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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Three novels by Tess Slesinger, Mary McCarthy and Marge Piercy respectively can inform us about American radical movements and perhaps radicalism in general. Each work is a radical self-critique written by political participants who assess their generation's radical experiment and its failure. I argue that there are two sets of arguments common to each critique, one related to the failure of radical imagination and one feminist, and that there is a “submerged” third critique that can be drawn from each narrative. It is from the later submerged critique that we can learn the most about the successive failures of American radicalism.
1. For autobiographical and biographical analyses, see: for Slesinger, , Biagi, Shirley, “Forgive Me for Dying,” Antioch Review 35 (Spring-Summer 1977): 224–36Google Scholar; Janet Sharistanian “Afterward,” Slesinger, , The Unpossessed (New York: Feminist Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Wald, Alan, “The Menorah Group Moves Left,” Jewish Social Studies 38 (Summer-Fall 1976): 289–320Google Scholar; for McCarthy, McCarthy, , On the Contrary (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1962)Google Scholar; Gelderman, Carol, Mary McCarthy: A Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988)Google Scholar; for Piercy, , Betsky, Celia “A Talk with Marge Piercy,” New York Times Book Review, 24 02 1980, pp. 36–38Google Scholar; Piercy, , Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Gitlin, Todd, The Sixties (New York: Bantam, 1987), pp. 371–73.Google Scholar
2. Slesinger, Tess, The Unpossessed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934), p. 34.Google Scholar
3. McCarthy, Mary, The Oasis (New York: Random House, 1949), pp. 8–9.Google Scholar
4. Piercy, Marge, Vida (New York: Summit books, 1979), pp. 110.Google Scholar
5. Ibid., pp. 411–12.
6. While loosely related to recent literary theorization which seeks to discover submerged analyses in texts, the following textual analysis is primarily a “reconstructive” effort in that it seeks to append narratives to those expressly stated.
7. Slesinger, , The Unpossessed, pp. 33–34.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., p. 31.
9. Ibid., p. 29.
10. Ibid., p. 31.
11. Ibid., pp. 326–30.
12. Ibid., pp. 40–41.
13. Ibid., p. 53.
14. Ibid., p. 61.
15. Ibid., p. 231.
16. McCarthy, , The Oasis, p. 35.Google Scholar
17. Ibid., p. 89.
18. Ibid., pp. 19, 21–22.
19. Ibid., p.88.
20. See Gelderman, , Mary McCarthy: A Life, pp. 142–48.Google Scholar Also see general assessments: Graebner, William S., The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1991)Google Scholar; Boyer, Paul, By Dawn's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985).Google Scholar
21. Ibid., pp. 32–33.
22. Ibid., p. 109.
23. Ibid., p. 178.
24. Piercy, Marge, Vida, p. 312.Google Scholar
25. Ibid., p. 311.
26. Ibid., p. 310–11.
27. Piercy, Marge, “The Grand Coolie Damn” in Morgan, Robin, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 430.Google Scholar
28. Slesinger, , The Unpossessed, p. 97.Google Scholar
29. Ibid., p. 350.
30. Piercy, , Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt, p. 177.Google Scholar
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36. Langer, Elinor, “After the Movement,” New York Times Book Review, 24 02 1980.Google Scholar
37. Leonard, John, (book review), New York Times, 15 01 1980.Google Scholar
38. Howe, Irving, Politics and the Novel (New York: Meridian, 1957), p. 163.Google Scholar
39. On the concept of invented communities, see: Nisbet, Robert, The Twilight of Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar and Abbott, Philip, Seeking New Inventions (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).Google Scholar
40. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “New England Reformers” (1844) in Cook, Reginald L., ed., Selected Prose and Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950), pp. 145, 147.Google Scholar
41. Ibid., p. 147.
42. Writing in another generation, Addams, Jane, early in her career, contended that a “fast growing number of cultivated people” were so infected with a sense of loneliness that they were being “buried beneath mental accumulation.” Thus “subjective necessity” required devotion to public problems. Philanthropy and Social Progress (New York: Crowell, 1893), p. 20.Google Scholar
43. Mansbridge, Jane J. describes this structure expertly in her Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Also see Holsworth's, Robert D. summary of “personalist politics” in Let Your Live Speak (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 179–200.Google Scholar
44. Goffman, Erving, Relations in Public (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 7.Google Scholar
45. Slesinger, , The Unpossessed, p. 39.Google Scholar
46. See the comments of collective members in Annie Popkin's account of early feminist radical organization. For example: “My whole lifestyle was completely determined by the movement…. Bread and Roses became the newer form and it was better for me.” “An Early Moment in Women's Liberation,” Radical America 22 (1989): 19–35.Google Scholar See Todd Gitlin on the centifrugal impact of feminism on the radical project of the sixties (The Sixties, pp. 375–76).
47. For a helpful review of problems in recent social movement theory, see Boggs, Carl, Social Movements and Political Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), chap. 1.Google Scholar
48. Slesinger had recently become estranged from the independent radicalism of the Menorah group led by her former spouse, Herbert Solow. See: Wald, Alan M., The New York Intellectuals, pp. 64–74.Google Scholar
49. Sussman, Warren, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 173.Google Scholar
50. Klehr, Harvey, The Heyday of American Communism(New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 367.Google Scholar
51. Gottdiener, Mark, The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), pp. 284–86.Google Scholar
52. Lefebvre, Henri, “Space: Social Product and Use Value” in Critical Sociology, ed. Frieberg, J. W. (New York: Irvington, 1979), p. 292Google Scholar; Bellah, Robert, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 71–75.Google Scholar
