Feminist Literary History

Janet Todd

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745668826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this timely book Janet Todd offers an analysis and defence of the feminist literary history practised by Elaine Showalter and other contemporary American literary critics. She argues that this approach rightly links the political concerns of feminist criticism to the uncovering of female voices embedded in history.

Todd reconstructs the development of feminist literary history from the 1960s through to the present day, highlighting the central themes as well as the strengths and weaknesses. She then examines the debate between American feminist critics, on the one hand, and feminist critics inspired by the work of French theorists such as Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous, on the other. She defends feminist literary history against its critics and casts doubt on some of the uses of psychoanalysis in feminism. Todd also considers the debate with men and assesses the relevance of academic analyses of gender, masculinity and homosexuality.

Feminist Literary History is a forceful and committed work, which addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary feminist theory and literary criticism. It will be widely read as an introductory text by students in English literature, modern languages, women's studies and cultural studies.

1

Early Work

To begin inevitably with history, American feminist critical history, it is immediately clear that there really are no great names, no authorities to revere like the French rewriter of Freud, Jacques Lacan, or the philosopher of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, or indeed like the French women psychoanalytical critics, Luce Irigaray or Julia Kristeva. Partly this reflects the ideals of early American feminist criticism which precisely opposed any authority. In the mid- and late-1970s names such as Elaine Showalter and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar arose which are still current but none can really be said to dominate the field theoretically or methodologically, although each has achieved a position of influence and academic respectability unknown to and unattainable by any primarily feminist scholar in Britain. Their achievement suggests the unparalleled gains of feminist criticism in the States, its extraordinary institutional acceptance from a British standpoint, and its perhaps inevitable collusion with the critical establishment it sought to reform and influence rather than destroy.

In opposition to the French – and to some extent British feminist criticism, a far less influential variety – the American version is historical and empirical in its orientation. In its early phases it stressed intellectual equality and the need for equal opportunity, while downgrading that ‘difference’ of men and women celebrated by French thinkers. Women were seen as a class more than a caste, distinct only in being universally oppressed.

Given its orientation, the most appropriate way to approach it is historically and contextually, to apply to it the method on which it has usually taken its stand; so I will give it a brief socio-history, allowing it to move towards narrative with all the limiting and even falsifying that that necessarily implies. Mary Jacobus, a British critic who was formerly a member of the Marxist-Feminist Literary Collective although she is now a francophile critic working in the USA, has been in a strong circumstantial position to judge American feminist criticism; she has noted its tendency towards narrative with some disapproval since she sees it as an essentialist – that is biologically determinist – fallacy, a leaning towards the critic’s own female experience or ‘herstory’. There is considerable truth in the observation; yet, with some acceptance of implications, there may be a way to accept and even celebrate certain non-formalist assumptions about the relation of literature and language to self, experience and history.

Foremothers

Feminist criticism begins, I suppose, when the first woman became aware of her relationship to language and conscious of herself as writer, speaker, reader or auditor. But it probably gets under way in our time with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1928) and with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). With much simplification and compression, these two books may be seen as begetting the American and French lines of feminist criticism.

Although more systematic than Woolf’s, Beauvoir’s book is less useful for feminist literary history in its tendency to universalize as nature rather than historicize as culture the distinctions of men and women. Toril Moi, who admires Beauvoir as the precursor and mother of modern feminism, gives her significance as an exemplary woman of rationality, an intellectual woman. Yet she also sees her caught up in a rationality defined by and for men, especially by the existential philosophy of her companion Jean-Paul Sartre. Both trapped in and liberated by the equation of consciousness and maleness, ‘Beauvoir cannot appropriate for feminism the Sartrean notion of free subjectivity and self-defining agency without becoming “contaminated” by the profoundly sexist ideology of objectivity to which this notion is inevitably coupled.’¹

There are added problems. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s practice of ransacking culture for myths and constructions of woman diminishes the book’s usefulness for women since it focuses on men’s needs and habits, while for literary critics it is limited by its philosophical rather than literary approach. In this penchant for the philosophical, it does however foreshadow later French feminist activity which veers into disciplines such as philosophy and psychoanalysis and, even when focusing on feminine writing, usually avoids specific analysis of literary works.

Virginia Woolf is literary through and through, tending towards narrative or story at every turn. She makes ideas into a particular biography and criticism into a kind of life history, most notably in her narrative of the poet, Judith Shakespeare, female equivalent of the famous William; inevitably this woman poet fails before she writes down her poetry, caught firmly in the ‘fetish’ of chastity. Woolf was wrong when, focusing on the silence of women, she saw no women loving and befriending each other in literature before Jane Austen. But her ignorance of the tradition of women’s (and men’s) fiction and poetry that extolled female friendship simply exposes the silencing rather than the silence, for few of the early women writers would have been much read by the time she was writing and few were in print. At the same time her lack of knowledge here places her within a tradition of women writers who wanted a history and literature and worried over their absence. It is a long line, stretching at least from the Duchess of Newcastle in the seventeenth century who, excited by her own rational powers, lamented the paucity of creative and rational achievement in her sex.

Woolf has been blamed for being essentialist, believing, for example, in a sentence that in structure and style is recognizably feminine, and for being too individualistic.² Certainly her stance was never collective and she promoted private martyrdom amd self-effacement without having any clear notion of how the individual experience could lead to communal acts or indeed to the desired advent of Shakespeare’s sister. Certainly too she was writing from a particular class.

All these aspects are limitations but they come with some compensation. Her awareness of her own class-bound situation seems to contribute to her awareness of differences in time and place within a single sex, an awareness that many later feminists dealing only in universals tend to forget.³ While she was individualistic, she understood that women’s common silence had been bound up with sexual conventions and with economic dependence and that speech, where it occasionally existed in the past, had been an act of individual effort against all grains. Criticism became story, perhaps the essentialist story of woman, but, unlike the universal conclusions of Beauvoir, Woolf’s narrative of Judith Shakespeare, raped and silenced in the past, pointed to a future in which women should help her to speak.⁴

This is not entirely to give narrative and history to English speakers and essence and philosophy to French. For example, at about the same time as Virginia Woolf was writing, Dorothy Richardson, famous through Woolf for her invention of the elastic and enveloping ‘woman’s sentence’, could make a very different statement about a woman’s relationship to privileged art; she declared that no woman, however gifted ‘could have brought herself to write “The Intimations of Immortality”’, not because she was silenced or overwhelmed by the masculinity of high art but because the shades of the prison house do not close in on her: ‘within her is a small gleam of the infinity men seek to catch within the shapes of systems of religion ߪ ’.⁵ None the less, in this continuum from woman as essence, metaphysical signifier of some sort or psychological given, to women of different colours, classes, ages, and places, living in history, it does seem that twentieth-century Anglo-American feminist criticism has leaned towards the edge of history.

Sexual and literary politics

The earliest phase of feminist criticism, inaugurated by activist feminists, is linked with the earliest phase of the modern American feminist movement in the late 1960s, helped along by such works as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). This was a popular reformist rather than revolutionary book with an immensely wide catchment; it is made somewhat depressing now by its author’s later trajectory out of feminism, but, in its time, it usefully suggested to women that the problem was not simply patriarchy, the rule of powerful men, but also women’s response to it. Consequently there was something they themselves could do. Women had learnt from their participation in the civil rights and anti-war movements that their role had frequently been limited to serving men (Stokeley Carmichael’s response in 1964 to a paper on the position of women in the anti-racist Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee – ‘the only position for women in SNCC is prone’ – was notorious). Consciousness-raising groups promoted the nascent feminist awareness, along with 1960s style sexual liberation and calls for female sexual, political and psychological power.⁶

Feminist criticism was inaugurated to take part in the activity. It insisted on yoking art and life and was flamboyantly engaged, completely avoiding neutrality and indeed disputing the concept of neutrality for any criticism. Its cry was that the personal was political. Literature in feminist production and consumption became a kind of therapy which undermined the authoritative impersonality of male criticism, apprehended as a weapon of patriarchal control. To avoid colluding with this oppressive criticism, the feminist version became loudly confessional, emphasizing the context and genesis of the criticism and the character and circumstances of the critic. It was loud because there was a feeling, following Woolf, that women had been silent for too long and must now allow a ‘sense of wrong, [to be] voiced’ as Tillie Olsen expressed it in Silences (1972). Canonical literature was ransacked for role models and vilified for the aggression against women it so often held. Meanwhile, formerly quiet works were made to yield a message of disturbance and protest. This excited criticism is partly exemplified by Mary Ellmann’s Thinking about Women (1968), which mocked assertive masculine criticism and its notions of manliness in style and art. Ellmann, like Woolf, found female expression in a kind of style rather than in the choice of peculiar experience (the later location of the specifically female), and she saw this style providing a subversively different perspective which served to unsettle the fixity of masculine judgement. In many ways Ellmann provided a commonsensical empirical statement of much of what French feminism would elaborately proclaim in the next decade.

Although the wittiest and most subtle of the early political works, Ellmann’s book had little immediate impact. The great blockbuster was Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970). This was the most famous mother of American feminist criticism, translating, in the resonant clichés of Time Magazine, ‘the war of the sexes from 19th century bedroom farce into raw guerrilla warfare’. Millett made a frontal attack on the overt misogyny of much privileged literature, its use of power and domination in its description of sexual activity, and she saw this writing directly as a source of the physical and psychological oppression of women.

In simple but powerful fashion Millett reinterpreted certain underappreciated works; Charlotte Brontë’s Villette was rescued from Matthew Arnold’s dismissal of it as the vessel of the author’s ‘hunger, rebellion and rage’, or rather it was allowed to yield these qualities in the context of a feminist desire for female autonomy; ‘hunger, rebellion and rage’ became ‘one long meditation on a prison break’. Millett saw the critical fate of Charlotte Brontë as a typical example of masculine critical prejudice and she used Villette to show the disjunction between the dominant literary discourse and women’s literary response.

Millett’s overarching thesis was socio-historical, positing a transformation in the relationship between the sexes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which was followed by a reaction amply expressed in the writings of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and, most recently, Norman Mailer. This reaction prevented any real modification of patriarchy and frustrated revolutionary change. Unproblematically, Millett took literature as mimesis, describing and interpreting life out there, but she did not simply accept the gender oppositions which most of the literature she described conveyed. In her view gender became a psychological concept referring to culturally acquired sexual identity, not a natural given, as women had been hoodwinked into thinking. In her concluding section she showed, through the homosexual novels and plays of Jean Genet, how frighteningly easy gender identity was to lose and how much the terms masculine and feminine had simply come to encode notions of high and low, master and slave.

Although colloquial in tone, Millett’s Sexual Politics is recognizably academic; it is footnoted and addressed to an educated middle class reader sharing a common culture. Yet it was quickly denounced as unscholarly by Norman Mailer, one of its victims; in The Prisoner of Sex (1971) he accused it of being unscholarly in its imprecise generalizations and its habit of reading passages out of context. Other feminists pointed out its misinterpretation of Villette, its tendency to ignore the literary aspect of literature, as well as its habit of making patriarchy universal. Certainly there was a naïve collapsing of character and author, as in most early feminist readings, similar to the collapsing of reader and author in the excitement of response. But, whatever its failings, the book was absolutely pertinent and of its time, and it did good service in revealing the old fashioned libertine aspects of the libertarian 1960s, with its gurus, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, and its literary heroes, Miller and Mailer.

The early phase of feminist criticism occurred towards the end of a time of civil disruption on American university campuses. In contrast to Britain, institutions were so large, numerous and affluent that the student body formed a political force. The curriculum of literary study, less culturally secure than in Britain, was modifiable and could for a time respond to student enthusiasm. The criticism of the early and mid-1970s was, then, often tied to consciousness-raising activities in the classroom and to straightforward reformist desires to teach and hear something good about women and something bad about men. And it was also tied to certain folklore activities of feminism much enjoyed by the press. The pedagogical aim and popular alliance are responsible for a great deal of the mockery with which feminist literary study has been received by those who believe in a traditional canon of English literary excellence and in transcendental principles of taste.

Millett’s Sexual Politics helped to give an evangelical feeling to the early movement of feminist criticism. Acceptance became a kind of awakening, a change of vision or re-vision to use Adrienne Rich’s term, and much women’s criticism, like Methodist autobiographies, took the form of life histories detailing a progress into critical light. Understanding was awareness of the politics within the literary, the misogyny at the heart of so much that was culturally privileged, misogyny that had become psychological and social oppression from which women needed liberation. Criticism following Millett concentrated on reducing canonical works to their predictable structures, their common visions, both of male quests for what was frequently envisaged as not woman and of contingent women as angels and whores, and it tied these representations to life, so revealing how the literary harshness was further expressed in social discrimination. The degradation of women in fiction, especially in pornography, was similar to the degradation of women in the streets; rape was rampant in literature and life, and the influence was in both directions. Literature was peculiarly implicated in the general oppression, then, because it had colonized the minds of both sexes with those stereotypes that had kept each gender firmly in place. Only through literary analysis, largely the domain of men until this time, could this power be controlled, and in such analysis it was necessary to see gender as the most basic definition and distinction and to understand that its transparency had been an immense deception.

Since the canon of literature in English represented power, the concentration in these early days was on the classic texts. They were given alternative readings either to resurrect them or to reveal their pernicious centres. The activity was most intense on American literature which was peculiarly male-centered and misogynist – English literature, more entrenched, has on the whole been reinterpreted, not opposed. During the next decade, the attack moved to encompass male criticism as well as male creative works. Annette Kolodny (The Lay of the Land, 1975) and Judith Fetterley (The Resisting Reader, 1978) showed the extent of the cultural betrayal of women in both literature and its study. The assumption had been absolute that the reader was male, an assumption simply reinforced by later critics using Stanley Fish’s reader response theory. Harold Bloom had declared portentously, ‘That which you are, that only can you read’. Quite so, was the feminist response. Fetterley’s book was intended not simply as traditional literary criticism but also as a liberating act for women and a survival manual for the female reader facing a literature that had become a zone of combat.

The prescriptive criticism of major literary authorities was seen not only to depend on and to canonize certain male writers like Melville and Hawthorne, notoriously hostile to women authors, but to work against any appreciation of those genres in which women chose or were forced to write. Nina Baym noted how, although commercially and numerically women had probably dominated American literature, at least from the mid nineteenth-century, theories controlling the reading of this literature excluded from critical comment those popular women authors, like Fanny Fern of the 1850s, who wrote specifically for women. Jane Tompkins pointed out that the privileging of certain modes of male writing banished the phenomenally successful female sentimental writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe from the canon. Male critics such as Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler and Sacvan Bercovich were judged to have found the essence of Americanism in precisely those themes and methods associated with men. In both literature and its criticism, women had become associated not with culture but with the impediments to it and the essence of American writing had been discovered in the male struggle for integrity and artistry precisely against woman and the woman writer. On the other side, female writing that did not conform to the stereotype of what was considered pap literature had had difficulty finding a critical audience at all; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s powerful short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, was misread because of the lack of those connections with the horror tradition of Poe that would have been made for male writing. The majority of women writers had been seen as ‘isolate islands of symbolic significance, available only to, and decipherable only by, one another’.⁷ A revisionist rereading of the entire literary inheritance of American literature, male and female, was required.

A woman’s tradition

By this stage the canon itself was under attack both by those who wanted to insert women and by those who desired to form an alternative canon. As in the earliest feminist studies of male literature, so in women’s, the first books were in the mode of the rhapsodic, inspired by the head...