FEMINIST CRITICISM IN THE WILDERNESS--Elaine Showalter--Criticism & Theory

Elaine Showalter

FEMINIST CRITICISM IN THE WILDERNESS

[lecture notes by Dr. S. Sree Kumar]

          Contemporary feminist criticism derived its inspiration from the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s. Mary Ellman’s Thinking About Women and Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics are the pioneering books in this respect.

          The initial effort of feminist critics was to revise orthodox ‘male’ literary history, exposing sexual stereotyping in canonical texts and reinterpreting or reviving the work of women writers. Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own was a major contribution to this project, but by the late 1970s it seemed to her that feminist criticism had reached ‘a theoretical impasse’. In a lecture entitled ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’ she attributed the impasse to the essentially male character of ‘theory’ itself, as practised and professionally institutionalized in the academy.

          In ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, Showalter finds feminist criticism no more unified. But it appears more adventurous in assimilating and engaging with theory. She says that the theoretical ‘impasse’ she spoke about in her previous writings seems actually to be an evolutionary phase.  

          FEMINIST CRITICISM IN THE WILDERNESS

In 1975, Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson identified two poles of feminist literary criticism.

The first of these modes, righteous, angry, and admonitory was compared to the Old Testament—‘looking for the sins and errors of the past’.

The second mode, disinterested and seeking ‘the grace of imagination’, was compared to the New Testament.

Both are necessary for only the Jeremiahs of ideology can lead us out of the Egypt of female servitude’ to the promised land of humanism.

Matthew Arnold also thought that the literary critics might perish in the wilderness before they reached the promised land of disinterestedness.

          In the 1980s feminist critics were still wandering in the wilderness. But they were in good company for as Geoffrey Harman tells us; all criticism is in the wilderness. Thus Feminist literary critics are themselves in a band of theoretical pioneers, since in the American literary tradition; the wilderness has been an exclusively masculine domain. Yet between feminist ideology and the liberal ideal of disinterestedness lies the wilderness of theory, which women too must make their home.

µ    An early obstacle to constructing a theoretical frame work for feminist criticism was the unwillingness of many women to limit or bound an expressive and dynamic enterprise.

µ    Many feminists viewed the structuralist, post structuralist, and deconstructionist debates of the 1970s as arid and false, an epitome of pernicious masculine discourse from which many feminists wished to escape. They saw their position in Virginia Woolf who saw the university library as the symbolic sanctuary of the male logos. ‘It was unpleasant to be locked out…it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in’.

µ     Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich and Marguerite Duras had satirized the sterile narcissism of male scholarship and celebrated women’s fortunate exclusion from the patriarchal methodolatry.  

          Yet it now appears that the theoretical impasse was actually an evolutionary phase. There was a sharp debate in American universities about the isolation of feminist criticism from a critical community increasingly theoretical in its interests and indifferent to women’s writing.  Feminist criticism on its part declined to communicate with the networks of power and respectability which they wanted to change.

          There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism—women as reader and women as writer.

Women as Reader

µ   Offers feminist readings of texts which consider the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism and women-as-sign in semiotic systems. This Showalter calls ‘Feminist Critique’.

µ    There is no theoretical coherence in its activity. It so eclectic [free, diverse] and wide-ranging.

µ   Kolodny argues that ‘women claims neither definitiveness nor structural completeness of her different readings and reading systems.

µ    This according to Kolodny has created a ‘playful pluralism’ of feminist critical theory. The feminist critic dances adroitly through the theoretical minefield.

µ    Showalter says, “Kolodny fails to convince me that feminist criticism must altogether abandon its hope of establishing some basic conceptual model’.

All feminist criticism is revisionist, questioning the adequacy of accepted conceptual structures. But by adopting a revisionist model, nothing new can be learned as long as androcentric models remain as the basic principles.

         

µ    Showalter is unhappy that some female critics have taken upon themselves a revisionism which becomes a kind of homage. They have made Lacan the ladies’ man. Feminist criticism will grind to a halt if it follows the discourse of the masters.

µ    Showalter writes, “I do not think feminist criticism can find a usable past in the androcentric critical tradition. It has more to learn from women’s studies than from English studies, more to learn from international feminist theory than from another seminar on the masters”.

Women as writer

Feminist criticism has shifted its centre from reversionary readings to a sustained investigation of literature by women. The subjects of women as writer are the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women. Showalter has invented the term ‘gynocritics’ to describe this. According to her gynocritics offer many theoretical opportunities. To see women’s writing as our primary subject forces us to make the leap to  a new conceptual vantage point and to redefine the nature of the theoretical problem before us.

In Ellen Moers’s Literary Women  in Showalter’s A Literature of their Own,  in Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic women’s writing asserted itself as the central project of feminist literary study.

The shift in emphasis has also taken place in European feminist criticism. The concept of ‘ecriture feminine’ the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text is a significant theoretical formulation in French feminist criticism. 

          English feminist criticism is more traditionally oriented to textual interpretation. But it is also moving toward a focus on women’s writing. English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses oppression’; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression. All are gynocentric. They are struggling to find a terminology that can rescue the feminine from its stereotypical associations with inferiority.

Women’s writing presently makes use of four models of difference: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural.

Women’s Writing and Woman’s Body

Organic of biological criticism is the most extreme statement of gender difference, of a text indelibly marked by the body: anatomy is textuality.

µ   Gilbert and Guber structure their analysis of women’s writing around metaphors of literary paternity. ‘In patriarchal western culture the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power’.

µ   Showalter questions this position and reply that women generate texts from the brain or that the word-processor which is a metaphysical womb.

µ    Metaphors of literary maternity dominated in 17^th and 18^th centuries. The process of literary creation is much more close to gestation, labor and delivery.

µ    Some feminist criticism stresses the importance of the body as a source of imagery. It has been intimate, confessional, and often innovative in style and form. But such criticism makes itself vulnerable. It virtually bares its throat to the knife.

µ   Showalter warns us that feminist bio criticism can also become cruelly prescriptive. It is dangerous to place the body at the center of a search for female identity. The study of biological imagery in women’s writing is useful and important as long as we understand that factors other than anatomy are involved in it. There can be no expression of the body which is unmediated by linguistics social and political structures.

Women’s writing and women’s language

Linguistic and textual theories of women’s writing ask whether men and women use language differently; whether sex differences in language use can be theorized in terms of biology, socialization, or culture’; whether women can create new languages of their won and whether speaking, reading, and writing are all gender marked. American, French, and British feminist critics have all drawn attention to the philosophical, linguistic, and practical problems of women’s use of language, and the debate over language is one of the exciting areas in gynocriticism. Poets and writers have led the attack on what Rich calls ‘the oppressor’s language’, a language sometimes criticized as sexist, sometimes as abstract.

Many French feminists advocate a revolutionary linguism, an oral break from the dictatorship of patriarchal speech.

µ    But scholars who want a women’s language that is intellectual and theoretical, that works inside the academy, are faced with what seems like an impossible paradox.

µ   ‘As long as women remain silent, they will be outside the historical process. But if they begin to speak and write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated; it is a history that logically speaking, their speech should disrupt’—Gauthier. 

µ    Mary Jacobus proposes ‘a woman’s writing that works within ‘male’ discourse but works ‘ceaselessly to deconstruct it; to write what cannot be written, and according to Shoshana Felman. ‘the challenge facing the woman today is nothing less than to ‘reinvent’ language,… to speak not only against, but outside of the specular phallogocentric structure, to establish the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of masculine meaning”

What are the prospects for a women’s language?  

Ø  The concept of a women’s language is not original. It is very ancient and appears in folklore and myth. In such myths the essence of women’s language is secrecy.

Ø  There are accounts of ‘women’s language among American Indians, Africans and Asians. There is some ethnographic evidence that in certain cultures women have evolved a private form of communication out of their need to resist the silence imposed upon them in public life.

 Showalter says that the advocacy of a woman’s language is a political gesture that also carries tremendous emotional force. But despite its unifying appeal, the concept of a women’s language is riddled with difficulties. Unlike Welsh, Swahili or Amharic, that is, languages of minority or colonized groups, there is no mother tongue, no genderlect spoken by the female population in a society, which differs significantly from the dominant language. Furthermore the many specific differences in male and female speech, intonation, and language use that have been identified cannot be explained in terms of ‘two separate sexspecific languages’ but need to be considered instead in terms of styles, strategies, and contexts of linguistic performance.

Showalter writes, “The appropriate task for feminist criticism is to concentrate on women’s access to language, on the available lexical range from which words can be selected, on the ideological and cultural determinants of expression.  The problem is not that language is insufficient to express women’s consciousness but that women have been denied the full resources of language and have been forced into silence, euphemism, or circumlocution”.

Virginia Woolf protested against the censorship which cut off female access to language. Comparing herself to Joyce, Woolf noted the differences between their verbal territories: “Now men are shocked if a woman says what she feels. Yet literature which is always pulling blinds is not literature. All that we have ought to be expressed—mind and body—a process of incredible difficulty and danger”.

“All that we have ought to be expressed—mind and body”. Rather than wishing to limit women’s linguistic range, we must fight to open and extend it. The holes in discourse, the blanks and gaps and silences, are not the spaces where female consciousness reveals itself but the blinds of a ‘prison house of language’. Women’s literature is still haunted by the ghosts of repressed language, and until we have exorcised those ghosts, it ought not to be in language that we base our theory of difference.  

Women’s writing and women’s psyche

In psychoanalytic terms, ‘lack’ has traditionally been associated with the feminine. Many feminists believe that psychoanalysis could become a powerful tool for literary criticism, and recently there has been a renewed interest in Freudian theory.

The most dramatic and promising new works in feminist psychoanalysis look at the pre-oedipal phase and at the process of psychosexual differentiation. Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender  has had an enormous influence on women’s studies.

µ   Chodorow revises traditional psychoanalytic concepts of differentiation, the process by which the child comes to perceive the self as separate and to develop ego and body boundaries.

µ   Since differentiation takes place in relation to the mother, the attitudes toward the mother ‘emerge in the earliest differentiation of the self’.

µ   The mother who is  a woman becomes and remains for children of both genders the ‘other’, or object. The child develops core gender identity concomitantly with differentiation, but the process is not the same for boys and girls.

µ    A boy must learn his gender identity negatively as being not female, and this difference requires continual reinforcement. In contrast a girl’s core gender identity is positive and built upon sameness, continuity, and identification with the mother. Women’s difficulties with feminine identity come after the Oedipal phase in which male power and cultural hegemony give sex differences a transformed value.

Although psychoanalytically based models of feminist criticism can now offer us remarkable and persuasive readings of individual texts and can highlight extraordinary similarities between women writing in a variety of cultural circumstances, they cannot explain historical change, ethnic difference, or the shaping force of generic and economic factors. To consider these issues, we must go beyond psychoanalysis to a more flexible and comprehensive model of writing which places it in the maximum context of culture.

Women’s writing and women’s culture

A theory based on a model of women’s culture can provide a more complete and satisfying way to talk about the specificity and difference of women’s writing than theories based in biology, linguistics, or psychoanalysis. Indeed, a theory of culture incorporates ideas about women’s body, language, and psyche but interprets them in relation to the social contexts in which they occur.

A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race, nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender.

In defining female culture, historians distinguish between the roles, activities, tastes, and behaviours, and functions actually generated out of women’s lives. It is important that woman’s culture is not and should not be seen as a subculture. It is hardly possible for the majority to live in a subculture. Women live a duality—as members of the general culture and as partakers of women’s culture.

A particularly stimulating analysis of female culture has been carried out by two Oxford anthropologists, Shirley and Edwin Ardener. In two essays—“Belief and the Problem of women’ & ‘The Problem Revisited’ they has suggested that women constitute a ‘muted’group, the boundaries of whose culture and reality overlap the dominant male group.

By the term ‘muted’ Ardener suggests problems both of language and of power. Both muted and dominant groups generate beliefs or ordering ideas of social reality at the unconscious level, but dominant groups control the forms or structures in which consciousness can be articulates.

Let us now look at Ardener’s diagram of the relationship of the dominant and the muted group:

Much of muted circle Y falls within the boundaries of dominant circle X. there is also a crescent of Y which is outside the dominant boundary and therefore ‘wild’. We can think of the ‘wild zone’ of women’s culture spatially, experientially, or metaphysically spatially it stands for an area which is literally no-man’s-land, a place forbidden to men, which corresponds to the zone in X which is off limits to women. Experientially it stands for the aspects of the female life-style which are outside of and unlike those of men; again, there is a corresponding zone of male experience alien to women. But if we think of the wild zone metaphysically, or in terms of consciousness, it has no corresponding male space since all of male consciousness is within the circle of the dominant structure and thus accessible to or structured by language. In terms of cultural anthropology women know what the male crescent is like, even if they have never seen it, because it becomes the subject of legend (like the wilderness). But men do not know what is in the wild.  

For some feminist critics, the wild zone, or ‘female space’ must be the address of a genuinely women-centred criticism, theory, and art, whose shared project is to bring into being the symbolic weight of female consciousness, to make the invisible visible, to make the silent speak. French feminist critics would like to make the wild zone the theoretical base of women’s difference. In their texts, the wild zone becomes the place for the revolutionary women’s language, the language of everything that is repressed, and for the revolutionary women’s writing in ‘white ink’.

An important aspect of Ardener’s model is that there are muted groups other than women; a dominant structure may determine many muted structures. A black American woman poet would have her literary identity formed by the dominant (white male) tradition, by a muted women’s culture, and by a muted black culture. She would be affected by both sexual and racial politics in a combination unique to her case; at the same time she shares an experience specific to her group.

µ    Thus the first task of gynocentric criticism must be to plot the precise cultural locus of female literary identity and to describe the forces that intersect an individual woman writer’s cultural field.

µ   A gynocentric criticism would also situate women writers with respect to the variables of literary culture, such as modes of production and distribution, relations of author and audience, relations of high to popular art, and hierarchies of genre.

Our current theories of literary influence also need to be tested in terms of women’s writing. If a man’s text, as Bloom and Said have maintained, is fathered, then a woman’s text is not only mothered but parented, it confronts both paternal and maternal precursors and must deal with the problems and advantages of both lines of inheritance. Woolf maintained that a woman’s writing thinks back through her mothers. But a woman writing unavoidable thinks back through her fathers as well; only male writers can forget or mute half of their parentage.

µ    We need more subtle and supple accounts of influence, not just to explain women’s writing but also to understand how men’s writing has resisted the acknowledgment of female precursors.

How can a cultural model of women’s writing help us to read  a woman’s text?

µ    Women’s text can be read as a double voiced discourse, containing a dominant and a muted story, what Gilbert and Gubar call a ‘palimpsest’.

µ   Another interpretive strategy is ‘thick description’—description that seeks to understand the meaning of cultural phenomena. It must insist upon gender and upon a female literary tradition among the multiple strata that make up the force of meaning in a  text.