American Women

Langdon Lynne Faust, ed. American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Abridged ed., 2 vols. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.449 pp., 456 pp. Kristin Herzog. Women, Ethnics, and Exotics: Images of Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. 254 pp. Edward Wagenknecht. Daughters of the Covenant: Portraits of Six Jewish Women. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983.192 pp. As a subject of study, women—whether figures of history or of fiction— seem to raise the same issues, even in singularly different works like the three reviewed here: Kristin Herzog's study of nineteenth-century American literature, Women, Ethnics, and Exotics; Edward Wagenknecht's account of six Jewish women, Daughter of the Covenant; and American Women Writers, two volumes that span the centuries since colonial times with their biographic sketches. All draw attention to the issue of women's power. They discern its presence, despite appearances of powerlessness, define the forms of its manifestation, and enumerate its effects. Inseparable from the issue of power are, of course, political issues: indeed, the two may well be synonymous. For the literary critic, politics involve specifically the making or breaking of a literary canon. Herzog seeks to change the traditional canon of nineteenth- century American fiction by making it increasingly "multi-ethnic." She would eliminate major and minor literature as categories by showing that both invest the same power in women, ethnics and natives or "exotics," a power that makes them all generically "feminine." Hawthorne and Melville, no less than Harriet Beecher Stowe, create "feminine" characters who possess "natural" power. In this respect, their work has themes and values in common with those of "neglected" black writers and of Native Americans, whose omission from the canon constitutes a historical mistake that Herzog hopes to rectify

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