Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature

Thresholds in Women's Writing

Kristin J. Jacobson, Kristin Allukian, Rickie-Ann Legleitner, Leslie Allison, Kristin J. Jacobson, Kristin Allukian, Rickie-Ann Legleitner, Leslie Allison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319738505
• eBook ISBN: 9783319738512
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book highlights the multiplicity of American women's writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women's writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection's introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women's writing is "threshold writing, " or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits bordersand offers enticing openings.

© The Author(s) 2018

Kristin J. Jacobson, Kristin Allukian, Rickie-Ann Legleitner and Leslie Allison (eds.)Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Threshold Thinking

Rita Bode¹ and Kristin J. Jacobson²

(1)

Trent University, Toronto, ON, Canada

(2)

Stockton University, Galloway, NJ, USA

Rita Bode

End Abstract

American Women’s Writing, Liminality, and Hybridity: Background and Contexts

Rita Bode, Trent University

In her introduction to A Jury of Her Peers (2009)—Elaine Showalter’s literary history of American women writers—Showalter points to the “daunting size and ... cultural, racial and even geographical diversity” of her undertaking as initially one of the most challenging aspects of the project. “National literary histories are usually huge team efforts,” she notes, “with a board of editors, a village of consultants, an army of research assistants,” but she goes on to acknowledge how digital technology came to her aid, delivering to her, rather than she having always to go to them, “thousands of texts and documents” (xiv). Affirming Showalter’s achievement, Dale M. Bauer nonetheless notes in her introduction to the 2012 Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature that “the days when a single scholar could decidedly do justice to creating a unified vision of the whole of American women’s literature seem past” (6), and her own history is comprised of thirty-two chapters by as many scholars. Showalter brings her introduction to a close by expressing her pleasure (highly deserved) in her accomplishment: “I am proud,” she writes, “that this is the first literary history of American women writers, but I also hope it will not be the last” (xvii). Whether it is Bauer’s expansive project or the recent co-authored Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers (2016) by Wendy Martin and Sharone Williams covering the seventeenth century through to present day, Showalter’s hopes are being amply fulfilled.

Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women’s Literature: Thresholds in Women’s Writing is not, nor does it aim to be, a literary history in any traditional sense, but it, too, can lay claim to fulfilling the forward-looking expectations for the critical understanding of America’s writing women. Our introduction consists of two parts, which together position the essays, both collectively and individually, as a significant intervention in recording the development of American women writers’ contributions to and formations of America’s rich literary history. This first part provides a general background and context for the collection, with a brief overview of the development of the field and of the key concepts that inform the volume as a whole, and in the second part, Kristin J. Jacobson discusses the essays in more specific detail, focusing on the ways in which the key concepts emerge in the individual works.

Much of the early work on American women writers as a distinct field of study was rooted in the nineteenth century. This is not surprising given that the nineteenth-century canon, strong and vibrant as it is, is nonetheless especially marked by the absence of women authors, while at the same time, even in cursory terms, the activity of America’s women writers in the nineteenth century was evident and pronounced. From Hawthorne’s well-known outburst over the “damned mob of scribbling women” to the Atlantic dinners, whose fame, in our own contemporary times, rests more on the exclusion of female contributors than on the honoring of its male ones, the nineteenth century offers particularly fertile ground for the reclamation of lost female literary voices. Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women’s Literature, however, suggests in its coverage from early American women’s writing through to the twenty-first century the ways in which the field is comprehensive and balanced, moving both forward and back from its initial nineteenth-century focus in a rich display of literary productivity. The concepts of liminality and hybridity, moreover, that this volume takes as its theme and focus, engage with notions of crossing, intersectionality , transitions, and transformations that tend to contest, as Jacobson points out below, exclusionary practices, and thus assume an expansive rather than limiting outlook.

The concepts of liminality and hybridity gained prominence in literary studies as a whole in the last quarter of the previous century. Both terms draw on the enriching ideas of other disciplines, liminality on anthropology and hybridity on biology. Inherent in their critical practice across disciplines, then, is the idea of porous boundaries , demarcations that signal overflow as much as they do containment. Liminality’s origins trace back to Arnold van Gennep’s work at the beginning of the twentieth century on the ritual patterns that societies commonly invoke to identify the process of transitions. Gennep considered the middle stage in a rite of passage the liminal one, the “in-between” stage in which a known and familiar stability is left behind before the new point of reference can be fully embraced. But it was Victor Turner, later in the century, who popularized van Gennep’s ideas on the importance of ritual by applying them on a broader scale to societal and communal shifts.¹

In their introduction to Landscapes of Liminality : Between Space and Place, Dara Downey , Ian Kinane , and Elizabeth Parker provide a succinct explanation of Turner’s broader application of liminality. “Turner contends,” they write,

that in (post)modern societies, in which rules of law and traditional customs have undergone major upheaval or change, individuals and communities are left in a continually unfixed, destructured, and liminal state of existence, caught between the conventions of customary social practices and the burgeoning social practices of new and radically different social formations.

This liminal existence facilitates the emergence of what Turner calls communitas , or “a new creative and collective ... unstructured community ... a community without frontiers” (8–9). Downey , Kinane , and Parker move beyond this standard understanding of Turner’s concept of liminality when they point to communitas as a site in which “traditional boundaries of class , race , religion and personality dissolve” (8). Their emphasis on altered and alternative boundaries positions Turner’s liminality as particularly conducive to the critical concept of hybridity.

Hybridity’s roots in science perhaps most commonly associate the term with botany and the grafting of different species of plants to form a new hybrid species; however, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word hybrid to designate some kind of mixture and crossings among all organic life has been in circulation since the seventeenth century (“hybrid”). Its current critical use is perhaps most closely aligned with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of language , Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theories, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s discussion of borderlands .² In developing his theory of dialogism, Bakhtin thinks of language as mixed and continually mixing—sometimes in the sense of two languages coming together in a single utterance, but also in the sense of the multi-voiced potential in any language through such variables as dialect, jargon, colloquialisms, and other forms of speech. For Bakhtin , both people and texts speak in many voices, which become hybrid voices as they not only respond to but also assume aspects of the polyphony of sound and meaning to which they are exposed.

In articulating the close relationship between the concepts of liminality and hybridity, Homi K. Bhabha is particularly significant partly perhaps because his thinking engages closely with one of the central critical preoccupations of our time, cultural analysis and postcolonial theory. For Bhabha , the liminal space between fixed identifications is itself a site of hybridity that facilitates the mingling and crossing of race, class , gender , and other differences. In The Location of Culture, he explains the basis of his sociolinguistic approach identifying “the linguistic difference” in cultural performance as the “disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (énoncé) and the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its ... cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space.” The subsequent “pact of interpretation” between proposition and enunciation “is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You.” He explains: rather, “the production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space” (36). Bhabha’s “Third Space of enunciation” is a zone of ongoing cultural exchanges, interventions, and mediations that make “the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process” (37) but that also make new transcultural formations possible.

Bhabha sees hybridity as a powerful, disruptive intrusion into seemingly fixed cultural relations: “hybridity ... unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power” (112). His theory, however, has been challenged on several fronts, most notably for eliding the power imbalances between the colonized and colonizer. Anjali Prabhu , for instance, challenges the generalizing tendency of Bhabha and his followers for failing to take into account specific differentiating contexts of time, history, and socioeconomic factors. In their handbook of key terms in postcolonialism, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths , and Helen Tiffin address such critiques, pointing out that hybridity’s emphasis on “the transformative cultural, linguistic and political impacts on both the colonized and the colonizer ... [have] been regarded as replicating assimilationist policies by masking or ‘whitewashing’ cultural differences.” While their overall conclusion is that the idea of hybridity does not “necessarily downplay oppositionality, and increase continuing post-colonial dependence” by negating “the hierarchical nature of the imperial process,” the critical challenges are significant as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Threshold Thinking
• Part I. Early American Thresholds
• Part II. Nineteenth-Century Thresholds
• Part III. Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Thresholds
• 19. Afterword: Beyond Thresholds—Suggestions for Further Research and Teaching Resources
• Back Matter