Monday, February 23, 2009

Backstory to the Purfuit of Happineff

I'm not one to go so far as to claim there is no such thing as coincidence. When I experience the circumstances, it can cause my eyebrows to feel frisky. Rarely do I conclude that the encounter need be endowed with some higher meaning or significance. But worth noting? Indeed.

My inboxes tend to be befouled with all sorts of daily missives from a prior lifetime, sometimes the lifetime of a week ago, sometimes back when it was amusing to joke about WMDs behind the WH curtains, and a few even more dusty than that. Several involve brief book-reviews, which in a simpler pre-agrarian age I read all of dutifully. These days, not so much.

However, when time is not at a premium, I have come to realize (or, actually, remember - I used to greatly savor the NYT Sunday book section, way back when) that book reviews can be a great entertainment on their own.

Somehow I found time one day a while back to process several of these, only to encounter mention of the same previously unknown colonial woman author. Both of these reviews were absorbing on their own merits - the "coincidence" was just an extra spark for me (and, yes, excuse for this blog):

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
by Elaine Showalter

Authors breed books. Like mothers, they grow and nurture their creations. Yet the word author is derived from the Latin auctor and actually means a male begetter, or father. As authors Sarah Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously claimed in their 1979 book Madwoman in the Attic, a study of Victorian women writers, a "pen is in some sense...a penis."

The presumption that authorship is fundamentally masculine has affected Anglo American women since the 17th century, when a writer such as Anne Bradstreet, the first woman to publish a book in the New World, needed the authorization of male patrons. Modern critics also have struggled to legitimate their interest in women writers. As Elaine Showalter detailed three decades ago in A Literature of Their Own -- her groundbreaking study of British women novelists -- "It has been difficult for critics to consider...women's literature theoretically because of their tendency to project and expand their own culture-bound stereotypes of femininity, and to see in women's writing an eternal opposition of biological and aesthetic creativity."

Now Showalter seeks to extend this earlier work to compile what she herself dubs "the first literary history of American women writers." A Jury of Her Peers participates in the tradition of recovering and reclaiming women writers omitted from histories, studies and anthologies of American literature. Drawing on past recovery projects, she provides a breathtaking overview of the intersections of gender and genre in American letters, including discussions of lesser-known writers such as Mary Rowlandson, who, after being abducted by Narragansett Indians, wrote the first "captivity narrative" of the Puritan era; Frances E. W. Harper, who published Iola Leroy, one of the the first novels by an African American woman; Ursula Le Guin, author of The Left Hand of Darkness and a pioneer of American science-fiction writing; and Gish Jen, a contemporary writer interested in portraying the hybrid identities of Asian American characters.

Yet Showalter's desire is to move beyond stockpiling the poetry, plays and fiction of American women to a place of thoughtful and active critique. Instead of simply asking, "Remember these writers?" she further queries, "And are these writers any good?" Showalter refuses to be either an unthinking cheerleader or an apolitical critic. Of past discomfort over Harriet Beecher Stowe's racial stereotypes and melodramatic style, she contends, "The critical neglect of Uncle Tom's Cabin has less to do with its alleged literary flaws [or] its racial politics...than with its awkward placement in...a period where the American literary canon was perceived as exceptionally narrow, strong and male."

With its frank assessments, impressive research and expansive scope, A Jury of Her Peers belongs on the shelf of any reader interested in the development of women's writing in America. Unlike the authors of other feminist literary histories, Showalter treats the pen as just a pen -- to be wielded well or badly, with ignorance or insight, regardless of the gender of the writer who holds it.

When I later the same day read this review of book in a quite different vein, it was as if a Little Bird dropped down from the ceiling with a prize - or at least a hint that there was something of nearly Cultural Heritage caliber I should be picking up on:

Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America
by William Graebner

The story of the hostage who comes by turns to identify with the captor is one of the oldest ever told. Tales of unsullied Puritan maidens kidnapped by Indians only to end up "going native" were staples of early American literature. The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which describes the ordeal of a minister's wife held for eleven weeks by Narragansett Indians during King Philip's War in 1676, was among the first such narratives, and it was enormously popular when it was published in Boston in 1682. Three hundred years later, a similar story seized the West's imagination: in Stockholm in 1973, after four customers were taken hostage in a holdup of the Sveriges Kreditbank, there were reports that one of them became affianced to one of the bank robbers. The archetype is of such sturdy provenance, in fact, that it surprised me to learn from William Graebner's Patty's Got a Gun that it wasn't until six years after the Kreditbank incident that the term "Stockholm syndrome" appeared in the American mass media. The phrase first surfaced in 1979, Graebner explains, "when Time magazine suggested that the syndrome might have taken hold among those being held hostage by Iranian militants in Tehran." Perhaps the obsession with the notion of a loss of self under conditions of duress is so primal, so elemental of modern anxieties, that people feared to give it a proper name. Until, that is, the 1970s -- a time so drenched in the detritus of captivity that the culture suddenly could not do without the shorthand.

The captivity narrative at the center of Graebner's book is the 1974 kidnapping of a modest and nondescript California heiress by a murderous ultra-left cult that called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. A stranger story has hardly ever been told. Months after her kidnapping, Patty Hearst appeared on surveillance footage of a bank robbery brandishing an M-1 machine gun. Ten days later the SLA would release tapes of her calling her parents pigs and insisting that if she had been brainwashed, it was only via "the process whereby the people are conditioned to passively take their place in society as slaves of the ruling class." When the police torched an SLA safe house with most of the group still inside, Patty watched it on live TV from a motel near Disneyland with the rest of her SLA "combat unit." Thus began a flight during which, apparently as a full-fledged member of the gang, she never once tried to escape for more than a year. Then came her trial in 1976 for armed robbery, in which celebrity attorney F. Lee Bailey tried and failed to convince a jury that Hearst bore no responsibility for her crime because she had been brainwashed.

Stockholm syndrome was everywhere in the 1970s. Hearst's case was but the most notorious. The "brainwashing" of soul-searching youth by religious cults became the paramount obsession of the middle class (in Sunday school at my Reform temple in Milwaukee, we were trained to resist their wiles). "Between 1969 and 1977," Graebner points out, "more than thirty zombie movies appeared in the United States and in other countries." The most notorious of them all, Dawn of the Dead, came out in 1978 -- the same year that a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers dramatized a "fear that human beings are vulnerable creatures, rather easily drained of the basic qualities of humanness," in this case by aliens who arrive in the form of lovely flowers that turn the citizens of San Francisco into "a new race, identical in appearance to the old one but, like zombies, lacking emotive qualities." Students of American culture will recognize the signposts of national anxiety: San Francisco, flowers, zombies. "If you're going to San Francisco/Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair," went a 1967 hit song about the "Summer of Love." The Bay Area was a national catchment for lost souls, a symbol of horror for parents who no longer considered their children their own. (Congress was worried enough about the problem to pass a Runaway Youth Act in 1974.) The fact that Hearst was kidnapped in no less a zombie reservoir than Berkeley would be central to the national discussion of her fate.

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I can't say whether I will ever get around to reading either of those books (the second has perhaps a slight edge for me), but I relished both mini-reviews and the happened-on name overlap added some buzz. You can take some Mary Rowlandson neat here. (credits: image courtesy Wikipedia, S. Freberg for Purfuit of Happineff.)