“Towards a feminist poetics by Elaine Showalter”
Two kinds of feminist criticism: Women as reader and Woman as writer
Woman as reader:
Woman as a consumer of male-produced literature questioning the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena and the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criticism, the fissures in male-constructed literary history; Woman as a sign in semiotic systems
Woman as writer:
Psychodynamics of female creativity, the problem of a female language, trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career, literary history, and studies of particular writers and works
Contrasting feminist critique and gynocritique:
Feminist critique:
- political and polemical – with theoretical affiliations with marxist sociology and aesthetics
- male-oriented; no idea of what women have felt and experienced; all about “What men have
thought women should be.”
- sexism of male critics – the limited roles women play in literary history
- a strong tendency to naturalize women’s victimization (as if inevitable)
- like the Old Testament: “Looking for the sins and errors of the past”
Gynocritique:
-self-contained and experimental – other modes of new feminist research
- like the New Testament: “seeking for the grace of imagination”
- to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature
- to develop new models based on the study of female experience
-to stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition
-to focus on the nearly visible world of female culture
- related to feminist research in history, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, all of which have developed hypotheses of a female subculture including not only the ascribed status, and the internalized constructs of feminity, but also the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women. Anthropologists study the female subculture in the relationships between women, as mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends; in sexuality, reproduction, and ideas about the body; and in rites of initiation and passage, purification ceremonies, myths, and taboos.
- totake into account the different velocities and curves ofpolitical, social, and personal histories in determining women’s literary choices and careers.
-to recommend women’s literature to go beyond these scenarios of compromise, madness, and death.
Patterns and phases in the evolution of a female literary tradition - three stages:
Feminine(imitation)(1840-1880) attempting to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture and internalized the assumptions of the male culture about female culture. (a male pseudonym – George Eliot (May Ann Evans). The feminist content is typically oblique, displaced, ironic and subversive – one has to read between the lines.
Feminist (protest): (1880 – 1920) Rejecting the accommodating postures of femininity and using literature to dramatise the ordeals of wronged womanhood.
Female: (1920 -) Women reject both imitation and protest and turn to female experience as the source of an autonomous art – extending the feminist analysis of culture to form and techniques of literature. Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf – thinking in terms of male and female sentences and dividing their work into masculine journalism and feminine fictions, redefining and sexualizing external and internal experience.
Theoretical approaches of feminist criticism:
- toemancipate itself from the influence of accepted models, and guide itself by its own
impulses (John Stuart Mill)
- the scientific approaches of Marxist aesthetics and structuralism cannot map out the female consciousness and female experience
- the new sciences of the text based on linguistics, computers, genetic structuralism, deconstructionism, neoformalism and deformalism, affective stylistics, and psychoaesthetics, have offered literary critics the opportunity to demonstrate that the work they do is as manly and aggressive as nuclear physics - not intuitive, expressive, and feminine, but strenuous, rigorous, impersonal, and virile.
- a two-tiered system of “higher” and “lower” criticism, the higher concerned with the “scientific” problems of form and structure, the “lower” concerned with the “humanistic” problems of content and interpretation
Final appeal:
- the task of feminist critics is to find a new language, a new way of reading that can integrate our intelligence and ourexperience, our reason and our suffering, our skepticism and our vision. This enterprise should not be confined to women.