlement through motherhood and self-control" (140). …

Francisco Ayala's New World writings are characterized by deep meditation on factors underlying the misuse of power and violent divisions among people. This becomes evident when his exceptional treatment of such topics as dictatorship and the Spanish Civil War are examined in the context of their generic representa tion. His subtle artistic procedures place both interpretive and moral onus on the reader. unreliable narrator The tendency to partisanship continued with the first of the novels of this subgenre, Jos? M?rmol's Amalia (1851). The author and the point of view in the novel overtly identify them selves with the Unitarians in the quest for political power in Argentina against the incumbent Federalists headed by Juan Manuel de Rosas. The early prestige that was accorded to this novel, which demonstrated the hallmarks of romanticism, came from the coincidence of literary fashion and the political interests of the newspaper-owning class which serialized it for the newspaper reading class. In time, readers of the academic class who were sympathetic to the interests of the rural and minority people would take issue with the political slant and the image of the dictator. In approaching his writings on the theme of dictatorship, Ayala seems to have considered such interpretive changeableness to be a hazard and to strive for works of constructive stability in this as in other narrative subgenres. In 1968 Mario Vargas Llosa wrote to several leading Latin American novelists soliciting their collaboration in a project concerning dictators. We learn from one of these writers, the

Critics have not thoroughly examined two prominent aspects of La colmena: (1) the conflict in the narration between external appearance and inner reality, (2) the reason why the mystery of Dofia Margot's death is never solved. La colmena may be likened to a "puzzle" which the reader tries to piece together as s/he gathers information about Margot's murder. However, this puzzle is never satisfactorily resolved, because many of the pieces are missing; others are blurred by an uncooperative narrator, misinformation propagated by certain characters, and a fragmented narrative. Rather than writing an explicit essay of social protest, Cela causes us to experience injustice by using an original narrative device: the invitation to a mystery in which the narrator purposely frustrates us all the way to the story's end. The truncated ending forces us to come to terms with the limitations of truth in this fictional world, which is, in fact, a microcosm of the real world.

(1) That narrative unreliability is a concept separable from the concept of an unreliable narrator; (2) That narrative unreliability requires for its explanation the concept of an implied author; (3) That narrative unreliability bears close and interesting connections to the importantly distinct concept of an ambiguous narrative;1 (4) That we can explain the prevalence of certain devices in narrative in terms of the ease or difficulty of the reader's task in figuring out whether and how those devices are being used.

UNIVERSITIES, THOUGH PERIODICALLY ACCUSED OF being flOt beds of radicalism, have an innate conservatism in their rituals and institutions that manifests itself not only in the medieval hoods and gowns of graduation ceremonies, but also in the accepted forms of academic discourse. Scholars, including literary scholars, still tend to establish the intellectual respectability and viability of their arguments by grounding them in some pre-established authority. Bold, daring, and iconoclastic critics are generally those who cite bold, daring, and iconoclastic authori ties; these in turn usually refer themselves to some higher instance, be it Nietzsche or Marx, Freud or Lacan, Foucault or Derrida. This traditional reliance on authority might help explain one of the peculiarities of the criticism of Poe's fiction, specifically of his detective stories. Readers have learned that they cannot trust Poe, that they must approach his narratives warily and with suspicion. The self-absorbed, ob sessed figures through whom he relates his tales are notoriously unreliable in their perceptions and interpretations of events. But the problem with Poe's works goes beyond the unreliable narrator to the unreliable author. Poe as a writer was fascinated by what he called "mystification," by duplicity, obfuscation, manipulation. Himself an adept practitioner of the art of deception, he perpetrated several successful hoaxes on his audience in the course of his career, ranging from journalistic pieces such as "The Balloon-Hoax" to apparently serious but actually tongue-in-cheek critical essays such as "The Philosophy of Composition." His works are full of jokes, conundrums, sly tricks, often made (as in "The Premature Burial") at the expense of his reader. He was also, as we have learned to our chagrin, not above blatant plagiarism. But though we do not trust Poe as author or the often eccentric or half-mad narrators he creates in his tales, we, strangely enough, do tend to trust one of his characters, the brilliant analyst and ratiocinator C. Auguste

Interpretations of Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) often have failed to explain the complex symbolism of the narrative. Indeed, dismissive or tendentious criticisms of the text have caused it to be eclipsed by Larsen's "earlier and more intriguing" book, Quicksand (1928).1 This essay reexamines Passing as a work concerned with the simultaneous representation and construction of race and especially class, within a circumscribed community. As such, my paper contributes to debates within Black feminist criticism about the value of these aspects of identity in relation to the production of black female subjectivities. I contend that the novel's main characters are neither purely "psychological" beings, as Claudia Tate asserts, nor are they essentially "sexual" creatures, as Deborah McDowell argues. Rather, I read Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry as representatives of different ideologies locked in struggle for dominance. In her introduction to Passing Deborah McDowell, one of the most astute critics of Larsen's work, states that "many critics have been misled by the novel's epigraph ... [since] it invites the reader to place race at the center of any critical interpretation."2 It would appear that McDowell herself has been misled by Passing's obviously unreliable narrator. So too, McDowell seems to agree with Claudia Tate's belief that, "Race is peripheral to Passing. It is more a device to sustain the suspense than a compelling social issue."3 I disagree with these assertions because it seems to me that the text is "all about race" or rather, the mediation of race in relation to sexuality and class.4 McDowell recognizes certain tropes employed by Larsen and, like many other critics, she maintains that Irene Redfield is the primary referent of the novel's title. Ultimately, however, McDowell is unable to give a full explication of the text's meaning since she tries to read/uce the text as a tale of latent sexual passion without discussing the key issues of race and class. Thus, while her discussion is certainly valuable, one might also say that it reifies sexuality at the risk of not exploring how sexuality is connected inextricably with other historically produced phenomena such as race and class. In order to sustain her ingenious reading of Passing as a tale that "passes for straight" and sublimates lesbian desire, McDowell misses the more intricate implications addressed by Larsen's work. The iconography McDowell reads as sexual is simultaneously racial: it also expresses class positionality. For example, the objective correlative envelope used in the first paragraph of the novel signifies not only the "sexual" (McDowell reads it as a "metaphorical vagina") but also the sender's race (alien) and class (elite). Thus, my reading emends McDowell's by insisting on the importance of race and class in Passing. If race as well as class conflict must occupy a primary position in any discussion of

THE critical attention that has been given to point of view in Los de abajo (1915) is minimal in comparison to the proliferation of studies concerning characterization, theme and structure.' However, a careful reading of Los de abajo will reveal the importance of narrative viewpoint in the novel. Point of view is the vantage point from which the story is seen and told. According to Mier Sternberg, point of view is "the most comprehensive principle motivating the selection, combination and distribution of elements in the narrative text."2 For Norman Friedman, the problem of point of view has always been one of subjectivity, that is, the interference of an authorial narrator, versus objectivity, or the disappearance of the author.3 Friedman provides the technical framework to show the distinction between the two poles, one of subjective "telling" and the other of objective "showing." He devises a specific and identifiable set of narrative modes through which an author progressively removes himself from the story. For Wayne C. Booth this problem is not clearly defined; point of view is not just a technique for subjectivizing and objectivizing but a narrative element which is concerned with the manipulative effects of the author on the reader, creating different types of narrative distance between the two. Booth says that authors affect our perceptions by using reliable or unreliable narrators: "For practical criticism probably the most important of these kinds of distance is that between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator."4 In order to provide some background to the critical aspects under consideration in this article, it is necessary to point out that the concept of narrative viewpoint encompasses two dimensions, one that exists in the real world and another that exists in the imaginative world of the art-work. Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren state that one dimension-"point of view"-carries the basic attitude or idea of the author and the other-"focus of narration"' --describes the method of narration.5 Robert Weimann has taken the problem of definition and terminology one step further by suggesting the existence of a fusion of the two types of point of view, the historical and the structural, within a work of literature

S 0 MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the debt of American fiction 3to the tradition of the romance that critics have either overlooked or been hesitant about claiming too much for the realistic strain. Charles Brockden Brown, for example, is generally treated as the ancestor of later romance writers like Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, and Faulkner. Following Richard Chase,' Leslie Fiedler has observed that Brown's work belongs to "the mythopoeic novel" in which "realistic milieu and consistent character alike are dissolved . . . giving way to the symbolic landscape and the symbolic action."2 But this generalization does not hold true for Brown's Arthur Mervyn, a novel in which social milieu is very much a real environment conditioning its characters in a very immediate way. Arthur Mervyn is not only a pre-Freudian portrait of a character whose experiences reveal clear Oedipal feelings, but he is a young man who is moved by the ambitions and anxieties fostered by the American myth of success. The novel exists in two parts. The first part appeared in i799, and the second part in i8oo. In between Brown brought to completion and published Edgar Huntley. The full possibilities of the narrative's social and psychological realism seem to have occurred to Brown in the midst of composition. From a simple demonstration of the ways in which a virtuous young man resists temptation, Brown shifted to an attempt to convey the ironic interplay between Arthur's conscious and unconscious motivation and the sense of bewilderment that results from the ambiguity of appearances. Moreover, Brown responded to the technical demands of his content. His new vision led him to experiment with the techniques of multiple perspective and the device of the unreliable narrator.