Folly (26 page)

These discussions of lesbianism and racism return me to my initial argument that
Folly
deconstructs the opposition between personal and political or private and public in a particularly striking and effective manner. Racism is not only economic and political discrimination, it is also a legacy of not-seeing carried within every white woman. Lesbianism is not just the personal choice of sexual partner, it is a way of connecting with women that leads to political empowerment.
Folly
replaces the arguably patriarchal notion of “either/or” with the more feminist one of “both/and.” Folly herself is both worker and mother, both mother and lover. Folly and Lenore are both personally racist and politically anti-racist. The women of Victory are both oppressed laborers and powerful fighters. It may be true, as some critics have argued, that the novel occasionally displays a tendency toward didacticism. But the issues raised in
Folly
—the erasure of African-American and working-class women's subjectivity, lesbians coming out and coming together, women struggling collectively to change the conditions of their lives—are of such importance and so imperfectly learned even by political activists, that we can readily forgive Maureen Brady for this touch of the pedagogue. Reading
Folly
is an educational experience in the best tradition of socially committed fiction: the novel expands our consciousness, increases our empathy, and touches our hearts.

Bonnie Zimmerman

Notes

1
. I am indebted to Glynis Carr's biographical entry on Maureen Brady in
Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the U. S.: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook,
eds. Denise D.Knightand Sandra Pollack (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 80–84.

2
. Maureen Brady, “An Exploration of Class and Race Dynamics in the Writing of
Folly,
”
13th Moon,
VII, 1 & 2 (1983): 145.

3
. Ibid., 145–46.

4
. Ibid., 146.

5
. Historical background is taken from
Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World,
ed. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Mary Frederickson, “‘I Know Which Side I'm On': Southern Women in the Labor Movement in the Twentieth Century,” in
Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History,
ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 156–80.

6
. Hall, 67.

7
. Frederickson, 160.

8
. Ibid., 174.

9
. Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, “From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition,” in
Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture,
eds. Judith Newton and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 218.

10
. Candida Ann Lacey, “Striking Fictions: Women Writers and the Making of a Proletarian Realism,”
Women's Studies International Forum
9, 4 (1986): 373–84. See also Fay M. Blake,
The Strike in the American Novel
(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972).

11
. Paula Rabinowitz,
Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 36.

12
. Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, “Getting Into the Game: American Women Writers and the Radical Tradition,”
Women's Studies International Forum
9, 4 (1986): 364.

13
. Bonnie Zimmerman,
The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).

14
. Maureen Brady, “Insider Outsider Coming of Age,”
Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions,
eds. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (New York and London: New York University Press, 1990), 55.

15
. George Levine,
The Realistic Imagination
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 8–9.

16
. David Lodge,
The Modes of Modern Writing
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).

17
. Brady, “An Exploration,” 148.

18
. Ibid., 149.

19
. Ibid., 150.

20
. Cindy Patton, “Crackers and Queers,”
Gay Community News
(June 1983): 1.

21
. Anna Livia, “You Can Only Be Wrong . . .,”
The Women's Review of Books
VI, 10–11 (July 1989): 33.

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