cover image Framing History

Framing History

Virginia Carmichael. University of Minnesota Press, $70.5 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-8166-2041-8

Freelance writer Carmichael has a valuable idea: to use the complicated story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as an open-ended narrative whose various versions have been attempts either to construct history or to critique the official version of history. Carmichael's academic prose may limit the book's readers to specialists, though she does examine popular culture. Carmichael begins by delineating the conservatives' official, Cold War version of the Rosenberg narrative, which led to public acceptance of the concept of ``the Soviet atomic spy ring.'' She reveals how this version of the narrative exploited Ethel Rosenberg's remoteness from ``sterile cultural images of the ideal 1950s wife.'' Carmichael also analyzes the critique of the Rosenberg story in art and books, such as in E. L. Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel , which suggests the possibility of dissent in a post-McCarthy society; and in Robert Coover's novel The Public Burning , ``a devastating critique of masculist hegemony.'' Carmichael concludes that in art and in history there are moments when the repressed elements of our consciousness are liberated. (Nov.)