Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women’s Writing, 1850-1930
Martha Cutter opens Unruly Tongue with a reminder of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman s feisty Hetty Fifield, a heroine who never heed[ed] the voice of authority and whose unruly tongue, in Cutters words, becomes a symbol for an unruly identity that challenges not only her place within nineteenth-century stereotypes of femininity but the theoretical structure of patriarchal authority in the world she inhabits (ix). With her attention closely focused on the language of a range of women writers in the period between 1850 and 1930, Cutter offers precise and vivid readings that capture the evolving voice of women who chose to revise male-centered theories of language through the deployment of a voice that is specifically feminine (x).Cutter is sensitive to changes in language as she moves from middle to late nineteenth-century works. She notes that whereas early and middle nineteenth-century women writers often limited the unruliness of their female characters and constrained their speech through coded or less openly rebellious words, late nineteenth-century writers moved toward articulation of a self-defined identity and voice. Cutter outlines the changes in language that emerged as the image of a new woman in the 1880s, independent and often autonomous, began to replace the stereotype of the submissive true woman fostered through the cult of domesticity earlier in the century.
Yet it is clear that all of the writers she discusses, in varying degrees, were concerned with the question of how they could consciously work to transform language so that it might reflect a uniquely female identity within the male-dominated culture of their time.Cutter organizes her material in three broad categories. The first group she considers includes Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Wilson, writers who recognized that the expectation of domestic sainthood and passivity constrained the cultivation of women s voices. Cutter argues that the language of these writers, however, remains patriarchal and that their heroines incorporate a domestic voice. Her second grouping includes Freeman, Anna Julia Cooper, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Frances Harper, and here Cutter sees a change in approach. These writers, according to Cutter, foreground women s placement within a theory of language that assumes the speaker to be masculine (and for Cooper and Harper, white) and engage in a quest to accentuate a feminine or maternal voice either within or outside of patriarchal discourse (xi).
In the last section, Cutter turns to Willa Cather and Jessie Fauset who deliberately disclose the limitations of patriarchal and racial discourses (xi).The categories Cutter creates, for the most part, help structure our understanding of the change in language across the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. They also aim to open the door to cross-cultural comparison. By pairing African American women writers with white women writers, Cutter clarifies the complexities that arise when race and gender are both at issue in the shaping of the heroine’s words and actions. Cutter acknowledges what Claudia Tate underscores in Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Thin of the Century (1992)while many late-nineteenth-century black women writers might have been sympathetic to the so-called ‘new (white) woman’s’ rejection of traditional domestic roles and attendant radically revised gender constructions, their black heroines are not so extreme. After all, such heroines could hardly reject what had not been broadly within their domain to embrace.
(Cutter 1999, 138)Yet Cutter also demonstrates, through her pairing of Fauset and Cather for example, how Fauset “deconstructs racial and sexual boundaries” through her heroine’s use of language and dance. It is not, in Cutter’s words, “the recovery of a pure feminine speech that Fauset seeks, but rather the acknowledgment that within language there are many discourses and that some of these discourses express what patriarchal society would suppress: the subversive desires of an unruly racial, and feminine, subject” (180).On the whole, Cutter offers an insightful analysis that illuminates the strategies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers who struggled against patriarchal and racist terminology to articulate a language and identity of their own. The movement Cutter outlines, while acknowledging that categories often overlap or oversimplify, is from “a domestic/historical voice (1850-1880), to a feminine (or maternal)/theoretical voice (1880-1915), to a metalinguistic/ethnic voice (1915-1930)” (xi). At times, Cutter’s comparisons within each category run the risk of creating artificial distinctions.
Cutter asserts, for example, that “unlike Freeman and Cooper, Chopin suggests that feminine desire is an aspect of women’s search for voice”; Chopin goes beyond “an unruly feminine language of self-assertion to the enunciation of a self-defined desire” (88-89). Yet a close look at some of Freeman s less well-known works reveals a similar interest in uncovering female sexuality, longing, and even aggression (as in her novel Madelon). In establishing distinctions, Cutter occasionally overlooks commonalities.Cutter is at her best when she resists labels (discourses which are, by turns, “patriarchal,” “ethnic,” “dominant,” “empowered,” “marginal,” or “metalinguistic”) in favor of the fresh language of her discussions of the texts.
Chapter 7, “Jessie Fauset’s and Willa Cather’s Metalinguistic, Ethnic Discourses:’ offers a good example of what Cutter’s more precise readings and conclusions achieve. Here Cutter manages to capture how the contours of the “vulva-like gorge” of Panther Canyon in Cather’s The Sang of the Lark “suggest the sexual spaces of the female body” (185), or how Fauset, in Plum Bun, incorporates feminine desire into “the metalinguistic, ethnic art its heroine creates, thereby crafting an alternative economy of desire and language that undermines those of the patriarchy.” Cutter’s reading shows that “below the overt plot of Plum Bun there is a radical message about the disruptive potential of art produced by a subject who is female, ethnic, and desiring (171). Her Chapters on Alcott, Wilson, Gilman, and Harper also offer lively analyses that provide readers with a rich and specific sense of how these writers increasingly created a revised world where women, as well as men, are not prepositions in language but agents, authors, speakers, and subject (140).
Through such attention to language, unruly Tongue contributes to our understanding of the linguistic development of women writers in the period between 1850 and 1930 as they grappled with the problem of voice in patriarchal America.