Christy Rishoi. Girl to Woman: American Women's Coming-of-Age Narratives

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by David Krasner

Christy Rishoi's brief book From Girl to Woman: American Women' s Coming-of-Age Narratives examines selected autobiographical works by Annie Dillard, Mary McCarthy, Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Moody, Kate Simon, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Chapter one establishes the ground rules: The narratives by these authors, Rishoi claims, "subvert traditional literary forms in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and resist the male-defined discourse of womanhood." Rishoi extols the virtues of each writer for creating protagonists influenced by inner conflict and socialization rather than subjects devoid of social influences and having fixed identities. The texts examined in this book emphasize their postmodern proclivities and struggle to resist the "tenacious hold of the liberal humanist notion of self on Western notions of subjectivity." The authors, Rishoi contends, reject the Enlightenment notion that subjectivity is conjured from autonomy, fixity, and fully formed notions of self; instead, these autobiographies develop fluid characters influenced by the community.

Chapter two goes even further, attacking the "American master narrative" that is described as monolithic and unitary. While acknowledging that the mainstream feminist movement has often ignored minorities, Rishoi retains a partisan agenda. Women writers display a "typical" self-effacement which stands in "marked contrast to those canonical male autobiographers, many of whom seem to accept their memory of events unproblematically and who apparently felt little anxiety about the inherent value of their stories." Rishoi, however, avoids identifying these canonical male autobiographers. Instead, she simply inveighs against the notion of male writers and their alleged one-dimensionality.

In the third chapter, Rishoi attends to the process of coming-of-age portrayed in American women's novels and autobiographies. She persists in assuming that male Bildungsroman novelists and autobiographers cling to characteristic fixity, while female texts of a similar ilk develop "hybrid subjectivity." Male Bildungsroman narratives, it is said, seek to establish universals at the expense of multi-dimensional and contradictory characterizations. Rishoi does raise the interesting point that male autobiographers generally describe the insider trying to break free from social conformity, while female autobiographers are frequently outsiders trying to belong to the community. Two examples of male coming-of-age novels are cited, Mark Twain's Huck Finn and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, neither of which, Rishoi admits, entirely illustrate the author's thesis of differences between the genders.

In chapter four, the author examines in considerable detail Annie Dillard's An American Childhood and Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi. Her descriptions of these works are lucid, and the textual analyses insightful; but she persists in the awkward insertion of ideology-laden terminology such as discursive practices and counterhegemonic practices, and interjects poststructuralism's old favorites Foucault and Althusser into the study whenever the work threatens to diverge from its rigid ideological mission. Chapter five investigates in considerable detail Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and two of Zora Neale Hurston's works, Dust Tracks an a Road and Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the final chapter rather astutely examines Kate Simon's memoir Bronx Primitive and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. The textual descriptions are illuminating. Unfortunately, Rishoi all too often digresses from literary criticism in order to grind her ideological axe.

Despite its admirable intentions and illuminating descriptive content, redundancy, excessive proselytizing, and a simplistic view of the Bildungsroman mar the work. Rishoi exhausts already tired postmodern phrases such as discursive formations and especially the verb valorize, which appears seventeen times in the book, more than once every ten pages. The author inflexibly espouses the view that universals are bad, multiple subjectivities are good, autonomous individualism is bad, social identity formation is good, and any deviation from these mantras invites her opprobrium. Yet the author herself occasionally universalizes, especially when she notes that "commonalities do exist" in the texts examined, a generalization that contradicts her own doctrine. Further, the author defends the term agency, which can be construed as autonomous self-fulfillment without social influences. In addition, it should be noted that nothing in a Bildungsroman suggests an autonomous protagonist fixed from beginning to end; instead, the basis of the genre, regardless of the author's gender, is predicated on the presentation of an individual who profits from the lessons of the world. The aim of a Bildungsroman is apprenticeship, where the protagonist, usually a juvenile, must "come of age" by preparing to mature. Coming-of-age means change from childhood to adulthood; so how can any Bildungsroman protagonist maintain a unifying fixed identity when the meaning of the genre itself calls for the subject's transition? If male coming-of-age narratives convey fixity, the author must prove this point by providing examples. Finally, despite its defense of multiple subjectivities and rejection of universals, the book ignores lesbian narratives. Examining Rita Mae Brown's superb coming-of-age narrative Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) might have provided the book with a semblance of inclusiveness. However, From Girl to Woman: American Women's Coming-of-Age Narratives excludes homosexual narratives, thereby presenting a "universal" subjectivity formation of heterosexuality and violating the author's own dictum.