Triptych Time: The Experiential Historiography of Meridel Le Sueur's The Dread Road - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Paula E. Geyh

In her attempts to bring Marxism and feminism together, Le Sueur adopts three primary strategies. Throughout her works, she focused on women as the subjects of history, effectively inflecting and extending a Marxist critique that traditionally considered man as the paradigmatic subject of history.(7) For Le Sueur, women are also the best readers of history--those "closest to the root" and most capable of recovering the occluded and forgotten history of the workers' oppression, and then, armed with this knowledge, of laying the foundation for a revolution to come. Finally (and perhaps most radically and problematically), she portrays women's reproductive potential--both in the biological sense and in the broader sense of the nurturing activities involved in the "reproduction of labor"--as a revolutionary force in its own right. She believes that women's dual roles as workers and as mothers, as subjects in both the production and reproduction of labor, give them a wider scope of knowledge and a broader field of action than men have. Thus, Le Sueur's female protagonists become the privileged actors in a new historical narrative--combining both Marxism and feminism--of both their own and the entire working class's oppression and ultimate liberation.

The triptych structure of The Dread Road reflects dynamic and dialogical relationships among interrelated versions of American history. At the same time, however, this structure (and the vision of history it represents) derives from and is driven by a new conception of the relationships between space and subjectivity, which arises in part from Le Sueur's feminist ideas and agenda. This relationship, which will be discussed in more detail presently, rejects the traditional philosophical correlation of man with time and history, and woman with atemporal space, and instead renders this female-gendered "space" as the site of history itself. The matrix of the novel is, thus, defined by three key components:

A. the ("formal") triptych structure;

B. the recovery of history (which might be seen to be enacted through that triptych structure); and

C. a gendered concept of space and subjectivity that connects history and textuality through a gendered "reading" (by a refigured subject) of the American landscape as history (a spatialization of history that will be seen to carry both possibilities and difficulties).

This essay will explore this matrix, working through the text to show how the various parts combine to create a powerful, albeit not unproblematic, new form of fictional historiography.

Like her earlier novel, The Girl, which Le Sueur constructed from the narratives of women with whom she worked during the Depression, The Dread Road is a collaborative text. Although the original images of The Dread Road "were torn out of the subjective pain of the author," Le Sueur says in the "Author's Note" that it "is not a book written by one person. This is a communal creation of an image, using the collective experience of a number of people" (61). This refusal of single authorship might be seen as an outgrowth of Le Sueur's critique of the individualism that has long been seen as a hallmark of the American character. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville coined the term "individualism" (in the first use of the word located by OED lexicographers) to define a tendency in the character of Americans, observing that "they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine their whole destiny in their own hands. Thus, not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart? Le Sueur's response to this dilemma is an amalgam of Marxism, with its emphasis on the importance of the collective, and a feminism that posits the fluidity and plurality of feminine subjectivity (close to Luce Irigaray's vision) against the alienation and putative unity of the masculine model of subjectivity, insisting upon the interrelation of individual experience and public consciousness ("the personal is political").