American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman.

American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman. By THOMAS CARL AUSTENFELD. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 2001. viii + 189 pp. $34.50. ISBN: 0-8139-2052-3.

Thomas Carl Austenfeld concludes his critical study of Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford, and Lillian Hellman with a series of questions. Can a shared literary theory or philosophy, a method of conceptualizing, be detected in their works? Is there a characteristic combination of political apprenticeship, ethical conviction, and woman's intuition which emerges as an approach that can be generalized and applied beyond these four women? Though he fights shy of a fully affirmative response, the very fact that he considers 'woman's intuition' to be a meaningful concept raises doubts about the approach. Despite carefully reminding his readers that he may be mired in a masculinist terminology, he none the less directs them towards the supposition that an ethic of care and relation can provide a new pattern of literary understanding, and that women writers are distinguished by their interest in relationships and in the protection of offspring, compromise, and the privileging of the immediate over the remote. Although he is not in negligible company intellectually here (citing Nel Noddings and Annette Baier as relevant thinkers) these assumptions remain unconvincing when applied to literature. What novels are not concerned with relationships? Surely male novelists are just as likely to privilege the personal over the political? By Austenfeld's criteria E. M. Forster was a woman. Austenfeld's major claim is that many sections of the literary lives of his four authors fall into place when they are considered as literary ethicists, women who foregrounded the moral consequences of their protagonists' activities and intended their writings as ethical signposts.Since all four were expatriates in Germany and Austria in the 1930s, witnessing the rise of Nazism firsthand, it would be highly surprising if their work did not bear traces of ethical and political debate. What Austenfeld needed was a reminder from Oscar Wilde, that there are no moral or immoral books, only books which are well written or badly written.

That said, the volume has plenty of local virtues, directing critical attention to the formative experiences of the four women outside America, and amplifying and correcting the conventional equation of the term 'expatriate' with male novelists in bars in Spain and France in the 1920s. Peripatetic Porter (stuck with very poor German in Berlin), Boyle (gaining a husband in provincial France and losing her US citizenship as a result), Stafford (a naive student in Heidelberg), and Hellman (much less naive, in Bonn) had quite different experiences from Hemingway, or indeed from each other. Austenfeld's approach is inductive, thoughtful, and produces subtly nuanced and well-argued readings, notably on the light shed by Porter's work on notions of collective guilt, read as an illegitimate extension of the mass appeal of totalitarian politics. The emphasis is uneven, and rightly so, with one chapter each devoted to Stafford and Hellman, slightly more on Porter, and three whole chapters on Boyle, who was, after all, in Europe without interruption for eighteen years and witnessed the takeover of both Austria and France. Stafford was only in Europe for two short periods, though her work remains exceptionally interesting in this connection. Austenfeld offers thought-provoking readings of the short stories. Hellman is a much more familiar topic, but the account of her film 'The North Star', a Hollywood-produced endorsement of Soviet collective life, with happy peasant dancers, lyrics by Gershwin, and a full-length rendition of the 'Internationale' made interesting reading. As Austenfeld notes, Hellman uses Germany as the focus for her own message and is therefore different from the other authors studied. They were concerned with Europe and themselves, Hellman with the United States and Americans.

JUDIE NEWMAN

UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM