Document Type
Reconsideration
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Meridel Le Sueur's 1939 novel The Girl occupies a troubled place within the history of American genres. Situated within several different subgenres—at once proletarian literature, feminist complaint, and sentimental melodrama—the novel sits comfortably in none. Written in 1939 but only published in 1978, it entered the public sphere almost forty years out of context, in a moment of radical feminism which, while it often resonated with Le Sueur's politics, could not but offer important dissonances as well. This long silence and late revision have partially obscured the book's original depiction of hunger as a force that destabilizes subjectivity within the novel and, by extension, destabilizes the novel's generic status. By transforming all desires into the desire for food, Le Sueur's powerful depiction of hunger appropriates the stylistic techniques of modernism in order to realistically render a hungry subject haunted by the shadow of Depression-era eugenics discourse. Le Sueur's refusal to subordinate the body's needs to those of the speaking subject, even and especially in cases of political expediency, complicates her characters' entry into the Habermasian public sphere. However, by insisting on the capacity of hunger as a kind of political speech, Le Sueur avoids earning a place for working-class women in the public sphere at the price of their disembodiment. In the process, she resists a line of eugenics discourse that lent biopolitical ballast to early socialist and feminist movements.
Repository Citation
Gentry, Amy. "Hungry Realism: Style and Subjecthood in Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–11. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/30