"I have been a character in academic fiction at least twice," Elaine
Showalter writes, "once a voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted
bohemian, once a prudish, dumpy, judgmental frump. I hope I am not too
easily identified in either of these guises . . . although I can tell
you that I preferred being cast as the luscious Concord grape to my role
as the withered prune."
In the days before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice
columns for graduate students and junior faculty, there were academic
novels teaching us how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress,
think, write, love, and (more than occasionally) solve murders. If many
of these books are wildly funny, others paint pictures of failure and
pain, of lives wasted or destroyed. Like the suburbs, Elaine Showalter
notes, the campus can be the site of pastoral and refuge. But even ivory
towers can be structurally unsound, or at least built with glass
ceilings. Though we love to read about them, all is not well in the
faculty towers, and the situation has been worsening.
In Faculty Towers, Showalter takes a personal look at the ways novels
about the academy have charted changes in the university and society
since 1950. With her readings of C. P. Snow's idealized world of
Cambridge dons, the globe-trotting antics of David Lodge's Morris Zapp,
the sleuthing Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross's best-selling mystery
series, or the recent spate of bitter novels in which narratives of
sexual harassment seem to serve as fables of power, anger, and desire,
Showalter holds a mirror up to the world she has inhabited over the
course of a distinguished and often controversial career.
