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English
Reshaping
the Literary Canon
Nina Baym may be retiring, but her impact
on study of women's literature will still be felt in the classroom.
Early
in Nina Baym's distinguished career she read a quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne
that would guide the arc of her writing and research. The 19th-century
Massachusetts novelist known for such classics as The Scarlet Letter and Twice-Told
Tales, dismissed fiction by women as trivial while describing
female writers as a "damned mob of scribbling women."
Baym, who came to the U of I in 1963 after earning a PhD at Harvard
University, and who retired in June of 2004 from LAS's Department of
English, eventually had the last laugh. Baym has written more than
60 articles, 130 reviews on American authors, and seven academic books.
She has also edited seven academic books, including the most widely
used college anthology in the field of American literature, the Norton
Anthology of American Literature.
Awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim
Foundation fellowships, and the prestigious Jay Hubbell Medal for Lifetime
Achievement in Advancing American Literature Study. From 1976 to 1987,
Baym was the director of the U of I School of Humanities. Upon retirement
she held the triple titles of Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences,
and Swanlund Endowed Chair, and Center For Advanced Study Professor.
But it was Hawthorne's ungenerous jab at women that led to some of
Baym's most impressive and recognized "scribblings." While never dismissing
Hawthorne, she began to re-read his novels through the lens of a woman.
In her 2000 acceptance speech for the Hubbell Medal, Baym said, "Re-reading The
Scarlet Letter as a woman-centered novel opened the door, indeed,
to a Hawthorne one did not know. Following the breadcrumb trail through
the forest; or, zigging and zagging from one item on this scavenger
hunt to the next, I found myself asking how other works by Hawthorne
might read if interpreted from a woman-centered perspective; next,
what one might make of Hawthorne's career if the dominant theological
approach were jettisoned."
The revelation is that Hawthorne's work was about women, whereas
critics of the time (and not only critics of Hawthorne) simply couldn't
imagine that an important male writer would be writing about women
at all.
The result of Baym's critical inquiry was the book The Shape of
Hawthorne's Career. In her next book, Women's Fiction, Baym
expanded her research to "questions of women characters in fiction
by other canonical American authors; to women characters in fiction
by American women; then, to American women novelists more generally." Prior
to Baym, literature experts primarily stuck to evaluating how women
writers portrayed men and vice versa. Nina Baym examined the whole
genre of so-called sentimental writing in America by women. Whether
or not the literature was "great" was immaterial to her.
It showed women making their way in the world, which was revolutionary.
One colleague said that Baym's work "spurred a feminist revision of
the way we write literary history." changing "why we read, what we
read, and how we read."
"The best literary critics, the really special literary critics, add
to the ways that we interpret texts," says LAS English professor Bob
Parker. "Nina Baym did that, and she did it a great deal, and she did
it brilliantly, rereading American literature through a perspective
that took women's concerns and women's writing into account at a time
when women's concerns and writing were simply not on the scholarly
map. Once in a long while there also comes along a critic who dramatically
changes which works of literature we interpret, and Baym did that as
well, teaching us that there were entire realms of literature that
had simply been forgotten because of modern critics' inability to imagine
the value of women's writing.
"In short, Baym enlarged the writing we refer to when we say "American
literature," and she changed how we interpret American literature.
It takes a rare critic to do one of those things. Only a defining critic
for a generation can do both of them."
Indeed, she has been a tireless advocate of the importance of women
writers in literary history. One reason for that advocacy is the advice
her mother gave her. "She instilled in me forever the conviction that
a woman had to be able to support herself and, if need, be, her family."
In her ground-breaking article, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How
Theories of American Fiction Excluded Women," Baym wrote passionately
about the reasons for "the critical invisibility of the many active
women authors in America." In that same paper she wrote that, "A culture
is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is
struggle or at least debate; it is nothing if not a dialectic."
"Nina Baym is a masterful teacher at every level," says U of I dean
of the Graduate School Dick Wheeler. "She has attracted many excellent
graduate students to the University of Illinois to study American literature
with her; her graduate seminars have been among those most sought after
in the department since she began teaching them; and the mentoring
she has provided her many doctoral advisees has had powerful and life-long
effects on their literary scholarship."
When Baym was awarded the Hubbell Medal, the award committee wrote
that "whether in collections such as Feminism and American Literary
History: Essays (1992) or in her many editorial capacities, Professor
Baym has introduced a generation of new readers to forgotten or neglected
writers of the past while at the same time forcing us to see well-known
writers and works from surprising perspectives."
Baym played a major role reshaping the literary canon into a more
inclusive collection, one that better reflects the diversity of America.
"Looking back on what is now a lifetime's work," Baym says, "I see
a career of opportunity rather than design: all I wanted to begin with
was a secure job teaching in a good college."
By Stephen J. Lyons
October 2004
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