2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
fiction. Female writers also began to take on violent and disturbing subject mat-
ter in a more graphic manner. Joyce Carol Oates claims for herself a tradition
embodied by male writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer in On
Boxing (1987), as does Annie Proulx with the Western in Close Range: Wyoming
Stories (1999), which includes the acclaimed “Brokeback Mountain.”
The efforts of women of color to expand definitions of American literature
to include black, white, Native American, and Latina experience continue. Lou-
ise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, Linda Hogan,
and Wendy Rose explore intersections of Native American life and mainstream
culture in their works. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of
Color (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, and Anzaldúa’s
Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) directed attention to Latina writers such as Julia
Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and
Cristina García. The works of these writers, like those of their Asian American
counterparts Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha, and Gish Jen and the poets Cathy Song and Janice Mirikitani,
depict the confusions, conflicts, and contradictions of female identity within
hybrid cultures.
In the 1990s women emerged as a powerful influence on literary markets both
as writers and as readers; by the end of the decade women had become the majority
buyers of both fiction and nonfiction. Empowered by female support and the creativ-
ity of women writers, concerns once relegated primarily to women—motherhood,
romance, body image, the difficulty of balancing family life and work, female rivalry,
rape, and sexual abuse—have become part of mainstream literature and culture.
Several writers have deliberately corrected the absence of these themes in canonical
texts. In A Thousand Acres (1991) Jane Smiley retells William Shakespeare’s King
Lear (circa 1606) through Ginny, who is based on Goneril, and in Ahab’s Wife; or,
The Star-Gazer (1999) Sena Jeter Naslund expands on a detail in Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick (1851). Additionally, women writers refuse to be limited by “female”
themes and the narrative structures associated with them. Rather than focusing on
the conflicts created by differences in gender, class, race, or sexuality, these writers
are now more inclined to celebrate such differences. They are also more likely to
explore simultaneously two sides of an issue that earlier writers felt were mutually
exclusive: female identity as innate and as socially constructed. As feminists work
toward broader definitions of women’s identity, activities, and desires, so do women
writers. No longer required to justify themselves in the literary marketplace, women
are free to write what and how they wish. This statement should not, however, be
taken to suggest that feminism or the ideas associated with its various “waves” are
no longer useful. A more productive approach is to understand the multiple and
innovative ways in which women writers seek to revise the conventions and themes
of American literature.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- In A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie
Proulx (2009) Elaine Showalter, drawing on her earlier study of British women