Sexualizing Power in Naturalism

Paul Hjartarson is an associate professor of English at the University
of Alberta.

Irene Gammel describes her study as “feminist, Foucauldian, and
comparative.” In its critique of naturalism, the study is feminist.
Gammel argues that naturalist fiction is a male mode of writing, which
“presents male authors, narrators, and characters looking at,
inspecting, and framing female sexuality and the female body” and
which is obsessed “with the female body as a locus of contagion, of
either excessive (hysterical, nymphomaniac, and sado-masochistic) or
repressed (frigid, hostile, exploitive) sexuality.” In its
understanding of the relation of sexuality, discourse, and power, the
study is certainly Foucauldian. Although Gammel seeks “to interweave
Michel Foucault’s theory with feminist theories,” she leans heavily
on Foucault (most notably The History of Sexuality), citing his work
more frequently than all the feminist theorists combined. Finally,
Gammel’s study is comparative in its approach both to naturalism and
to the fiction of Dreiser and Grove. According to Gammel, choosing these
two writers enables her “to cover the first four decades of the
twentieth century and three cultures—German, Canadian, and
American.”

As Gammel’s statements suggest, Sexualizing Power is a very ambitious
study. Its strength lies in its critique of naturalism—though much
work remains—and in its revisionist readings of Dreiser and Grove. The
international scope of the study unfortunately leads to a neglect of the
national and the regional; it perhaps also prompts Gammel to assume and
assert rather than to argue. Gammel, for example, simply assumes that
Grove is a naturalist writer and, surprisingly, makes no attempt to
identify the Canadian naturalist tradition into which his writing
supposedly fits; at the same time, she says little about the German
traditions that shaped Greve/Grove’s writings. For a study that
declares at its outset that “American and Canadian naturalism
established itself as a significant art form in the early twentieth
century, translating, recontextualizing, and rewriting the conventions
of nineteenth-century European forms,” this is a significant
deficiency. Sexualizing Power nevertheless makes a promising beginning
on an important topic and will leave readers wanting more.