This engrossing book describes how four twentieth-century women
writers-Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, and
Grace Paley-have inherited and adapted the classical tradition of
American romance fiction. Emily Miller Budick argues that this
tradition, exemplified by the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar
Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, William Faulkner, and
Ralph Ellison, is inherently skepticist, questioning whether and
how we know reality. It is also sharply critical of the patriarchal
bias of American culture, which is understood by these writers as a
way of evading or settling philosophical doubt. Analyzing such
works as The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Portrait of a Lady, The
Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Invisible Man, Budick
explores this antipatriarchal critique and shows how it enables the
twentieth-century women romancers to inherit the tradition. In
their writings, however-in McCullers's Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, Morrison's Song of Solomon and
Beloved, and Paley's short stories-these writers do more than
further the concerns of the male authors. They also explore the
idea of maternal knowledge and think through alternatives not only
to the patriarchal organization of society but to matriarchal
constructions as well. Budick offers provocative insights into what
it means to inherit a tradition--in particular across lines of
gender, but also across lines of race--as she discusses the ways
these four women writers revise the genre of romance to accommodate
the exigencies of modern American society.
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