SOURCE: A review of No Man's Land, Volume 2: Sexchanges, in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 128–30.

In the following review of Sexchanges, Patterson explores Gubar and Gilbert's emphasis on World War I as a cause and metaphor for the sexual struggle between men and women at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sexchanges explores revisions of gender that occurred in society and were reflected in literature from the 1880s through the 1930s. As in their first volume (1988), in volume two Gilbert and Gubar continue to associate sexual difference with sexual antagonism, although they focus here on the antagonism specifically related to redefinitions of gender and sexuality: “the sexes battle because sex roles change, but, when the sexes battle, sex itself (that is, eroticism) changes” (p. xi).

The book begins with an analysis of Rider Haggard's She (1887). The heroine, She-who-must-be-obeyed, is “a monstrously passionate woman with...