Her Symbol Was Civil War

Abstract

This chapter suggests that it was the Savage Coast's gender-nonconforming and sexually liberated protagonist, along with the politically radical and experimental form of the novel, that ran counter to contemporaneous political and aesthetic gender dictates. The chapter traces the political development of Helen, the protagonist of Savage Coast—her transformation from tourist and witness into activist and radical, from girlhood “liberalism” to mature political engagement, from an “awkward” adolescence of rebellion and anger to a sense of sexual and historical subjectivity found in the collective experience of political action. It then looks at how the rejection of the novel highlighted the constraints and expectations of women's writing in the 1930s and 1940s, under which women were often lauded for their smallness and modesty. The rejection of Savage Coast or its “anomalous” form was the first of what would become a steady stream of criticism of Muriel Rukeyser's work. The chapter explicates the recovery of Savage Coast, and then explains how it alerted us (again) to the fact that the recuperation of women writers has not ended, and that there is a continued need for archival work that restores feminist and radical texts and puts them into print. It also explores how Rukeyser worked to develop a poetics of history that was particularly attuned to exploring the latency of the past inside the present. Savage Coast is essential to understanding this textual-archival practice, one that Rukeyser develops throughout her life.