Summary Of Biting The Moon By Anne S. Frye

Joanne S. Frye was a feminist writer who grew up in the fifties and sixties. She was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1944 to parents of Mennonite heritage. She got her PhD in English in 1974 at Indian University. Frye wrote her dissertation on Virginia Woolf because she loved Woolf’s brilliant language and analytical life insights. Shortly after she divorced, she took a teaching job at the College of Wooster, were she taught English and eventually helped establish and teach in the Women’s Studies program. Joanne S. Frye is a prodigious feminist writer, teacher, and critic, enabling numerous other feminists to relate to her.
One of Frye’s many great literary works is Biting the Moon: A Memoir of Motherhood and Feminism. The book is a memoir of
Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, has a section on Frye called, “Politics, Literary Form, and a Feminist Poetics of the Novel.” Frye further analyzes the realistic novel, getting some of her ideas and theories from other authors and feminists. She uses Peter Brooks claim that narrative is central to life while paralleling Barbra Foley’s discussion of mimesis and referentiality (Hoffman and Murphy 432). Hoffman and Murphy use an excerpt from Living Stories, Telling Lives to help readers understand the structural features that Frye is explaining about the realistic novel. Frye states that “Four prominent qualities of the novel suggest its direct connection to life experiences: its narrative form, its flexibility, its popularity, and its concern with the individual” (Hoffman and Murphy 433). She relates how a narrative needs to give meaning to events by comparing it to a child who wants to hear talk about the events of their day or a bedtime story at the end of the day. Frye goes on to explain that the novel she is talking about in this section of her book does not meet “the most urgent feminist concern: the need for cultural change and the opening of possibilities in the lives of women” (Hoffman and Murphy 438). Another feminist author agrees stating that the novel is of little interest to feminist writers and the feminist need for change, due to its structure of male-controlled society. Frye states that once women
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Feminist Poetics of the Novel." Essentials of the Theory of Fiction.
Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 432-49. Print.
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Athens: U of Georgia, 1996. 174-204.