Opening with Adrienne Rich's much-quoted 1971 call for women's revisions of literary texts, Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar define feminist re-vision as inevitably oppositional, its triple purpose being: to question and renew established male texts, to ascertain and/or extend the female character's subjectivity in those texts, and to contest or upset the authority of those texts. A number of essays in the collection fit this definition. For instance- Ruth Bienstock Anohk's discussions of the retelling of the Jewish folktales of the golem and the dybbuk in the fiction of Cynthia Ozick, Marge Piercy, Ellen Galford and Judith Katz; Lynn Alexander's analysis of Gloria Naylor's recovery of the term “whore" in Bailey’s Café; or (and perhaps not surprisingly) Sarah Appleton Aguiar's own discussion of revisions of King Lear from the perspective of the daughters.

The approach to rewriting as oppositional re-vision inevitably invites taking the measure of the 'discourse of opposition' the rewriting embodies. Contrasting literary criticism (arguably a form of critical rewriting) of Nabokov's Lolita with literary rewritings of it, Timothy McCracken maintains: “while criticism can contest, negotiate, rethink, and reframe, it cannot rewrite Lolita" (134). In her examination of revisionist mythmaking in young adult fiction, Elise Earthman comes to the disappointed conclusion that the possibilities offered by myth are left for a large part unrealized in two out of the three texts she considers. Taking her point of departure in the claim that young women read “to learn how to solve their problems" (qtd. 163), and her cue from Alicia Ostricker's conception of revisionist mythmaking as “instructions for survival” (qtd. 162), Earthman concludes that the texts she examines are not oppositional enough, ultimately offering no model that could aid the young woman reader's development into adulthood. In a similar way, Ellen Peel distinguishes degrees of subversion in her essay on rewritings of the Pygmalion and Galatea myth. Though the myth already formulates its own critique of the patriarchal values it represents, rewritings of it do so to a higher or lesser degree.

Dissenting from the oppositional discourse characteristic of most of the contributions to the volume, Merri Lisa Johnson’s “Taking America as a Lover: Contemporary Women 'Engage' the American” is an essay that rejects the trope of revision, proffering that of love-making (and/or fucking) in its stead. Johnson wants to reopen the discussion surrounding the relationship between American women writers and the dominant, male American literature and culture. To do so, she imagines the relationship between women writers and tradition (male predecessors, the male dominant ideological text of America) as one between metaphorical lovers. “Volumes of feminist literary criticism reiterate the trope of revision, constructing oppositional relationships between contemporary women writers and tradition . . . There is more to this relationship than an unremitting turning away. Indeed, . . . women write something much more complicated than a 'revision’ of male texts; they write the long, convoluted, sexy scripts of desire that pass between men and women on personal and social levels throughout time" (107). Calling on Gilbert & Gubar's paradigm of "ambivalent affiliation" as articulated in their study of twentieth-century women writers, No Man’s Land, Johnson writes that “we affiliate ambivalently with the masculine part of our culture (in the form of boyfriends, fathers, canonized texts, and traditional values)” (109). Grounding her discussion of the ways in which to deal with "the 'mixed blessing' of men and their texts," as she puts it (110), in a comparative analysis of two texts, she contrasts Lisa Carver's Dancing Queen with Ruth Behar's autobiographical scholarship. Thus she proves Carver's novel to be a loud and exuberant performance of American values that may be transgressive of them but is also complicit in its obliviousness to the problem of social inequality in America – “the parceling out and policing of entitlement to American freedoms, mobility, and consumption" (116-17) of which Behar's cautious and critical engagement with American values and identity is so aware.

The trope of re-vision is perhaps taken most literally in Jamie Barlowe's essay on Jane Campion’s film adaptation of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, which focuses on Campion's opening sequence as a scene of instruction that “teaches female spectators how to view her feminist film" (223). The trope is dropped for a notion of rewriting as “counterwriting, 'writing otherwise': a polemical agenda-driven form of intertextuality” in Christian Moraru's essay on Bharati Mukheree's The Holder of the World (254). Showing how Mukheree's “purloining” (as he puts it) of The Scarlet Letter "spells out an entire politics of gender and, in doing so, engenders an alternate history of empire as well as of the canon” (255), Moraru achieves what he sets out to do: “to explain exactly how and why literature's 'feeding' on previous literature is a political act" (255). Locating his essay within recent scholarship on intertextuality, and the novel's “intertextual/rewriterly modus operand” within the context of the "unprecedented circulation and refashioning of cultural products, ideas, styles, symbols, and people” characteristic of our global age (256), Moraru provides the rare reflection on rewriting as a mode of textual production that is also historically and culturally situated, offering us a glimpse of what the book might have been if assessments of women’s rewriting in the last quarter of a century had indeed been made.

–Liedeke Plate, Utrecht University, symploke, 2002

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