Introduction
Dr. Katie Gemmill
To grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book, to hold it fast, to turn it over and survey it at leisure—that is the effort of a critic of books, and it is perpetually defeated. Nothing, no power, will keep a book steady and motionless before us, so that we may have time to examine its shape and design.
Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921)
At first glance, this epigraph from Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction might sound like a depressing point of departure for the volume you’ve just opened: the Vassar English Department’s brand new critical journal. Fortunately, I’m a glass-half-full kind of reader. I find more cause for joy than despair in the idea that a text can never be fully grasped by any given reader in any given moment. Supposing Lubbock to be right about this, every act of critical reading, in its inherent incompleteness, would itself be the premise for a new and different act of reading at some other time. The very imperfection of criticism as a practice would perpetually ensure a diversity of perspectives and ideas. Not a bad upshot, in my view.
‘Diverse’ might in fact be the most fitting epithet for the essay collection at hand. While all nine of the critics published here are broadly concerned with the question of how literary texts make their meaning, they pull from disparate archives and multiple genres. Only with respect to methodology do some rough groupings begin to emerge. The first four authors ground their arguments in closely observed exegesis. Anna Wiley reads Edward Taylor’s poem “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly” and its readiness to ask questions that complicate Christian morality as evidence of the fundamentally intellectual nature of Taylor’s faith. Adjacently, Nick Barone reads Anne Bradstreet’s pair of epistles to her husband (who is “absent upon publick employment”)as poetic experiments in accommodating her subjective experience as a woman within a strictly Puritan faith. Rachel Altemose invites us to view Martha, of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Jessie, of Marsha Norman’s Night Mother, as versions of the same character, whose rendering in opposite literary styles—theatricalized and realistic, respectively—allow for two markedly different explorations of female identity. And finally, Elena Schultz close reads the waves in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, arguing that while their meaning relative to each character is—in a fitting complementarity of form and content—fluid, they nevertheless universally represent the possibility of redemption.
The two more explicitly theoretical papers in this volume also happen to share an argumentative shape: both of them show authors using a specific socio-cultural dynamic to stand in for, and even to express, something buried just below the surface of things. Focusing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Elena Janney charts the many instances in which the white protagonist’s psychotic distress is depicted in conjunction with images of racial difference and racialized sexuality: a pattern that not only pathologizes blackness, but also evokes a pervasive anxiety about the breakdown of familiar hierarchies. Similarly, in Thomas Heywood’s play A Woman Killed With Kindness, John Rezes explores how the transgressions of Nicholas, a servant character, allow him to use the master-servant relationship as a framework for performing homosocial desire.
A final group of essays invites us to think more broadly about genre. Kayla Schwab argues that Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s shared desire to claim space in a male-dominated art world led to a competitive but productive collaboration between these two sisters—one that inspired Virginia to adapt some of Vanessa’s distinctly modernist ideas about visual artistry for use in her own fictional craft. Leah Cates considers the relationship between the “real” and the “true” in fiction, surveying a range of texts that distort or exaggerate reality in order to produce representations that are ultimately, though somewhat paradoxically, more authentic than a strictly realistic ones would be. And lastly, Micah Katz-Zeiger reimagines the possibilities of the protest novel beyond James Baldwin’s critique of the genre—namely, that it sacrifices character in favor of the broader political goals of the text. Katz-Zeiger turns to William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer to demonstrate how the author’s absurd depiction of character itself becomes a means of protesting Reason, an oppressive ideology.
Whether or not a critic’s effort to grasp the whole of a text must perpetually be defeated, as Lubbock claims, the effort contained in the following pages—to offer specific and fresh readings of texts new and old—is a triumph indeed.
Katie Gemmill
Vassar College
May 2017