Tania Modleski,
Old Wives’ Tales: Feminist Re-visions of Film and other Fictions. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999.
ISBN 1 86064 386 8
238 pp
UK£14.95
(Review copy supplied by I.B. Tauris)

Uploaded 1 November 2000

At the outset I should say that I’m personally involved in some of what Tania Modleski is writing about in Old Wives’ Tales: Feminist Re-visions of Film and other Fictions. I debated whether to make this acknowledgement, because I am so far on the fringes of Modleski’s target as to make it seem grasping on my part to include myself in, as the variant on an old joke would have it. Yet Modleski herself has engaged in the sort of categorical grouping, has made either/or positions so much a part of her strategy in this book, that I find myself included, whatever I might prefer.

As Modleski herself suggests, one starting point for this current book is the reaction to her previous book, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (1991), and another is her first book, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (1982). There is no question but that Modleski has a place in the history of feminist scholarship, primarily in film studies (at least from my point of view, since that is how I first came into contact with her), but also in feminist cultural studies, most significantly because Loving with a Vengeance was one of the first academic studies of women’s popular genres, including women’s romance novels.

Kay Mussell (Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women’s Romance Fiction, 1984) was another early scholar of women’s romance novels who took them seriously in an era when few people did, and when feminist scholars tended to critique them in scathing terms. By the time I began presenting conference papers and publishing essays on women’s romance novels in the early 1990s, I still felt compelled to include a defense couched within feminist terms, but by the time Mussell extended invitations to contribute to a double issue of Para*Doxa (Where’s Love Gone? Transformations in the Romance Genre 3.1-2, 1997) I was no longer interested in defending the genre from feminist attacks and more likely to argue that feminism needs to find scope for the romance phenomenon. My particular response to Mussell’s invitation was an analysis of Emma Darcy’s Harlequin novels from a sort of auteurist approach, influenced by Haskell’s identification of four themes she associates with the woman’s film.

Modleski also contributed to that double issue of Para*Doxa, and then she contributed a follow-up piece to Para*Doxa 4.9 in 1998. (Curiously, Old Wives’ Tales’ acknowledgements include the first piece’s prior publication in Para*Doxa, but not the appearance of the second piece there-nor, significantly, Mussell’s response, which immediately followed it there.) The second piece, “My life as a romance writer,” resulted from Modleski’s anger at the content of Where’s Love Gone? and her perception that she, as she puts it there, had been left “hanging out to dry” (134). Her first piece, “My life as a romance reader,” was meant as “a personal piece, an offshoot of my memoir” (134), and she felt betrayed when the issue appeared and hers was the only piece written from such a personal perspective.
However, she was also angry about the fact that so many of the other contributors to Where’s Love Gone? were romance authors who claimed a feminist content for their novels and a feminist aspect to the phenomenon in general that Modleski rejects.

I was practically the only person among a host of critics and romance writers who had any reservations whatsoever about the genre. All the writers attacked the earlier studies as simplistic, as well as entirely negative in their evaluation of romances. They touted themselves as ´cutting edge’ authors and critics, who, as I put it in my rejoinder, had achieved the full flowering of feminist consciousness. I responded by pointing to some of the absurdities of the claims made on behalf of romances (e.g., ´Reading and writing a romance may be the most subversive thing a woman can do when it comes to contesting patriarchal culture’). (9)

Modleski footnotes this quotation within the context of the “Romance writer” essay, wryly observing that such subversive acts must rate “right up there, I guess, with struggling for effective sexual harassment policies, working at rape crisis centers, and protecting abortion clinics” (66). Like Radway, then-although Modleski takes pains to note that she and Radway have differed in their understanding of the romance phenomenon-Modleski relegates romances to an unreal world and favors practical action in the “real” world.

One of her points is valid. She and Radway differed from each other in their responses to the romance novel phenomenon, just as she and Radway did not see the romance novel phenomenon entirely in either/or terms. Her chapter entitled “The white negress and the heavy-duty dyke” was originally published in an anthology edited by Dana Heller entitled Cross-Purposes: Lesbianism, Feminism, and the Limits of Alliance (1997); the phrase “limits of alliance” seems to me to be the crux of this point. How does one ally two things that seem to be at odds? For example, romance novels simultaneously participate in hegemonic activities that support the patriarchy while providing opportunities of various sorts to challenge that patriarchy, both through fantasy and through real-world acts (such as spending money and time on one’s own desire to read such novels). As issues, race and feminism have also sometimes come into situations of theoretical and practical conflict; forced to prioritize, which should one choose? Yet my recollection of the thrust of much feminist argumentation that I read as a graduate student in the ’70s and ’80s was that feminism encouraged, even required, the ability to transcend binary oppositions so that competing points of view could receive their due acknowledgement. In Old Wives’ Tales Modleski provides some support for my recollection insofar as she rejects binary oppositions that would seem to be dividing contemporary feminists.

Apparently, though, from the evidence of her introduction to Old Wives’ Tales (“Feminist criticism today: notes from Jurassic park”) along with “My life as a romance writer,” Modleski has been taking a beating lately, not from the old male chauvinist pig dragons, but from young members of the current generation of feminist scholars. She perceives this group to be in error in lumping together all of the feminist scholarship from the 1970s and 1980s, which it then discredits for not acknowledging difference. In contrast, Modleski argues that this group has itself failed to acknowledge the differences present in that body of early feminist scholarship. Most of all, she notes that she’s still here, that is, that she was part of that early feminist scholarship, that she has participated in feminist scholarship since then, and that her own position has changed over the years, thus disproving claims by the current generation that the early feminist scholars were dinosaurs who can be consigned to history.

It would seem that Modleski herself has fallen into the us or them trap.

I am reminded of an event in Milwaukee in the 1980s when Pat ricia Mellencamp spoke to a gathering organized by the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin (where Modleski was also situated at the time). Mellencamp also spoke in personal terms, and she spoke with real feeling about the pain of growing older and watching younger women displace her. Modleski echoes that sense of loss and frustration, even as she tries to structure a book around something more than the personal.

In both issues of Para*Doxa Modleski is identified as “currently writing a memoir as well as a study of how contemporary female film-makers and performers are reworking popular genres” (e.g., “Reader” 28). In her “Notes from Jurassic park,” Modleski describes the evolution of Old Wives’ Tales from a project “broadly” about “women as cultural producers” to “a book about women filmmakers” (1). In the end, as she says:

neither of these topics exactly fit” (1). She next describes a desire “to look at a phenomenon I began to conceive of as ´postfeminism in the good sense.’ I had in mind the kind of work by women artists that might challenge certain feminist orthodoxies but that in fact has been made possible by feminist politics itself. In other words, it seemed to me that women artists are now able to risk being labeled as politically incorrect because they can assume a certain level of feminist consciousness on the part of their audience, and, equally importantly, can be assured of a ready market for their work (2).

Broadly speaking, any one of these projects, from the memoir to the study of manifestations of “good” postfeminism could have been interesting, given Modleski’s talents as a writer and her abilities as a feminist scholar. Yet Old Wives’ Tales not only doesn’t hang together as a coherent project; it is seriously flawed by Modleski’s obsession with the oppositions she sets up between herself as singular representative of early feminist scholarship and the current young turks.

Perhaps because I came to Old Wives’ Tales with foreknowledge of the two pieces on romance novels, I cannot entirely agree with Julianne Pidduck’s observation that “race, an increasingly central aspect of feminist criticism, forms a core theme of the book” (review article, Screen 41.1, 2000: 127). Certainly race issues inform several of Modleski’s chapters. Her discussion of Anita Hill’s Senate testimony within the context of the Freudian concept of deferral along with her discussion of an interview with Virginia Thomas in People make her first chapter particularly thoughtful and persuasive.

When Modleski discusses performance issues in chapters about Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing or Anna Deavere Smith’s performance pieces, she runs into the difficulties inherent in talking about performances that readers may not have seen. When Modleski moves from Smith to Viet Nam war films, the connections seem tenuous at best.

It is also a bit hard not to see Modleski’s discussion of Jane Campion’s mother (in a chapter entitled “Axe the piano player”) as somewhat self-serving, as Modleski wants to talk of her own mother-and does, in the final chapter, entitled “Something else besides a mother: reflections of a feminist on the death of her mother.” To me she seems to be grasping at connecting straws, striving to find a unity at the heart of this book that does not exist.

Perhaps, though, I am just put off by what Pidduck refers to as a “tone [that] can drift towards excessive defensiveness” (128), along with similar concerns about “Modleski’s insistence on two hostile generational camps [as] problematic and reductive” (128). Also, because I am aware of the context within which the two romance essays first appeared, I am disappointed that Modleski has not responded to Mussell’s reply. Finally, as someone familiar with Campion’s The Piano and its reception locally in Aotearoa New Zealand, I must disagree with some of what Modleski writes in “Axe the piano player”-that is, I think she’s misunderstood or failed to contextualize relatively simple points about the film and its reception.

For example, it matters that Modleski refers to “a companion” when she means Baines (36) because the difference between Baines and Stewart’s understanding of indigenous culture is connected with Campion’s participation in a postcolonial discourse. That Modleski is aware of the presence of this discourse in the film is obvious from her discussion of colonialism on the same page, but she simplifies the historical relation of Maori to colonialism by seeing their wearing of European clothes as an example of “the average colonialist[‘s] . . . luring/coercing them [Maori] to accept white culture” (36). History shows that Maori appropriated aspects of European culture, including clothing, for their own advantage and by their own choice, and few people in Aotearoa New Zealand would suggest that Maori adopted the sort of passive response to colonialism that Modleski assumes. (To add my own personal experience, à la Modleski, I am proofreading this review outside Rotorua’s Museum of Art and History, where I have just read that Maori happily adopted wool fabric because they appreciated its warmth and durability.)

According to Modleski, “The image of the Maori woman [played by Tungia Baker] who walks down the beach intoning a dirge-like melody as Ada and Baines go off at the end says it all” (39). Really? Had Tungia Baker in real life been welcoming Hunter and Keitel to the beach, her karanga of welcome would probably have sounded equally dirge-like to Modleski, since karangas invoke the spirits of dead ancestors to join the living. Finally, Ada and Baines do not leave New Zealand (44); Ada leaves Stewart to move with Baines to another, more settled part of colonial New Zealand.

These different readings suggest different interpretations: While Campion’s representation of Maori has been criticized for falling into stereotypes, the Maori characters have also been read as a form of Greek chorus whose presence provides a commentary on the colonizing settlers; the move to Nelson at the end of the film suggests a reconstituted family of more culturally attuned settlers (Baines and Ada) whose daughter (Flora) represents the future New Zealander who will take advantage of the greater freedoms available to a young woman in a land yet to be “civilized” by more restrictive European standards.

Modleski’s bibliography is interesting, the illustrations are few but appropriate, and her style is often amusing and amusingly informal (e.g., “Gosh.”, 3). As individual essays, the parts of Old Wives’ Tales offer much of interest, but they do not add up to a satisfying whole.

Harriet Margolis