Women, Philosophy and Literature

Jane Duran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754657859
• eBook ISBN: 9781134779543
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

New work on women thinkers often makes the point that philosophical conceptual thought is where we find it, examples such as Simone de Beauvoir and the nineteenth century Black American writer Anna Julia Cooper assure us that there is ample room for the development of philosophy in literary works but as yet there has been no single unifying attempt to trace such projects among a variety of women novelists. This book articulates philosophical concerns in the work of five well known twentieth century women writers, including writers of color. Duran traces the development of philosophical themes - ontological, ethical and feminist - in the writings of Margaret Drabble, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Cade Bambara and Elena Poniatowska presenting both a general overview of the author's work with an emphasis on traditional philosophical questions and a detailed feminist reading of the work.

Part I The View

Chapter One Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315546551-1

The strength of the old contest between philosophy and literature is such that it recurs in a variety of guises, even in contemporary work. New work being done on rhetoric and philosophy or philosophy of literature; lines of Continental theory; the current mania for deconstruction—all of these areas signal to us that the demarcations between “philosophy” and “literature,” never strong in the first place, are now more blurred than ever.

The battle not only recurs, but seems to grow in force. If it seems important to some in philosophy to try to make the boundaries clearer, it has also seemed important to some trained in literature to try to create murkier edges. But the existence of the debate and its force tell us something important; literature can inform, can apprise us of the existence of issues, and can shape our attitudes in areas such as morality and aesthetics. Philosophy—especially any sort of philosophy not in the analytic tradition—can itself be analyzed in terms of its rhetorical content and style, and can, at least in some instances, be analyzed along the same lines as literature. These points push us in the direction of acknowledging changes in the general area of disciplinary boundaries, and of the disciplines as a whole.¹

¹ Cherwitz, Richard A. (ed.) (1990), Rhetoric and Philosophy, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

This dispute would not be so crucial were it not for the long history of philosophy’s having attempted to cast itself in a mold that might best be termed “arbiter of all things,” and of its having, strenuously, attempted to divorce itself from other areas of endeavor. But the rise in historical theory, and all of the other contemporary movements—feminism, postcolonial theory and so on—has left its mark on philosophical thinking, for better or worse, and it is no longer possible for philosophy to have the same level of pretension that it did of old. The fact that, (as is usually trotted out in such arguments), the debate goes back to Plato and Aristotle does nothing to lessen its ferocity.

Philosophy, then, can be thought of as a kind of writing, and since we already think of literature in such terms, it is much easier to begin an analysis of their intersection. Some authors seem to lend themselves to such an overview: the work of Henry James, Tolstoy, Melville and others has long been deemed to be philosophical, and thinkers such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are clearly already literary. What is needed is a much more precise focus on what the boundaries are, and how they are transgressed. It is perhaps not surprising that in the canon of those authors whose work has already been labeled as conceptual, there are surprisingly few women writers. Virginia Woolf, perhaps; Simone de Beauvoir certainly—but then we acknowledge that she is a philosopher. The task, then, is to try to be precise about the women authors whose work has been left out of the list of those who have enlightened us conceptually and to try to make more use of what they have done. If it is the case that a number of women writers have been omitted, why is their omission glaring? What, if anything, is noteworthy about their work?

An investigation into the contribution of women novelists, particularly from the standpoint of the intersection of literature and philosophy, begs the question of women’s general intellectual contribution, and in what ways it may be different from that of men. This is a question that we will revisit throughout this work. But if it is clear that we can at least minimally make the case that women have their own tack, so to speak, it is obvious that it requires articulation. The general conundrum over philosophy and literature, whatever the gender of the author, was addressed years ago in an essay by J. Hillis Miller. The piece is titled “Literature and Religion,” but its general point is more than relevant:

Exactly what does it mean to say that religious meanings are present in a poem or a play? It may mean the following: The poet belonged to a certain culture. Among the elements of that culture were religious beliefs. These were part of the worldview of his age, and naturally they enter into his poems, since all men are subject to the spirit of their times.²

² Miller, J. Hillis (1991), “Literature and Religion,” Theory Now and Then, 73.

Although Miller will go on to reject this rather flat historicism, this line of argument has such obvious appeal that it does a great deal to render the debate moot in an immediate sense. Of course, the reader is tempted to say, every writer does participate in the spirit of her culture, and in that sense every work is inherently religious (or philosophical). The task, then, is to try to be a great deal more precise about what it is in which the worldview consists, insofar as it is manifested in the literature in question.

If, as we have seen, rhetoric, literary theory and, certainly, common sense, propel us in the direction of recognizing a great deal of literature as having philosophical import, one might inquire why this line has been so controversial. In part it has to do with the ancient battle between philosophy and literature, which we will examine shortly. But in part it also has to do with the difficulty of saying what it is that is philosophical about a given work. The general tone of a work (as Miller implies) may be philosophical: its content, in some rare instances, may be overtly laden with philosophical theory. (We need only to think of twentieth-century French novelists here.) But the range of literature is such that the vast majority of works will fall somewhere in between these two extremes: Without being as blatant in their construction as Nausea or The Stranger, many works will be driven by a philosophical sense that is perhaps larger than a mere zeitgeist. One thinks for example, of various of the novels of Virginia Woolf—the use of time in To the Lighthouse is nothing short of phenomenal as a construct, and it impels the reader to accept that a certain sort of phenomenological view of time is at work. More recently, A.S. Byatt has written of the decline of something like the traditional historical novel, and its replacement by another sort of historical work. Although Byatt scarcely mentions her sister, the work of Margaret Drabble would seem to be a fine exemplar of Byatt’s general thesis: works such as The Ice Age or The Peppered Moth play with our notions of time, including the present, past and future.

In general, then, we want to be able to say that there is a philosophical component to a work that is clear enough that we can set it out, without necessarily having to make the claim that it is the driving force of the novel in question. Our efforts in this regard are probably assisted by the fact that, currently, a great deal of what passes for literary theory is derived from positions that are indisputably philosophical. Terry Eagleton’s classic Literary Theory makes this clear, and as he indicates in the Afterword to the most recent edition the drive to the philosophical was moved by postmodern considerations:

What was perhaps most in question [in the late 1960s] was the assumption that literature embodied universal value, and this intellectual crisis was closely linked to changes in the social composition of universities themselves. Students had traditionally been expected, when encountering a literary text, to put their own particular histories temporarily on ice, and judge it from the vantage-point of some classless, genderless, non-ethnic, disinterested universal subject.³

³ Eagleton, Terry (1996), Literary Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 191.

The push away from this view-from-nowhere sort of conceptualization pattern helped drive all of the moves in theory that themselves are now widely regarded as philosophical. Thus readings now became at least somewhat more theory-laden, and in a relevant way, simply because of the new push of category. What this meant, of course, is that it was now possible to see strands in works that had remained hitherto unexamined or undiscovered. The “madwoman in the attic” was always there; she had been there in the first edition, so to speak. Her presence was simply unremarked upon until a combination of feminist theory and what would emerge as postcolonial readings gave a new impetus to the categorization of nineteenth-century classics.

If the new theory gave greater weight to the notion that it was possible to see literature philosophically and, indeed, to see philosophy as literature, it is fair to say that that notion had always been present, at least to some extent. Readers of Dickens a hundred and a hundred and fifty years ago responded to his social concerns intuitively, even if they were not always aware of what they were doing. Woolf’s work was clearly seen as having philosophical import from the beginning; it was recognized that the startling takes she provided for the reader themselves relied upon new concepts of time and the self. It is simply the case that the infusion of theory in the past twenty or so years has sped along the process of reading and re-reading with a philosophical eye, and has assisted in the articulation of relevant views. In a brief editorial marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Denis Dutton and Garry Hagberg write: “[the journal] has provided a home for anyone convinced by the initially counterintuitive notion that a close study of fiction can play an irreplaceable role in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language and even metaphysics. Philosophy is about life from the broadest possible perceptive, and so is literature.”⁴

⁴ Dutton, Denis and Garry Hagberg (2002), “War of the Worldviews,” Philosophy and Literature, 25 (1), April.

So, one might suppose, the difficulties in drawing lines and stepping over boundaries are not as great as might first be imagined. Such a sanguine view is somewhat out of place, however, because the battles between philosophy and literature are ancient and complex. It is not possible to begin to think across the boundaries—or even along the boundaries—without recapitulating some of the original skirmishes. The ancients were afraid of the arts (and rightly so, in some instances) because of their potential to evoke the emotions and do damage to the quest for rational inquiry. But the new ways of categorizing that have been bequeathed to us in recent times may be of assistance here.

The blurring of boundaries that characterizes contemporary theory also assists us in articulating new views of the arts and of the role of the emotions in general, views that may make it easier to see either literature as philosophical or philosophy as a form of literature. If everything is a “text,” then surely we have no difficulty in assimilating actual hard-copy, real world, non-metaphorical texts under one large rubric. If philosophy is something more than the discipline of philosophy as practiced in American colleges and universities—and almost everyone agrees that it is—then surely we can characterize Middlemarch as philosophical. On the other hand, if George Eliot’s work may be thought of as a form of philosophy, then philosophy itself, especially Continental work, is clearly part and parcel of literature.⁵

⁵ Villanueva Gardner, Catherine (1999), has, in fact, made such an argument about George Eliot in her Rediscovering Women Philosophers, Boulder, CO: Westview.

The ancients recognized the place of the emotions and emotional responses in our lives—they simply did not want those responses to rule over our more rational selves. If we can think of an emotional response as simply one part of a network of responses to a situation, or even a claim, we are well on the way to being able to articulate a place for literature and literary works. The poet’s divine madness, after all, may simply be one way of approaching the eternal—the point is that it is not the only way. But presumably those with even minimal philosophical training already knew that. Our task is to tease out the philosophical in literature, and then see how those moves, within the framework of pieces authored by women, might assist us in developing views about the world and the world’s objects that will ultimately be of value to us.

The Ancient Battle

Discussions about philosophy and the arts almost always take Plato and Plato’s caveats about the arts as a point of departure. The chief discussion occurs in the Republic, of course, but the worth of the arts is mentioned in many Platonic dialogues. Plato’s attack on the arts, and some forms of literature in particular, is so much a part of this debate that it is regularly referred to even in other debates. Martha Nussbaum, for example, mentions the topic in The Therapy of Desire in connection with the thought of Epicurus:

Epicurus did not write poetry. Indeed, there is evidence that he was hostile both to poetry and to forms of education that nourish a desire for it…. And since it is obvious that most conventional poetic genres are deeply committed in their very structure to the very desires and emotions that Epicurus denounces as empty—to fear, love, pity and anger—Epicurus has a strong additional reason…for avoiding poetic language in particular. Even popular and non-elite poetry would fall under this critique—a point already seen by Plato in his attack on epic and tragedy….⁶

⁶ Nussbaum, Martha (1994), The Therapy of Desire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 154–155.

Here Plato’s strong attack is the barometer by which to measure Epicurus’, and the assumption made by both parties—that poetic literature is in some sense harmful—is clearly articulated by Nussbaum. We already know that the argument was fairly simple: the arts (here a certain form of literary art) tend to arouse the emotions in ways that are difficult to control, and hence encourage behavior that is irrational and that, even when forcefully fought against, may be hard to govern. But there is a corollary to this argument, when thought through, that ought to put us on guard: if the arts function by mimesis, what is it that they mimic?

The short answer, cast in Platonic terms, is that they may very well mimic the worst in human behavior. But it is human behavior that they do imitate—and from this imitation we can learn. Jowett’s version of the old dispute, as rendered in Book X of the Republic contains the following lines:

There is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The View
• Part II The Europeans
• Part III The New World
• Part IV Closings
• Index