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• W2623519839 abstract "Reviewed by: Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction by Catherine Romagnolo Marilyn Edelstein OPENING ACTS: NARRATIVE BEGINNINGS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FEMINIST FICTION, by Catherine Romagnolo. Frontiers of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 192 pp. $55.00 cloth. In Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction, Catherine Romagnolo provides a welcome addition to the field of narrative theory and the related but often more technical and scientistic field of narratology, which until the concept and practice of feminist narratology emerged in the mid-1980s, rarely dealt with the relations between narrative and issues of gender and sexuality, as Romagnolo does.1 Romagnolo’s book also provides an important expansion of feminist narratology itself by foregrounding, especially in its later chapters, the ways in which racialized, ethnic, and national identities intersect with gender and sexuality. Romagnolo’s focus on narrative beginnings (on which there are only a few book-length studies, none of which analyze issues of gender, sexuality, and/or race) may at first glance seem more formal than thematic or conceptual, but it allows Romagnolo to address such important issues as marriage, motherhood, literary and cultural origins, national and racial identities, and agency as they are explored by the twentieth-century American women writers she studies: white women writers Edith Wharton and H. D. in the earlier part of the century and important women writers of color Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, and Julia Alvarez in the latter half of the century. By both theorizing narrative beginnings and examining their formal and ideological significance in novels by these writers, Romagnolo has done a great service to critics and theorists of narrative and of twentieth-century women’s fiction and has helped to develop a more inclusive and intersectional feminist narratological practice. In her introductory chapter, Romagnolo provides an original, useful, and broadly applicable typology of narrative beginnings: “Conceptual Beginnings” (in which an author thematizes the idea of beginnings or origins) (p. xxi); “Formal Beginnings,” which she subdivides into “Primary Discursive Beginnings” (the actual “Beginning of the Text”) and “Secondary Discursive Beginnings” (“The Beginning of a Chapter or of a Break in the Text”) (pp. xxii-xxiii); “Chronological Beginnings” (“The Beginning of the Story”) (p. xxv); and “Causal Beginnings” (“The Beginning of the Plot”) (p. xxvi). While a handful of narrative theorists have attended to what Romagnolo calls “primary discursive beginnings,” Romagnolo’s analyses of “conceptual beginnings” and “causal beginnings” are especially original and rich, given how crucial questions of origins and causality are in literary and historical (including national) narratives. Romagnolo’s first chapter, after her useful theoretical introduction, analyzes Wharton’s novel Summer (1917), a text widely discussed by feminist [End Page 230] critics, who often focus on Wharton’s critiques of the typical nineteenth-century marriage plot. Although this short chapter is often repetitive (a minor flaw throughout the book), Romagnolo insightfully analyzes the structural and thematic relevance of both beginnings and origins in the novel. She argues that, whereas most feminist critics have focused on the ending (with Charity’s pseudo-incestuous marriage to her foster father Royall), a focus instead on the novel’s beginning and Charity’s almost-motherless origins demonstrates that Wharton is just as “skeptical of an idealization of motherhood as she is of the patriarchal system under which the characters live” (p. 4). In Romagnolo’s second chapter, she turns to a rarely discussed short novel, now out of print, by the modernist writer H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), whose poetry feminist scholars have written about far more frequently than her fiction. Paint It Today, written in 1921 but not published in its entirety until 1992, is a roman à clef, part of a trilogy of autobiographical novels usually called the Madrigal cycle, in which H. D. explores an artist’s coming to voice and growing awareness of lesbian desire (or “sister-love”) (p. 23). Many readers of H. D.’s poetry and other prose will be interested in Romagnolo’s analyses of the almost-forgotten Paint It Today. The most compelling chapters for many readers will be the last four, on frequently taught and oft-analyzed books by major contemporary American women writers of color: Morrison’s..." @default.
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• W2623519839 title "Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction by Catherine Romagnolo" @default.
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• W2623519839 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tsw.2017.0007" @default.
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