7777i lunula ,1111i oíA.'íWí ijijjfinhc aesthete, the literate army officer is our intellectual representative within the text; like his, our interpretative strategies should be shaken by Draupadi. As Western readers, female and male, we arc blind to the radical difference of Third-World sexual politics. Mahasveta's story, and Spivak's foreword, remind us that sexual difference is no invariant entity. Acknowledging its import in Western textü should be a step toward fracturing other assumptions about (racial, historical, economic) uniformity. Draupadi'« survival is unusually heroic, but as survival it exemplifies the faith in women's resiliency evident throughout (he.se essays. Female characters and female authors alike emerge as ingenious strategists who succeed in devising some mode of assertion. Even Maggie Tulliver, an obvious exception, here dies in the service of her author's self-discovery, not as a victim of society. With the exploration of women's ingenuity comes an unlikely cast of female heroes: Helen of Troy, Petrarch's Laura, and Freud's Dora, to name a few. The critical focus on sexual difference may increase recognition of unorthodox female creative strategies. In addition to refining our mythologies of difference, this moment of feminist inquiry allows new figures 1.0 provide a different and enabling mythology. Acknowkdgmen is I am grateful to the editors and staff of Critical Inquiry for their assistance in preparing this issue; special thanks are due to Toby Gordon for her expert help in editing and to W.J. T. Mitchell for his unwavering support. I am also grateful to a large community of feminist scholars, particularly to Marianne Hirsch, Janel Mueller, and Marta I'eixoto. for their encouragement and advice. This issue of Critical Inquiry could not have been produced without the exceptional skill and generosity of its managing editor, Janel Silver, who served in fact, if not in title, as coed i tor of this issue. No amount of thanks could indicate my gratitude to her. FJÍ7.al>eth Abel ?sg-~ Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness Elaine Showalter /. Pluralism and the Feminist Critique Women have no wilderness in them. They are provident instead Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. —Louise BogAn, "Women" In a splendidly witty dialogue of 1075, Carolyn Ileilbrun and Catharine Siimpson identified two poles of feminist literary criticism. The first of these modes, righteous, angry, and admonitory, they compared to the Old Testament, "looking for the sins and errors of the past." The second mode, disinterested and seeking "the grace of imagination." they compared to the New Testament. Both are necessary, they concluded, for only the Jeremiahs of ideolog)' can lead us our of the "Egypt of female servitude" to the promised land of humanism.1 Matthew Arnold also thought that literary critics might perish in the wilderness before they reached the promised land of disinterestedness; Ileilbrun and Stimpson were neo-Arnoldian as befitted members of the Columbia and Barnard faculties. lUit if. in 1981. feminist literary critics arc still wandering in the 1. Carufyii C*. Heillmm and Catharine R- Stimpson, "Thrones«F Feminist f :ihhísii>- A Dialogue." in Feminiit Ijlertirt Criticism. ed. Josephine Donovan ((.exiiiRton, K).. 11175). p fit. I .it*o rlist'uss (hí* eli'Mint lion in my "Towards a Feminist Poetic*." in Wnnini Writing mul Writing ntfiuf Wom/n, cd. Mary (archns (New Votk. 11)79). pp. 23-41; A nnnibct »t (In* ide:'* in Ihr (list pari of the ptescrH essay -tie raised metre briefly in il»ť earlier picre. CI"MI by Ihr l»i.ivcw, ní ChiiBRn. <"V3- IÍWWIIŕW«l?-e locked out ... it is worse, perhaps, to lie locked in." Advocates of the antitheorelical position traced their descent from Wool f and from other feminist visionaries. such as Mary Daly, Ad Henne Rich, and Marguerite Du ras, who bad satirized the sterile narcissism of male scholarship and celebrated women's fortunate exclusion from its patriarchal methodolairy. Thus for some, feminist criticism was an act of resistance to theory, a confrontation with existing canons and judgments, what Josephine Donovan calls "a mode of negation within a fundamental dialectic." As Judith Feiterley declared in her book. The Resisting Reader, feminisi criticism has Ix-en characterized by "a resistance to codification and a refusal to have its parameters prematurely set." I have discussed elsewhere, with considerable sympathy, the suspicion of monolithic systems and the rejection of scientism in literary study that many feminist critics have voiced. While scientific criticism struggled to purge itself of the subjective, feminisi criticism reasserted the authority of experience.7 Yet il now appears thai what looked like a theoretical impasse was actually an evolutionary phase. The ethics of awakening have been succeeded, at least in the universities, by.a second stage characterized by anxiety about the isolation of feminist criticism from a critical community increasingly theoretical in its interests and indifferent to women's writing. The question of how feminist criticism should define itself with relation to the new critical theories and theorists has occasioned sharp debate in Europe and the United States. Nina Auerbach has noted the absence oľ dialogue and asks whelher feminist criticism itself must accept responsibility: Feminist critics seem particularly reluctant to define themselves to the uninitiated. There is a sense in which our sisterhood has become too powerful; as a school, our belief in outsell is so potení thai we decline communication with the networks of power and respcel ability wc say we want to change." ?. Donovan, "Afierwaid: Critical Revision," Feminist l.ilemry Critifism, p. 74. [ndidi reitei'ley, The Resisting Header: A Feminist Approach to Anient"» Fiitian (Rlooinington. Ind.. 197ft). |>. vüi. See my "Towards a Feminist Poelies," pp. S7-3Í). Tito Authority of Experienre is the lide of an aniholoKv edited hy I.re Kdwii'd* and Ailyu Diamond (Amherst. Mil**.. 11177). ft. Nina Aneipaefi, "Feniini*t Criticism Reviewed." in Gender und literary Voire, e«l. Janet Todd (New York. 1080). p. 25«. 26 81 IH2 Elaine, Shawalter Feminist Criticism But rather than declining communication with these networks, feminist criticism has indeed spoken directly to thetn. in their own media: PMLA, Diacritics, Glyph, Tel Quel, New Literary History, and Critical Inquiry. For the feminist critic seeking clarification, the proliferation of communiques may itself prove confusing. There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism, and to conflate them (as most commentators do) is to remain permanently bemused by their theoretical potentialities. The first mode is ideological; it is concerned with the feminist as reader, and it offers feminist readings of texts which consider the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and woman-assign in semiotic systems. This is not all feminist reading can do; it can be a liberating intellectual act, as Adrienne Rich proposes: A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name—and therefore live—afresh." This invigorating encounter with literature, which I will ca\\ feminist reading or thcfeminist critique, is in essence a mode of interpretation, one of many which any complex text will accommodate and permit. It is very difficult to propose theoretical coherence in an activity which by its nature is so eclectic and wide-ranging, although as a critical practice feminist reading has certainly been very influential. But in the free play of the interpretive field, the feminist critique can only compete with alternative readings, all of which have the built-in obsolescence of Buicks, cast away as newer readings lake their place. As Kolodny, the most sophisticated theorist of feminist interpretation, has conceded: All the feminist is asserting, then, is her own equivalent right to liberate new (and perhaps different) significances from these same texts; and, at the same time, her right to choose which features of a text she takes as relevant because she is, after all. asking new and different questions of it. In the process, she claims neither de-finitiveness nor structural completeness for her different readings and reading systems, hut only their usefulness in recognizing the particular achievements of woman-as-author and their applicability in conscientiously decoding woman-as-sign. Rather than being discouraged by these limited objectives» Kolodny found them the happy cause of the "playful pluralism" of feminist criti- 9. Adrienue Rkh, "When Wc Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," On ljr&. Sreirts, andSiUna (New York, 197*»), p. SS. Critical Inquiry Winter J 981 IS) cal theory, a pluralism which she believes to be "the only critical stance consistent with the current status of the larger women's movement."10 Her feminist critic dances adroitly through the theoretical minefield. Keenly aware of the political issues involved and presenting brilliant arguments, Kolodny nonetheless fails to convince me that feminist criticism must altogether abandon its hope "of establishing some basic conceptual model." If we see our critical job as interpretation and re-interpretation, we must be content with pluralism as our critical stance. But if we wish to ask questions about the process and the contexts of writing, if we genuinely wish to define ourselves to the uninitiated, we cannot rule out the prospect of theoretical consensus at this early stage. All feminist criticism is in some sense revisionist, questioning the adequacy of accepted conceptual structures, and indeed most contemporary American criticism claims to be revisionist too» The most exciting and comprehensive case for this "revisionary imperative" is made by Sandra Gilbert: at its most ambitious, she asserts, feminist criticism "wants to decode and demystify all the disguised questions and answers that have always shadowed the connections between textualily and sexuality, genre and gender, psychosexual identity and cultural authority."" But in practice, the revisionai y feminist critique is redressing a grievance and is built upon existing models. No one would deny that feminist criticism has affinities to other contemporary critical practices and methodologies and that the best work is also the most fully informed. Nonetheless, the feminist obsession with correcting, modifying, supplementing, revising, humanizing, or even attacking male critical theory keeps independent upon it and retards our progress in solving our own theoretical problems. What I mean here by "male critical theory" is a concept of creativity, literary history, or literary interpretation based entirely on male experience and put forward as universal. »So long as we look to androcentric models for our most basic principles—even if we revise them by adding the feminist frame oľ reference—we are learning nothing new. And when the process is so one-sided, when male critics boast of their ignorance Of feminist criticism, it is disheartening to find feminist critics still anxious for approval from the "white fathers" who will not listen or reply. Some feminist critics have take" upon themselves a revisionism which becomes a kind of homage; they have made Lacan 10. Kolodny, "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory. Ptactlce. ami Polities oľn Feminist Literary Criticism." Frminiu Stmtit* 6 (Spring 1980): tí), 20. the complete theoretical case for a feminist hernieneulits i« outlined in Kolodny s ruay*. it« hiding "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary Criticism.' " Critical Inquiry 2 (Autumn 1975): 75-92; "A Map lor Rereading; or. Gender and (he Interpretation of Utentry Texts," Nfiv Liltmry HiUmy (1980): 45I-Ö7; and "The Theory «if Feminist Criií-rif m" (paper delivered at the National Center for the Humanities Conference on Feminist Criticism, Research Triangle Park. N.C.. March I9fll). 11. Sandra M. Gilbert, "What Do Feminist Critics Want?: or. A Postcard limn tlie Volt M\t>r AliE llulUln, (Winter 1980): 19- 184 Elaine Slwwatler Feminist Criticism the ladies' man of Diacritics and have forced Pierre Macliercy into those dark alleys of the psyche where Engels feared to tread. According to Christiane Makward, the problem is even more serious in France than in the United States: "If neofeminist thought in Trance seems to have ground to a halt." she writes, "it. is because it has continued to feed on the discourse of the masters."" It is time for feminist criticism to decide whether between religion and revision we can claim any firm theoretical ground of our own. In calling for a feminist criticism that is genuinely women centered, independent, and intellectually coherent, I do not mean to endorse the separatist fantasies of radical feminist visionaries or to exlude from our critical practice a variety of intellectual tools. But we need to ask much more searching))' what we want to know and how we can find answers to the questions that come from our experience. I do not think that 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. It must find its own subject, its own system, its own theory, and its own voice. As Rich writes of Emily Dickinson, in her poem "I Am in Danger—Sir—," we must choose to have the argument out at last on our own premises. 2. Defining the Feminine: Gynocritics and the Woman's Text A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine. —Virginia Woolf It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain. For this practice will never be theorized, enclosed, encoded—which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. —Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" In the past decade, I believe, this process of defining the feminine has started to take place. Feminist criticism has gradually shifted its center from revisionary readings to a sustained investigation of literature by women. The second mode of feminist criticism engendered by this process is the study of women as writers, and its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women; the 12. Christine Makward. "To B<* or Nol to Re. ... A Feminist Speaker," in tl>e Fulurr of Different*, cd. Hewer Eisenstein and Alice Jardinc (Boston. 1980), p. 102. On Lacan, «c Jane Gallop. "The Ladies' Man," Diacritics G (Winter 1976): 28-M: on Machcn-y. see die Miiixisi-Femihisi Literature Collective's "Women's Writing." Critical Inquiry Winter I9XI t ,V5 psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective female career: and the evolution and laws of a fcnirdc literary tradition. No English term exists Tor such a specialized critical discourse, and so I have invented the term "gynocritics." Unlike the feminist critique, gynocritics offers 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. It is no longer the ideological dilemma of reconciling revisionary pluralisms but the essential question of difference. How can we constitute women as a distinct literary group? What is the difference of women's writing? Patricia Meyer Spacks, I think, was the first academic critic lo notice this shift from an androcentric to a gynocentiic feminist criticism. In The Female imagination (1975). she pointed out that few feminist theorists had concerned themselves with women's writing- Simone de Beatfvoir's treatment of women writers in The Second Sex "always suggests an a priori tendency to take them less seriously than their masculine counterparts"; Mary Ellmann. in Thinking about Women, characterized women's literary success as escape from the categories of womanhood; and, according to Spacks, Kate Millet!, in Sexual Politics, "has little interest in woman imaginative writers."13 Spacks' wide-ranging study inaugurated a new period of feminist literary history and criticism which asked, again and again, how women's writing had been different, how womanhood itself shaped women's creative expression. In such books as Ellen Moers'Literary Women (1976). my own A Literature of Their Own (1977). Nina Baym's Woman's Fiction (1978). Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. (1979). and Margaret Homans' Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980). and in hundreds of essays and papers, women's writing asserted itself as the central project of feminist literary study. This shift in emphasis has also taken place in European feminist criticism. To date, most commentary on French feminist critical discourse has stressed its fundamental dissimilarity from the empirical American orientation, its unfamiliar intellectual grounding in linguistics, Marxism. neo-Freudian and Lacaiiian psychoanalysis, and Derridean deconstruciiou. Despite these differences, however, the new French feminisms have much in common with radical American feminist theories in terms of intellectual affiliations and rhetorical energies. The concept oféerittti'efeminine, the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text, is a significant theoretical formulation in French feminist criticism, although it descr il>es a Utopian possibility rather than a literary practice. Helene Cixous, one of the leading advocate* of re rit u re feminine, has admitted that, with only a few exceptions. "(here has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity." and Nancy IS. I'anitia Meyer Sparks. The Female teuigintilion (New York, IÍI7&), |>p. 19. 52. 01 4 í 86 Etaine Skttwalter Feminist Criticism Miller explains lhát éerilure feminine "privileges a textuality of lbe avantgarde, a literary production of the late twentieth century, .md it is therefore fundamentally a hope, if not a blueprint, for the future."" Nonetheless, the concept of écriture feminine provides a way of talking about women's writing which reasserts the value of the feminine and identifies the theoretical project of feminist criticism as the analysis of difference. In recent years, the translations of important work by Julia Kristeva. Cixous, and Luce Irigaray and the excellent collection New French Feminisms have made French criticism much more accessible to American feminist scholars.""' English feminist criticism, which incorporates French feminist and Marxist theory but is more traditionally oriented to textual interpretation, is also moving toward a focus on women's writing."1 The emphasis in each country falls somewhat differently: English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression. All, however, have become gynocentric. All are struggling to find a terminology that can rescue the feminine from its stereotypical associations with inferiority. Defining the unique difference of women's writing, as Wool f and Cixous have warned, must present a slippery and demanding task. Is difference a matter of style? Genre? Experience? Or is it produced by the reading process, as some textual critics would maintain? Spacks calls the difference of women's writing a "delicate divergency," testifying to the subtle and elusive nature of the feminine practice of writing. Yet the delicate divergency of the woman's text challenges us to respond with equal delicacy and precision to the small but crucial deviations, the cumulative weightings of experience and exclusion, that have marked the history of women's writing. Before we can chart this history, we must uncover it, patiently and scrupulously; our theories must be firmly grounded in reading and research. But we have the opportunity, through gynocrilics, to learn something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literary culture. Theories of women's writing presently make use of four models of difference: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural. Each is an M. Heléne Cixous, "The Laugh of ihe Medusa." nans. Keith and I'aula Oihen.Signs 1 (Summer 1976): 87«. Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plot* and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction."/'MM 96 (January 1981): 37. 15. For an overview, sec üomna C. Stanton, "Language and Rcvnlmion: The Franco-American Disconnection," in Future of Difference, pp. 7IW7, and Elaine Marks and Isabcllt de Counivron. ed$.p New French Feminiwu (Amherst. Mass.. 1979); all funlicr references to rVeur French Feminisms, abbreviated NFF. will hereafter l>c included with translator's name parenthetically in the text. 16. Tvo major work* arc the manifesto of the Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective. "Women's Writing," and the papcis from the Oxford University lectures on women and literature, Women Writing and Writing about Women, cd. jacobus. Critical Inquiry Winter 19$I 187 effort to define and differentiate the qualities ol the woman writer and the woman's text; each model also represents a school of gvtioeentric feminist criticism with its own favorite lexis, styles, and methods. They overlap but are roughly sequential in that each incorporates the otic before- I shall try now to son out the various terminologies and assumptions of these four models of difference and evaluate their usefulness. 3- Women's Writing and Woman's Body More body, hence more writing. —Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" Organic or biological criticism is the most extreme statement of gender difference, of a text indelibly marked by i he body: anatomy is tcxtuality. Biological criticism is also one of ihe most sibylline and perplexing theoretical formulations oľ feminist criticism. Simply lo invoke anatomy risks a return to ihe crude essentialism, ihe phallic and ovarian theories of art, that oppressed women in the past. Victorian physicians believed thai women's physiological functions diverted about twenty percent of their creative energy from brain activity. Victorian anthropologists believed that the frontal lobes of the male brain were heavier and more developed than female lobes and thus that women were inferior in intelligence. While feminist criticism rejects the attribution of literal biological inferiority, some theorists seem to have accepted the metaphorical implications of female biological difference in writing. In The Madwoman in the Attic, for example. Gilbert and Gubar structure their analysis of women's writing around metaphors of literary paternity. "In patriarchal western culture," they maintain, ". . . the text's author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis." Lacking phallic authority, (hey go on to suggest, women's writing is profoundly marked by the anxieties of this difference: "If the pen is a metaphorical penis, from what organ can females generate texts?"'7 To this rhetorical question Gilbert and Gubar offer no reply; but it is a se noil s question of much feminist theoretical discourse. Those critics who. like myself, would protest the fundamental analogy might reply lhal women generate texts from the brain or thai ihe word-processor of I he near future, will) its compactly coded microchips, its inputs and oulpitis, is a metaphorical womb. The metaphor of literary paternity, as Auerbach has pointed out in her review o{The Madwamon, ignores "an 17. (hIIk'H nml Qubar, The Madwoman in the Aitic The Woman Wrtin and ihe Nineteenth Century IJterary Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 1979). pp. fi. 7: all Initiier iffririHc* to ihi* work will hereafter I« included parenthetically in ihe text. 188 Elaine Showalter Feminist Criticism equally timeless and, for me. even more oppressive metaphorical equation between literary creativity and childbirth."1" Certainly metaphors of literary maternity predominated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the process of literary creation is analogically much more similar to gestation, labor, and delivery than it is lo insemination. Describing Thackeray's plan for Henry Esmond, for example, Douglas Jerrold jovially remarked, "You have heard, I suppose, that Thackeray is big with twenty pans, and unless he is wrong in his lime, expects the first installment al Christmas."'" (If to write is metaphorically to give birth, from what organ can males generate texts?) Some radical feminist critics, primarily in France but also in the United States, insist that we must read these metaphors as more than playful; that we must seriously rethink and redefine biological differentiation and its relation to women's unity. They argue that "women's writing proceeds from the body, that our sexual differentiation is also our source.'"'0 In Of Woman Horn, Rich explains her belief that female biology . . . lias far more radical implications than wc have yet come to appreciate. Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these reasons; it will, I believe. come to view our physicality as a resource rather than a destiny. In order to live a fully human life, we require not only control of our bodies ... we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, the corporeal ground of our intelligence.*1 Feminist criticism written in the biological perspective generally stresses the importance of the body as a source of imagery. Alicia Os-triker, for example, argues that contemporary American women poets use a franker, more pervasive anatomical imagery than their male counterparts and that this insistent body language refuses the spurious transcendence that comes at the price of denying the flesh. In a fas* cinating essay on Whitman and Dickinson, Terence Diggory shows that physical nakedness, so potent a poetic symbol of authenticity for Whit» 18. Auerbach, review of Madaxman, Victorian Studies 23 (Summer 1980); 506. 19. Douglas Jerrotcl. quoted in Kathleen Tuloisotl, MiiWj of ihr Eighteen-Forties (l/m-don, liifii), p. 39 n. James Joyce imagined die creator a? female and litem y creation as a prQce» of gestation; sep Richard VMmann.JamfS Jajte: A ßiigrrrphy (London, 1959), pp. 300-fi. 20. Carolyn Kurke, "Report from Palis; Women's Writing and ihr Women's Move- mcni." 5ip« 3 (Summer 1978); «51. 21. Rich. 0/ Woman Bom: Motlurhood as Kxpetience "fit Imtiiulim (N?w York. 1977). p. 62. Biofeminist criticism has been inHucntial in other disciplines as well: e.g.. art (rides, such as Judy Chicago and Lucy Uppard. have suggested that »omen artists are compelled lo use a uterine or vaginal iconography of centralized foe"*, curved lines, and Utiilc or sensuous foi-ms. Sec Uppard, Firm the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's. An (New York. 1976). Critical Inquiry Winter 1981 189 man and other male poets, had very different connotations for Dickinson and her successors, who associated nakedness with the objectified or sexually exploited female nude and who chose instead protective images of the armored sclf."~ Feminist criticism which itself i ries to be biological, to write From the critic's body, has been intimate, confessional, often innovative in style and form. Kachel Blau Du Plessis'"Washing Blood," the introduction to a special issue of Feminist Studies on (he subject of motherhood, proceeds, in short lyrical paragraphs, to describe her own experience in adopting a child, to recount her dreams and nightmares, and to meditate upon the "healing unification of body and mind based not only on the lived experiences of motherhood as a social institution . . . but also on a biologii al power speaking through us."" Such criticism makes itself defiantly vulnerable, virtually bares its throat!to the knife, since our professional taboos against self-revelation are so strong. When it succeeds, however, it achieves the power and the dignity of art. Its existence is an implicit rebuke to women critics who continue to write, according to Rich, "Trom somewhere outside their female bodies." In comparison to this flowing confessional criticism, the tight-lipped Olympian intelligence of sm h texts as Elizabeth Mardwick's Seduction and Betrayal or Susan Sonlag's Illness os Metaphor can seem arid and strained. Yet in its obsessions with the "corporeal ground of our intelligence." feminist biocriticism can also become cruelly prescriptive. There is a sense in which the exhibition oľ bloody wounds becomes an initiation ritual quite separate and disconnected from critical insight. And as the editors of the journal Questions fémimstes point out, "it is ... dangerous to place the body at the center of a search for female identity. . . . The themes of otherness and of the Body merge together, because the most visible difference between men and women, and the only one we know Tor sure to be permanent ... is indeed the difference in body. This difference has been used as a pretext to justify'full power of one sex over i llic other" {trans. Yvonne Rochetle-O.zello, NFF, p. 218). The study of biological imagery in women's writing is useful and important as long as wc understand that factors other than anatomy are involved in it. Ideas about the body are fundamental to understanding how women conceptualize (heir situation in society; but there can be no expression of the lnuly which is unmediaied by linguistic, social, and literary structures. The difference of woman's literary practice, therefore, must l>e 5 22. See Alicia ((striker, Body l-uigiiage: Imagery of the Rody in Women's Poetry." It In The State of the Language, cd. I>conard Michaelsand Christopher Ricks (Bei Veley. 1980). pp. 2'17-fiS, and Terence Diggory, "Armoured Women. Naked Men: Dickinson, Whitman, ■fid 'I heir Successors." in Sťokŕt/ienre's Sister*: Femivitl E-twtyS on Women Poets, ed. <>ill>ert •ndGtihai (Bloomington, Ind.. 1970). pp. 135-50. 21. Rachel Blan DuPlessis. "Washing Blood." Feminist Studies A (June 107ft): 10. I lie eiiiiie Intic is an important document of feminist rrilirism. / 90 Elaine Shmoa/kr Feminist Criticism sought (in Miller's words) in "the body of her writing; and not the writing of her body."" 4. Women's Writing and Women's Language The women say, the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips: They say, the language you speak is made up of words that, are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. —Moniquf. WiirlG, Les CiiériUem 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, social i zation, or culture; whether women can create new languages of their own; 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 most exciting areas in gyno-critics. Poets and writers have led the attack on what Rich calls "Ihe oppressor's language," a language sometimes criticized as sexist, sometimes as abstract. But the problem goes well beyond reformist efforts to purge language of its sexist aspects. As Nelly Furman explains, "It is through the medium of language that we define and categorize areas of difference and similarity, which in turn allow us to comprehend the world around us. Male-centered categorizations predominate in American English and subtly shape our understanding and perception of reality; this is why attention is increasingly directed to the inherently oppressive aspects for women of a male-constructed language system."" According to Carolyn Burke, the language system is at the center of French feminist theory: The central issue in much recent women's writing in France is to find and use an appropriate female language. language is the place to begin: a prise dp conscience must be followed by a prise k with the hody and with pleasure, we must disinlelleclualize writing. . . . And this language, as it develops, will not degenerate and dry up, will not go back to the fleshiest academicism, the stereotypical and servile discourses I hat we reject. . . . Feminine language riiust. by its very nature, work on life passionately, scientifically, poetically, politically in order to make it invulnerable. [Trans. Rochette-Ozrello. NFF, pp. 177-78] But scholars who want a women's language that m intellectual and theoretical, that works inside the academy, are faced with what seems like an impossible paradox, as Xaviére Gauthicr has lamented: "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, I heir speech should disrupt" (trans. Marilyn A. August, NFF, pp. 162-63). What we need. Mary Jacobus has proposed, is a women'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 lo 'reinvent' language,. .. lo speak not only against, but outside of the specular phallogoccntirestructure, to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of masculine meaning."" Beyond rhetoric, what can linguistic, historical, and anthropological research loll us about the prospects for a women's language? First of all, (he concept of a women's language is not original with feminist criticism; it is very ancient and appears frequently in folklore and myth. In such myths, i he essence of women's language is its secrecy; what is really being descril>ed is the male fantasy of the enigmatic nature oľ r he feminine. 2G. Hurke. "Report from Paris," p. 811. 27. jacobus, "The Difference of View," in Women'* Writing and Writing /il-aut Women, pp. 12-13. Shosliana Fclnian. "Women and Madness: The Critical ľballaey." Diarritiet T> tWimer 1975): 10. 192 Elaine ShowatUr Feminist Criticism Herodotus, for example, reported lhat the Amazons were able linguists who easily mastered the languages of their male antagonists, although men could never learn the women's tongue. In The While Goddess, Robert Graves romantically argues that a women's language existed in a matriarchal stage of prehistory; after a great battle of the sexes, the matriarchy was overthrown and the women's language went underground, to survive in the mysterious cults of Eleusis and Corinth and the witch covens of Western Europe. Travelers and missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought bark accounts oľ "women's languages" among American Indians, Africans, and Asians (the differences in linguistic structure they reported were usually superficial). 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. In ecstatic religions, for example, women, more frequently than men. speak in tongues, a phenomenon attributed by anthropologists to their relative inarticulateness in formal religious discourse. But such ritualized and unintelligible female "languages" are scarcely cause for rejoicing; indeed, it was lie-cause witches were suspected of esoteric knowledge and possessed speech that they were burned.18 From a political perspective, there are interesting parallels between the feminist problem of a women's language and the recurring "language issue" in the general history of decolonisation. After a revolution, a new state must decide which language to make official: the language that is "psychologically immediate," that allows "the kind of force that speaking one's mother tongue permits"; or the language that "is an avenue to the wider community of modern culture." a community to whose movements of thought only "foreign" languages can give access." The language issue in feminist criticism has emerged, in a sense, after our revolution, and it reveals the tensions in the women's movement between those who would stay outside the academic establishments and the institutions of criticism and those who would enter and even conquer them. The advocacy of a women's language is thus 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, Breton, Swahili, or Amharic, that is, languages of minority or colonized groups, there is no mother tongue, no gen deflect spoken by the female population in a society, which differs significantly from the dominant language. English and American linguists agree that "there is absolutely no evidence lhat would suggest the sexes are pre- 2ft. On women's Luigi'Hgc. we Sarah B. I'oineioy, ťíi*M«v.t, W'harer, Wnv\ and Sfrtvtt: Women in Clivieal Antiquity (New York. 19»ii), p. 24; MrConiicll-Ginei, "Linguistics and die Feminist Challenge." in Women nnrf language, p- Mi and loan M. l^wis, Efítotic Utlipmi (IÍ171), cited in Shirley Ardencr. ed., Pt*?civing Womm (New York, 1ÍI77), p. 50. 2Q. Clifford Gtcm, The Inurpretotion ý CuUurei (New York. 1975í. pp. 2-11-42. Critical Inquiry Wittier 1981 193 programmed lo develop structurally different linguistic systems." 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 sex-specific languages" but need to lie considered instead in terms of styles, strategies, and contexts of linguistic performance.110 Efforts at quantitative analysis of language in texts by men or women, such as Mary Hiatt's computerized study of contemporary fiction, The Way Women Write (1977), can easily be attacked for treating words apart from their meanings and purposes. At a higher level, analyses which look for "feminine style" in ihc repetition ol stylislic devices, image patterns, and syntax in women's writing lend to confuse innate forms wilh the overdctermined results of literary choice. Language and style are never raw and instinctual but are always the pr (June 1972)- 15.1-Rl. 28 80 59 / 96 Elaine Showaller Feminist Criticism new feminist psychoanalysis lhal does not revise Freud but instead emphasizes the development and construction of gender identities. The most dramatic and promising new work in feminist psychoanalysis looks at the pre-Oedipal phase and at the process of psychosexual differentiation. Nancy Ghodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978) has had an enormous influence on women's studies. Chodorow revises traditional psychoanalytic concepts of differentiation, the proces» by which the child comes to perceive the self as separate and to develop ego and body boundaries. Since differentiation takes place in relation to the mother (the primary caretaker), attitudes toward the mother "emerge in the earliest differentiation of the self"; "the mother, who is a woman, Incomes 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 thp same for hoys and girls. 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. Ghodorow's work suggests that shared parenting, the involvement of men as primary caretakers of children, will have a profound effect on our sense of sex difference, gender identity, and sexual preference. But what is the significance of feminist psychoanalysis for literary criticism? One thematic carry-over has been a critical inlerest in the mother-daughter configuration as a source of female creativity.311 Elizabeth Abel's bold investigation of female friendship in contemporary women's novels uses Ghodorow's theory to show how not only the relationships of women characters but also the relationship of women writers to each other are determined by the psychodynamics of female bonding. Abel too confronts Bloom's paradigm of literary history, but unlike Gilbert and Gubar she sees a "triad ic female pattern" in which the Oedipal relation to the male tradition is balanced by the woman writer's pre-Oedipal relation to the female tradition. "As the dynamics of female friendship differ from those of male," Abel concludes, "the dynamics of female literary influence also diverge and deserve a theory of influence attuned to female psychology and to women's dual position in literary history."37 35. Nancy Chodorow. "Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic respective," in Future of Different*, p. U. See alio Chodorow el al., "On The Rrpmtu'tuw of Mothering: A Methodological Debate.'* Signs 6 (Spring 1981): 182-51-1. 36. Sec. e.g.. The t-ost Tradition: Mothers and Daitghlm in LUeralwf. cd. Onhy M. Davison and F.. M. Broner (New York, 1980); (his work u more engaged with myths and images of matritineage than with redefining female identity. 37. F.li/abeth Alici, "(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics oľ Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women," Signs 6 (Spring 1981): 431. Critical Inquiry Winter 1981 J 97 Like Gilbert. Gubar, and Miller, Abel brings together women's texts from a variety of national literatures, choosing to emphasize "the constancy of certain emotional dynamics depicted in diverse cultural situations." Ye( the privileging of gender implies not only the constancy hut also the immutability of these dynamics. Although p*ychoanalyiically 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 women's writing which places it in the maximum context of culture 6. Wameris Writing and Women's Culture I consider women's literature as a specific category, nor because <>' biology, but because it is, in a sense, the literature of (he colonized, —-Christiane Rochefort, "The Privilege of Consciousness" A theory based on a model of women's culture can provide. 1 be-lieve. 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 woman's body, language, and psyche but interprets them in relation to die social contexts in which they occur. The ways in which women conceptualize their bodies and their sexual and reproductive functions arc intricately linked to their cultural environments. The female psyche ran be studied as the product or construction of cultural forces. Language, too, comes back into the picture, as we consider the social dimensions and determinants of language use, (he shaping of linguistic behavior by cultin.iI ideals. A cultural theory acknowledges (hat there are important differences between women as writers: class, race, nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women's culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space. It is in the emphasis on the binding force of women's culture that this approach differs from Marxist theories of cultural hegemony. Hypotheses of women's culture have been developed over the last decade primarily by anthropologists, sociologists, and social historians in order to get away from masculine systems, hierarchies, and values and to get at (he primary and self-defined nature of female cultural experience. i In the field of women's history, the concept of women's culture is s(ill | controversial, although there is agreement on its significance as a / 98 Elaine Slwwatter Feminist. Criticism theoretical formulation. Gerda Lerner explains the importance of examining women's experience in its own terms: Women have been left out of history not because of the evil conspiracies of men in general or mule historians in particular, but because we have considered history only in male-centered terms. We have missed women and their activities, because we have asked questions of history which arc inappropriate to women. To rectify this, and to light up areas of historical darkness we must, fora time. focus on a woman-centered inquiry, considering the possibility of the existence of a female culture within the general culture shared by men and women. History must include an account of the female experience over time and should include the development of feminist consciousness as an essential aspect of women's past. This is the primary task of women's history. The central question it raises is: What would history be like if it were seen through (he eyes of women and ordered by values they define?3* In defining female culture, historians distinguish between the roles, activities, tastes, and behaviors prescribed and considered appropriate for women and those activities, behaviors, and functions actually generated out of women's lives. In the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term "woman's sphere" expressed the Victorian and Jackso-nian vision of separate roles for men and women, with little or no overlap and with women subordinate. If we were to diagram it, the Victorian model would look like this: 1 Worsen Woman's sphere was defined and maintained by men. but women frequently internalized its precepts in the American "cult of true womanhood" and the English "feminine ideal." Women's culture, however, redefines women's "activities and goals from a woman-centered point of view. . .. The term implies an assertion of equality and an awareness of sisterhood, the commonality of women." Women's culture refers to "the broad-based communality of values, institutions, relationships, and 38. Gerda I-crner. "The Challenge of Woinvn's History," The Majority Find* lit Part (New York. 1981); all further references to this hook, abbreviate«! MFP, will hereafter be included parenthetically in the lexi. Critical inquiry Winter 1981 199 methods of communication" unifying nineteenth-century female experience, a culture nonetheless with significant variants by class and ethnic group (MFP, pp. 52, 54). Sc>me feminist historians have accepted the model of separate spheres and have seen the movement from woman's sphere to women's culture to women's-rights activism as the consecutive stages of an evolutionary political process. Others see a more complex and perpetual negotiation taking place between women's culture and the general culture. As ferner has argued: i It is important to understand 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 their social existence within the general culture and, whenever they are confined by patriarchal restraint or segregation into separateness (which always has subordination as its purpose), they transform this restraint into complementarity (asserting the imporlance of woman's function, even its "superiority") and redefine it. Thus, women live a duality—as members of the general culture and as partakers of women's culture. [MFP, p. 52] Lerne r's views are similar to those of some cultural anthropologists. A particularly stimulating analysis of female culture has been carried out by two Oxford anthropologists, Shirley and Edwin Ardener. The Ar-deners have tried to outline a model of women's culture which is not historically limited and to provide a terminology for its characteristics. Two essays by Edwin Ardener, "Belief and the Problem of Women" (1972) and "The 'Problem' Revisited" (1975), suggest that women constitute a muted group, the boundaries of whose culture andTeality overlap, but are not wholly contained by, the dominant (mate) group. A model of the cultural situation of women is crucial to understanding both how they are perceived by the dominant group and how they perceive themselves and others. Both historians and anthropologists emphasize the incompleteness of androcentric models of history and culture and the inadequacy of such models for the analysis of female experience. In the past, female experience which could not be accommodated by androcentric models was treated as deviant or simply ignored. Observation from an exterior point of view could never be the same as comprehension from within. Ardener's model also has many connections to and implications Tor current feminist literary theory, since (he concepts of perception, silence, and silencing are so central to discussions of women's participation in literary culture.1" 39. See, e.g. Tillie Olsen. Silaua (New Yoik. I978); Sheila Rowlxirh.ini, FP«muíi'.i CofíseialaneS*, Man'i World (Harmondsworth, Ie the address of a genuinely women-centered criticism, theory, and art, whose shared project is to bring into being the symbolic weight of female consciousness, lo make the invisible visible, (o make (he silent speak. French feminist critics would like to make the wild zone the theoretical base of women's difference. In their texts, the wild /one 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." It. is (he Dark Continent in which Cixous' laughing Medusa and Wittig's gitéritfera reside. Through voluntary entry into the wild zone, other feminist critics (ell us, a woman can write her way out of the "cramped confines of patriarchal space."4' The images of (his journey are now familiar in feminist quest fictions and in essays alxiut (hem. The writer/heroine, often guided by another woman, (ravels lo (he "mother country" of liberated desire and female authenticity; crossing to the other side of (he mirror, like Alice in Wonderland, is often a symbol of the passage. Many forms of American radical feminism also romantically assert that women are closer to nature, to (he environment, to a matriarchal principle at once biological and ecological. Mary Daly's GynlEcaUigy and Margaret At wood's novel Surfacing are texts which create this feminist mythology. In English and American literature, women writers have often imagined Amazon Utopias, cities or countries situated in (he wild zone or on its border: Elizabeth Gaskell's gentle Gfxnford is probably an Amazon Utopia; so is Charlotte Perkins Oilman's HerUmd or. lo lake n recent example, Joanna Russ' Whileaway. A few years ago, the feminist publishing house Daughters, Inc. (tied lo create a business version of the Amazon Utopia; as Lois Gould reported in the New York Times Magazine (2 January 1977). "They believe (hey are building the working models for (he critical next stage of feminism: full independence from the control and influence of "male-dominated" institutions—the news media, the health, education, and legal systems, the art. theater, and literary worlds, (he banks." These fantasies of an idyllic enclave represent a phenomenon which feminist criticism must recognize in the history of women's willing. But ivc must also understand (hat (here can be no writing or criticism totally outside of (he dominant structure; no publication is fully independent from the economic and political pressures of the male-dominated society. The concept of a woman's text in (he wild zone is a playful abstraction: in (he reality (o which we inus( address ourselves as critics, women's writing is a "double-voiced discourse" lhal always embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muled and the dominant.At '11. Maii MtCauy, "Possessing Female Sparc: 'The Tender Sliooi,' ~ Womm'i Studie» H 12. Smán I-inscr and Evelyn Totion Berk, "|Why| Are There No Girat Women 35 2^2 luaiiu' SitowaUvT 7'tunlHhi lAintijm- And insofar as most feminist critics are also women writing, this precarious heritage is one we share; every ste]) that feminist criticism lakes toward defining women's writing is a step toward self-understanding as well; every account of a female literary culture and a female literary tradition has parallel significance for our own place in critical history and critical tradition. Women writing are not, then, inside and outsú/e of the male tradition; they are inside two traditions simultaneously, "undercurrents" in Ellen Moers' metaphor, of the mainstream. To mix metaphors again, the literary estate of women, as Myra Jehlen says, "suggests ... a more lluid imagery of interacting juxtapositions, the point of which would he to represent not so much the territory, as its defining borders. Indeed, the female territory might well be envisioned as one long border, and independence for women, not as a separate country, but as open access to the sea." As Jehlen goes on to explain, an aggressive feminist criticism must poise itself on this border and must see women's writing in its changing historical and cultural relation to that other body of texts identified by feminist criticism not simply as literature but as "men's writing."'''' The difference of women's writing, then, can only be understood in terms of this complex and historically grounded cultural relation. An important aspect of Ardener's model is that there are mined groups other than women; a dominant structure may determine many mmed structures. A black American woman poet, for example, would have her literary identity formed by the dominant (white male) tradition, by a muted women's culture, and by a muled black culture. She would be affected by both sexual and racial politics in a combination unique to her case; at the same time, as Barbara Smith points out, she shares an experience specific to her group: "Black women writers constitute an identifiable literary tradition . . . thcmatically, stylistically, aesthetically, and conceptually. Black women writers manifest common approaches to the act of creating literature as a direct result of the specific political, social, and economic experience they have been obliged to share."11 Thus the first task of a gynocentric criticism must l>e to plot the precise cultural locus of female literary identity and to describe the forces thai intersect an individual woman writer's cultural field, A gynocentrie criticism would also situate women writers with respect to the variables of literary culture, such as modes of production and distribution, relations Critics? And What Difference Di>es li Make?" in The ľri*m of Sex: Essays in rta Sotiolofzy of Knowledge, cd. Beek ami Julia A. Sherman {Madison, Wis. L 979), p. lift. 43. Myra Jehlen, "Archimedes and die Paradox of Feminist Criticism," Sign* ft (An- lumn 1981): 582, 44. Smith, "Black Feminist Criticism," p. 32. See also Gloria'ľ. I lull. "'Afro-American Women Poels: A llio-Criiical Survey," in Shakespeartl'i Sisters, pp. lGii-82. and Mark*. "Lesbian Inlcite-xuialiiy," in HottHisexualihrs awt French tjletiiluve^ at. Marks and Grotte Sumholian (lihnea. N.V., 1979). Critical Inquiry Winter 1981 203 of author and audience, relations of high to popular art, and hierarchies of genre. Insofar :»s our concepts of literary periodization are based on men's writing, women's writing must be forcibly assimilated to an irrelevant grid; we discuss a Renaissance which is not a renaissance for women, a Romantic period in which women played very little part, a modernism with which women conflict- Al the same time, I he ongoing history of women's writing has been suppressed, leaving large and mysterious gaps in accounts of the development of genre. (Jynocentric criticism is already well on the way to providing us with another perspective on literary history. Margaret Anne Doody, for example, suggests thai "the period between the death of Richardson and the appearance of the novels of Scott and Austen" which has "been regarded as a dead period, a dull blank" is in fact the period in which late eighteenth-century women Writers were developing "the paradigm for women's fiction of the nineteenth century—something hardly less than the paradigm of the nineteenth-century novel itself."" There has also been a feminist rc-habilitalion of the female go(hie, a mutation of a popular genre once Ix-'Iicvcd marginal but now seen as part of the great tradition of the novel.™ In American literature, the pioneering work of Ann Douglas, Nina Bayrn, and Jane Tompkins, among others, has given us a new view oľ the power of women's fiction (o feminize ninctcenth Gothir: Amtfn, FJiot, Cluli Isiwence fl'nin rion. NJ . I9H0). •17. See Doughs, The Ftminitttfian of Airieritan C.iiliu'f (New Voik. 1977): Nina Hrnut. H'««rtw'i Firtiaii: A Guide In Novels by een read in relation to an implied "doiniuanl" fictional and sodal mode and had ilms been perteived as Hawed, feminist readings foreground its muted symbolic strategies and explore its credibility and coherence in its own terms. Feminist critics revise views like those of Richard Chase, who dcscrilx:* Rochcslct as castraied thus implying that jane's neurosis is penis envy, and G. Armour Craig, who sec* the novel as Jane's snuggle for superiority. io see Jane instead as healthy within her own system, (hat is. a women's society See Chase. "The Brontes; or, Myth ni>me*üc.iied."y