Bookshelf review: Woman Characters in Baseball Literature

 A Critical Study, by Kathleen Sullivan. McFarland, 2005.

Novels and feature films tend to find comfort in stock characters. Stories about celebrities in particular focus on two or three types of women. You have your temptress who, for various reasons, wants to keep the protagonist from succeeding at his mission. For baseball materials you have the likes of  Memo Paris and Harriet Bird in The Natural and Lola in Damned Yankees/The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant. In addition you have the character who’s just down-right evil like Rachel Phelps, the owner of the Indians who wants her team to finish dead-last so she can move the team to Florida.  There’s the nurturer, like Iris Lemon in The Natural, Eleanor Twitchell-Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees,  Aimee Alexander in The Winning Team, and whatever character June Allyson plays in any movie she’s in. These strong women serve as the voice of reason and unabashed supporters of the man’s cause. And, of course, there are the skeptical mothers like Ma Gehrig in TPOTY and Ma Stratton in The Stratton Story, who think their sons are idiots and worry that the world will take advantage of them.

Focusing solely on the written word, Sullivan, a lecturer at the University of Texas at Arlington, further classifies them in terms of the goddesses of mythologies, primarily those who nurture others and those who exert their own personalities and desires. In addition to the classic baseball literature such as The Natural and the works of Mark Harris, she digs deep to introduce readers to an exciting variety of novels that may have slipped under the “popular” radar, including She’s on Firstby Barbara Gregorich; Rachel, the Rabbi’s Wife, by Sylvia Tennenbaum; The Sweetheart Season: A Novel, by Kern Joy Fowler; and Things Invisible to See, by Nancy Willard.

While Sullivan does make some very interesting and thought-provoking points — which, after all is the purpose of literary analysis — the issue I have with such books is that sometimes that runs tends to run too deep. Do the writers really sit and figure out that scenario X represents concept A? If they do, fine. After all, critics and teachers need something to talk and write about. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Of course, some might say that since I’m a man, the fact that I’m being less than glowing serves as proof that a) books like Sullivan’s are necessary, and b) I’m an ignorant dolt. I argue neither point. Thankfully, Women Characters in Baseball Literature has made me a bit more sensitive to such considerations heretofore unimagined.