Reviews for Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion

The average rating for Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-11-15 00:00:00 Song Yu Perhaps I'm out of practice teasing out meanings in academic writing, but I had a hard time discerning an overarching thesis to this book. I could say, in very general terms, that it's an examination of fictional representations of two coinciding phenomena of late 19th Century America: the gilded-age prosperity which led to a rise in consumer culture, and the development of the concept of "girlhood" as a period in a woman's life between childhood and adulthood. The book's focus is on how the interactions of these phenomena are reflected in the popular fiction for girls from 1860-1940, in what the author sums up as "buying into womanhood." However, each chapter seems to take these concepts in a different direction, and many other ingredients are thrown in the mix: the 19th century authors' unease about the growing urbanization of American life (so many of the works for girls of the period seem to compare wholesome happy country girls, with their peevish citified cousins), and anxieties about both nouveaux riches upstarts, and newly arrived immigrants. The books examined include Little Women, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Daddy-Long-Legs, Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Her Father's Daughter, the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the Nancy Drew books, produced by the Stratemeyer syndicate behind the pen name, "Carolyn Keene." Despite my inability to sum up Peter Stonely's main point (if there is one) in a couple lines, and despite not exactly finding the book an easy read (I took breaks of days between chapters, and couldn't always face picking it up at times when I felt more careworn than usual), I found it enormously interesting and thought-provoking; hence the four stars. It made me want to set about doing my own examinations of vintage girls' fictions through the lens of consumerism, and I found myself wishing I could suggest other girls' books to Stonely to dissect. These include Winona's Way in which the "nice" girls in a town learn that as young ladies of comfortable means and leisure, it is their duty to charitably run social clubs for hard-working impoverished department store employees (this, we learn, is the best way to prevent any latent Bolsheviks from demanding better pay and working conditions. Socialism is nipped in the bud, hooray!). Brenda's Bargain: A Story For Girls is another piece of weirdness. Here the Radcliffe-educated young women running a settlement house feel that one of the most important things they can teach young immigrant girls is correct taste in home furnishings. They actually give the girls a test which involves furnishing a doll house. Both "vulgar" and "tasteful" toy furnishings are given to the pupils, and the young ladies shake their heads in despair, when again and again, the Portuguese immigrant girls choose the overstuffed arm chairs rather than white painted wicker chairs. I do wish that a bibliography and index had been included in this book; I find their absence a little odd. I also found it peculiar that in a chapter on stories published in late 19th century children's periodicals, a burgeoning time for that market, Stonely focuses exclusively on stories collected in an obscure 1980 anthology, Companions Of Our Youth: Stories By Women For Young People's Magazines, 1865 1900. By a funny coincidence, this is a book I have been slowly reading over the last two years. It was nice for me that I had the anthology on hand so that I could read the stories for myself to see if I agreed with Stonely's conclusions, but I see no reason to assume that the stories collected here are representative of the period as a whole rather than reflecting the anthologist's tastes. A little more delving into the source material would have been appropriate. The book ended on a high note, in a comparison of Nancy Drew and the Little House books, both published in the 1930s. I had previously noticed that the American children's books of the 1930s that are still read today tend to fall into two distinct camps: series fiction mysteries and historical fiction that hearkens back to pioneer or colonial days, so it felt validating that Stonely makes the same observation. He goes further and articulates precisely how these were two different responses to the Great Depression. Over all, I came away from this book wanting to read, write, and think more. And that feels good.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-20 00:00:00 Derice Harwood A scholarly, but very accessible look at literature aimed at young girls beginning with Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" and ending with Nancy Drew. The author, a professor from Belfast, Northern Ireland, traces the "selling of womanhood" through literature as it relates to such sociological issues as gender, race, class, buying power and morality. Very often an author played out on the page her own dichotomy. Is the desire and ability for the acqusition of material goods "bad", or is it "good?" Are riches reserved for the worthy, i.e. those born into a certain class or race? Or can one pull oneself up by the bootsraps i.e. the American Dream? Does a woman need to marry money, or can she make money? And if she does make money can she do so without help and without losing her femininity? Fascinating, too, are the absolutely draw-dropping excerpts from two series in particular. The first is The Motor Girls which was, even for the day, rife with sexual tension, particularly around a character named Walter, not to mention lax in adult supervision. The other is the mean-spirited, extremely ugly racuism in the books of Gene Stratton Porter. All told, a very provacative book. I enjoyed it.