WOMEN AND FICTION: LITERATURE AS POLITICS

Literature is political. With this manifesto Judith Fetterley begins her impor? tant study, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Later she writes what is even more patently true: the criticism of literature is also a political act. Such an insistence on the political nature of both literature and the criticism of literature also informs the work of most other feminists currently writing about the novel; concern with power and its effects on women, in fiction and in life, is central to all four ofthe books here under review. At a time when much of what the academic establishment tells us about our reading is frankly reductive, limiting the focus of concern in a narrower and narrower way, removing literature from involvement in daily life and decisions, the feminists pound away: literature does make a difference in how we live, we must attend to what it tells us about life, attention must be paid. Unfortunately, however, attention is not paid?or, at least, not paid often enough. Description of sicknesses in the power relationships considered by fiction has only turned audiences away; the vision is simply too terrifying, too depress? ing, too pessimistic to bear; the attention that feminist literary criticism too often receives becomes simply dismissive. The strength of Fetterley's study is that while she recognizes clearly the sickness of the culture reflected in the fiction she analyzes, she also shows us how that consciousness is power. Literature not only reflects life but helps us to live life; to see clearly the literature in which our culture is steeped is to make us con? scious, to give us the power to effect change. But there is more. The wisdom of Fetterley's insights into the four American short stories and four American novels that she considers suggests that an audience far more diverse than other feminists will learn from her work. She as? serts that to bring new eyes to the text, to look as women at literature, to engage in what Adrienne Rich describes as re-vision, means that books will no longer be read as they have been read. Her assertion is bold but justified. Fetterley's