Literature after Feminism

Rita Felski

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226241166
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent commentators have portrayed feminist critics as grim-faced ideologues who are destroying the study of literature. Feminists, they claim, reduce art to politics and are hostile to any form of aesthetic pleasure. Literature after Feminism is the first work to comprehensively rebut such caricatures, while also offering a clear-eyed assessment of the relative merits of various feminist approaches to literature.Spelling out her main arguments clearly and succinctly, Rita Felski explains how feminism has changed the ways people read and think about literature. She organizes her book around four key questions: Do women and men read differently? How have feminist critics imagined the female author? What does plot have to do with gender? And what do feminists have to say about the relationship between literary and political value? Interweaving incisive commentary with literary examples, Felski advocates a double critical vision that can do justice to the social and political meanings of literature without dismissing or scanting the aesthetic.

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READERS

What is reading for if not to bring the embodied imagination to these unsettling connections, these dreams? These other spaces we inhabit and these other identities who inhabit us?

MINROSE GWIN

THE most famous readers in Western literature are surely Don Quixote and Emma Bovary. The eccentric nobleman who dreams of valiant quests and battles imaginary giants may seem far removed from the sultry doctor’s wife pining away in the French provinces. Yet these two figures from very different times and cultures are bound together by a common thread. They are both foolish readers. Their stories remind us of the perils that await the intemperate lover of fiction. As readers ourselves, we are asked to think of our activity as both a poison and a cure: through the act of reading we will discover the dangers of certain ways of reading.

A number of critics have talked about the parallels between these two figures, but no one has paid much attention to the fact that Don Quixote is a man and Emma Bovary a woman. This point may seem too obvious to be worth mentioning, yet it is a vital clue to how readers and reading are portrayed in these two novels. Critics sometimes refer to Emma Bovary as a female Quixote, but they do not pause to elaborate on what this idea might entail. Yet Emma’s gender is not a mere afterthought, a minor variation on a universal theme; rather, her status as a middle-class woman shapes what she reads, how she reads, and the kind of salvation she awaits from fiction. It steers her toward a destiny that is very different from that of Cervantes’s hero.

These two well-known readers are a useful starting point for thinking about the larger theme of gender and reading. What do they tell us about how male and female readers are portrayed in fiction? What light do they shed on the perils and pleasures of reading? And how have feminist critics responded to these images? How do they envision the female reader? What are her traits, her attributes, her desires, her dreams? What exactly does it mean to read as a woman?

Reading and Romance

Don Quixote is a fictional character who has made the transition from literature to myth. He is a cultural icon, an easily recognizable figure in a pantheon of popular heroes. During my teenage years, pictures of Don Quixote by Daumier or Picasso were a staple decoration of many student bedrooms. The 1960s musical Man of La Mancha is still performed in high school auditoriums; its most well-known song, “Dream the Impossible Dream,” recasts the theme of Cervantes’s novel in a distinctively American idiom. Don Quixote remains a resonant symbol of unquenchable idealism, a comic-tragic hero familiar to many people who may never have read a word of the book in which he appears.

Emma Bovary is, of course, one of the most memorable tragic women of nineteenth-century fiction; like her celebrated counterpart Anna Karenina, she has intrigued and fascinated many readers. A complex amalgam of boldness and banality, of ennui and eroticism, Emma inspires passionate and often conflicting responses from each generation of literary scholars. Feminists, too, are deeply divided; some decry Emma as a male-authored stereotype, others acclaim her as a complex, many-sided, even subversive heroine. I count myself among those who value Flaubert’s novel and who also believe that it gives us powerful if partial insights into the dynamics of gender.

Both Don Quixote and Emma Bovary are led astray by their reading of romances. This very coincidence, however, alerts us to the changing meanings of a word. In Cervantes’s novel, the romance is synonymous with the familiar arc of the heroic quest. This quest may include the ceremonial courting of a fair lady, yet its primary purpose often lies elsewhere. The ideal and goal of the romance are the hero’s attainment of manhood through a series of grueling tests. His idealized love for an unattainable woman is subordinate to this greater theme of a quest for glory that is both worldly and spiritual.

By the twentieth century, romance acquires a very different meaning. Manly striving and heroic achievement fade into the background. Instead, romance focuses ever more intently on the ebb and flow of feeling, on protestations of love and the awakening of female passion. The elaborate choreography of pursuit and retreat, of courtship and seduction, is now often recounted through a woman’s eyes. Romance, in other words, becomes a distinctively feminine preoccupation; stripped of all extraneous detail, it caters to fantasies of emotional fulfillment and blissful erotic surrender. At the same time, its cultural status dwindles dramatically. The adjective “romantic,” like its cousin “sentimental,” is substantially diminished; it loses all sublimity. Romance now evokes the treacherous terrain of female feeling rather than the heroic myth of male transcendence. From Arthurian romance to Harlequin romance: could there be a more telling illustration of the changing fortunes of a word?

Let us look more closely at the diverging fates of our fictional readers. Don Quixote is usually regarded as the quintessential antiromance that marks the birth of the modern novel. The hero’s fierce attachment to works of medieval chivalry only underscores the absurd anachronism of such fictions in a disenchanted world. Don Quixote’s delusions are directly attributed to his excessive reading; in other respects, we are told, he is a shrewd and able man. It is books that inspire him to take the mundane for the heroic and to confuse the pedestrian with the sublime. It is books that are the cause of his deranged quest, his constant brawling with strangers and his ecstatic appeals to the fair Dulcinea. The repeated clash between the conventions of knightly romance and the everyday life of seventeenth-century Spain exposes the patent foolishness of reading works of fiction in too literal a fashion.

Yet there is continuity as well as change between the medieval romance and the modern novel. Cervantes does not simply poke fun at Don Quixote’s love of romance but weaves aspects of the romance tradition into his own novel. One powerful link between the old fiction and the new is the freedom that is afforded the male hero. Both the romance and the novel are structured around a journey and a series of tests. Don Quixote, of course, finds that his path is constantly hampered by his faulty expectations. Castles turn out to be dingy and disreputable inns, fair maidens are really disheveled prostitutes, and his stirring appeals to codes of knightly honor merely inspire puzzled head-scratching from those he meets along the way. Cervantes’s novel thus translates the male quest into a new key, that of mundane disappointment rather than heroic achievement.

Nevertheless, Don Quixote still has the freedom of the traditional hero of romance. He is able to abandon home and family, to travel alone across treacherous terrain, to engage in combat with those who threaten him. And the ambitions that are inspired by his reading remain unflinchingly bold in their public reach: “to undo endless wrongs, set right endless injustices, correct endless errors, fix endless abuses and atone for endless sins.”¹ In this sense, his dogged devotion to an anachronistic tradition springs from a perverse heroism that is noble as well as comic. Don Quixote’s extravagant idealism points to the limits of a world that has been stripped bare of transcendental meaning. Critics often describe him as a Christlike figure, whose attachment to the absolute values of chivalric romance is absurd but also often poignant and even sublime.

When Emma Bovary finds out that she is pregnant, her first reaction is apathy and indifference. Gradually, however, she begins to hope for a male child, reflecting on how life stories are shaped by the constraints of gender.

A man, at least, is free: he can explore all passions and all countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most distant pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. Being inert as well as pliable, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and the inequity of the law. Like the veil held to her hat by a ribbon, her will flutters in every breeze; she is always drawn by some desire, restrained by some rule of conduct.²

As is often the case with Flaubert, it is hard to know how much of this voice is Emma and how much the narrator, how seriously we are to take such musings. Yet Emma’s reflections are largely borne out by the unfolding plot of Madame Bovary. The novel takes over large chunks of the gender script of medieval romance and leaves them unchanged. Emma does not do battle with real giants, but, unlike Don Quixote, she does not do battle with imaginary giants either. Both her imagination and her field of action are constrained by the fact of her femaleness.

Reading thus serves a very different role in the two novels. For Don Quixote reading is a trigger for action; his love of books catapults him into the outside world in search of adventure and excitement. It connects him to a glorious heroic tradition and moral vision that he strains, however comically, to emulate in his own deeds. For Emma, by contrast, reading is a substitute for action; it offers a temporary refuge, an inner escape from the dreary, stale confines of a milieu she despises but cannot leave. As the walls of her home press in relentlessly around her, she turns to books for compensation and distraction. Flaubert’s heroine seems to confirm the thesis that women’s peculiarly intense attachment to reading stems from the restrictions they encounter in the real world. Thus Emma Bovary and Don Quixote both persistently confuse the real world with the world of books, yet in each novel the reality and the books are of a different order.

Here is Flaubert’s description of the books that Emma reads as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl.

They were all about love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every relay, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heart-aches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little boatrides by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed and weeping like fountains.³

This dry list underscores the formulaic nature of Emma’s reading. The books in which she delights and which fuel her fantasies are filled with the stock figures of historical romance. There are still residues of danger, heroism, and adventure in these stories, but they are overlaid with a thick layer of sentiment. Romance is becoming synonymous with the sovereignty of love and the mutual confession of intense feeling. These stories become the yardstick against which Emma measures the erotic and emotional impoverishment of her later life. The radiant passions of romance throw into cruel contrast the drab, grinding emptiness of her days. In a sense, her real betrayal of her husband Charles takes place in the realm of literature. She commits adultery with novels.

The fictional illusions that sustain Emma are thus of a very different kind from those inspiring Don Quixote. She does not dream of saving the world through heroic acts but of the redemptive power of love. All of Emma’s ambition, aggression, and stifled energies are channeled into an erotic script. She yearns for passionate embraces, whispered endearments, dimly imagined acts of erotic pleasure. Against a backdrop of Oriental palaces and exotic lagoons, Emma is swept off her feet by a bold and sensual hero. In her fantasies, the active role is assumed by a man whose passion will redeem her by transporting her into another world. Her desire takes the form of ecstatic surrender to a transcendent sexual force. Here is Flaubert describing Emma as she writes to her lover, Léon:

it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories, of her favorite books, her strongest desires, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that her heart beat wildly in awe and admiration, though unable to see him distinctly, for, like a god, he was hidden beneath the abundance of his attributes. . . . She felt him near her; he was coming and would ravish her entire being in a kiss. Then she would fall back to earth again shattered; for these vague ecstacies of imaginary love would exhaust her more than the wildest orgies.⁴

Clearly, Emma’s faults as a reader are very different from those of Don Quixote. Her errors of interpretation are not factual but psychological and emotional. She does not mistake windmills for giants but commits the much more banal error of confusing a bored and indifferent lover for a passionate one. Don Quixote’s madness distances him from the rest of his milieu, causing mirth and astonishment among his compatriots. But Emma’s confusion of the men in her life with the heroes of romantic literature results in a much more familiar story of imagined love, seduction, and abandonment.

The romantic yearnings of men and women, we might conclude, have very different meanings. Men’s desire to place women on pedestals harks back to the codes of chivalry and the pure and unblemished heart of the courtly hero. The passive yet conveniently unattainable heroine is the perfect expression of this fantasy, allowing it to remain intact. By contrast, a woman who idealizes her male lover often comes across as sentimental and foolish; she merely underscores women’s gullibility and propensity to self-deception. And yet Emma Bovary can never fully achieve Don Quixote’s triumphant solipsism, his unshaken conviction in the reality of his imaginary world. Because she must look to her lovers to play the active role in the romance script inside her head, she is doomed to find her hopes disappointed and her fantasies shattered. Oblivious or indifferent to her yearning, they cannot bestow upon her the recognition and validation for which she longs.⁵

There are, of course, a number of reasons for the more somber and pessimistic coloring of Flaubert’s novel. But one way of measuring the distance between Cervantes and Flaubert is by looking at changing conceptions of gender and reading. From the eighteenth century onward, middle-class women were an important part of the reading public, and reading for pleasure came to be seen as a distinctively female province. The novel was attentive to the nuances of psychology and the delicate delineation of feeling; this made it well suited to women who were increasingly seen as experts in emotion and guardians of the private sphere. When essayists or novelists wanted to address the potential dangers and corrupting influence of fiction, they increasingly chose to portray the gullible reader as a woman. The history of the novel is littered with heroines who confuse literature and life and expect their own destiny to echo the radiant trajectory of romantic fiction. Emma Bovary is merely the most visible and notorious example of a long list of foolish female readers.

There was something more than a little unseemly about women’s love of the printed word. This theme crops up repeatedly in Kate Flint’s survey of attitudes toward the female reader in nineteenth-century England. Almost as interesting as her actual argument are the images that Flint has collected of women reading. Stretched out languorously on a sofa or surreptitiously skimming forbidden books in the library, these women radiate prurient curiosity and sensual abandonment. As a solitary activity that can be compulsive and guilt-ridden, women’s reading conjured up the specter of auto-erotic pleasure. Popular images of the female reader often conveyed a distinct sexual charge.

Novel-reading, writers agreed, was an occupation that offered particular pleasures and dangers to women. As one British writer from the 1840s expressed it, “The great bulk of novel readers are females; and to them such impressions (as are conveyed through fiction) are peculiarly mischievous: for first, they are naturally more sensitive, more impressable, than the other sex; and secondly, their engagements are of a less engrossing character—they have more time as well as more inclination to indulge in reveries of fiction.”⁶We can see from such comments how beliefs about middle-class women readers expanded to embrace the entire sex. First of all, the author writes as if all women have ample time in which to explore the seductive byways of fiction. Such images of the leisured reader dreaming away her days in the pages of novels would of course have been quite foreign to the harried shop girls, scullery maids, and factory workers of Victorian England. Second, the writer takes it for granted that women possess a particularly sensitive and malleable nature. Women have a greater capacity for sympathy, for entering imaginatively into the thoughts and feelings of others. This capacity renders them ideal readers of novels, which often take as their subject the delicate delineation of sentiment. Yet it also makes women particularly vulnerable to the blandishments of fiction, which can so easily seduce them and lead them astray.

Such assumptions about the impact of fiction on women were not always false. Some women of the period agreed with these accounts of the perils of reading and testified to the ways in which their own lives had been harmed by an uncritical enjoyment of novels. Here is the voice of one female writer criticizing the fictional portrayal of romantic love: “I was prepared to believe that one deep and lasting love could make anyone completely happy, could even fill all the interstices caused by complete lack of any useful occupation or purpose in life. All the novels I read told me that—most novels did tell one that in those days—and I supposed it must be true.”⁷ The view of women as eager and uncritical consumers of books receives some support from women’s own stories of how they read. Well-known female writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot added their voices to this chorus, warning women of the perils of being led astray by vapid and sentimental forms of fiction.

Yet, as Flint shows, this image captures only one facet of women’s varied and complex relations to reading. Books fulfilled a variety of roles for women in Victorian England. They were often turned to for guidance, as valuable sources of moral advice and religious instruction. They could serve as useful bodyguards, helping to ward off importune advances from strange men when traveling alone. They formed the backbone of women’s home schooling and their projects of...