I am beginning to realize that taking the self out
of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self
out feels like obeying a gag order--pretending an
objectivity where there is nothing objective about the
experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning
over literature." -- from Heroines On the last day of
December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances
Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the
female modernists and her recent transplantation to
Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job.
Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for
her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates
of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog
entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally
pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles,
Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists
themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end
their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized.
Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My
Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic
girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in
the margins and developing an alternative canon. In
Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog
into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship.
Combing theories that have dictated what literature
should be and who is allowed to write it--from T. S.
Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such
mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary
McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the
Second Wave of feminism--she traces the genesis of a
cultural template that consistently exiles female
experience to the realm of the "minor," and diagnoses
women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When
she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno.
"When he does, it's existential." By advancing the
Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her
generation while providing a model for a newly
subjectivized criticism.
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