Women Writing and Writing about Women

Mary Jacobus

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415521697
• eBook ISBN: 9781136321665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This innovative collection of contemporary essays in feminist literary criticism provides a spectrum of approaches and positions, united by their common focus on writing by and about women.

Spanning the novel, poetry, drama, film and criticism, the contributors emphasise some of the problems of theory and practice posed by writing as a woman and by women's representation in literature. The subjects of individual essays range from the nineteenth and twentieth century novel to avant-garde film, and from Victorian women poets to Russian women poets of today. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as structuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, socio-linguistics and Marxist analyses of literature, the essays suggest the variety and vigour of contemporary feminist literary criticism, as well as representing some of the debates currently animating it. Topics of common concern range from the nature of a women's tradition in literature to the scope and method of feminist literary criticism itself.

Successfully bridging the gap between literary criticism and literary production, the scope of this collection will be of considerable interest to those concerned with current developments in literary criticism as well as to those in the field of women's studies.

1Towards a Feminist Poetics

Elaine Showalter

In 1977, Leon Edel, the distinguished biographer of Henry James, contributed to a London symposium of essays by six male critics called Contemporary Approaches to English Studies. Professor Edel presented his essay as a dramatised discussion between three literary scholars who stand arguing about art on the steps of the British Museum:

There was Criticus, a short, thick-bodied intellectual with spectacles, who clung to a pipe in his right hand. There was Poeticus, who cultivated a Yeatsian forelock, but without the eyeglasses and the ribbon. He made his living by reviewing and had come to the B.M. to look up something or other. Then there was Plutarchus, a lean and lanky biographer wearing a corduroy jacket.

As these three gentlemen are warming to their important subject, a taxi pulls up in front of them and releases ‖an auburn-haired young woman, obviously American, who wore ear-rings and carried an armful of folders and an attache case’. Into the Museum she dashes, leaving the trio momentarily wondering why femininity requires brainwork. They are still arguing when she comes out, twenty-one pages later.¹

I suppose we should be grateful that at least one woman – let us call her Critica – makes an appearance in this gathering, even if she is not invited to join the debate. I imagine that she is a feminist critic – in fact if I could afford to take taxis to the British Museum, I would think they had perhaps seen me – and it is pleasing to think that while the men stand gossiping in the sun, she is inside hard at work. But these are scant satisfactions when we realise that of all the approaches to English studies current in the 1970s, feminist criticism is the most isolated and the least understood. Members of English departments who can remember what Harold Bloom means by clinamen, and who know the difference betweeen Tartu and Barthian semiotics, will remark that they are against feminist criticism and consequently have never read any. Those who have read it, often seem to have read through a glass darkly, superimposing their stereotypes on the critical texts. In his introduction to Nina Auerbach’s subtle feminist analysis of Dombey and Son in the Dickens Studies Annual, for example, Robert Partlow discusses the deplorable but non-existent essay of his own imagining:

At first glance, Nina Auerbach’s essay … might seem to be a case of special pleading, another piece of women’s lib propaganda masquerading as literary criticism, but it is not quite that … such an essay could have been … ludicrous … it could have seen dark phallic significance in curving railroad tracks and upright church pews – but it does not.²

In contrast to Partlow’s caricature (feminist criticism will naturally be obsessed with the phallus), there are the belligerent assumptions of Robert Boyers, in the Winter 1977 issue of the influential American quarterly Partisan Review, that it will be obsessed with destroying great male artists. In ‘A Case Against Feminist Criticism’, Boyers used a single work, Joan Mellen’s Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film (1973), as an example of feminist deficiency in ‘intellectual honesty’ and ‘rigour’. He defines feminist criticism as the ‘insistence on asking the same questions of every work and demanding ideologically satisfactory answers to those questions as a means of evaluating it’, and concludes his diatribe thus:

Though I do not think anyone has made a credible case for feminist criticism as a viable alternative to any other mode, no one can seriously object to feminists continuing to try. We ought to demand that such efforts be minimally distinguished by intellectual candour and some degree of precision. This I have failed to discover in most feminist criticism.³

Since his article makes its ‘case’ so recklessly that Joan Mellen brought charges for libel, and the Partisan Review was obliged to print a retraction in the following issue, Boyers hardly seems the ideal champion to enter the critical lists under the twin banners of honesty and rigour. Indeed, his terminology is best understood as a form of intimidation, intended to force women into using a discourse more acceptable to the academy, characterised by the ‘rigour’ which my dictionary defines as strictness, a severe or cruel act, or ‘state of rigidity in living tissues or organs that prevents response to stimuli’. In formulating a feminist literary theory, one ought never to expect to appease a Robert Boyers. And yet these ‘cases’ cannot continue to be settled, one by one, out of court. The absence of a clearly articulated theory makes feminist criticism perpetually vulnerable to such attacks, and not even feminist critics seem to agree what it is that they mean to profess and defend.

A second obstacle to the articulation of a feminist critical practice is the activist’s suspicion of theory, especially when the demand for clarification comes from sources as patently sexist as the egregiously named Boyers and Mailers of the literary quarterlies. Too many literary abstractions which claim to be universal have in fact described only male perceptions, experiences and options, and have falsified the social and personal contexts in which literature is produced and consumed. In women’s fiction, the complacently precise and systematising male has often been the target of satire, especially when his subject is Woman. George Eliot’s impotent structuralist Casaubon is a classic instance, as is Mr Ramsay, the self-pitying philosopher in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. More recently Doris Lessing’s Professor Bloodrot in The Golden Notebook lectures confidently on orgasm in the female swan; as Bloodrot proceeds, the women in the audience rise one by one and leave. What women have found hard to take in such male characters is their self-deception, their pretence to objectivity, their emotion parading as reason. As Adrienne Rich comments in Of Woman Born, ‘the term “rational” relegates to its opposite term all that it refuses to deal with, and thus ends by assuming itself to be purified of the nonrational, rather than searching to identify and assimilate its own surreal or nonlinear elements’.⁴ For some radical feminists, methodology itself is an intellectual instrument of patriarchy, a tyrannical Methodolatry which sets implicit limits to what can be questioned and discussed. ‘The God Method’, writes Mary Daly,

is in fact a subordinate deity, serving higher powers. These are social and cultural institutions whose survival depends upon the classification of disruptive and disturbing information as nondata. Under patriarchy, Method has wiped out women’s questions so totally that even women have not been able to hear and formulate our own questions, to meet our own experiences.⁵

From this perspective, the academic demand for theory can only be heard as a threat to the feminist need for authenticity, and the visitor looking for a formula he or she can take away without personal encounter is not welcome. In the United States, where Women’s Studies programmes offer degree options in nearly 300 colleges and universities, there are fears that feminist analysis has been co-opted by academia, and counter-demands that we resist the pressure to assimilate. Some believe that the activism and empiricism of feminist criticism is its greatest strength, and point to the flourishing international women’s press, to new feminist publishing houses, and to writing collectives and manifestoes. They are afraid that if the theory is perfected, the movement will be dead. But these defensive responses may also be rationalisations of the psychic barriers to women’s participation in theoretical discourse. Traditionally women have been cast in the supporting rather than the starring roles of literary scholarship. Whereas male critics in the twentieth century have moved to centre-stage, openly contesting for primacy with writers, establishing coteries and schools, speaking unabashedly (to quote Geoffrey Hartman) of their ‘pen-envy’,⁶ women are still too often translators, editors, hostesses at the conference and the Festschrift, interpreters; to congratulate ourselves for working patiently and anonymously for the coming of Shakespeare’s sister, as Virginia Woolf exhorted us to do in 1928, is in a sense to make a virtue of necessity. In this essay, therefore, I would like to outline a brief taxonomy, if not a poetics, of feminist criticism, in the hope that it will serve as an introduction to a body of work which needs to be considered both as a major contribution to English studies and as part of an interdisciplinary effort to reconstruct the social, political and cultural experience of women.

Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties. The first type is concerned with woman as reader – with woman as the consumer of male-produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes. I shall call this kind of analysis the feminist critique, and like other kinds of critique it is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male-constructed literary history. It is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film; and with the analysis of woman-as-sign in semiotic systems. The second type of feminist criticism is concerned with woman as writer – with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the psycho-dynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works. No term exists in English for such a specialised discourse, and so I have adapted the French term la gynocritique: ‘gynocritics’ (although the significance of the male pseudonym in the history of women’s writing also suggested the term ‘georgics’).

The feminist critique is essentially political and polemical, with theoretical affiliations to Marxist sociology and aesthetics; gynocritics is more self-contained and experimental, with connections to other modes of new feminist research. In a dialogue between these two positions, Carolyn Heilbrun, the writer, and Catherine Stimpson, editor of the American journal Signs: Women in Culture and Society, compare the feminist critique to the Old Testament, looking for the sins and errors of the past’, and gynocritics to the New Testament, seeking ‘the grace of imagination’. Both kinds are necessary, they explain, for only the Jeremiahs of the feminist critique can lead us out of the ‘Egypt of female servitude’ to the promised land of the feminist vision. That the discussion makes use of these Biblical metaphors points to the connections between feminist consciousness and conversion narratives which often appear in women’s literature; Carolyn Heilbrun comments on her own text, ‘when I talk about feminist criticism, I am amazed at how high a moral tone I take’.⁷

The Feminist Critique: Hardy

Let us take briefly as an example of the way a feminist critique might proceed, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with the famous scene of the drunken Michael Henchard selling his wife and infant daughter for five guineas at a country fair. In his study of Hardy, Irving Howe has praised the brilliance and power of this opening scene:

To shake loose from one’s wife; to discard that drooping rag of a woman, with her mute complaints and maddening passivity; to escape not by a slinking abandonment but through the public sale of her body to a stranger, as horses are sold at a fair; and thus to wrest, through sheer amoral wilfulness, a second chance out of life – it is with this stroke, so insidiously attractive to male fantasy, that The Mayor of Casterbridge begins.⁸

It is obvious that a woman, unless she has been indoctrinated into being very deeply identified indeed with male culture, will have a different experience of this scene. I quote Howe first to indicate how the fantasies of the male critic distort the text; for Hardy tells us very little about the relationship of Michael and Susan Henchard, and what we see in the early scenes does not suggest that she is drooping, complaining or passive. Her role, however, is a passive one; severely constrained by her womanhood, and further burdened by her child, there is no way that she can wrest a second chance out of life. She cannot master events, but only accommodate herself to them.

What Howe, like other male critics of Hardy, conveniently overlooks about the novel is that Henchard sells not only his wife but his child, a child who can only be female. Patriarchal societies do not readily sell their sons, but their daughters are all for sale sooner or later. Hardy wished to make the sale of the daughter emphatic and central; in early drafts of the novel Henchard has two daughters and sells only one, but Hardy revised to make it clearer that Henchard is symbolically selling his entire share in the world of women. Having severed his bonds with this female community of love and loyalty, Henchard has chosen to live in the male community, to define his human relationships by the male code of paternity, money and legal contract. His tragedy lies in realising the inadequacy of this system, and in his inability to repossess the loving bonds he comes desperately to need.

The emotional centre of The Mayor of Casterbridge is neither Henchard’s relationship to his wife, nor his superficial romance with Lucetta Templeman, but his slow appreciation of the strength and dignity of his wife’s daughter, Elizabeth-Jane. Like the other women in the book, she is governed by her own heart – man-made laws are not important to her until she is taught by Henchard himself to value legality, paternity, external definitions, and thus in the end to reject him. A self-proclaimed ‘woman-hater’, a man who has felt at best a ‘supercilious pity’ for womankind, Henchard is humbled and ‘unmanned’ by the collapse of his own virile façade, the loss of his mayor’s chain, his master’s authority, his father’s rights. But in Henchard’s alleged weakness and womanishness’, breaking through in moments of tenderness, Hardy is really showing us the man at his best. Thus Hardy’s female characters in The Mayor of Casterbridge, as in his other novels, are somewhat idealised and melancholy projections of a repressed male self.

As we see in this analysis, one of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men have thought women should be. In some fields of specialisation, this may require a long apprenticeship to the male theoretician, whether he be Althusser, Barthes, Macherey or Lacan; and then an application of the theory of signs or myths or the unconscious to male texts or films. The temporal and intellectual investment one makes in such a process increases resistance to questioning it, and to seeing its historical and ideological boundaries. The critique also has a tendency to naturalise women’s victimisation, by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of discussion. One sees, moreover, in works like Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal, the bittersweet moral distinctions the critic makes between women merely betrayed by men, like Hetty in Adam Bede, and the heroines who make careers out of betrayal, like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. This comes dangerously close to a celebration of the opportunities of victimisation, the seduction of betrayal.⁹

Gynocritics and Female Culture

In contrast to this angry or loving fixation on male literature, the programme of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• New Title Page
• New Copyright
• Old Title Page
• Old Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• The Difference of View
• 1. Towards a Feminist Poetics
• 2. The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in Villette
• 3. The Indefinite Disclosed: Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson
• 4. Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf
• 5. Sue Bridehead and the New Woman
• 6. Ibsen and the Language of Women
• 7. Poetry and Conscience:Russian Women Poets of the Twentieth Century
• 8. Writing as a Woman
• 9. Feminism, Film and the Avant-garde
• Index