Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories PDF
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Sex,Race,and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories American Literature Readings in the 21stCentury Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21stCenturypublishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories Melissa Bostrom SEX,RACE,ANDFAMILYINCONTEMPORARYAMERICANSHORTSTORIES Copyright © Melissa Bostrom,2007. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-7990-2 All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproducedin any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case ofbrief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N.Y.10010 and Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire,England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St.Martin’s Press,LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States,United Kingdom and other countries.Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-53850-8 ISBN 978-0-230-60748-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230607484 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India. First edition:August 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Story 9 2. The Female Sexual Economy 43 3. Economies of Whiteness 83 4. Economies 131 Notes 157 Works Cited 197 Index 217 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments The story of this book has been long, and the help I have received has overflowed the bounds of any economy. I thank the many readers who graciously provided feedback at many stages: María DeGuzmán, Linda Wagner-Martin, John McGowan, Laurie Langbauer, Marianne Gingher, Jane Burns, and Bob Johnstone, with a special debt to Tara Powell and Andy Leiter. Thanks to Farideh Koohi-Kamali and Elizabeth Sabo at Palgrave Macmillan for guiding the book, and thanks to Maran Elancheran at Newgen for its design. Funding from UNC’s Department of English and Royster Society supported the project at critical junctures. I have been lucky to have a substantial cheering section of friends behind me: Kim Burton-Oakes, Berenice Cadena Patiño, Mary Cunningham, Brian Dietz, Adam Garratt, Jessica Kem Gorman, Tom Gorman, Jennifer Haytock, Chris Hill, Sharon Joffe, Ann Kakaliouras, Alex McAulay, Lisa McAulay, Fiona Mills, Joy Salyers, Courtney Sears, Cindy Stone, Elaine Tola, Rich Zink, and, above all, Sarah Mazer Zink. I especially thank my family for lifting my spirits across the miles—my parents, Dave and Kay; my siblings, Lynn and Ben; and my extended family, Andrea Grotenhuis, Todd Grotenhuis, Brian Nowling, Cara Nowling, Paula Nowling, Jo Wier, Jeff Wier, Katie Wier, and Peg Wier. My grandfather, Bob Wier, supported me throughout the work of this project, and we’ll all miss him in celebrating its end. Finally, I would need to write another book to adequately express my gratitude to Krisztian Horvath, whose kindness, sense of humor, intellect, and love have made the journey worthwhile. Introduction In the widely acclaimed story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” Lorrie Moore relates the tale of a Mother and a Husband whose Baby has been diagnosed with renal cancer.1 The story opens with the Mother’s discovery of a blood clot in the Baby’s diaper and follows the family through his treatment. Moore’s story is not a run-of-the-mill family drama, though. The first words the Husband utters in the story follow the Mother’s announcement of the Baby’s diagnosis; his first reaction is to suggest, “Take notes.” Because his wife is a novelist and teacher, he repeats, “Take notes. We are going to need the money” (219). When the Mother, appalled, tells him, “Iwrite fiction. This isn’t fiction,” he recommends that she write their story as a journalistic report. “Get two dollars a word,” he suggests (222). In response to the news that their infant son will need a nephrectomy and chemotherapy at the least, and perhaps the removal of the other kidney and a transplant as well, the Husband immediately focuses on ways to turn this situation into one that is profitable rather than financially draining. Although the Mother resists his advice throughout the story, steadfastly refusing to profit from her Baby’s life-threatening illness, she seems to recover from those qualms by the end of the story, when the Baby’s cancer has faded into remission. “There are the notes,” she writes on the final page. “Now where is the money?” (250). Moore foregrounds the relationship between the short story and economics here in a way few other writers have done. The Mother’s choice to tell the story for money underlines the relationship between writers of short stories and the kind of financial gain they can bring. Originally published in the New Yorker—currently the most promi- nent U.S. magazine printing literary short fiction—this story is par- ticularly important because it was widely anthologized, including in the 1998 volume of the Best American Short Stories series and as the first-prize winner of the O. Henry Awards for that same year. Charles McGrath, the former fiction editor of the New Yorker, has speculated that this “knockout” story propelled Moore’s collection Birds of M. Bostrom, Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories © Melissa Bostrom 2007 2 SEX,RACE,AND FAMILY Americato the New York Timesbestseller list, a rare feat for any short story collection. The story thus reached a wide audience—wider, per- haps, than almost any other piece of literary short fiction published in the past decade (“The Short Story” E1).2 The narrative voice of the story, that of the (unnamed) Mother, also sparked speculation by readers and critics that the events related in the story were inspired by Moore’s own life. The story’s initial appearance in the New Yorkerfed such conjecture through the contents page, which implied that the piece was a memoir; the first page of the story itself was printed oppo- site a photograph of Moore (Passaro 83–84). Moore herself was rather coy about the truth of that assumption; her “Contributors’ Notes” accompanying the story’s publication in the 1998 Best American Short Stories volume say simply, “This story has a relation- ship to real life like that of a coin to a head. It is dedicated to my son” (291). Even her simile invokes economic terms to explain the story’s relation to reality. Although Moore’s story portrays a contemporary example, American women have been writing stories about their families to support them for many decades. The earliest women short story writers in this country turned to the short story after attempting genres such as Sunday School literature, child-rearing and etiquette advice, children’s literature, and even the more traditional essays, novels, and poetry (Koppelman, “A Preliminary Sketch” 1). Financially, they found short stories to be the best option for supporting themselves; stories simply sold better and paid more. As Mary Louise Pratt has noted, the story genre is partic- ularly friendly to writers who are new to the literary scene, such as women and minorities, in a way that most other traditional genres are not, allowing a number of new writers to find remuneration and recognition as they launch their careers. Moore herself has remarked that this fact about the story is good for both readers and writers: to have art forms “newly open to people who wouldn’t ordinarily have the economic means to write them, is not a bad thing. It allows for voices, and pieces of the world, and life coming into light and play that readers didn’t have before” (McGraw, Moore, and Burgin 26). Moreover, as Virginia Woolf observed in A Room of One’s Own, shorter forms are better suited to women writers, who can constantly be interrupted in their domestic and childcare duties, and fiction requires less concentrated attention than either drama or poetry (Woolf 78, 66). Even contemporary writers find truth in this state- ment. Sue Miller, in her introduction to the 2002 Best American Short Stories volume, explains that Woolf’s dictum held true in her own life: “I wound up writing short stories,” she recounts, “because
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