Highlights from this issue...

Weaving a spell
Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, 445 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Margaret Randall

IN 1984 ARTE PUBLICO PRESS in Houston published The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Neither press nor author were known beyond the circles of those who were beginning to enjoy a burgeoning Chicana literature. A few Chicano names were just then entering the mainstream. Cisneros was one of what would soon emerge as a brilliant and diverse group of women--from an array of Latina origins--whose books demanded attention. The House on Mango Street guaranteed Arte Publico Press a future; only four years after it first hit bookstores, the brief novel had won the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award and gone into its fourth edition. It has been translated into a number of languages and remains a steady best seller.

For Cisneros, other literary successes followed. There was a defiant yet deeply tender volume of poems, My Wicked Wicked Ways, in 1987, the excellent Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories in 1991 and Loose Woman, a book of verse described by Ana Castillo as "a collection of love poems for the nonbeliever," in 1994. Cisneros even published a delightful children's book, Hairs / Pelitos, in 1997. She was awarded two NEA grants for poetry and fiction and the coveted MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. When, though, would her promised second novel appear?

The literary world waited. Cisneros' devoted readership waited. Is Sandra really working on that novel? people would ask, and the usual disgruntled commentary about "one-novel writers" began to be heard. Then it happened. Caramelo makes its appearance. Could this smart, visionary, linguistically innovative writer possibly fulfill our expectations? I wondered.

She has, many times over. And now it's up to reviewers to find the words with which to sing this novel's praises. Cisneros surely deserves more than superlatives, yet Caramelo is superb. There should be a brand-new language to describe the ways in which she has imbued the ancient art of story-telling with her trademark organization (at once spiral and complex), character development, evocation of time and place, portrayal of a particular culture (Mexican American/American Mexican) and visionary wisdom.

Many of us, lately, have asked the question: who owns the stories of our lives? Today's sociopolitical debacle, especially in the United States, reflects such a dramatic contradiction between the stories told by government officials, corporate leaders, the media and other "experts" and the stories that we live. How to make sense of this contradiction? How to fill the abysmal distance between news of a "healthy economy" and job loss for tens of thousands, between the criminal greed of corporations--whose CEOs, when caught, get a slap on the wrist--and the continued insistence that it's all about "consumer confidence": if the ordinary citizen would only spend more money, everything would be all right? How to make sense of wars waged in the name of national security and the bombing of civilians that is described as "liberation"?

Our stories have been twisted inside out.

Can literature--a literature in which history, memory, invention, political astuteness, contradiction and tenderness combine to produce that fiction more real than truth--help us at a time like this? I think so. Barbara Kingsolver's work, Alice Walker's and a few others are examples that come to mind. Add Sandra Cisneros to the list.

CUÉNTAME ALGO, AUNQUE SEA UNA MENTIRA. Tell me a story, even if it's a lie. In a disclaimer alternately titled "I don't want her, you can have her, she's too hocicona (big mouth) for me," Cisneros warns the reader that her book is "nothing but story, bits of string, odds and ends found here and there, embroidered together to make something new." She admits to having "invented what I do not know and exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy lies." It is Cisneros' unique use of language that lifts Caramelo from the category of a very fine novel and situates it among the great literature of our time.

Caramelo possesses the real unreality of Latin American magic realism: the stories within stories, their surprising imagery and unexpected twists bring to mind García Márquez, Juan Rulfo and the Isabel Allende of House of the Spirits. But Cisneros has moved beyond those authors and their novels. She weaves a new fabric of Spanish, English and Spanglish, and in so doing reflects the particular symbiosis of the Mexican American and American Mexican cultures that blossomed in this part of the world as the twentieth century unfolded.

One way she does this--though by no means the only way--is by translating certain Spanish terms or phrases into absolutely literal English, so that the meaning beneath the meaning rises up, grabs the reader and shakes her or him into awareness. We say this, exactly this, the book insists, and because we say this and say it in this way, we are a particular sort of people with a particular history, situated in a particular time and geography, acting out of a particular place of hobbled wisdom.

Eighty-six chapters bear titles such as Recuerdo de Acapulco, Qué elegante, Mexico Next Right, Tarzan, Aunty Light-Skin, Niños y borrachos, Fotonovelas, So Here My History Begins for Your Good Understanding and My Poor Telling, God Squeezes, Some Order Some Progress But Not Enough of Either, A poco--You're Kidding, Cuídate, and How Narciso Falls into Disrepute Due to Sins of the Dangler. These are not cute turns of phrase, but deeply meaningful index cards that point us where the writer wants us to go.

Celaya, the young girl protagonist and storyteller, traces her Mexican American family from before the time of the Little Grandfather and Awful Grandmother, from Mexico City to Chicago, to San Antonio, back to Mexico and once again to Chicago. Celaya is the youngest child and only daughter in an immigrant working-class family whose father loves her madly but always says he has seven sons instead of six sons and a daughter ("los siete hijos" common to traditional gendered Spanish).

Caramelo does not depend on plot in the usual sense. It is a book about a family as it migrates from the old country to the new, and how its many members survive the cultural changes implicit in this migration. It is the story of Celaya, from before her birth to young adulthood, and of those who accompany her. At first her point of view is a child's, wise but limited to her own perceptions. As she and her story unfold, she comes to see things from others' perspectives as well.

In Caramelo race, the privilege bestowed by lighter skin, gender, sexuality, class and the love-hate relationship that characterizes Mexicans and US Americans are handled with a delicate touch but the most nuanced complexity. Even the book's title is many-layered. Celaya's great-great-grandmother was a skilled weaver of rebozos, those Mexican shawls that range from the common black and white flecked cotton in which poor women carry their babies to the most elegant silk, so fine that one can be pulled through a wedding band. Caramelo describes one of the latter variety, the word defining the golden tan flecked with black and white that brings to mind the sweet of the same name. But as the novel unfolds, caramelo takes on other meanings as well. It becomes a leitmotif for what is familiar and also for what shows us the way.

Cisneros' characters are magical as well as solidly believable: the Awful Grandmother (even this bitter and manipulative woman is eventually humanized as she moves beyond death to speak to Celaya, and Celaya comes to feel that they become one another), Uncle Old and Uncle Baby and their broods, her father Inocencio Reyes (the old world upholsterer who resists becoming "the king of plastic slipcovers"), her mother Zoila who fights resignation and late in life embraces Public Radio's Studs Terkel--"no intelligent life around here except my plants"--the mysterious servant girl Candelaria, Exaltación Henestrosa the fish goddess of Tehuantepec, the wise curandera María Sabina, brothers Memo Toto Lolo Rafa Ito and Tikis, cousins Elvis Aristotle and Byron, El Santo Niño de Atocha, Catholic high school bad girl and best friend Viva Osuna, father's friend Marcelino Ordóñez and his "Mars Tacos to Went" and all the dogs named after Woodrow Wilson. Celaya herself takes us back to when she "was dirt" (before she was born) and, spiraling through flashbacks and subsidiary stories, takes the reader with her as she comes of age in that fragile but sinewy place between eras and cultures, human exploration and "the way things are done."

I HAVE RESISTED transcribing phrases or paragraphs from Caramelo. While they would undoubtedly show Cisneros' imagination, expertise with language and perhaps even her vast intelligence, removing bits of her prose from the novel's context would be reductionist and ultimately not of much use. You must read this book for yourself, two or three times.

A chronology helps the reader situate the story within the separate and entwined histories of Mexico and the United States. Here we are reminded of and can relate to Cortés and Moctezuma's 1519 meeting in Mexico City, the first published mention of the rebozo (1572), the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the Mexican Revolution (1911), General Pershing's unsuccessful foray into Mexico to get Pancho Villa (1916), the births and deaths of numerous popular figures on both sides of the border, periodic moments in the long sad history of migrations and immigration law, Elvis Presley's 1963 Fun in Acapulco, Zapata's 1994 rebirth in Chiapas and finally 2001, which witnessed both the Zapatistas' march into Mexico City to demand indigenous rights and the attack on New York's World Trade Center. These are the events that shaped the lives about which Cisneros writes.

Less successful, from my point of view, is the inclusion of long footnotes at the end of chapters often not much longer than the notes. I found myself flipping back and forth, engrossed in the information contained in the notes, but wondering if there might not have been a less distracting way to provide it.

The only other question I have is about the Spanish-language translation Knopf announces as simultaneous with publication of its English counterpart. I have read Elena Poniatowska's excellent translation of The House on Mango Street (La casa en Mango Street); that a writer of Poniatowska's stature would take on that translation attests to the quality of the original. Still, I wonder how Caramelo's Spanish-language version will deal with one of the novel's major innovations: the literal rendering of extremely idiomatic Spanish that provides not only much of the book's charm but also so much of its deeper meaning.

These are simply questions, marginal at best. Caramelo is a giant of a novel, ambitious and fulfilling, hard-hitting yet graceful, masterfully written yet never letting the prose overpower the story--truth or "healthy lie." It's been a while since I've been so completely captivated by a book.

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Abandoned genius
Camille Claudel: A Life by Odile Ayral-Clause. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002, 279 pp., $29.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Leslie Brokaw

Camille sculpting Sakuntala in the Notre-Dame des Champs atelier, 1886. From Camille Claudel.

WHEN SCULPTOR CAMILLE CLAUDEL began studying with Auguste Rodin in 1882, she was seventeen, living with her parents and focused on one goal: to hone the remarkable artistic skill she had been developing since she was twelve. Rodin was 41, living with a son and his companion Rose Beuret, on the cusp of a reputation as the most important sculptor of the era.

Four years later, Claudel and Rodin were ensconced in an affair that was both romantic and professional. Rodin wrote up a somewhat jaw-dropping contract for his young lover:

I will have for a student only Mademoiselle Camille Claudel and I will protect her alone through all the means I have at my disposal through my friends who will be hers especially through my influential friends.

I will accept no other students so that no other rival talent could be produced by chance, although I suppose that one rarely meets artists as naturally gifted....

After the exhibition in May we will go to Italy and will live there communally for at least six months of an indissoluble liaison after which Mademoiselle Camille will be my wife.....

From now to May I will have no other woman otherwise the conditions of this contract are broken....

I will take none of the models I have known....

Mademoiselle Camille promises to welcome me to her atelier four times a month until May. (pp. 71-72)

That year, 1886, was to be the apex of Claudel's life. She and her close friend Jessie Lipscomb had broken the gender barrier and were the first women working as assistants at Rodin's studio. (Like Claudel, Lipscomb had come to Paris for the opportunity to sculpt from nude models, an option not possible for women elsewhere.) The 21-year-old Claudel's affair with Rodin was still secret from her family. Rodin was desperately in love with her, using her not just as a studio assistant but as a model and inspiration as well; he began work on The Kiss that year. Art critics were praising her work.

Claudel had begun what was to become one of her most powerful and symbolic works: Sakuntala, sometimes referred to as Vertumne et Pomone. Life-sized, it depicts a naked woman, hand at her breast, eyes closed, slumped over, while a man on his knees reaches up to envelope and support her in his arms. His forehead touches hers; her thigh leans into his waist. The image depicts the moment in the fifth-century Hindu drama, Sakuntala, when two separated lovers are reunited and tumble into each other. It is an image that echoes the passion of Claudel's own affair with Rodin.

When Sakuntala was exhibited in 1888 at the Salon held in Paris each May, critic Paul Leroi declared it "the most extraordinary work in the Salon." It won an honorable mention. But, as Odile Ayral-Clause details in her new biography, the idyll Claudel captured in this tender masterpiece and homage to her own great love did not continue. Although she and Rodin traveled, the promised visit to Italy never materialized, and Rodin neither married her nor left Beuret. Claudel's life from her early twenties until her death in 1943 resembles the trajectory of an arrow: rising briefly, then dropping steadily to the dirt.

Camille Claudel, La Valse. Bronze, 1905. From Camille Claudel.

AYRAL-CLAUSE FOCUSES on Claudel's career and relationships, looking for the first time at the full patchwork of journals, letters, art reviews from the era, reports from government officials, interviews and medical records that together show how Claudel lived, what she cared about and why she had such difficulty cobbling together a living. The book is heavy on Claudel's personal life, lighter on critical analysis of her art.

As Ayral-Clause presents it, Claudel remained deeply entwined with Rodin and his memory for her entire life, mostly to ill effect. Rodin at times went out of his way to help secure state commissions and critical reviews for her after their split in 1893, and even helped pay her expenses through surreptitious intermediaries when her finances were exhausted. But Claudel, for her part, became increasingly convinced of Rodin's artistic thievery--both figuratively and literally--and denounced him bitterly in letters to friends and colleagues. Her family was horrified and scandalized by the affair, and they never fully embraced her after it was disclosed; her mother and sister broke almost all ties. By Ayral-Clause's reports, Claudel never had another lover nor even a close friend again.

Paul Claudel maintained the most contact with his estranged sister. He was at first deeply judgmental; almost twenty years later he himself became entangled in an affair with a married woman and got her pregnant. The woman ended up abandoning both Claudel and her husband for a third man, leaving Paul Claudel with a broken heart and greater capacity for sympathy for his sister.

But by this time, Camille had begun to descend into paranoia and mental illness. She became an almost complete recluse, living alone with the shades drawn, doors barricaded, and food delivered through a window. Paul Claudel wrote in his diary in 1909 after a visit to his 44-year-old sister: "Camille mad. Wallpaper ripped in long strips, the only armchair broken and torn, horrible filth. Camille huge, with a dirty face, speaking ceaselessly in a monotonous and metallic voice."

In March 1913, Claudel's family committed her to the Ville-Evrard Asylum. A year later, she was moved to the Montdevergues Asylum near Avignon as part of a wartime evacuation. She spent the rest of her life, another thirty years, institutionalized at Montdevergues. Many of the letters she wrote never got out; most of the ones written to her by her handful of friends and supporters never made it in. As much as seven years would pass between visits from her family. The land where she was buried was "reclaimed" ten years later and her bones were moved to a communal grave.

Camille Claudel, La Vague. Plaster, 1897. From Camille Claudel.

ALL OF THIS MATTERS because Claudel mattered. Although recognition and study of her work all but disappeared until the 1980s--Ayral-Clause notes in her preface that "as recently as twenty years ago, in France, Camille Claudel was known only to a handful of admirers"--during her lifetime Claudel was termed a "genius" by journalists, critics, and Rodin himself.

Her genius manifested itself in her technical abilities and eye for form, and in the brazen sensuality of her religious and literary subjects. The naked, embracing, waltzing couple depicted in La Valse was commissioned then rejected by the state Ministry of Fine Arts because of its boldness. "The closeness of the sexual organs is rendered with a surprising sensuality," wrote a Ministry inspector. Claudel added concealing drapery to her design, but she still did not get the commission. Years later, an art critic of the period, Louis Vauxelles, wrote: "Ah! If Camille Claudel had stooped to sculpting elegant dancers, of a socialite elegance, her success would have been sudden and fabulous; the artist, scornful of this type of success, chose to symbolize rhythm, melody, and intoxication."

Claudel struggled, but she was not ignored. An anonymous article in 1896 termed her "the modern woman," and the following year journalist Henry de Braisne noted that her inclusion on the jury at the Champ de Mars Salon was a critical benchmark. "Mademoiselle Claudel is without rival when it comes to her will power, her hard work, her incredible integrity, her faith in truth, which to her is Beauty," he wrote.

Just as Claudel's bones disappeared into a mass grave, her muted prominence evaporated. In 1952 Paul Claudel agreed to allow some of her works to be installed at the Musée Rodin in Paris. But otherwise she and her more than 260 sculptures became an almost forgotten footnote in history.

All that changed in the 1980s. In 1982, Anne Delbée published a fictionalized biography called Camille Claudel: Une Femme. Two years later, a major Claudel retrospective was held at the Musée Rodin, and her mystique as a tragic martyr took hold. In 1988, the first US exhibition of her work was held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts; that same year saw the release of the movie Camille Claudel, in which a tortured Isabelle Adjani wailed "Ro-din! Ro-din!" at the fleeing backside of Gérard Depardieu.

Ayral-Clause notes that much of the correspondence between Claudel and Rodin and Claudel and her father was either destroyed or is still hidden away. As a result, some important details are frustratingly opaque. The break-up between Claudel and Rodin, for instance, is given only a few pages of description and analysis, and a reference to an abortion Claudel may have had around the same time barely registers. Even less explored are mysterious and apparently unfounded claims by some of Claudel's friends that Claudel had several children by Rodin. For a book that implies that her whole life turned on this one affair, the fuzziness of the actual rupture is unsatisfying.

Still, Ayral-Clause vividly portrays the difficult reality of Claudel's life in sparkly fin-de-siècle Paris, a time that still captures our imagination. While Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was portraying the wild nights at the Moulin Rouge, across town in her studio by the Seine Claudel was struggling to pay her rent and model's fees. At one point she wrote to her dealer Eugene Blot: "If I could still change careers, I would prefer it. I would have done better to buy beautiful dresses and beautiful hats that would underline my natural qualities rather than devote myself to my passion for doubtful constructions and somewhat forbidding groups."

One fellow art student commented: "To say that a lass, perhaps not out of her teens, had gone prancing off to Paris to study art, was to say that she had gone irretrievably to hell." Claudel went to Paris and found patrons, press and her talent; she had her heaven for a time. But she also found a hell, and it was tragic and merciless.

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Playboy's parents
Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England 1815-1914 by Lisa Z. Sigel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002, 227 pp., $24.00 paper.

Reviewed by Mariana Valverde

Postcard: Lesbian undressing, part 2. From Governing Pleasures.

IT WOULD BE HARD TO FIND a feminist in North America who did not have an opinion, indeed a whole theory, about pornography. Political battles have raged as feminists have sought to define its meaning, evaluate its significance for the women's movement and propose legal tools to regulate its production or its consumption or both. This wealth of opinion stands in sharp contrast to the dearth of reliable information. In the mid-eighties, some radical feminists who were otherwise extremely suspicious of state agencies reproduced FBI statistics about the extent and the social harms of pornography, without considering that the FBI's "facts" are likely to be as objective as the information about marijuana provided by drug czars. Now that the sex wars of the eighties are a dim memory and it should be possible to "recollect emotion in tranquility," we are still not seeing much by way of measured, even-handed efforts to document what gets produced, which men (or women) consume what products, in what cultural contexts and with what effects.

Lisa Sigel is a historian of Victorian Britain who has chosen to follow one particular strand in the complex and largely unknown history of the production and consumption of pornography. She pays particular attention to the political and especially the class contexts of the various types of porn produced or distributed in Britain during a century in which the slow but steady spread of literacy and new photographic techniques united to make modern pornography possible. For addressing a general audience and undertaking to inform feminists, rather than invoking porn to generate research-free theory, she deserves credit, despite the book's flaws.

Postcard: Xavier Sager, "La Luxure/Luxury." Luxure is mistranslated on the card. It actually means "lust." From Governing Pleasures.

A key finding whose present-day implications Sigel begins to sketch out in a concluding section is that nineteenth-century Britain did not have a single pornography industry or a single porn market. Since the 1950s, large-scale quasi-monopolies have imposed a uniform picture of female beauty as well as a standard menu of male desires. The standardization of mainstream porn has allowed and even encouraged more adventurous producers to generate less professionally produced material for "deviant" niche markets--just as the standardization of soft drink flavors creates a market niche for artisanal drinks that aren't found in corner stores. The large porn producers reproduce, through economic domination, the very distinction between normal mainstream vs. deviant minority that spokesmen like Hugh Hefner have claimed to be valiantly destroying.

But until about the 1890s, when sexually daring postcards and erotic novels began to be sold to the masses, pornography in Britain was not a large-scale capitalist enterprise. The production of porn was an artisanal endeavour: the idiosyncrasies of a few men could make a significant impact on the market and, more importantly from the point of view of gender politics, political agendas of various kinds--from the republicanism of London printers in the early nineteenth century to the snobbish libertinism of Richard Burton and his friends--were an integral part of pornography, rather than being carefully excised as they are in Playboy-type products.

Postcard: Dulio Raineri, "The Hunt." From Governing Pleasures.

Chapter Two, "Revolutionary pornography," tries to do for Britain what Robert Darnton and Lynn Hunt have done for France: demonstrate that the modern category of "pornography" no more captures how obscene texts and images functioned in the late eighteenth century than the modern category of "gay" captures eighteenth-century same-sex desires. Obscene texts were often thoroughly political--usually anti-monarchical and/or anti-aristocratic--and were put in circulation by the radical pressmen who also published Tom Paine. Prosecutions--usually launched not by state agents but by the private Society for the Suppression of Vice--were thus motivated by complex interests. They were rarely very effective, in part because private societies had difficulty generating the necessary evidence and financing the cases, and in part because there was no obscenity law as such until 1857. (The ways in which sexual material was prosecuted and otherwise regulated through the law of libel is one of the interesting legal history topics that Sigel neglects.)

The 1857 Obscene Publications Act, Sigel claims, "proved only slightly more effective than the old" legislation because "the publishers had been well schooled in evading the authorities in their radical activities. " The accompanying footnote, however, tells us that in just two 1858 prosecutions more than 27,000 prints were seized, which is hardly insignificant; in any case, one or two well-publicized prosecutions for obscenity can have a huge chilling effect on the industry. While Sigel does a good job of providing information on the handful of radical publishers responsible for putting titillating sexual-political works in circulation, we are left not knowing just what role legal tools played in the demise of this early form of radical literature. Given the marked cultural shift toward conservatism that took place in the 1850s and 1860s, it may be that coercive state measures were not really necessary to squash both erotic and political radicalism, but Sigel does not shed any light on this important question.

SIGEL DETAILS THE EMERGENCE in the 1880s and 1890s of networks of elite men who prided themselves on being erotically as well as geographically adventurous. Richard Burton, of Arabian Nights fame, is the best known of these, but what I at least did not know was that he was part of a group called "The Cannibal Club." Its members, some of whom were explorers and scientists, produced what one hesitates to call a "discourse" combining imperialist imagery, quasi-scientific voyeurism and traditional British deviant eroticism (flagellation figuring prominently in their letters to one another as well as in publications and pictures). Sigel references the literature on orientalism but fails to use the obviously rich resources of Cannibal Club correspondence and publications to full effect. The homoeroticism that is much more apparent in this type of porn than in any of the other types she describes also gets short shrift.

Postcard: "The Cigarette Girl." From Governing Pleasures.

Still, Sigel's account is useful in underlining how futile it is to attempt to separate "high" culture from "low" eroticism and, for that matter, science from obscenity. The quasi-scientific objectification of exotic bodies was taken up and reproduced in other more populist genres: pictures of real or pretend Greek boys in the nude and retouched photos of bare-breasted women quickly became popular consumer items, detached from their roots in scientific inquiry. Science and anthropology could thus disavow responsibility for the flood of orientalist, sexually titillating imagery that swept Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century, the expensive, literarily pretentious porn books that circulated widely in the second half of the nineteenth century became impossible to publish in Britain itself, due to pressure from the police, the Post Office and the National Vigilance Society (a body very active in the suppression of music halls and other vices). Gentlemen found it much easier to order books from France or the Netherlands; to document this Sigel makes very good use of the numerous detailed catalogues, with prices in both sterling and US dollars, that are still extant. Such importations were apparently not difficult as long as the imported objects were expensive (some of the books cost five or even ten pounds, a very large sum in 1900) and were ordered by gentlemen. But authorities grew worried when new photographic techniques and the development of popular consumerism combined to generate a new type of porn: mass-produced postcards, ranging from the mildly titillating to what today would count as obscene, selling for only two or three pence. Sigel describes and reproduces many of these images, but does not tell us whether official worry had any impact on this industry, so we are left not knowing whether British working-class people continued to have access to these images (as French people, particularly those with male relatives serving in North Africa, did).

IT IS UNFORTUNATE that Governing Pleasures is not a terribly good book--the historical context is very unevenly drawn, the legal history is shaky and the rich variety of racializing moves found in different types of porn is noted, but not analyzed. The plot summaries of porn novels are flat-footed, and the analysis tends to belabor the obvious. To give but one example: Sigel states that the famous early nineteenth-century porn novel Fanny Hill exhibits "a penchant for heterosexuality"--which is like declaring that the Pope demonstrates a penchant for Catholicism.

Sigel constantly reminds the reader about heterosexual hegemony, even though this is the one dimension of pornography that requires no further demonstration; but she fails to explore--as one could easily do, with a bit of help from Eve Sedgwick--the nonheterosexual relations and interests that are visible in descriptions of straight sex. For instance, she opens the book by quoting an interesting, very historically specific ditty about British Prime Minister Gladstone:

Who'll bugger the Turk?
"I," said Gladstone, "as Chief of the Nation,
And Premier of England to gain reputation.
I'll bugger the Turk,
And ne'er let him shirk
My prick's Grand Demonstration!"

Postcard: Wedding night embrace, part 2. From Governing Pleasures.

Nonetheless Governing Pleasures deserves to be read. Lynn Hunt has edited a wonderful recent collection, The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, and we have a couple of specialized books, mainly about France. But feminist discussions of sexual representations are still chronically impoverished by our collective ignorance of how the contemporary category of "pornography" came to replace more varied and often more experimental genres of erotic literature and imagery.

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Gerda Lerner at sixteen. From Fireweed.

The making of a historian
Fireweed: A Political Autobiography by Gerda Lerner. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002, 377 pp., $34.50 hardcover.

Reviewed by Karen Offen

GERDA LERNER, the author of this eloquent autobiography, is best known as a pioneer in women's history. Not only is she a feminist scholar par excellence, but she has been an incontestable force in the establishment of the field. Her experience as a woman and her historian's consciousness have both been deeply shaped by the most forceful movements and events of the twentieth-century West--the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following World War One, the Great Depression, Nazism, the Holocaust, displacement, war, immigration. She has been Austrian, stateless, then American; in Europe she witnessed vicious anti-Semitism, followed in America by vicious anti-communism and racism. She has been a privileged child, a resister, a prisoner, a refugee, a governess, an immigrant, an "enemy alien," a lover and wife, an X-ray technician, a mother, a grandmother, a novelist, a musical librettist, an organizer, a student and, ultimately, a historian, a seeker of social and political justice, and a US citizen who has made an indelible mark.

Lerner began her graduate training as a historian in 1963, the year after I did, but her vision of doing women's history was not one I or many others then shared. She was clearly prescient as well as determined, insisting that women's history was what she wanted to do--indeed, what needed doing--and she stubbornly found a way of getting professional certification to do it. In the ensuing decade, when others like myself (younger and undoubtedly more hesitant to challenge the established wisdom) began to turn away from a more conventionally acceptable, male-defined, but unsatisfying set of historical questions, Lerner was well ahead of us, tugging and pulling, and insisting on the importance of the mission. Those of us who have known her primarily through her contributions to feminist history have been eagerly waiting for this account of her formative years. We have wanted to know more about what shaped the intrepid woman we respect, love, fear (just a little) and admire (a great deal). We have wanted to know what she thought about and what she felt.

In several earlier publications, beginning with The Majority Finds Its Past in 1979, Lerner began to chronicle her professional journey in women's history. In her major interpretive works, The Creation of Patriarchy and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, she deftly demonstrated a broad range of skills, knowledge and methodology; she turned Friedrich Engels' theories about women's subordination upside down, arguing instead that the commodification of women's sexual and reproductive capacity by men "lies at the foundation of private property" and predates its formation. Now we are treated to a look at how and why the early life history of this remarkable woman matters so much for her later trajectory.

FIREWEED APTLY TAKES its title from the plant that is first to bloom and thrive after a ravaging fire. It tells of Gerda Kronstein Lerner's experiences from her childhood and teen years in interwar Vienna to New York City and her first difficult marriage to the young man who had been her first love. It speaks of her early married life with her second husband in Los Angeles, the birth of their two children, and their return to the New York area. It breaks off in 1958, at the point when she took up long-delayed university studies, first at the New School for Social Research, then at Columbia University. In between lies a tale of adventure, true grit and determination, told by a complex and highly gifted woman who at one point refers to "my usual arrogant self." She has a perfect right, in my opinion, to be arrogant, but unlike many of her counterparts in the academy, she tempers her arrogance with self-reflection. Throughout the book she offers up and analyzes her earlier feelings and opinions as she remembers them, and she is not hesitant to engage in self-criticism. She understands that her life has had significance, and she admirably conveys this message to her readers.

Lerner with son Dan and his sons Reed (left) and Clay. From Fireweed.

"Beginnings," the first of four parts, covers her early life in Vienna as the elder daughter of a pharmacist and his artistically-minded wife. Born in 1920 when famine was still raging in Vienna, and the new government was trying against considerable odds to make something of the shrunken rump state that was the German-speaking Austrian Republic, Gerda marked her coming of age in 1938 with a nightmarish five weeks in prison. She was held as a hostage for her absent father whom the police wanted to interrogate, while she fretted about missing her final exams for the Matura (she was released just in time and passed with honors). It is a gripping chronicle of how a young, protected girl faced ugly political realities without losing either her nerve, her ambition, or her life. Her immediate family survived the Nazi round-up of Jews in Vienna, thanks to some very complex maneuvering and her father's decision to open a branch of the family business in Liechtenstein. But although every member of her immediate family survived, each was marked differently and unforgettably by the trauma of relocation. Gerda made it to the United States, thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Florida-based branch of her then fiancé's family. Her younger sister ended up in Israel. Her mother, who refused to stay in Liechtenstein with Gerda's father, survived in southern France.

The remaining three parts of the book deal with Lerner's experiences as an immigrant to, then a proud, though critical, citizen of the United States. She relentlessly and successfully sets her experiences in the context of the major historical events that affected her own life and those in her immediate entourage. Unlike Virginia Woolf ("As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world"), Lerner is particularly eloquent about the meaning of her naturalization in 1943:

Only a refugee, only a once-stateless person, can understand what that symbolic ceremony of naturalization meant. I have, in my long life, experienced all kinds of feelings of helplessness, fear, terror, insecurity. But nothing can compare to being cast outside the civil contract, outside the definition of the citizen. One still has life, but nothing more. One has neither residence, nor permanence, nor a voice that matters, nor the simple privileges that belong to others by right of birth. And so, to have the gift of citizenship granted at last was like being reborn. (p. 223)

Lerner did not believe, however, that the United States of America was a perfect democracy. Events were soon to prove this assessment right, as after the Second World War ended and the Cold War took shape the ugly features of post-war anti-communism began to manifest themselves. The chapters that trace how she became an "American radical" begin in Los Angeles in the 1940s, where she had moved with her second husband Carl Lerner, a free-lance film editor. There she became a mother and in 1946 helped establish the Los Angeles branch of a new activist group, the Congress of American Women (CAW), which had been founded as the US affiliate of the Soviet-backed Women's International Democratic Federation.

Lerner thought she was experiencing the rise of fascism all over again, as witch hunts began in the film industry and union politics took on a sinister aspect. Her grass-roots activism began through CAW, picketing markets about high prices, protesting the close of war-time childcare facilities, founding co-op nurseries, organizing against nuclear weaponry and, throughout, attempting to incorporate women of color into the group. She joined the Communist Party, but became increasingly critical of its approach to the woman question.

Following the Lerners' return to New York in 1949, she became even more deeply involved at the national level with CAW, which in the meantime had attracted the unwelcome attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. CAW was denounced and rather swiftly shut itself down in self-defense. Lerner, frightened, destroyed her papers, an act she now deeply regrets. "I made a pile of all I could find and then, as I had done after the Nazi occupation of Austria, I burned it in the fireplace. The connection between these two events was quite sharp in my mind. There is something truly terrible in watching a book burn; it is even worse to set it on fire. For me, the fact I was doing this, out of fear and to protect myself and my family, became a symbol of repression and defeat."

Lerner's subsequent activism took other forms, which are well chronicled here. Increasingly these efforts to mobilize women and her return to university studies focused on women and women's history. In the early 1950s she wrote the text for a musical, Singing of Women, with her friend Eve Merriam, who did the lyrics. This work, framing research on women's history in the "context of a quarrel between a contemporary couple over what were their appropriate roles in marriage," seemed to prefigure Lerner's ultimate mission. The musical had a short run in Greenwich Village.

Lerner at a speaking engagement in Vienna, 1995. From Fireweed.

AS A WORK OF PROSE, this autobiography has a peculiar beauty. Some of the lines are magical, as, for example, when she writes of her efforts to master the English language, "I absorbed vocabulary voraciously and collected 'phrases' as though they were jewelry." This is a woman who worked hard at mastery, and whose expressiveness, here and in her earlier books, leaves little to be desired. She makes clear, however, that it took years of effort--and that until her husband Carl's death, she ran every word she wrote by him: "When he died it took me well over a year to learn that I could write without him. I had seriously believed that I could not." She also speaks eloquently of her efforts to reclaim her mother tongue, German, after some fifty years of not speaking or reading it.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Gerda Lerner's memoir, as of her many other publications, is the lucidity of her vision. Such clarity seems the natural product of a multilingual person, who understands more than others perhaps how difficult it is truly to master expression in a language. I am reminded here of several earlier memoirs by women of European origins, such as Lost in Translation, in which another gifted woman writer, Eva Hoffman, pondered the costs of moving out of her Polish mother tongue, or Susan Groag Bell's eloquent Between Worlds in Czechoslovakia, England, and America, or French Lessons, Alice Kaplan's beautiful yet terrifying account of her attempts to acquire mastery of--and an identity in--French. With Lerner's acute writing, one does not sense the same hesitation or loss; language does not seem to become an insurmountable obstacle to shaping a self in a new culture. Once she has stated her view, whether about her own life or about women's history, it is hard to imagine seeing it any other way. Lerner doesn't leave much room for argument. Nor, perhaps, is there any need for argument. But, like the eloquent Simone de Beauvoir, who also told her own life, she has made it difficult for any would-be biographer to do better.

Even though Lerner has made hard choices about what to discuss and what to leave out, the value and beauty (and the historical merit) of her narrative are incontestable. What I find especially important is precisely that this is a life told by a woman who is deeply aware of and concerned about world and national events and their impact on the lives of ordinary people. Yet, as a woman historian devoted to women's history and recognition of the female experience, she also fully acknowledges the importance of the "private" side--the men and women in her life, her two American-born children and the irreplaceable gifts of love, friendship, genuine human sympathy, generosity, hard work--and uncommon good luck.

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