In 1970, Kate Millett published Sexual Politics, a book which most critics agree inaugurated the practice of feminist literary criticism. Millett began with the radical idea that rather than being remote from everyday life, literature is political and is not exempt from scrutiny. In what is now a conventional move of (particularly early) feminist criticism, Judith Fetterley establishes this link between the personal and the political by beginning her work on American fiction with a personal story. As she relates in the preface to The Resisting Reader, the book grew out of a course she taught on "Images of Women in American Literature," in which she required her students to record their responses to the literature in a journal. It is out of these journals -- those of her students and her own -- that this book springs.

The introduction begins in agreement and with echoes of Millett: "Literature is political. It is painful to have to insist on this fact, but the necessity of such insistence indicates the dimensions of the problem (xi)." According to Fetterley, the canon of American literature is filled with primarily male authors and the majority of these texts also display some sort of male bias. In addition, a common characteristic of much of American literature is that it is "frequently dedicated to defining what is peculiarly American about experience and identity (xii)." In this context, American literature fails the woman reader by representing male experience as universal. In her words, "the experience of being American is equated with the experience of being male" (xii). It is not simply that primarily male authors write primarily about male characters, but rather that American identity is consistently defined in opposition to the feminine.

Fetterley does anticipate certain kinds of criticism in her introductory remarks. She explicitly states that she does not view her work as either definitive or comprehensive. Instead, she sees her readings of these particular texts as one moment in an ongoing conversation. She writes: "I hope my book will be suggestive -- that it will stimulate dialogue, discussion, debate, re-reading, and finally re-vision" (viii).

So her task is to re-read a number of classic American texts in order to disrupt the standard critical readings. Fetterley treats a relatively small number of texts, beginning in the first chapter with four short stories: "Rip Van Winkle," "I Want to Know Why," "The Birthmark," and "A Rose for Emily" and then goes on to examine Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, James's The Bostonians and ends with Mailer's An American Dream. She is particularly interested in female characters previously neglected by critics and the representation of asymmetrical relations of power between men and women in this fiction.

Two of her readings in particular are interesting, especially in the context of ENAM 712. Fetterley begins with Washington Irving's "Rip van Winkle," a story, she writes in which "marked the emergence of American literature at home and abroad (2). She identifies this story as a first example of en enduring myth in American literature, "life in an all-male world, a world without women, the ideal American territory" (6). Here is represented the fantasy of eternal boyhood, free from the strictures and responsibilities present in the domestic, an adventurous life in the wilderness in the company of other men. Although the connection is not dwelled on by Fetterley herself, Rip can be seen as a pre-cursor to the character of Huckleberry Finn, another text in which the question, "where does the female reader locate herself?" could be quite productive.

Fetterley's approach to The Bostonians differs slightly from the ways in which she examines "Rip Van Winkle." She begins by quoting liberally from the extensive body of James criticism and proceeds to identify a pattern within that critical history: most critics of this James novel allow their readings to be shaped by beliefs and assumptions outside of the text (in a nice twist, surely the same thing she herself will be accused of). In their assumptions of where James's sympathies lie, they disregard contradictory evidence both in the way in which James conceived of his own work and within the text itself.

To be sure, Fetterley's book is dated -- this is apparent in some of the language she uses. She repeatedly refers to "the phallic critic" and "patriarchy" as if the meanings of these terms self-evident. She also uncritically deploys the term "women," ostensibly to refer to a discrete group of individuals with something in common (perhaps a reading experience of alienation, an inability to find oneself represented in texts that claim to be universal). Fetterley's particular concern with "women" as one all-encompassing category makes her unable to account for such variables as class and race, an issue which becomes vital to feminist theory over the next twenty years. However, some of her readings seem obsolete for the opposite reason -- that now they seem fairly commonplace. For example, is it still radical to say that Hemingway's representations of women are highly problematic?

Although, by and large, she does not seem interested in simply labelling male authors as sexist and condemning them, there are moments when she tends to conflate author with narrator and author with character (the section on Hawthorne is one example). There are also occasions when the reader of Fetterley wishes for more specific evidence from the texts she is examining, but in general her readings are tamer and more subtle than the fiery, manifesto-like introduction would lead one to expect. In fact, she concludes that several of the male authors she treats offer far more complex and sympathetic representations of women than critics have recognized.

Finally, the most useful thing about Fetterley's book is the way in which it reinvigorates the critical debates surrounding canonical male authors, encouraging the reader of American literature to "resist" critical commonplaces rather than simply "assent" to them. Even critics not convinced by her close readings should be disrupted out of complacency with the generally accepted critical consensus of these "classic" texts.