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Feminist Naturalism
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20316 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
2,962 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen is a contributing editor to Kirkus Reviews and a
freelance reviewer for the Boston Globe, Sewanee Review, and
several other publications.
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COLD TIMES
Elizabeth Jordan Moore
New York: Summit, 1992
412 pp., $20.00
POSTCARDS
E. Annie Proulx
New York: Scribner's, 1992
308 pp., $22.95
The appearance in 1985 of Carolyn Chute's Beans of Egypt, Maine gave the state its most prominent position on the American literary map since the 1890s, when Sarah Orne Jewett's exquisite portrayals of coastal and island people celebrated the integrity and dignity of lives lived, in many senses, on the margins.
Chute's boldly written story of two sprawling, profane, impoverished, illiterate rural families seemed, and seems today, a raffish rejoinder to Jewett's delicate understatements. Yet the two writers are alike in their perception of the granitic strengths that develop, over time and through grudging acceptance of their burdens in those otherwise demeaned and isolated by poverty and its consequences.
The resilience of Chute's people, their insistent lust for life (and for one another), gives them a vitality cheerfully disproportionate to their cripplingly inhibiting circumstances. In Letourneau's Used Auto Parts (1988), she envisioned a patriarchal backwoods alternative society that blithely ignores the "real world," living by its own rude yet eminently practical laws. Chute has said her third novel (as yet unpublished) concerns "a modern-day Robin Hood." It is clear that this writer's imaginative commitment to "the other America" (to borrow sociologist Michael Harrington's phrase for the culture of poverty) continues to stimulate, as it has empowered, her writing.
Chute's unblinking, unapologetic concentration on the hardships of small-town life, though firmly rooted in our fiction, has not in recent decades had many counterparts--at least among women writers. Sporadically, however, there have been such explosive departures from the norm (say, the classically sculpted fictions of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather) as Rebecca Harding Davis' once-famous "Life in the Iron Mills" (1861). This melodramatic and compelling story, a muckraking exposure of industrialism and its exploitation of the working poor, set a courageous standard carried later by such forthright late nineteenth-century spokeswomen for the underclass as
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