John and Sebastian Cabot Book

I found this scholarly book enormously frustrating, largely because of the force and vigor of Berlant's argument. She makes a persuasive case for middlebrow women's culture as a space in which frustration with the status quo (capitalism and its discontents) gets articulated, bargained with, and recast into (variously) utopian aspiration (the possibility for revolution never present, the hope for reform--inadequate in Berlant's view--always there), repeated despair, cliché, or identity imprisonment. (Or some combination of several of these!) Berlant acknowledges a side of identity that I agree is important: the possibility that identity performance can be imitation and salve rather than innovation and salvation.

Berlant is interested in genres of "female complaint," ruptures in melodramatic or conventional texts that indicate the insufficiency of feminine types and heteronormative narratives to encompass a satisfactory version of identity. Appropriately, her form of literary criticism also enacts complaint. Most of the chapters center around political failures that are aestheticized. So the thrust of these chapters is often very depressing. Which should not be a complaint (he!) in and of itself but is for me. I'm not satisfied at winding up with the conclusion that sentimentalism is unsatisfactory. I think that I represent one of the feminists that Berlant refutes in her introduction -- someone who perhaps overly optimistically looks for self-expression, political outrage, and play in even the most conventional of narratives.

Berlant's arguments are forceful, and I did like her argument about Parker's love poetry of failure as a way of dramatizing the dissonance between the promise of heteronormativity as cultural belonging and the reality of unsatisfactory feminine stereotyping in the modern period. She also had some great writing in this chapter, my personal fave being this line: "[Parker:] takes consolation by playing around with the forms that bind: ironic formalism is the normativity of the middlebrow author, who can have her sex and hate it too."

Great chapter on Show Boat, the culture of publicity, and the intersection of feminine ideals and racial nostalgia. I suppose I enjoyed individual formal analyses and fruitful comparisons more than I liked the dominating argument, a juggernaut of cultural disappointment and displeasure. (Ironically, Berlant focuses on the vitality of pleasure in the narratives that women create to make sense of their conventional feminine identity.)