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Created: October 25, 2002
Latest Update: October 25, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Study Notes: Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic:Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, October 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.
These notes are based on Femnism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, by Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry, SUNY Press, 1991. ISBN: 0-7914-0770-5 (pbk).For this week, I just want to quote a small passage from Chapter 6, by Josephine Donovan. If you have the text please read the chapter. If not, please read the excerpt so that you can follow our discussion.
From "Style and Power" by Josephine Donovan. At p. 90.
"In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt similarly observes that in the epistolary style of the novel "everythin was subordinated to the aim of exprssing the ideas passin in the mind at the moment of writing." In Literary Women,Ellen Noers called this the "dashaway" style characterized by its "breathless, disorganized 'artless' informality." Not surprisingly this was consdiered a woman's style."Nineteenth-century American writer Caroline Kirkland apologetically termed hers a "gossiping" style and used another model from women's domestic production --- knitting --- to explain its construction. In A New Homeshe noted she used "a rambling gossiping style,," recognizing that "this going back to take up dropped stitches, is not the orthodox way of telling one's story; and if I though I could do any better, I would go back and begin at the very beginning; but I feel conscious that the truly feminine sin of talking 'about it and about it,' the unconquesrable partiality for wandering wordiness would cleave to me still." Thus, Kirkland realizes that she is resisting an "ortodox" official narrative mode in using an "unofficial style based on anotehr kind of women's use-value praxis, knitting. Here again we find a blurring of the boundaries between the literary and nonliterary and a rejection, albeit apologetically, of official prescriipts. Not surprisingly, her work, A New Home --- Who'll Follow?, is a borderline "novel" between fiction and nonfiction --- a fictionalized autobiographical narrative of her pioneering expereinces in the early nineteenth-century Midwest.
The dashaway, gossipy, epistolary style clearly suggested a naive, uncontrolled sensitivity, one that was immediately responsive to its invironment and not submissive to rhetorical distancing designs, such as seen in htehypotactic Ciceronian period of "official" prose. It also allowed the speaker to express subversive thoughts, which could later be justified as having been made under the excitement of the moment.
The stylistic devices women employed in the early novel (as well as, in some case, before and after) reflect their oppressed political position. Located on the margins, in unofficial zones women used forms derived from their familiar everyday world, forms that expressed a paratactic nonsubordinating sensitivity, and which, finally, registered a resistance to the heirarchica subordinations of official modes, the "word of the fathrs." In this way women contributed enormously to the creation of the dialogic counterhegemonic consciousness that Bakhtin saw embodied in the novel."