This volume presents a collection of critical essays that center women’s friendship in women’s literary and artistic production. Analyzing cultural portrayals of women’s friendships in fiction, letters, and film, these essays collectively suggest new models of literary interpretation that do not prioritize heterosexual romance. Instead, this book represents friendships as mature and meaningful relationships that contribute to identity formation and political coalition. Both the supportive and competitive aspects of friendships are shown to be crucial to women’s identities as individuals, political citizens, and artists. Addressing the complexities of how 20th- and 21st-century cultural texts construe women’s friendships as they navigate patriarchal institutions, this collection advances scholarship on friendship beyond men and masculine models.
Author(s): Kristi Branham, Kelly L. Reames
Series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 330
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Images
Chapter 1: Introduction: Navigating Women’s Friendships into the Twenty-First Century
Bibliography
Part I: Friendship as Identity
Chapter 2: Entangled Roots: “Old Friends” Reconnected in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation
Between Cruelty and Mutuality: Feminist Examinations of Friendship
The Princess and the Potato: Embodiment in Adolescent and Adult Friendship
Navigating Abortion: Adolescent Friendship and Its Falling Out
Embodied Differences: Adult Friendship and the In/Fertile Body
Ritual Return: Domestic Friendship at the Kitchen Table
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 3: The Gothic’s Creation of Women’s Friendship in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Political Progress and Social Stall: Groupthink, Smart Talk, and Mary McCarthy’s Friendship Novel
“On the Same Side and Alone:” Mary McCarthy’s Life and Friendships
“Am I My Sister’s Jailer?”: Rivalry, Envy, and Competitive Consumerism in The Group
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Girlfriend Epistemology in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
Situating GFE Within Womanist Readings of The Color Purple
Self-Other-Divine: Experiencing Friendship and Knowing God
Bibliography
Part II: Friendship as Support
Chapter 6: “We Will Work Together”: Interclass Women’s Collabships in Progressive Era Novels
Bibliography
Chapter 7: Fleur’s Kinship, Pauline’s Whiteness: How Colonization Shapes Friendship in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks
Fleur’s and Pauline’s Survival Strategies
Gendered Forms of Colonization
Fleur’s Silence and Pauline’s Narrative
Bibliography
Chapter 8: “What Obligation Do I Have Toward Her?”: College Girl Friendships and Self-Actualization in Hangsaman and The Bell Jar
I
II
III
IV
V
Bibliography
Chapter 9: “The Tenderness of One Woman for Another”: Female Friendship and Revolt in the Twentieth-Century Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Bibliography
Part III: Friendship as Challenge
Chapter 10: “Feeling You Near”: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Friendship with Mary Callery
Bibliography
Chapter 11: “These Sweet Trees”: Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Womanist Friendship
Reading Black Feminist Intersectional
On Womanist Friendship
Meeting Alice Walker and June Jordan as Friends
“First-Person Singular: A Letter to June Jordan”
Summertime Tanka
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 12: Chicana Visions: Ana Castillo and Cherríe Moraga’s Friendship, Falling Out, and Forgiveness
Bibliography
Chapter 13: Beat-Associated Women and Female Relationships in Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road
Life-Writing and Beat-Associated Memoirists
Lu Anne Henderson, Anne Murphy, and Diana Hansen in Off the Road
Bibliography
Chapter 14: “I Prefer to Think That History Made Her:” Exploring the Relationship Between Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Edwina Kruse Through This Lofty Oak
Background
Letters and Diary Entries
This Lofty Oak
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
