"SPLITTING OPEN THE WORLD"

- SEARCHING FOR THE TRUE WOMEN'S WRITING

BY

JENNIFER DONOVAN

A thesis submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Honours).

Department of Sociology University of New South Wales February, 1991 SYNOPSIS

This thesis explores the contention presented by the so-called French feminists (including Irigaray, Kristeva, and especially Cixous) that the situation of women cannot change until they have their own discourse and that women's writing must be based in their bodies. The purpose of "l'ecriture feminine", these writers claim, 1s to inscribe difference, to awaken women to one another, and to undermine patriarchy.

My ambition was to find actual examples of this "ecriture feminine", and evidence of its effects. In attempting to deal with the abstruseness of much of the writing by the French women who encourage women to celebrate the difference and "write the body", I have briefly indicated some points of contact and divergence between Anglo-American feminists and the French. I have also described the persistent patriarchal obstruction to women's writing in order to highlight the revolutionary potential of writing the body.

I examined writing by women who were variously woman­ identified, feminist and anti-feminist. I also considered various styles of women's writing, particularly poetry, which seemed to approach most closely the discourse envisaged by the French theorists. The writers discussed include Tillie Olsen, Marge Piercy, Christina Stead, Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Susan Griffin and others. ACKNOWIEDGEMENTS

This thesis owes its existence to the energies of many people other than just the author. Thanks firstly to my supervisor, Lizabeth During, for her continued enthusiasm and encouragement, and especially for her invaluable help with refining the many drafts. Thanks also to Frances Lovejoy who coordinates the Women's Studies programme which makes research such as this feasible.

Special thanks to Doreen Martin for her typing ability, and to John Donovan for access to - and assistance with - the world of word processing.

Finally, grateful acknowledgement goes to the Martins, Donovans, and all at No.42 who helped so generously with childcare and the removal of distractions. DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to the French women who inspired it, especially to Annie Leclerc and Madeleine Gagnon who gave me some time and attention in Paris, 1988. Also to Phyl who began learning with me.

The advent of female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience: in other words, a new element. Make what distinctions you please in the social world, it still remains true that men and women have different organizations, and consequently different experiences ... But hitherto ... the literature of women has fallen short of its functions owing to a very natural and a very explicable weakness - it has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women 1s the real task they have to perform. -G.H.Lewes, "The Lady Novelist", 1852.

Language is a translation. It speaks through the body. Each time we translate what we are in the process of thinking, it necessarily passes through our bodies. If a woman disposes of her body (and I'm not talking about women who are alienated from their bodies, but about those who have a body which is theirs, who inhabit it, live in it), when she speaks, her words pass through it. This gives another universe of expression from men. -Helene Cixous, "Conversations" TABLE OF CONIENTS

Synopsis page 1

Acknowledgements page 11

Dedication page iii

Introduction page 1

Chapter One: The problem of definition: what is women's writing? Patriarchal methods of silencing The significance of difference Searching for a feminine aesthetic A history of patriarchal interference with women's writing page 5

Chapter Two: Definition and historical overview of American and French feminism Theory of difference Luce Irigaray Julia Kristeva Helene Cixous Searching for the women m French feminist theory page 20

Chapter Three: Continuum of woman-identification Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle Analysis of the failure of women's writing "The body" in Stead, Piercy and Olsen Language use by Stead, Piercy and Olsen Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology: strategy or poetry? page 36 Chapter Four: Inscribing "jouissance": the power and limitations of poetry Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language Other forms of expression - articulate silence - the mythical world - body language (giving voice) - dream imagery page 53

Conclusion page 77

Bibliography page 80 INTRODUCTION

The significance and power contained in the ability to write cannot be underestimated. Writing is the way in which human beings express creativity and imagination, record their history, analyse and attempt to make sense of their existences, communicate thoughts, ideas and opinions with one another. While patriarchy has not succeeded in denying women literacy and creativity, it has utilised several tools to restrict women's access to writing and publication. Dale Spender explains the effect of patriarchy thus:

a patriarchal society depends in large measure on the experience and values of males being perceived as the ONLY valid frame of reference for society ... it is therefore in patriarchal interest to prevent women from sharing, establishing and asserting their equally real, valid, different frame of reference, which is the outcome of different experience.1

When this theory of patriarchy is applied to the way in which our society is encoded and perpetuated through writing it becomes apparent that for women to write is a subversive activity. Women who write challenge patriarchy's view that male experience is the only experience; they challenge patriarchy's view of women as lacking creative genius and adequate intellect, as being too emotional, as having nothing worthwhile to say, and they challenge patriarchy's view of women's proper sphere being in the home and invisible in the public domain. When women appropriate men's tools and write it is subversive; when women create new tools and write in their own language it will be revolutionary.

The methods used by patriarchy to restrict women's access to writing are manifold. Women are silenced by deprivation of resources which has left them less educated: women suffer from a far higher rate of illiteracy than men. The traditional social role created for women by patriarchy and physiological demands restrict women's time and space in which to write. When they do write they have difficulty getting published. When they are published they are forced to hide behind male pseudonyms, or

1Spender, Dale Woman of Ideas (1982: pp.4-5) 1 restrict themselves to approved genres, are more often ignored or contemptuously reviewed by male critics and their patriarchal double standards, then quickly pass out of publication. They are alienated from the patriarchal language they are forced to employ, a theoretical point which will be pursued in greater detail further on. And because of all these factors, women who do write, work in a vacuum, being prevented from discovering the tradition of women writers before them, and lacking models to inspire them. The cover of Joanna Russ' How To Suppress Women's Writin~ bears the following dialogue:

"She didn't write it. (But if it's clear she did the deed ... ) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. {The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. (Jane Eyre. Poor dear, that's all she ever ... ) She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. (It's a thriller, a romance, a children's book. It's sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning. Branwell Bronte. Her own "masculine side.") She wrote it, but she's an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard's help ... ) She wrote it BUT ... "2

It is important to analyse the methods used within patriarchy to silence women's writing in order to recognise the fear that is its prime motive. Such effort would not be expended unless there was reason to fear what women can produce and the effect that their writing could have. This thesis examines women's writing in order to discern what patriarchy fears: that is, its difference. It discusses the problem of defining what is meant by women's writing, and examines the philosophical notion of difference as propounded by contemporary French feminist theorists including Irigaray, Kristeva, and especially Cixous. It examines the efforts made by the patriarchy to silence women's writing, and evaluates the failures and successes of the women to overcome these obstacles and "write the body" or discover an effective feminine discourse. It analyses the work of specific writers (Adrienne Rich, Tillie Olsen, Marge Piercy, Christina Stead, Mary Daly) in the light of French feminist

2Russ, Joanna, How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983: cover) 2 theories, and it attempts to predict the revolutionary potential of true women's writing.

The thesis will explore several questions about how theories of difference relate to writing; whether women writers in the English language match the expectations of the French philosophers; whether there is currently such a thing stylistically as women's writing, and if not, why not? Will there ever be? What form will it take? And what effect will it have? It seeks a blueprint and a precedent for "writing the body" with the expectation that they cannot yet be found, but that they one day may. It understands that ecriture feminine must be found or created as it is the necessary tool for women to dismantle patriarchy. It also confronts the problem of definition which is a continual hazard for a woman writer wary of falling into any masculinist traps. Should we look for blueprints and specificities in writing which is metaphoric and not intended to be read literally or as a textbook? And yet how do we extract anything from the theories of these women to convert it to action?

It will become apparent that it is not possible to confine women's writing within the restraints of a definition. There is something in women's writing which cannot be understood in terms of taste or standards and yet is presupposed to exist by the French feminists, and can be assumed to exist because of the levels and methods of patriarchal obstruction to women who write, and by the simple fact of women's difference. The "theory of difference" is responsible for a schism in the women's movement between those who regard difference as a retrogressive step to biological determinism, and those who promote the idea that difference is not only inevitable but also desirable. Surely the claim that women are not really different from men overlooks the thousands of years of patriarchal history and differing socialisation processes? And surely it is possible not to view difference as a problem or deficiency but as opportunity? To believe that women are different and that there is a female perspective in their writing and other arts is to anticipate different stories, imaginings and means of expression, and must add strength to the women's movement in its opposition to and exposure of patriarchy. It is very possible that the fear of 3 difference, even in the women's movement results from a patriarchal strategy. As Silvia Bovenschen points out:

The possibility that women might experience and perceive femininity differently from men was often seen as a way of questioning, of posing an indirect threat to masculine art.3

It has been the patriarchy on the defensive but disguised as progressive that has decided that art is androgynous in nature and that women are really the same as men after all. This effectively denies women the chance to be threateningly different, and in so doing discover their own capabilities and potentials. If women are acknowledged to be different then they must automatically be seen as inherently opposed to, and outside the norm dictated by the patriarchy.

Unfortunately, many women who identify themselves as "feminist" have learnt the lesson of sameness too well and reject the possibilities that difference holds (see, for example Lynne Se gal's Is the Future Female?). The French feminists who espouse the theory of difference are often regarded with fear and ignorance by Anglo American women uncomfortable with the notion. And yet the French women maintain that the question of difference is the most significant issue for women. In the next chapter the relationships between sex and language will be explored in greater detail. Chapters Three and Four will examine some examples of women's writing in an attempt to analyse its successes and failures in terms of the French feminist's theories, and attempt to predict the way forward for women's writing in its quest to articulate difference and thereby assist in dismantling patriarchy.

3Bovenschen, Silvia, "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?" in Ecker, Gisela, Feminist Aesthetics (1985: p.38) 4 CHAP'IERONE

The problem of definition 1s the first challenge in the search for women's writing. Women's writing is not necessarily "feminist" or "feminine". Perhaps it is not even written by women. Perhaps definition of creativity is impossible; perhaps the mere attempt to define is a masculinist endeavour which serves only to remind us of how inadequate patriarchal discourse is when describing anything to do with women. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf admits to recognizing but shirking the issue: "Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems"4 • In her review of Dorothy Richardson's fiction, however, she attempted to describe the make-up of a sentence which she believed was feminine in gender:

There is no one word, such as romance or realism, to cover, even roughly, the works of Miss Dorothy Richardson. Their chief characteristic... is one for which we still seek a name. She has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes ... It is a woman's sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman's mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex ... s

Searching through women's writing for empirical evidence of a female style has proved a tempting but futile exercise. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch defined masculine and feminine styles of writing in his attempt to prove their existence. The "masculine style" was of course described as bold, clear, forceful and vigorous; the "feminine style" was vague, tremulous, weak and so on.6 The definitions of women's writing ordained by other male critics reveal more about

4Woolf, Virginia A Room of One's Own (1981: p.6) Squoted in Kaplan, Sidney Janet, Feminine Consciousness in the Modem British Novel (1976: p.79) 6Atwood, Margaret, "Paradoxes and Dilemmas ... " in Matheson, Gwen, Women in the Canadian Mosaic (1976: p.264) 5 their perception of women's place in society than their analysis of literature:

In 1852 Lewes thought he could identify the feminine literary traits as Sentiment and Observation; in 1904, William L. Courtney found that "the female author is at once self-conscious and didactic"; in 1965, Bernard Bergonzi explained that "women novelists... like to keep their focus narrow. "7

Women's writing is not a stylistic trend. It cannot be defined within the narrow and inappropriate parameters of style outlined by Quiller-Couch, nor in the "taxonomy of feminine peculiarities" provided by other male critics. It is not carefully constructed theory or convention. Empirical goosechases attempting to show that women use a feminine style can be proved and disproved by an equal number of examples and is a meaningless, futile exercise. Even if it were possible to make a complete survey of all features of all works of art and literature by women, and then to compare it to all men's artistic production it would still not provide an answer to the question of how women's writing is to be defined. In all the evidence such an exercise would provide, we would still not encounter anything essentially feminine; rather an assortment of features which reflect women's role and position in society, and the general values attached to sexual difference. It is what Gisela Ecker describes as "historically-defined difference"S which we would uncover in such empirical research: it might raise our consciousness about the workings of society, but it would not be useful in the search for a coherent definition.

It is equally futile to attempt to prove that all women writers write about topics traditionally relegated to women. In The Female Ima1:ination, Patricia Meyer Spacks finds that

for readily discernible historical reasons women have characteristically concerned themselves with matters more or less peripheral to male concerns, or at least

7Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own (1977: p.6) SEcker, Gisela, Feminist Aesthetics (1985:p. l 6) 6 slightly skewed from them. The differences between traditional female preoccupations and roles and male ones make a difference in female writing.9

While this is doubtlessly true some of the time, it is not true all of the time, and this claim only perpetuates a stereotypical male­ defined view of women's writing. This attitude can result in both a devaluation of women's writing when it does concern "traditional" areas, and a silencing or distortion of women's writing when it does not.

This public/private dichotomy which evolved in the West during the changes wrought by Industrialization, was the historical development which spawned the emergence of the concept of "woman's role". In Man's World, Woman's Place, Elizabeth Janeway points out that the role of mother, home-maker and wife defined what a woman was in ways that related directly to her being female. No such strictures related to men, who were defined more by how they were employed in the public world, than by what sex they were. Janeway argued that sex-role differentiation derived .partly from male theories of behavioural science which invented and imposed the psychology of women. These ideas were internalised by women who submitted to the mythology because it held certain rewards: women exchanged "private power in return for public submission. That is the regular, orthodox bargain by which men rule the world and allow women to rule in their own place. "10

Ultimately the associat10n of women with the private sphere and men with the public became seen as the main characteristics of maleness and femaleness. Men were identified with what was public: the workplace, politics, institutions, intellectual and cultural life, the general exercise of power and authority. Women were connected to the private or domestic: home, children, housework and sexuality. Anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo maintained that a universal assymmetry exists in the cultural evaluation of male and female, and that it is important to distinguish between authority,

9Spacks, Patricia Meyer, The Female Imagination (1976: p.11) IOJaneway, Elizabeth, Man's World. Woman's Place (1971: p.56) 7 power and influence. Women held certain forms of power and often exerted a good deal of influence in society. But authority - the source of legitimacy in the exercise of power - lay with men. The basis of the assignment of cultural value to men lay in the ability of men to maintain distance from the domestic sphere. I I

The effect of the continued public/private split on women's writing is interesting. Firstly it dictates that women should not be concerned with the kind of writing which is extraneous to the tasks of the domestic role. Writing wields authority which is after all, the preserve of men. Secondly, if women must write, the split holds that women must only write in genres which are in keeping with their domesticity, such as, letters, diaries and home hints and which tend to reproduce rather than challenge ideology and convention. Thirdly, if women must write and must be published in the public sphere, then they can only write of domestic concerns for that is their role and all they know .1 2

Even today, as the public/private dichotomy is gradually being exposed, analysed and its injustices confronted and redressed, the expectations of women's writing often remain mired in the role dictated for women by the domestic sphere; effective authority is still the preserve of men. Elaine Showalter is quoted in Tillie Olsen's Silences:

Literature has never been so sexually polarised as it is today, and women, as subjects, images, and artists, have never been so inconsequential in the realms of high literary culture... As this new virtuoso fiction becomes the yardstick of what is serious and important in contemporary writing, women writers are being crowded once more into that snugly isolated inner space of art which they have often described as

11 Rosaldo, Michelle, and Lamphere, Woman. Culture and Society (1,4-: p.17) 12It is interesting to note as Ian Watts in The Rise of the Novel (1957) points out, that the rise of the novel took place in an epoch that was discovering the language of the private sphere which was assumed to characterize the bourgeoisie as much as women. It wasn't entirely devalued, rather, male writers were working their way into feminine areas and eventually bestowing it with an authority it lacked previously. 8 "the living centre," a space which always looks disturbingly like the kitchen. I 3

Yet women's writing refuses to become a genre, or a sub-cultural space. Women writers do not always portray the types of characters which correspond to the roles laid down for men and women. They do not just create female characters responding to the male world. They do not just create female characters who are passive, nurturant and close to nature. Nor are their male characters always active, authoritative, and involved with technology and industry. Women write about women who do all sorts of things, not just respond to men.

Simone de Beauvoir's theory of men's absolute truth and woman as "Other" highlights the old categories of male and female subject matter. According to de Beauvoir men mistake their masculine perspective for absolute truth, so that everything is observed, examined and portrayed from a male point of view. Men have delineated certain areas and topics as male concerns and the refore important. Everything else she argues is "other" and less important and can safely be relegated to women. There is a universally held presumption that, as Deborah Cameron observes,

men are the norm from which women deviate, that the male norm is superior to the female deviation, and that the difference is ultimately reducible to biology, that is, "natural" .. .14

Why is it, asks Simone de Beauvoir, that women do not dispute male sovereignty? The reason, she concludes, is that

women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of

13Showalter, quoted in Olsen, Tillie, Silences (1980: p.23) 14Cameron, Deborah, Feminism and Lin~uistic Theory (1985: p.28) 9 Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men - fathers or husbands - more firmly than they are to other women.15

Simone de Beauvoir's observation signals once again the significance of women's writing. When women write they take a major step towards making the connections between women, giving them a past, an identity, a voice, which will ultimately threaten the oppressive patriarchy, and elevate women out of the role of 'inessential'/'other'.

Just as women's writing will not fall into particular categories of style, content and characters, women's writing cannot be categorised according to genre either. To assert that women's idiom is the novel, or that women write romance fiction is, again, sterotyping women's writing and confining it within limits set by the patriarchy.

So, women's writing is not a specific style, it is not set subject matter or characterisations, nor is it a certain writing genre. Nevertheless, women's writing - whether it be simply writing by women, or writing which attempts to represent women from a female perspective, or writing which attempts to deconstruct patriarchal writing conventions, or even the revolutionary discourse referred to by the French - exists, perhaps in an indefinable form. Women's writing is that threat to patriarchy which results in obstruction and silencing which will be examined in further detail. It is the promise of difference, the inscription of which has perhaps not yet been achieved, and which therefore cannot illuminate any attempt at definition.

The problem of definition should be pursued for it is revealing even in what it cannot tell us. There are no limits to what women can do; there are only limits to the patriarchal perception and understanding of what they do. This points to a further stumbling­ block on the quest for definition: to define women's writing it is

15de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex (1981: p.19) 10 necessary to use male language - the language of patriarchy - and it does not extend far enough. Of course the women who write for the most part are forced to use patriarchal language too, but there is a lot of evidence to show where they criticise and attempt to move outside of it, such as Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology, Monique Wittig in Les Guerilleres and Susan Griffin in Woman and Nature. A great deal has been written by Anglo-American writers about women and language, including Robin Lakoff, Miller and Swift, Dale Spender and others. Perhaps the most important work outside of France has been done by Deborah Cameron who points out that the language we most use is the language of men and serves to maintain the power of men and the powerlessness of women. She believes that women must consider alternatives to this language which silences, alienates and oppresses them (a point which will be pursued further on):

Language is a weapon used by the powerful to oppress their subordinates. But why should language and knowledge about the workings of language be a resource for the powerful alone? Why shouldn't the weapons of reaction be appropriated by the other side?16

The French have traditionally ascribed great importance to language and writing and this is especially apparent in the work of the French feminists discussed here. For this reason, as well as constraints of length it is necessary to confine this discussion to writing at the expense of other forms of creativity. The thesis that women see or experience differently to men, and that articulation of this different vision is potentially revolutionary, applies to all art forms. The quest for a feminist aesthetic is articulated not only by contemporary French theorists, but also by German feminists, as in the collection of essays in Gisela Ecker's Feminist Aesthetics. Articles by Silvia Bovenschen, Elisabeth Lenk, Sigrid Weigel, Christa Wolf, Gisela Breitling and others, span a range of disciplines including film, photography, architecture, music and visual arts as well as mythology and literature. "Is there a feminine aesthetic?", asks Silvia Bovenschen:

16Cameron, op,cit,.p.49 1 1 Certainly there is, if one is talking about aesthetic awareness and modes of sensory perception. Certainly not, if one is talking about an unusual variant of artistic production or about a painstakingly constructed theory of art. Women's break with the formal, intrinsic laws of a given medium, the release of their imagination - these are unpredictable for an art with feminist intentions. There is, thank heavens, no premeditated strategy which can predict what happens when female sensuality is freed. I 7

At the moment a feminine aesthetic is only a subversive process, says Elisabeth Lenk in her discussion of visual arts, film and literature:

[it is] a dynamic which is at once productive and threatening - productive because women are beginning to take command of their fantasies; threatening (to the establishment) because the seemingly immutable woman, the pillar of patriarchal society, the foundation on which men have stood for so long is on the move. I 8

Silvia Bovenschen's observations about art can equally be applied to literature, as she ponders the existence of a definition of feminine creativity:

What is the ground that we are working? From where does a 'feminine' art get its identity? Or does it not need to do that? Is art, then, still art in the traditional sense, no matter how far it has gone to the dogs? Is 'feminine' a criterion of substance, an ontological entity?I 9

Ultimately she decides that no formal criteria for 'feminist art' can be set down, which is good for two reasons:

It enables us to categorically reject the notion of artistic norms, and it prevents renewal of the calcified

17ihid.,p.49 I8Lenk, Elizabeth, "The Self-Reflecting Woman" in Ecker, op.cit.,p.51 I 9aovenschen, QJ2..lli. ,p.30 12 aesthetics debate, this time under the guise of the feminist 'approach' .20

Male fear of women's creativity as a subversive and revolutionary force is expressed by a complex and sophisticated network of means by which to stifle or silence women's voices in all art forms, but especially their writing. The power of the female voice is regarded as so threatening that patriarchy has responded with enforced silencing and suppression. The lengths to which patriarchal interests have gone to exclude the female voice are very revealing of the depth of the fear which motivates them.

Over the last twenty years a great deal of work has been done by Anglo-American feminists to expose the patriarchal tools of silencing and to "dis-cover" some of the female voices which have been lost. It has become one of the most important areas of feminist research: not just to recover and publish 'lost' women's writing, but also to point to the wrong done to women, and to assist in the construction of literary theory. Tillie Olsen's Silences, Adrienne Rich's Of Lies, Secrets, and Silences, Dale Spender's Women of Ideas, Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writin2. Michelle Cliffs classic article "The Resonance of Interruption" are some of the most important works in this area. Tillie Olsen's 1980 book Silences combines excerpts, anecdotes, quotations and analysis to form witness to the circumstances which obstruct or silence the creation of literature.

Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.

These are not natural silences, that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural; the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.21

20ibid,,p48 21 0lsen, op,cit.. Preface 1 3 Silences includes a speech given in 1971 entitled "One Out Of Twelve: writers who are women in our century". This was the figure arrived at after analysing the authorship of works used in tertiary literature courses in the United States. One strategy used to control women's writing has been to distinguish between public and private writing. It has been considered proper for women to write in the private sphere, as in letters and diaries, but public writing was taboo. Women developed the private sphere into a space of their own and created extensive networks of shared information in this manner. Unlike male diaries and letters, especially those of influential men, whose writing is published and treated with serious consideration, women's private/personal writing has been trivialised and disregarded as a serious historical or literary resource22: "And here is the single most virulent false categorizing ever invented: the moving of art object X from the category of "serious art" to the category of "not serious"" .23

So, despite the fact that women have been producing knowledge about our traditions and culture for centuries, it is men who control what is believable, worthwhile knowledge and what has the right to enter the canon. In "Canon Fathers and Myth Universe", Lillian S. Robinson examines the "dominant myth of a human universal that turns out to be male"24 -that is, the literary canon (or 'can(n)on fodder' as she names it) - exposes its neglect of women. Literary canon is based on the myth of the universal human, but resides, for women, in the cultural experience of being forcibly silenced and left with limited access to language. Alice Jardine and Anne Menke pursue women's exclusion from the canon and pose the difficult

22That is, until recent women's history writers and researchers who have devoted great energy to recovering the lost voices of women's cultural history, and have published or re-published important pieces of oral history, (for example, Jan Carter's Nothing to Spare, pulished by Penguin in 1980) or social history (Maud Pember Reeves' Round About a Pound a Week, first published in 1913 and republished by Virago in 1979). Deirdre Beddoes' Discovering Women's History: A Practical Manual (Pandora Press, 1983) is a good example of the new interest in recovering the personal/private histories of women. 23Russ, op,cit,. p54 24 Robinson, Lilian S., "Canon Fathers and Myth Universe" in New Literary Histor.y (19, 1, 1987: p.23) 14 question "Do we want to do away with canon or bring women into it?"25

Distortion is another strategy which has resulted in naming women who write as 'deviant' and 'insane'. Sappho, the great lyric poet and teacher so celebrated and eminent in her own time later became the object of ridicule: " ... she was satirized and maligned by the Greeks, and her love of women was distorted by Roman writers into something unfeminine and perverse ... "26 Despite the evidence of her attraction to women and her erotic poetry dedicated to women, we are told that Sappho committed suicide because of her unrequited love for a male, and, in addition, that she was "ugly". Sappho's writing has been distorted, as has her life-story. Little of her work remains as it was destroyed by Church fathers who regarded it as erotic and profane. Hence, distortion results in the removal of the woman and her writing from our tradition.

Women's writing has been appropriated by the patriarchal order when it suited their purposes. What Joanna Russ calls the "denial of agency" 27 has meant that women's writing has literally been stolen from them and their authorship denied, and often attributed to a male. D.H. Lawrence, for example, solicited notes and reminiscences from Jessie Chambers, and from his wife Frieda. He also took over other women's manuscripts and rewrote them, as in the cases of Helen Corke and Mollie Skinner. 28 And yet it is the women writers who are accused of theft: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, says Virginia Woolf, was accused of hiring a male scholar to write her works because she used learned terms and 'wrote of many matters outside her ken' .29 Perhaps even more insidious is the male assertion that women's writing has somehow written itself. For example, Mary Shelley is described as a passive medium, almost somnambulistic:

25 Jardine, Alice, and Menke, Anne, "Exploding the Issue ... "in Yale French Studies <75, 1988, p.231) 26Chicago, Judy, The Dinner Party (1979: p.66) 27Russ, op,cit,.Chapter 3 28Spender, Dale, Man Made Language (1985: p.222) 29Russ, op,cit,. p.20 15 Her extreme youth, as well as her sex, have contributed to the generally held opinion that she was not so much an author in her own right as a transparent medium through which passed the ideas of those around her. "All Mrs. Shelley did," writes Mario Praz, "was to provide a passive reflection of some of the wild fantasies which were living in the au about her."30

Further instances include Sydney Dobell's comment about the "involuntary art" of Wuthering Heights, or Henry James likening Jane Austen to a spinster knitting absentmindedly.3 1 Worst of all, perhaps, is the theory that 'the man inside her' wrote it, hence Mary McCarthy, for example, has been complimented on her "masculine mind. "3 2

The alienation of women writers from the public sphere is another strategy of control. As we know from past examples of Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte), George Eliot (Marian Evans), Cotton Mather Mills (Elizabeth Gaskell), Miles Franklin (Sarah Miles Franklin) and Georges Sand, women understood that they received less discriminatory treatment if it was thought they were males. After the publication of Jane Eyre, a literary debate arose as to whether Currer Bell was a male or a female and there was some agreement that if the novel had been written by a man it was a marvellous achievement, but if written by a women it was scandalous. "If Currer Bell were a woman, she violated .... [the] sense of what was proper in a good daughter, wife, or woman of England. "3 3

For women the perils of publishing in an industry (like all others) controlled by "rich, white, heterosexual men", have been documented by Lynne Spender.34 Those women who do manage to get into print often find they go out again very quickly. Many women who have enjoyed literary prestige during their own time

30Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (1980: p.94) 31Register, Cheri, "American Feminist Literary Criticism ... " in Donovan, Josephine (ed.), Feminist Literary Criticism (1975: p.9) 32Russ, op,cit,. p.22 33Spender (1985), op.cit,. p.198 34Spender, Lynne, "The Politics of Publishing" in Women's Studies International Forum (6, 5, 1983: p.469) 1 6 soon vanished without a trace from the records of posterity. As evidence of this, Lynne Spender cites the example of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Lei2h, which went into a second edition within two weeks of its initial publication in 1887, and ran through thirteen editions by 1873. It was 'out-of-print' early in the twentieth century and was not republished until 1978 when the Women's Press brought out a full-length edition.35 Joanna Russ describes her frustrated attempts to obtain Charlotte Bronte's Villette for use as a college text during the seventies, but was unable to find any in-print edition.36

What Cheri Register describes as "phallic criticism"37 also serves to silence women by belittling women's writing on the grounds of its failure to conform to notions about femininity:

Anthony Burgess says that he cannot bear to read Jane Austen because she is too feminine. Yet he is equally critical of George Eliot for achieving a successful "male impersonation" and Ivy Compton­ Burnett for writing "sexless literature". Some critics give backhanded praise to female authors who "transcend" their femininity, their words echoing Samuel Johnson's comparison of intellectual women to dancing dogs. Critics like these are pleasantly surprised to encounter a women "who writes like a man". But others insist on it. Lionel Trilling, for example, dislikes Djuna Barnes's prose because it is not masculine enough.3 8

Interruption is perhaps the most under-estimated of the strategies designed to control women who write. Time, says Dale Spender, "is an important consideration in any discussion of men's and women's writing, for writing takes time, and women in our society do not usually have as much of it as men. "39 In Silences, Tillie Olsen examines the number of women of achievement in the literary field who are/were single and/or childless. In the last century, nearly all

35 ililil... p.469 36Russ, op.cit., p.63 37Reg1ster, · QJ2..,ill., · p. 9 38ib.i.d..• p.9 39Spender, D. (1985) op,cit.. pp218-219 17 of them never married or married late, as in our century. A number of women have documented the fact that it took family deaths to free them into their own development: George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Kate Chopin, Isak Dinesen. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary:

Father's birthday. He would have been 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; - inconceivable.40

Interruptions affect women's lives in ways that rarely affect men, and force them to set aside ideas until they can steal time for themselves: "the idea which was emerging before she left to cook a meal or change a baby or visit her mother in a nursing home, is not as it was; something essential to the development of that idea is gone. "41

Individual interruptions link together to form a tradition of interruptions to women's writing - trivialization, distortion, appropriation, alienation, neglect, have created a tradition of silences resulting in an incomplete history and pattern of culture. Through silencing and interruption we are deprived of the knowledge of our common past and present.42 Hence, as Adrienne Rich notes in On Lies, Secrets and Silences:

40o1sen, Qll&il.,p.17 41 Cliff, Michelle, "The Resonance of Interruption" in Chrysalis (8, summer, 1979: p.32) 42It seems that even now women should not feel complacent about uninterrupted access to women's writing. Despite the recent explosion of women's publishing houses and feminist presses, which should be some guarantee against future disappearance of women's writing, Dale Spender warns that the male-dominated information technology revolution threatens to sweep away the gains. Arguing that "print is not the medium it used to be ... it's no longer the primary area of information encoding", she points out that women do not own newspapers, television, radio stations, software companies, data bases, or electronic corporations. If electronic transmission of information is going to replace print, and universities shift information services from libraries to computers, women's writing and research could once again disappear: "almost all the women's scholarship of the past twenty or more years is encoded in books; and the question is, how safe is women's knowledge in these media moving times?" Dale Spender, "Feminism does not compute" in Sydney Morning Herald, 24/11/1990 1 8 One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.43

It is easy to see the fear motivating patriarchy which punishes the women who are deviant enough to write. In their editorial for the issue of Women's Studies International Forum entitled "Gatekeeping: The denial, dismissal and distortion of women", Dale and Lynne Spender liken patriarchal control of language to tactics used by a totalitarian regime which "of necessity resorts to censorship to ensure the perpetuation of their own view of the world and the justification for their own power" .44 When women can write their difference in a discourse which is peculiarly and appropriately theirs then patriarchy will be forced to acknowledge another valid frame of reference and the assumptions on which it is based will founder and collapse. 'Truth' and 'canon' will be very different when women take charge of their own representation and evaluation. Writing is a source of identity, a means of expression, a mode of change. Patriarchy regards women's writing as dangerous because it reveals to women the gaps in male-ordained knowledge and constitutes a challenge to men as the arbiters of reality; it offers an insight into the wrongs done to them by male-dominated society; and it reveals new ways of seeing and expressing: it gives women voice:

One of the salient characteristics of oppress10n 1s silence; if and when women could speak their own words without interference the silence would cease - it would be the beginning of the end of male power.45

43Rich, Adrienne, On Lies, Secrets and Silences (1980: p.11) 44 Spender, Dale, and Spender, Lynne, "Gatekeeping ... " in Women's Studies International Forum (6,5,1983: Editorial) 4 5 i.h.i.d...., p .4 6 7 1 9 CHAPTER TWO

The term "feminism" encompasses many different modes of thinking. Similarly "feminist" is a label which contains a diversity of meaning and implication. In Sexual/Textual Politics Toril Moi chooses a historic, political definition derived from Julia Kristeva as follows:

1 Women demand equal access to the symbolic order. Liberal feminism. Equality. 2 Women reject the male symbolic order in the name of difference. Radical feminism. Femininity extolled. 3 Women reject the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical. 4 6

She adds that the third position does not imply a rejection of the second, rather that the third removes the risk of becoming a form of inverted sexism by taking over, and attaching feminist values, to metaphysical categories. A feminist is one who also recognizes the existence of masculinists and masculinism in the patriarchy which decrees that women occupy an inferior position in society. Evidently, a feminist may belong to one of many different categories (lesbian, Marxist, radical, Western and so on) or may reject the notion of categorization all together but shares an opposition to patriarchy and masculinist notions of superiority.

"Feminism" is an identifiable historical movement containing many different elements. It is not a simple, finite movement: it is a complex compound of philosophy and activism, hence sub-category labels as 'Socialist' Feminism and 'Utopian' Feminism. Feminism has been described as a wavelike movement - a not altogether appropriate metaphor as it implies a pattern of peaks and troughs, rather than the ongoing development of theories and practices it seeks to represent. The notion of the three waves of the feminist movement is essentially an American notion, propounded by and based upon the theoretical writings of predominantly American women.

46Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics (1985: p.12) 20 The first wave, according to this metaphor, spans a period of about 150 years: from the writings of Abigail Adams, Frances Wright and, in England, Mary Wollstonecraft, through the civil rights and political struggles of Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, the Grimke sisters, Margaret Sanger, Jane Addams, Emma Goldman and the Suffragettes and including the novels of Harriet Martineau, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and of course England's Virginia Woolf. Attaining the vote and the end of World War Two marks the end of the first wave in this theory of women's history, which effectively disregards what women were doing in non-English speaking countries, and any achievements made which fall outside its fairly arbitrarily defined time spans.

The second wave began with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and gained momentum with the publication of other classics: Kate Millett's Sexual Politics ( 1969), Germine Greer's Female Eunuch (1970) and articles by Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan. Gloria Steinem described the new emphasis:

The last wave won for many women of the world a legal identity as human beings, not the possessions of others. Now we seek to complete that step for all women, and to gain legal equality too.4 7

Or as Germaine Greer put it: " Then genteel middle-class ladies [of the nineteenth century] clamoured for reform, now ungenteel middle class women are calling for revolution. "4 8

Their literature called attention to women's inferior position m patriarchal society and demanded change - liberation for women. Politically the call was for equality; socially the new obsession was with sexuality. Women's fiction of the period mirrored these themes: Marilyn French's The Women's Room (1977), Erica Jong's Fear of Flyin& (1974), Fay Weldon's Praxis (1979), Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook (1962). Ms magazine went into publication along

4 7 Steinem, Gloria, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1984: p.160) 48Greer, Germaine, The Female Eunuch (1970: p.16) 21 with many other feminist magazines. The campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment dominated the women's movement which was dividing and defining itself: reformist, liberal, political, cultural, socialist, Marxist, conservative and radical feminists; belonging to the National Organization of Women (N.O.W.), National Women's Political Caucus (N.W.P.), Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), Women's Equity Action League (W.E.A.L.), Older Women's Liberation (O.W.L.). The United Nations proclaimed 1975 International Women's Year. Women's studies programmes were created. Feminist publication houses were established. Women rediscovered their foresisters of the first wave and began to trace the continuous history of feminist thought.

The third wave has marked a return to theory and a new level of woman-centredness. The emphasis has moved from an image of women as victims of patriarchy to women as creative survivors of patriarchy who have maintained a separate cultural identity despite the efforts of patriarchy to stifle and silence them. The voices of this wave include Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Susan Griffin and Dale Spender, all of whom have contributed to a deepening of the analysis of the social construction of gender. This analysis represents a progression from the second wave in that instead of attempting to reduce the gap between masculine and feminine, it seeks to highlight those aspects of female experience that are potential sources of strength and power for women, and create a new blueprint for social change.

But the wave metaphor has limited usefulness. It does succeed in highlighting the achievement of the f oremothers of feminism and it does refute the notion that feminism sprang out of nowhere in the sixties. It provides an alternative continuum to the patriarchal historical framework, upon which feminists may plot their experiences. But it is ultimately flawed. It implies a lack of achievement in feminist thought or activity during the periods marked out as troughs. It is primarily an American notion befitting American women's experiences, and including a few voices from other English-speaking countries, but virtually none from non­ Western backgrounds. And its chronological structure, albeit loose, still precludes some of those visionary women from the nineteenth 22 century from the third wave category to which their forward­ thinking theories should more appropriately belong.

Because of its focus on America, the wave model of feminism did not even attempt to cope with the special case, the specific trajectory of French feminism. That was until aspects of the so­ called third wave with its emphasis on theory and women­ centredness found a reference point in the writing being produced by radical French women over the last ten to fifteen years.

Before this time, feminism in France had some parallels to what was happening in America. For example, there was a French feminist movement in the 1820s-1850s led by such figures as Flora Tristan, The Saint Simonians, Claire Demar. In the 1960s-70s there was a corresponding working together of women's groups on such central issues as contraception and abortion; a split between reformists and radicals; a development of tensions between lesbians and heterosexuals; a shattering of links between feminist movements and other political and social movements.

In these years influential women's groups were formed (such as Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes, Psychanalyse et Politique) and women's studies programmes were begun. But the French experience traditionally has been very different from the American. French femininsts have been far more involved in creating theory; their leading feminist figures have tended to come from intellectual backgrounds, and the emphasis of their discourse is philosophical, literary, political, psychoanalytical. The significance of this difference cannot be underestimated and deserves further investigation.

In New French Feminisms, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron give a brief outline of feminism's history in France in order to establish why the divergence between American and French feminism began. They reach back into the Middle Ages to Joan of Arc and Christine de Pisan maintaining that throughout history there has only been one area in which women have been able to transcend the oppression of patriarchy and make significant achievements, and that is in language, both written and spoken:

23 A complex line of French feminist descent begins with the salons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the precieuses and the femme savantes, to the women writers known as Sappho 1900, and all­ women lycees. and the contemporary "politique et psychanalyse" ... it is still the combination of activism in language and politics that is most characteristic of French feminisms ... Nowhere else have groups of women come together with the express purpose of criticizing and reshaping the official male language and, through it, male manners and male power.4 9

The period between the end of World War Two and the late 1960's was a time for reform in the struggle for women's rights in France. Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex (1949) and women's role began to be interpreted sociologically, drawing on historical information and political analyses. The protests of 1968 encouraged the radicalisation of women. "Psychanalyse et politique", the avant garde intellectual group established its own publishing house "des femmes". In 1970 the French press invented the title Mou vemen t de Liberation des Femmes (MLF) to refer to the various other radical women's groups which had sprung up, including the "Feministes revolutionnaires", for whom Monique Wittig was the founding spokeswoman, and the "Ligue du droit des femmes", for which Simone de Beauvoir was the president.

The associations and publications of French feminists have persistently concentrated on two main themes : sexuality and language, and it is here that the differences between French and American feminisms become most pronounced. It is too simplistic to assert that American women are activists while French women are theorists, but it is at least true that the differences between the French and the Anglo-Americans lie in the emphasis given to theory. As Ann Rosalind Jones observes

.. .in the realm of theory, the French share a deep critique of the modes through which the West has claimed to discern evidence - or reality - and a

49Marks, Elaine and de Courtivron, Isabelle (eds.) New French Feminisms (1981: p.6) 24 susp1c1on concerning efforts to change the position of women that fail to address the forces in the body, m the unconscious, in the basic structures of culture that are invisible to the empirical eye. Briefly, French feminists in general believe that Western thought has been based on a systematic repression of women's experience.SO

The theory of difference propounded by French feminist theorists has only recently found a favourable reception among the Anglo­ Americans with the third wave women-centredness of American feminism. Previously the notion of difference, whether biological or cultural, "genuine" or "imposed", had been problematic for the American women's movement who tended to regard "difference" as a retrogressive step to biological determinism. For them "different" could never be "equal" or even "superior" for their shortsighted ambition was an impossible desire to prove that women were the same as men in order to justify having equal rights. Apart from ignoring the obvious physical differences, this view also overlooks the thousands of years of patriarchal history and the differing socialization processes of men and women. The theory of difference contained in the writings of French feminists such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and others suggests that it is possible not to view difference as a problem or deficiency, but rather as opportunity. To assume that women are different is to anticipate different stories, imaginations and means of expression which strengthen the women's movement in its opposition to and exposure of patriarchy:

Sexual difference is one of the important questions of our age, if not in fact the burning issue. According to Heidegger, each age is preoccupied with one thing, and one alone. Sexual difference is probably that issue m our own age which could be our salvation on an intellectual level.5 1

50Jones, Ann Rosalind, "Writing the Body ... " in Showalter, Elaine (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism (1985: p.361) 51 Irigaray, Luce, "Sexual Difference" in Moi, Toril (ed.), French Feminist Thought (1987: p.118) 25 Thus wrote Luce lrigaray in her article "Sexual Difference" (reprinted in Toril Moi's French Feminist Thought: A Reader). Luce Irigaray is a psychoanalyst, though much of her work is concerned with linguistics. Her insistence on a fundamental biological and sexual difference between male and female is the cornerstone of her theory. For her doctorate d'etat she submitted her book Speculum de l'autre femme in 1974 which resulted in her dismissal from the University of Vincennes. In Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (1977) a collection of essays, she theorises about female sexuality and the existence of a female language. Although her theories arise from the study of the ideas of Freud and Lacan, they also react against them. She rejects the notion of woman which defines her on the basis of the lack of a penis, or phallus, and instead sees female sexuality as infinite and mysterious:

Female sexuality has always been conceptualised on the basis of masculine parameters ... woman's autoeroticism is very different from man's. In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a women's body, language .... As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for meditation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman "touches herself" all the time, and moreover no one can for bid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two - but not divisible into one(s) - that caress each other ... one would have to dig down very deep indeed to discover beneath the traces of this civilisation, of this history, the vestiges of a more archaic civilisation that might give some clue to women's sexuality .s 2

Irigaray both adapts and refutes Lacan's theory that there is no space for a female element in language, that the female represents what is absent and not expressed in language. She believes that women have a specific speech which is reflected in their bodies and sexuality, that women have lips down below as well as up above.

Man doesn't have a double set of lips, women does Throughout history they have wanted to rape the lips

52Jrigaray, Luce, This Sex Which is Not One (1985: p.25) 26 below, brutally open them and not allow women to let their lips touch each other . . . I see the lips as the entrance to female sexuality .5 3

In Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (This Sex Which Is Not One) she returns to Freud's image of the ancient civilisation which would give some indication as to what women's sexuality is all about by employing a special language:

that extremely ancient civilization would undoubtedly have a different alphabet, a different language ... women's desire would not be expected to speak the same language as men's; women's desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks.5 4

Sexuality and language are inextricably linked:

"She" is indefinitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she is said to be whimiscal, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious .. . not to mention her language, in which "she" sets off in all directions leaving "him" unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand.5 5

For women to articulate themselves and their sexuality they must recover the ancient language or create a new one, or they will remain silent and repressed:

If we don't invent a language, if we don't find our body's language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story. We shall tire of the same ones, and leave our desires unexpressed, unrealized.5 6

53Jrigaray, Luce, quoted in Amsberg, Kiki and Steenhuis, Aafke, "An Interview with Luce Irigaray" in Hecate (9, 1/2, 1983: p.195) 54Irigaray, (1985) op,cit,, p.25 55ibid., p.25 56ihid..., p.214 27 She maintains that at the moment women exist as a void. Men define women's sexual organs as a nothingness, a hole: "the horror of nothing to see ",57 and that women's language employs only lacks and deficiencies to designate themselves: "They've left us their negatives" .58

In "Quand nos levres se parlent", ("When Our Lips Speak Together"), Chapter Two of This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray symbolically describes the failure of the language women use and incites a search for a new language which accurately expresses female sexuality instead of perpetuating the male-created image of a nothingness which is awaiting the fulfilment and sustenance of a male. This other language will pose a challenge to phallomorphism; it is "radically non-uniting, does not obey the laws of consistency and object-ivity and will admit of no meta-discourse".59

If we keep on speaking sameness, if we speak to each other as men have been doing for centuries, as we have been taught to speak, we'll miss each other, fail ourselves. Again .... Words will pass through our bodies, above our heads. They'll vanish, and we'll be lost. Far off, up high. Absent from ourselves: we'll be spoken machines, speaking machines. Enveloped in proper skins, but not our own. Withdrawn into proper names, violated by them. Not yours, not mine. We don't have any. We change names as men exchange us, as they use us, use us up. It would be frivolous of us, exchanged by them, to be so changeable. 6 O

Although Julia Kristeva shares an interest in language she differs from Irigaray in her perception of the power and significance of women's difference. Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria and moved to Paris in 1966, the same year that Jacques Lacan published Ecri ts and Michel Foucault published Les Mots et les Choses. In Paris she quickly came to prominence as the only woman associated with the avant garde literary journal Tel Ouel which was the forum for most

57ibid., p.26 58 ib.id...., p.201 59 Irigaray, Luce, quoted in Adlam, Diane and Venn, Couze, "Introduction to Irigaray" in Ideology and Consciousness (1, May, 1977: p.60) 601rigaray, (1985) op,cit., p.205 28 of the post-structuralist theorists of France. She is the most frequently translated and widely read of the French feminists. Her work in linguistic research has produced several important books: Semiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse (her doctoral thesis, 1969), La Revolution du langage poetig_ue (1974) which earned her a chair in linguistics at the University of Paris Vll, Desire in Language (1980), and Polylogue (1977). Her abiding interest in Marxism led to a trip to China in 197 4 with the editorial board of Tel Ouel. She subsequently published Des Chinoises (1974), translated in 1977 as About Chinese Women. Throughout her career she has maintained an interested but critical attitude toward feminism.

Kristeva's attitude to women and language is ambivalent. She regards women as outsiders to male discourse in their speech and writing for two reasons:

the predominance in them of drives related to anality and childbirth, and their marginal position vis-a-vis masculine culture. Their semiotic style is likely to involve repetitive, spasmodic separations from the dominating discourse, which, more often, they are forced to imitate.61

Unlike Irigaray and Cixous, however, she does not consider the formulation of a new language as an appropriate course to take. She sees a liberating potential in women's marginality which she thinks unlikely to fall into the masculine behaviour of creating fixed, authoritative speaker or language.

Kristeva believes that women should persist m challenging existing discourse:

if women have a role to play ... it is only in assuming a negative function: reject everything finite, definite, structured, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society. Such an attitude places women on the side

61Jones, op,cit., p.363 29 of the explosion of social codes: with revolutionary movements.62

For Julia Kristeva the only way women can disrupt the symbolic order is from within it: they must know the official language. To some extent she rejects the concept of difference as expounded by Irigaray and other theorists:

The belief that 'one is a woman' is almost as absurd and obscurantist as the belief that 'one is a man' ... On a deeper level, however, a woman cannot 'be'; it is something which does not even belong in the order of being. It follows that a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say 'that's not it' and 'that's still not it'. In 'woman', I see something that cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies.63

The only difference or specificity she will accept is biological, although, as Ann Rosalind Jones points out, it is not a radical theory:

She argues that motherhood, although legitimated and idealized in the Christian Symbolic order, has unsuspected subversive potential... But her stress on the necessity of motherhood as a woman's duty still participates in a centuries-old fixation on maternity as bodily experience linked to emotional self-sacrifice. Kristeva still believes that men create the world of power and representation; women create babies.6 4

In keeping with this position, for Kristeva there can be no essential female difference in language, although she concedes the existence of

62Kristeva, Julia, "Oscillation between power and denial" in Marks, op.cit., pp166-167 63 Jones, Ann Rosalind, "Julia Kristeva on Femininity ... " in Feminist Review (18, Winter, 1984: p.62) 64i.b.id.., pp62-63 30 "feminine spaces": the moments when women deny culture and its texts, reject theory as masculine, exult the female body ... 65

Helene Cixous's work contains both similarities and disagreements with the work of lrigaray and Kristeva. She was born in Algeria and teaches at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) where she founded a Women's Studies Course in 1975. She was spokeswoman for Psychanalyse et Politigue and wrote many texts which were published by their publishing house, des femmes. She has also written several plays and is now the head of the Center of Research in Feminine Studies in Paris. She is the foremost proponent of ecriture feminine and is committed to a theory of sexual difference and the need for women to find a language which will articulate this difference. L'ecriture feminine combines concepts from theorists like Derrida and Lacan whose work greatly influenced Cixous. L'ecriture feminine "speaks the body"; symbolising and representing sexuality in a way removed from phallocratic thought, it "celebrates the radical otherness of women's erotic embodiment" .66 Cixous believes that by "writing the body"67 or, finding a language which articulates women's sexuality and jouissance68(the "Dark Continent"69), women will discover the repressed voices of history, of every culture and society. She declares that the only way out of a system which is based on assumptions that oppress and repress female consciousness, alienating women from the "dark continent" of her bodily self and channelling female desire into the flights of the sorceress and the fugues of the hysteric, is by escape. Women must challenge "phallo-logocentric" authority by exploring the continent of female pleasure in the face of admonition and anxiety from patriarchal tradition.

65Jardine, Alice, Gynesis (1985: p.263) 66 Dallery, Arleen, "Sexual Embodiment" in Women's Studies International Forum (8,3, 1985: p.202) 67 Cixous, Helene, "The Laugh of the Medusa" in Abel, E., and Abel, E.K., (eds), The Signs Reader (1983: pp279-297) 68 "Jouissance" is a word for pleasure which has been translated as both 'bliss' and 'ecstasy', neither of which include its sexual reading of 'orgasm'. 69iJiliL., pp279-297 3 1 Cixous's best known articles are "Le Rire de la Meduse", ("The Laugh of the Medusa") which appeared in L'Arc (1975), and "Sorties" published in La jeune nee, (1975). In La jeune nee (The Newly Born Woman) Cixous hints at the revolutionary power of l'ecriture feminine and its potential in epic terms:

Woman must write her body, must make up the unimpeded tongue that bursts partitions, classes and rhetorics, orders or codes, must inundate, run through, go beyond the discourse with its last reserves ...

When "The Repressed" of their culture and their society come back, it is an explosive return, which is absolutely shattering, staggering, overturning with a force never let loose before on the scale of the most tremendous repressions: for at the end of the Age of the Phallus, women will have been either wiped out or heated to the highest, most violent, white-hot fire ... Write yourself: your body must make itself heard. Then the huge resources of the unconscious will burst out. Finally the inexhaustible feminine Imaginary is going to be deployed. 7 o

"The Laugh of the Medusa" is the text which, according to Marks and de Courtivron, seems destined "for a measure of immortality". It is an "innovative combination of fiction and manifesto [which does not] conform to traditional genre semiotics [and contains] a new imagery of women". 7 l In it, Helene Cixous exhorts women to "write the body" which has hitherto been silenced, for this will be a revolutionary act:

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you; your body is yours, take it ... writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures. 7 2

Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva are three of the most prominent and

70cixous, Helene, The Newly Born Woman (1986: pp95-97) 71 Marks and de Courtivron, op. cit., p.37 72cixous (1983), op,cit.. p.283 32 commonly translated of the French feminists who are theorising about language. Their work provides just some of the evidence of the preoccupation of French feminists with the relationship between the theories of difference and women's writing. Other women doing important work in the area who will be referred to here, (although they cannot be examined in detail due to restraints of length and the lack of translated material) include philosophers Annie Leclerc and Catherine Clement, novelists Chantal Chawaf and Christiane Rochefort, author Madeline Gagnon, author and film-maker Margeurite Duras, editor of Sorcieres Xaviere Gauthier, Professor of French at Pennsylvania State University, Christiane Makward, and internationally renowned author Monique Wittig, who wrote Les Guerilleres and other innovative works. All of these women have published extensively on various aspects of the topic of writing and difference. Their work and dialogues with one another indicate the pre-eminence of their regard for this discussion.

However, this discussion also highlights a lack in their work - either an oversight or a telling silence - for their theories provide no blueprint, no map for future directions. Their discussion of sexuality and language stops short of examining literature for examples to illustrate their ambition. This is less true of Cixous, but she also neglects literary texts written by women. The inherent difficulty for all the theorists is best described by Cixous: "it is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain."73 The French feminist theorists have drawn on the work of Derrida which insists on positive deconstruction, but seem to have overlooked the accompanying restriction that free play cannot work. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak demonstrates the fault in Cixous's work in particular:

Much of Derrida's critique of humanism­ phallocentrism is concerned with a reminder of the limits of deconstructive power as well as with the impossibility of remaining in-between. Unless one is

73 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "French Feminism in an International Frame" in Yale French Studies (62, 1981: p.172) 33 aware that one cannot avoid taking a stand, unwitting stands get taken ... 7 4 and she warns against the tendency to offer "grandiose solutions with little political specificity, couched in the strategic form of rhetorical questions. "7 5

Obviously it would be naive and mistaken to search for simple answers to questions about women's writing in the work of the French feminists. It would be to fall in with masculinist behaviours to seek phallocentric logic, clear definitions, and prescriptive directions for future writing from them. It is not the intention of this essay to undertake an analysis or detailed criticism of their theories; rather to attempt to apply them to contemporary women writers in the English language. French feminist literary discourse has tended to be a study of the functions of gender and a call for attention to be given to the inadequacies of contemporary discourse. It has speculated about the future and power of l'ecriture feminine. It has even done this in such uncommon styles and modes of language use as to alert the reader to possible means of writing the difference. It is not meant to be read literally, rather to provide metaphors or signposts, but it has rarely or inadequately made an analysis of real women writers and their work; analysis which could only add weight to their theories and claims. Irigaray's Speculum of The Other Woman contains essays on Plato and Descartes. Kristeva analyses Mallarme and Joyce and Artaud in her work. Cixous believes that Joyce and Genet are anti-phallocentric writers. Juliet Mitchell notes that "Kristeva and her colleagues, while producing very interesting ideas, choose exclusively male texts" ,76 and in Gynesis, Alice Jardine comments that:

. . . it is not women writers who are the focus of [Cixous's] work. Her focus is on the male poets (Genet, Holderlin, Kafka, Kleist, Shakespeare) and on the male theoreticians (Derrida, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Nietzsche) . .. Irigaray and Kristeva are uniquely

74i.b.id...., p.174 75ibid., pp176-177 76Mitchell, Juliet, "Women: The Longest Revolution" in Eagleton, Mary (ed.), feminist Literary Theory (1986: p.102) 34 concerned with analysing the male tradition: from Freud to the philosophers to the avant garde. 7 7

With the exception of Cixous recent celebration of the peculiar femaleness of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector78, this does seem to be a legitimate criticism. At this point, French feminist theory about women's writing is mostly speculation and metaphoric incitement. Examination of women's writing in the light of French feminist literary theories may only prove, as Cixous suspects, that there has not yet been much literature that honestly presents the female perspective. But such an examination may serve to illuminate the failures of contemporary women writers who would be considered to write from a women-centred perspective and yet perhaps fall short of the revolutionary discourse described by the French feminists.

77 Jardine, op.cit., p.62 78 Cixous, Helene, "L'Approche de Clarice Lispector" in Poetique (40, November, 1979) 35 CHAPIBR THREE

Women have always written despite the disapproving and obstructive patriarchy. But they have written with widely varymg degrees of woman-identification or woman-centredness. Elaine Showalter attempted to categorise the woman-centredness of women's writing on a chronological basis : first she identifies a period of " imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition and internalisation of its standards of art and its view on social roles", which she labels "Feminine" and which lasted from the 1840's to the death of George Eliot in 1880; second is the phase of "protest against [the dominant] standards and values, and advocacy of minority rights and values, including a demand for autonomy" which she calls "Feminist", and which ran from 1880 to 1920; last is the period of "self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity ", which she names "Female" and which has lasted from 1920 to the present, "but entering a new stage of self-awareness about 1960" _79 This effort of Elaine Showalter's serves only to highlight the futility of categorisation in application to women's writing. There are as many exceptions to these rules as there are examples which conform. What happens to a Kate Chopin whose attitude falls into the "Female" category, but whose age puts her in both "Feminine" and "Feminist" eras? Or a Mills and Boon novelist who writes in the "Female" time span but with "Feminine" sensibilities?

No label or category is always applicable, and it can be used as a tool of oppression. Examination of three twentieth century writers (all of whom would fall into Showalter's "Female" category chronologically), reveals both the variety of meaning which can be ascribed to woman-identification and the failure of the writing to rise to the revolutionary heights aspired to by the French feminist theories.

Christina Stead, Marge Piercy and Tillie Olson would all feature at different points on a continuum of woman-identification. They are variously anti-feminist (Stead), feminist (Piercy) and woman-

79Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own (1977: p.13) 36 centred (Olsen). Christina Stead did not identify as a feminist and rejected women's liberation. She said "I had no feeling about women when I wrote. I am a women, therefore I write a certain way about women" .so Nevertheless, her books constantly trace with careful attention and profound understanding the constriction of women's lives by social circumstances, and through characters such as Teresa Hawkins, Letty Fox, Louisa and Henrietta Pollitt, the rebellion by individual women in a search for independence.

In The Man Who Loved Children81 the central character is male, the subject of the book is a patriarchal family, the setting is the United States in the Depression, yet the book certainly contains women­ centred themes and ideas. The Man Who Loved Children is first and foremost a powerful account of the destructiveness of the patriarchal family. Sam Pollitt as the head of the family is an evil character who engages in never-ending power struggles with his wife and children. Henny, his bitter and vicious wife who rails continually against the life she is forced to lead with him, stands for Christina Stead's own view of women's lot in a man's world. As one critic noted, she gives no hint in any of her novels that she considers women to be naturally weak or passive, but her heroines always suffer from being pushed into such roles.8 2

Henny is nothing like the maternal ideal in her approach to motherhood: she is "a charming, slatternly witch, their household witch", 83 who is cruel and violent toward her children, especially her step-daughter Louisa. Louie is a powerful characterization physically, intellectually and sexually. She is a positive character who asserts herself and her developing abilities in the face of Sam's almost stifling oppression. Despite enormous obstacles of circumstance and personality, Louie and Henny develop a sort of bond against Sam - a female network born out of common

80Stead, Christina, "An Interview" in Australian Literary Studies (6, 3, 1974: p.245) 81 Stead, Christina, The Man Who Loved Children (first published 1940, edition referred to herein published 1981) 82Bailey, Hilary, "Foreword" to Stead, Christina, The Beauties and the Furies (1982) 83stead, (1981) op,cit.. p. 376 37 experience of the tyranny of patriarchy. Female networking is also seen in Henny's visit to her family where she and the other women get together and draw on Old Ellen's wisdom and strength and share their experiences. Although Henny usually sees women as drawn together in an alliance of mutual despair, there are nevertheless several positive experiences for her, especially with Sam's unfortunate sister Bonnie, for whom Henny alone feels compassion.

Despite Christina Stead's reluctance to identify as feminist, her writing obviously contains many elements which could be claimed to be women-centred or -identified. Unlike Christina Stead, Marge Piercy identifies herself strongly with feminism : "[I am] active primarily in the women's movement but, as the spirit seizes me, in other issues also" .8 4 She is a seventies feminist, of the wave of feminism that created the women's liberation movement. First published in 1976, Woman On The Edge Of Time was one of the most important novels of the seventies in raising consciousness about women's issues. Her novel is very consciously feminist, although it is perhaps dated now in some of its attitudes. Woman On The Edge Of Time presents a picture of the United States in1976, in the life of a 37-year-old Mexican-American woman who has been very harshly treated by a society which has declared her insane, killed her lover, stolen her child and removed her freedom. Connie Ramos is the inmate of a public mental hospital, but she has the special ability to visit the potential future in the society of Mattapoisette. Mattapoisette is ecologically and socially harmonious. Its inhabitants are virtually androgynous, sex roles no longer exist, and sexual relationships are not confined to the institution of heterosexuality:

Fasure we couple. Not for money, not for a living. For love, for pleasure, for relief, out of habit, out of curiosity and lust.85

84 Piercy, Marge, Frontispiece to Woman On the Edge of Time (first published 1976, edition referred to herein published 1986) 85ihi.d...., p.64 38 Marge Piercy's story describes her idea of a non-sexist utopia, wherein language has been de-gendered, and where capitalism and patriarchal nuclear families cannot exist.

"Our notions of evil center around power and greed - taking from other people their food, their liberty, their health, their land, their customs, their pride ... "8 6

While her central character is easy to identify with and understand because she endures injustices and oppressions with which women are familiar, Marge Piercy's utopia is less easily imagined. It is perhaps not the utopia that would be chosen by '80s and '90s feminists who might choose an equality in difference theme rather than the androgyny of Mattapoisette, wherein children are not born of women and can be breastfed by both sexes.

"It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding. "87

Connie is shocked that Barbarossa - a man - has breasts and breastfeeds.

She felt angry. Yes, how dare any man share that pleasure. These women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the last refuge of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in blood and in milk.88

86ihid..., p.139 87ibid., p.105 88i..b.i..d...., p.134 39 Connie gradually comes to believe that the way of Mattapoisette is better. In Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy joins a host of other women writers such as Joanna Russ, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Margaret Atwood89 who depict utopian societies wherein women are not oppressed or discriminated against, or who depict dystopias frighteningly similar to contemporary society.

Tillie Olsen writes with a female perspective that is different again from Christina Stead who rejected feminism and Marge Piercy who identifies with it very consciously and strongly. Tillie Olsen writes from an earlier tradition, one which is currently being re-explored, of celebrating women's experience and achievements in the face of patriarchal oppression. Her writing is the link between radical tradition and contemporary feminism. Her first short story was entitled "I Stand Here Ironing", significantly, considering that she did not write it until her mid-forties, after twenty years of marriage and child-rearing. Her writing speaks from women to women and contains much to identify it as woman-centred. "Tell Me A Riddle" tells a story which Tillie Olsen later enlarged upon in Silences. In "Tell Me A Riddle", after forty-seven years of marital oppression, Eva is dying. Her children are grown and her husband is retired. All her life she has lived for people but never really with them. Now she wants space and peace, "never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others" ,90 but her husband continues to try to direct her life.

" Now, when it pleases you, you find a reading circle for me. And forty years ago when the children were morsels and there was a Circle, did you stay home with them once so I could go? Even once? You trained me well." 9 1

In the process of dying Eva releases that which has been stifled m her for years : songs, poems, philosophies, political manifestoes. In

89Russ, Joanna, The Female Man (1985); Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland (1915); Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) 90o1sen, Tillie, Tell Me A Riddle (first published 1961, edition referred to herein published 1983: p. 79) 9 1i.b.id..., p. 77 40 this story, Tillie Olsen highlights the tragedy for women of the sexual division of labour. While women are expected to raise families and maintain houses, they are not free to be creative and much is silenced. Tillie Olsen was herself a victim of this silencing (which is detailed and explored further in Silences). Her novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties was begun in 1932 at age nineteen but not completed until 1974, being consistently interrupted or silenced by domestic responsibilities.

Christina Stead, Marge Piercy and Tillie Olsen have all been poorly treated as women writers in patriarchal society: when Saul Bellow received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976 he said that the award should have gone to Christina Stead. Susan Sontag ranks The Man Who Loved Children with Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby as one of the few masterpieces of literature that will endure. Yet in his introduction to the novel, Randall Jarrell describes it as "an unread book" .92 It was out of print for twenty-five years from its first publication in 1940. Similarly, Marge Piercy's books, including Woman On The Ed2e of Time, were virtually unavailable outide the United States for ten years before 1979, when the Women's Press published three of them. Tillie Olsen suffered at the hands of patriarchal expectations of women: it was forty years from when she started writing Yonnondio: From the Thirties before she could overcome the constraints of her role as a wife and mother, and her self-doubt, low self-esteem to complete and publish it.

All three of these women writers write from different backgrounds, with different theoretical starting points, and vastly different attitudes to feminism. All of their books have something to tell us about women. And yet none of them celebrates difference or "writes the body" in the way Helene Cixous envisages. As has already been shown, women's writing of the kind Cixous proposes defies definition and categorization. There are no formal criteria for the female perspective it expresses. Women's writing should give women voice and draw attention to them. It should enable imagining and the postulation of utopias. It should be the

92Jarrell, Randall, "Introduction" to Stead, (1981) op,cit. 41 space in which to learn to walk, to fantasize, and to experiment in order to open up a creative way out of the tension between the "limitations of the strategies and the unsuitability of the desires" in the real lives of women.93

Most significantly it should step beyond current boundaries of wntmg. Because it is female, it is subversive and it has already deviated from the masculine norm. It should be establishing new contexts, language, expressions and images. Women's writing should be a political act which releases women from suppression and marks their "shattering entry into history" ,94

So how does the writing which has gone before fail? How does the work of women writers as diverse as Christina Stead, Marge Piercy and Tillie Olsen fall short of being the revolutionary act anticipated by Helene Cixous? What are the weaknesses in their work which causes Helene Cixous to assert that "with a few rare exceptions, there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity ... "?95

It is possible to pinpoint several weaknesses in women's writing to date, examples of which can be found in the spectrum of work by Stead, Piercy and Olsen. There are several difficulties not intrinsic to the actual writing which nevertheless restrict women's creativity in some ways. For example, the most obvious problem for all things female in our patriarchal world is male criticism, misunderstanding, rejection, contempt. Several women, including Adrienne Rich, have described how difficult it is for a woman to write, knowing that she has a male as well as a female audience. Men, says Rich, will not hesitate to denigrate women's writing simply because it is by a woman. Silvia Bovenschen explains the fear and ignorance that is the basis of this male attitude:

If women view their art as something produced by women for women men will fight it, if for no other reason than because their aesthetic yardstick is

93weigel, Sigrid, "Double Focus ... " in Ecker, op.cit., p. 67 94Cixous, (1983) op.cit., p. 284 95 i.hid...., p.282 42 unable to measure a phenomenon such as this. Patriarchal blinkers cannot be taken off at whim.96

Male fear of women's creativity translates into all the techniques of silencing described earlier. The problem for a woman writing in a patriarchal world which obviously disapproves of women writing is that she is seen as deviant and dangerous. Even when women writers solve the material and environmental problems that try to prevent their writing it is not easy to overcome the inhibition of knowing they are going to be judged by men as "intruders on the rights of men"97 as Lynne Spender describes them.

Repeatedly, the woman writer finds herself at a point of tension, aware that her writing both challenges the conventional view of what is appropriate for women and encroaches on what some see as a male preserve.98

Tillie Olsen in Silences describes Ellen Glasgow's experience at the hands of a male writer who told her:

The best advice I can give you is to stop writing and go back to the South and have some babies. The greatest woman is not the woman who has written the finest book, but the woman who has had the finest b a b1es. ... 99

Writing for a male audience is a double-edged sword, as Adrienne Rich warns: a woman writer who is successful in male terms (that is, accepted and praised by male critics) is in danger of being tokenised by them, incorporated into the patriarchal canon, and hence removed from her sisters. Margaret Atwood also describes the

... often observed phenomenon of the member of a despised social group who manages to transcend the limitation imposed on the group, at least enough to become "successful", disassociating him/herself from

96Bovenschen, op.cit., p.45 97spender, Lynne, Intruders on the Ri&hts of Men (1983) 98Eagleton, op.cit., p. 40 99 O1sen, (1980) op,cit., ppl99-200 43 the group... Thus the [successful] women who say: "I've never had any problems. I don't know what they're talking about." . .. Why carry with you the stigma attached to that dismal category you've escaped from?100

Intrinsic weaknesses in the women's writing that exists, include ambivalence toward sexuality. This happens partly because women who write about women risk being further denigrated, for all things female are regarded in patriarchy as unimportant, and this is particularly true of sexuality as written about by women. For example, Christina Stead suffered at the hands of male critics when Letty Fox (1935) was published because discussion of the sexual morality presented in the book took precedence over a serious consideration of its content. It was denounced as a slur on American womanhood and banned in Australia. She did not publish agam after that for many years. As Mary Eagleton observes:

If the woman writer writes about women, she risks the label of 'partiality', 'narrowness', 'a woman's book'. If she tries to write about her own deepest responses, particularly sexual, she feels anxious about revealing 'the truth about my own experiences as a body' (Woolf), or about 'experiencing myself as a woman' (Rich). Indeed the very act of writing is seen as expressing a conflict between 'traditional female functions' and 'the subversive function of the imagination' (Rich).101

It is not surprising that women do not "write the body" as effectively as Helene Cixous would have it. In Woman On The Ed~e Of Time, for example, Marge Piercy depicts her utopian Mattapoisette as virtually androgynous. Instead of celebrating the difference she has men capable of breastfeeding and non-sexual reproduction. In The Man Who Loved Children sexuality is the issue that causes the shift in the balance of power in the family. Louie, entering adolescence, moves away from her father into a new alliance with Henny - her awakening sexuality is enormously threatening to her sexually repressed father. Sexuality is an

100 Atwood, (1976) op.cit., p.260 101 Eagleton, i.b.i.d..., p. 40 44 instinctive, life-affirming capacity to Louie - she becomes conscious of her body and of a whole system of impulses and intuitions which link her to the rest of existence. Unfortunately, her sexuality also evokes negative feelings in Henny about her own womanhood and Louie suffers at her hands. However, Louie is drawn to her stepmother "by the natural outlawry of womankind" and it is from her that she learns to question, hate and resist Sam's tyranny. It is sexuality too which represents the tie that binds women to hateful existences. Sex is a double-edged sword that frees Louie and ensnares Henny. The mutual and often violent hatred between Henny and Sam is underscored by passionate and angry sex, to which their seven children bear witness. "Your Dad didn't talk to me for twenty-two years, and I had fourteen youngsters as a result", says Old Ellen, Henny's mother; "It isn't necessary to talk" said Henny bitterly.102

Sex also puts the other women into unloved and exploited pos1t10ns: Old Ellen is discarded by her husband in favour of a younger woman; Hassie attempts to ignore her husband's unfaithfulness; Bonnie is left pregnant and unmarried and abandoned; and the reader is fearful for Evie's future as Sam plays games of seduction with his "Little Womey".

Tillie Olsen, arguably the most woman-centred of this spectrum of writers, allocates very little space to concerns of sexuality. Not all of her stories are concerned with women's character and lives; class is an important issue in her writing and in her efforts to display the ravages of capitalism she does not always make women her primary concern. Such is the case in Y onnondio: From the Thirties, with its compassionate portrayal of a family in the Depression thirties.

The French feminists would have it that sexuality is the most powerful and important ingredient of women's writing: that sexuality cannot be divorced from their writing; that women's writing will articulate the difference in such a way that will lead to true liberation for women from oppression. Helene Cixous envisages

I02stead, (1981) op.cit., p.197 45 an end of the "Phallic period", and predicts two possible results; women will either have been annihilated, or "borne up to the highest and most violent incandescence." l03 Only by "furiously inhabiting our sumptuous bodies" and "writing the body", inscribing our sexual power, can women forecast the downfall of patriarchy based not on the obliteration of women but on their ascendence. 10 4

Women's writing is intrinsically weakened by the alienation of women from the legitimated language. It is perhaps all the more remarkable that women writers have managed to translate from the darkness to the dominant discourse (as Marguerite Duras describes it105), but it begs the question, how much more articulate could women be if they could write in their own language? And what would that language be? Christine Stead, Marge Piercy and Tillie Olsen all betray their concern with the inadequacy of the language they use. In Woman On The Edge Of Time, Marge Piercy expresses her dissatisfaction with male-dominated discourse by creating a gender-free language in utopian Mattapoisette: Luciente explains to Connie:

"Might as well be Yif. Your Mem has a sweet friend who abuses per and who ... sold your sister" 106

In "Tell Me A Riddle" by Tillie Olsen, Eva's bitterness pours out in a jumbled miscellany of philosophy, poetry, politics, songs and remembered conversations. David is forced to listen helplessly to her patchwork dialogue which expresses all she has kept inside, withheld from him throughout their life :

And it seemed to him that for seventy years she had hidden a tape recorder, infinitely microscopic, within her, that it had coiled infinite mile on mile, trapping every song, every melody, every word read, heard and spoken - and that maliciously she was playing

l03Cixous, Helene, "The Laugh of the Medusa" in Marks and de Courtivron (eds.) New French Feminisms (1981: p.256) 104~. p.256 lOSouras, Marguerite, "From an Interview" in Marks and de Courtivron, op.cit., p.174 106piercy, op. cit,. p.36 46 back only what said nothing of him, of the children, of their intimate life together.107

Her delirious diatribe is somehow more articulate and better illustrates the disappointments of her life than any polemic:

The broken up prose of the last section of the story mimes Eva's disordered recapitulation, reorders her living, giving us her words as a concrete poetic testament, a lifeline to real human progress. I 08

The Man Who Loved Children is a curious language study in which Christina Stead depicts the power of language. Sam uses a strange language with the children which is calculated and manipulative. The younger children take it up as a refrain, the older ones are wary of it and seldom lapse into it. His language is the ultimate man-made language: it shapes the children's lives and rituals:

"All I esks for is a pore wittoo [little] bandana : I works a-takin' deown de chimbleys so that the heouse won't be knocked to smithereens in the next gale en yore litle mushheads with it, en so that Mothering kin sleep peaceful like - though why she should with what she's been a-doin' to your poor dad, I don't know - en all I esks is a pore wittoo bandana sangwidge en I don't get whut I esks."109

In response to the oppression of Sam's language, Henny uses a violent vocabulary punctuated by vicious swearing and characterised by impotent hatred:

"I've stuffed mattresses for you and your children and cooked dinners for the whole gang of filthy, rotten, ignorant, blowing Pollits that I hate. I've had the house stinking like a corpse cellar with your formalin that you're proud of and had to put up with your vile animals and idiotic collections and your blood-and-

107otsen, (1983) op.cit.. p120 108Kaplan, Cora, "Introduction" in ibid. 109 Stead, (1981) op,cit.. p.485 47 bone fertilizer in the garden and everlasting talk, talk, talk, talk, talk." 11 o

Louie the survivor of the story escapes Sam by retreating into solitude and silence and by exploring alternative languages. Eventually she creates her own, secret language in her play "The Snake Man", which Sam inevitably rejects :

" Why can't it be in English?" said Sam feebly. Louie smiled vacantly, like a little child, "I don't know .... Damn my eyes if I've ever seen anything so stupid and silly" complained Sam." 111

Louie's writing threatens to disrupt Sam's monopoly on language; he must humiliate her and ridicule her efforts in order to maintain his power:

She flushed purple. "It's in code; in code - I make up my own code: so that no one can read.' 'You can show your poor little dad,' he cadged, and winked at the children who sat round simmering, waiting for the excitement. He insinuated, 'It isn't something you're ashamed to show me, is it? You see, Looloo, though you think I'm too dopey to see through you, I know more'n you think.' 112

Construction of a female language will surely go deeper than eradicating gendered pronouns. The sexism inherent in our language is just one. of its shortcomings. Its inability to articulate women's experiences is a more serious deficiency. This has been addressed by several feminist women writers, most notably Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics Of Radical Feminism. Mary Daly examines, analyses, changes, reclaims and reconstructs language. Her book is difficult to read - Susan Leigh Starr describes it as being like a spider's web:

How do you read a spider's web? It took me several weeks .... the language Mary uses is thick, convoluted at times, filled with word games and puns, coining

110ihlil.., p.110 11 libid., pp404-409 112ih.i.d..., p.367 48 new words and phrases. When I began the book I had a great deal of resistance to these.11 3

Mary Daly's work with language began with Beyond God the Father in 1973 in which she wrote that:

the essential thing is to hear our own words, always giving prior attention to our own experience, never letting prefabricated theory have authority over us.1 14

In Gyn/Ecology she spirals ahead to a scholarly criticism of the patriarchal manipulation of language while at the same time attempting to recapture the power of language for women. Gyn/Ecology argues strongly for the total demise of patriarchy and the reconstruction of a woman-identified, patriarchy-free environment. Mary Daly synthesises poetry, mythology, theology, philosophy, and literary criticism in a complex and scholarly diatribe, in which the physical and psychic experiences of women are always central. Gyn/Ecology charts a voyage towards a woman­ identified environment in which women's energy and creativity will be re-appropriated for the task of reducing patriarchy to nothingness. The following is an extract from the introduction to Gyn/Ecology :

Writing this book is participating in feminist process. This is problematic. For isn't a book by its definition a "thing", an objectification of thinking /imagining /speaking? ... Like crystal balls, Glowing Globes, these help us to fore tell the future and to dis-cover the past, for they further the process itself by transforming the previously unknown into that which we explicitly know, and therefore can reflect upon, criticize. Thus they spark new v1s10ns. This creative crystallizing is a translation of feminist journeying of our encounters with the unknown into a chrysalis.115

Gyn/Ecology is uninhibited by patriarchal forms: Mary Daly rejects what she calls "methodolatry":

11 3starr, Susan Leigh quoted in Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology (1978: frontispiece) 114Daly, Mary, Beyond God the Father (1973: p.189) 11soa1y, (1978) op.cit,. pp22-23 49 Elsewhere I have advocated comm1ttmg the crime of Methodicide, since the Methodolatry of patriarchal disciplines kills creative though t. 1 16

She breaks rules of spelling, capitalization, use of pronouns, punctuation. Her most immediately obvious, significant and creative tactic is the creation of new words to suit her meanings:

Gynocentric writing means risking. Since the language and style of patriarchal writing simply cannot contain or carry the energy of women's exorcism and ecstasy, in this book I invent, dis-cover, re-member. At times I make up words ... often I unmask deceptive words by dividing them and employing alternate meanings for prefixes . . . I also unmask their hidden reversals, often by using less known or "obsolete" meanings (for example, 'glamour' as used to name a witch's power). 11 7

She seduces the reader into listening to words differently by wordplay, looking for lost or subliminal associations, by uncovering unexpected or subversive dimensions of meanings. Sometimes she rejects words she regards as inauthentic or oppressive, and admits to often using intuition as her guide.

Mary Daly describes her own temptation at times to break into chants or incantations, for at times her words seem to have a life of their own. "They seem to want to break the bonds of conventional usage, to break the silence imposed [ on them]." 11 8 Indeed, her writing has an almost mesmeric effect at times. Jill Matthews views it as poetry and mysticism which is both about the journey of the soul and about language. She describes Mary Daly's language as "exhilarating, mesmerising and incantatory." 1 l 9

Is this then, what the French feminists aspire to m their quest for a women's language? Gyn/Ecolo~y. for all its success at overstepping

ll6ibid., p.23 11 7 i..b.lil..., p.24 l 18ibid., p.24 119Matthews, Jill, "Separate but Superior" in Gay Information (5, 1981: p.19) 50 the bounds of legitimated discourse, still has its shortcomings. It has been criticised for its inaccessibility; its elitism.

There is not a mention in the book of the material circumstances of most women's lives: there is no consideration of work, of children, of money, of sex 120

Is it a book of strategy or is it poetry? If it is a strategic text it is negligent regarding practicalities. For example, Mary Daly finds it possible to describe in detail global atrocities against women without calling for an end to them. She draws heavily on the work done by Fran Hosken to describe the African ritual of genital mutilation, but she does not refer to Fran Hosken's tireless campaign to recognise and eradicate these practices. Hosken's attempts to get international agencies interested in the problem have been ignored, and her work has often been regarded with embarrassment and distaste.

It is understood that Mary Daly's journey turns away from a confrontation with patriarchy as a waste of sacred female energy, but just what happens to African women in the meantime, while a relatively small group of listeners journey inwards with Mary Daly, is never confronted.

If Gyn/Ecology is poetry it is nevertheless taking a number of clear theoretical stands, on difference, separatism and women's culture. Perhaps it is neither strategy nor poetry: rather a true example of women's writing which defies genre categorisation.

Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology confronts the patriarchal discourse in a way that is both reminiscent of, and would surely be pleasing to Helene Cixous. Yet her work has a different starting point and a different ambition to that of Cixous. For Mary Daly sexuality is not the issue, despite her identification with lesbian separatism: she does not attempt to "write the body". For her it is women's energies which sustain patriarchy, and it will be their removal which destroys it. For the French feminists sexuality and its inscription in

120i..hid.., p.19 5 1 language is the primary issue. Mary Daly confronts the language but not with the aim of inscribing sexuality. Gyn/Ecolo2y therefore only responds to a part of the challenge of creating a true women's writing along the lines indefinitely laid down by the French feminists. The following chapter will take the example of Mary Daly as a stepping-off point for further examination of authors who have made deliberate attempts to expose, grapple with and replace patriarchal discourse.

52 CHAPfER FOUR

The Patriarchy reinforces women in the position of 'Other' and considers itself to be the only valid frame of reference for reality. Patriarchal scholarship fails to acknowledge the existence of a separate women's experience, even while it maintains the public/private spheres which serve most significantly to keep women out of positions of power. Patriarchy has sophisticated weapons at its disposal to maintain women's silence should they attempt to confront the injustice and oppression of this view. Language is male-oriented because it has evolved through centuries of patriarchy to meet the needs of patriarchy:

Every single meaning is literally man-made, and, inevitably then, words encode a male point of view which is often at odds with female experience. I 21

In a man-made language women must either see things through male eyes, or reject existing words, thus silencing themselves:

As soon as we learn words we find ourselves outside them. This makes us aliens. This makes us silent. This makes us vulnerable. We need a language which constructs the reality of women's autonomy, women's strength, women's power. With such a language we will not be a muted group.122

One of the tasks of women's writing must be to use language as a weapon against itself, and create new meanings and definitions, or else to employ other methods of inscribing difference, which will be explored further on.

The direction of change for which Helene Cixous and her French contemporaries are calling is nowhere clearly indicated or easily recognized. In "The Laugh of the Medusa" Helene Cixous uses a kind of epic, poetic voice - sometimes wistful, sometimes polemical - to make exciting, inspiring suggestions; a voice which is recognizable in

12 1Cameron, op.cit., p.111 122Rowbotham, Sheila, quoted in Spender, D., (1985) .Q.12...ci.1., p.190 53 Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology. But like Mary Daly, Cixous and most of the other French feminists referred to here fail to provide - or deliberately withhold - a blueprint for the implementation of their ideas. Without destroying the spirit of their work (which is certainly not meant to be read literally, with masculinist logic), it is surely still possible to attempt to apply and test the ideas they express. The examination of fiction by three English-language women novelists with different perspectives on feminism and woman­ identification showed that for all the valuable things they had to say about women, they were very far from meeting the challenge set by the French feminists: to articulate the difference and thus inscribe woman in a new and revolutionary discourse.

L'ecriture feminine contends that to inscribe the body is not just a means of expression for a woman writer: it constitutes a subversion of patriarchy and patriarchal discourse by substituting jouissance for logic and convention. The difficulty for the woman writer lies in the means of effective, articulate expression of the body: how to inscribe jouissance?

Cixous provides a typically abstruse suggestion: that women's writing should be done in the white ink of mother's milk.123 Susan Gubar uses a similar metaphor, described in the introduction to Elizabeth Abel's Writing and Sexual Difference as "bleeding into print":

The continuity of life and art, biography and text, and the recurrent identification of writing with violation, with a process of bleeding into print, reflect the woman writer's recognition that her body is the text.124

However, given the constraints and limitations of the man-made language which is necessarily the starting-point, it would be useful now to look at poetry as an alternative - and possibly more appropriate - genre for such writing.

123Cixous, (1983) op.cit., p.285 124Gubar, Susan, quoted in Abel, Elizabeth, Writing and Sexual Difference (1982: p.3) 54 If, as Gisela Breitling believes, language "expresses what is commonly human in masculine grammatical forms", 125 then poetry with its lack of grammatical rules, forms and structures would seem to be an obvious alternative; an escape from the legitimated language which could be appropriated by women. Poetry has not been a traditional genre for women's writing as Gilbert and Gubar discovered in The Madwoman in the Attic. In 1845 Elizabeth Barrett Browning commented that "England has had many learned women ... and yet where are the poetesses?".126 Her epic poem Aurora Leigh exposed the taboo against women's entry into public discourse as speakers, writers or poets:

In the first person epic voice of a major poet, it breaks a very specific silence, almost a gentleman's agreement between women authors and the arbiters of high culture in Victorian England, that allowed women to write if only they would shut up about it.1 27

In 1862 Emily Dickinson wrote:

They shut me up in Prose­ As when a little Girl they put me in the Closet- Because they liked me "still"-... ",128 implying a recognition that poetry by women was regarded as somehow inappropriate and immodest. And in 1928, Virginia Woolf invented a tragic "Judith Shakespeare" whose tragic history depicted her belief that "it is the poetry that is still denied outlet" .129

Examining the attitude of male critics to female poets, Gilbert and Gubar quote Theodore Roethke's review of Louise Bogan's work,

125 Breitling, Gisela, "Speech, Silence and the Discourse of Art ... " m Ecker, op.cit,. p.164 126Gilbert, Sandra, and Gubar, Susan, "Shakespeare's Sisters" in Eagleton, (ed.) op.cit., p.106 127 Kaplan, Cora, "Aurora Leigh and Other Poems" in Eagleton, (ed.) op,cit.. p.114 128Gilbert and Gubar, op.cit., p.107 129illliL_, p.106-7 55 which neatly sums up the attitudes expressed m their numerous other examples:

And one could . . . add other aesthetic and moral shortcomings: the spinning out; the embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life - that special province of the feminine talent in prose - hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is; lyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the altar; stamping a tiny foot against God or lapsing into a sententiousness that implies the author has re­ invented integrity; carrying on excessively about Fate, about time; lamenting the lot of the woman; caterwauling; writing the same poem about fifty times,· an d so on ... 130

As to why women are discouraged from poetry even more strongly than from other written forms, Gilbert and Gubar speculate that poetry is of all possible literary occupations the one to which European culture has traditionally assigned the highest status:

Verse-writing - the product of mysterious 'inspiration', divine afflatus, bardic ritual - has historically been a holy vocation ... But if... women cannot be priests, then how - since poets are priests - can they be poets?131

Poetry has been taken up enthusistically by some women writers consciously searching for some form of ecriture feminine. American poet, Audre Lorde is a major proponent of the power of poetry. Poetry is not the sterile wordplay celebrated by the "white fathers" in order to conceal "their desperate wish for imagination without insight." 132 Poetry is the "revelation or distillation of experience." 133 It has the fluidity to contain new words, structures and images. For women then, "poetry is not a luxury"_ 134 Poetry as a potentially

130ililil., p.107 l31ibid., p.110 l 32Lorde, Audre, "Poetry is Not a Luxury" in Eisenstein and Jardine, op.cit.. p.126 133.i.JiliL, p.126 134ililil., p.126 56 revolutionary discourse is, for Lorde, the true ecriture feminine: it is "not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives". 135 In this woman-identified definition of poetry, women should be able to write the body and unleash the truths that will split open the world.

Poetry would not always have been embraced for the reasons it is now being taken up. The freedom of poetry's structures which make it so attractive to women seeking a new discourse are relatively recent concepts in poetry. The free verse of the romanticists and the modernists contrast sharply with the rigid structures of the old school of poetry. The use of poetry as the direction for the future of women's writing may be mistaken in the first place. Poetry, after all, has rarely had wide readership, or been socially powerful, and must be considered an impotent political tool in current patriarchal society. The danger must exist the refore that for women to claim poetry as the most appropriate form for their discourse, the inevitable patriarchal response will be to create a female ghetto of poetry, depriving it of power and audibility .13 6

The use to which women writers have put poetry m recent years contains many interesting connections with the theories of the French feminists, and certainly their work - as shall be shown - comes closer to the creative space which steps beyond current boundaries of writing. Poetry has a great deal to say about how women can establish new contexts, language, expressions and images, and is the form in which much powerful recent women's writing has been inscribed. However, poetry, too, ultimately fails to meet the challenge of the French feminists as will be shown with the following examples.

135ibid., p.126 l 361t must also be remembered that, as was shown earlier with the rise of the novel, men are not averse to taking up women's occupations if it will involve some kind of reward for themselves (usually economic). It is not impossible to imagine a future where women have popularized poetry to the extent that patriarchy would try to regain control over it, rather than relegate it to a ghetto. The challenge for women then is to make their poetry peculiarly female in its ability to articulate femaleness - the challenge posited by the French feminists. 57 Poetry, says Cora Kaplan, is a privileged metalanguage in western patriarchal culture. She maintains that although other written forms of high culture (theology, philosophy, political theory, drama, prose fiction) are also concerned with being language about language, in poetry this is the very raison d'etre of the genre.I 3 7

Similarly, in her preface to "One Foot on the Mountain", Lily Mohin argues the political role of poetry:

Poetry, with its tradition of concentrated insights, its brevity of form, is the ideal vehicle for the kind of politics we propose ... Poetry has traditionally been the place to state condensed or particular perceptions which elsewhere would be called mad or perhaps banal. To describe the ordinary fabric of our lives and to say that these things are significant has always been an element in poetry .1 38

The perception of poetry as political, or as a superior form of literature means that for women to claim poetry as their most appropriate method of written expression is an even more rebellious gesture than for women to write in other genres. If women's writing is to be as revolutionary as Helene Cixous predicts, then poetry is surely the desirable form to use. Even more importantly for women writers, however, is the suitability of poetry as a means of expression. For example, Susan Griffin uses a poetic prose to contrast with the emotionless, detached, bodiless expression of patriarchal thought:

I 'found that I could best discover my insights about the logic of civilized man by going underneath logic, that is by writing associatively, and thus enlisting my intuition, or uncivilized self. Thus my prose in this book is like poetry, and like poetry always begins with feeling.139

l 37Kaplan, Cora, Sea Changes (1986: p.69) 13 8 Moh in, Lily, quoted by Montefiore, Janet in "Feminist Identity and Poetic Tradition" in Feminist Review (13, 1983: p.77) l 39Griffin, Susan, Woman and Nature (1978: p.xv) 58 Since the 1960s women have begun to produce an enormous amount of "woman-identified" poetry, in the sense that the writers have chosen to explore experiences central to their sex and to find forms and styles appropriate to their expression. The years between 1960 and 1965 saw the publication of highly influential poetry by Muriel Rukeseyer (The Speed of Darkness, 1960), Anne Sexton (To Bedlam and Part Way Back, 1960), Adrienne Rich (Snapshots of a Dau2hter-in-Law, 1963), Sylvia Plath (Ariel, 1965), and Maxine Kumin (The Privile2e, 1965). The late '60s and early '70s saw the emergence of poetry by black women, including Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan.

This poetry has aroused controversy for several reasons: their poetry was confronting in its difference to what was traditionally expected from "poetesses" (in his Foreword to Ariel, for example, Robert Lowell wrote "Sylvia Plath becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly created - hardly a person at all or a woman, certainly not a "poetess"." 140). Secondly, the lives of the poets such as Anne Sexton and Silvia Plath were/are often morbidly fascinating sagas of breakdown and suicide; and thirdly, the poetry was being written by women, about women, and for women at a time when women's voices seemed to have been almost unheard in the patriarchal literary world for some time.

French feminists believe that inequities and distinctions between the sexes are embedded in our phallocentric language, and that only a reconstructed female-centred language will truly express what is female. It is interesting to note that a very high proportion of women's poetry in England and America is about the right to speak or write: "The desire to write imaginative poetry and prose was and is a demand for access to and parity within the law and myth­ making groups in society."141 Adrienne Rich is a good example of a woman writing in the English language whose poetry is primarily concerned with the issue of writing as a woman, and whose consc10usness parallels the French feminist's preoccupation with the inscription of sexuality in language.

140Lowell, Robert, Foreword to Plath, Silvia, Ariel, quoted m Russ, Joanna, op.cit., p.23 141Kaplan, (1986) QJ2....ili., p.71 59 Adrienne Rich came to a realization that language works against women in patriarchal society when she sought to describe her love of women in her poetry and prose. With this realization came a profound understanding of the power of language and the potential of poetry. She wrote:

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful... 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 until now a male perogative, and how we can begin to see and name - and therefore live - afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution ... for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored.1 42

Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 and published her first book of poems in 1951. She is famous both as a poet and as a feminist theorist; Alicia Ostriker describes her as a "poet of ideas". 143 Her first volumes, A Change of World (1951) and The Diamond Cutters (1955), contain conventional and cautious poetry which gained the approval of her reviewers. W.H.Auden, in his Foreword to A Change of World, wrote that Adrienne Rich's first poems "are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs." 144 However, in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), Adrienne Rich identified more as a female poet and confronted issues of language, the oppression of women, and female consciousness. Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969) and The Will to Change (1971) deal with external, political struggles and examine conflict in class, race, sex

142Rich, Adrienne, "When We Dead Awaken ... " in On Lies, Secrets and Silences (1980: p.35) 1430striker, Alicia, Writing Like A Woman (1983: p.102) 1440striker, Alicia, Stealing the Language (1986: p.4) 60 and Vietnam. With Diving Into the Wreck (1973) Adrienne Rich was openly connected with feminism: the belief that society's religion, philosophy, history, law and literature rest on the subordination of women. In 1974 she won the National Book Award for Diving Into the Wreck, and she accepted it jointly with two other women poets in the name of "all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in the patriarchal world ... " 145

In The Dream of a Common Language (1978), Adrienne Rich deals with language as the potential ground for revolution. Several poems are about a "whole new poetry" as well as non-verbal forms of communication. Adrienne Rich's poetry, particularly in Dream of a Common Language, is also concerned with physical, sexual links, especially relationships between mothers and daughters, and between lesbians, and with the metaphorical links between literal and figurative sisters and foremother figures.

Adrienne Rich frequently refers to the power of poetry to bring about change, in her own poetry and in her prose and in interviews:

.. .I still believe that the energy of poetry comes from the unconscious and always will. So a poetry which could affirm woman or the female, which could affirm a bisexual vision, or which could affirm a whole other way of being male and female as part of its consciousness, as part of its tradition, such a poetry of the future would still, it seems to me, be churning up new unconscious material, which we would be fascinated and influenced by ... 146

In "Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman", which was originally her introduction to the collected works of poet Judy Grahn, she restated her perception of the revolutionary potential of poetry for women. She writes here of the need to keep on re-stating the necessity of poetry to those who have reason to fear its power, or who believe that language is just words and are adequate to describe the world which she believes requires transformation.I 4 7

145Moers, Ellen, Literary Women (1980: p. xiii) 146Gelpi and Gel pi, Adrienne Rich's Poetry (1975: p.113) 147Rich, Adrienne, (1980) op,cit,,"Power and Danger" 61 Adrienne Rich recognizes her own power, as a woman poet, to cause change, to influence our unconscious, to create new images. Erica Jong describes the sense she has of Adrienne Rich as a visionary:

... the poems are not only about dead ends. They are about loneliness and the various forms it takes: the loneliness of being a woman in a male-dominated culture, the loneliness of being a lifegiver in a world that is in love with death, the loneliness of being an artist, an outsider, a survivor ... But she also shows that loneliness can be the beginning of rebirth. The woman, because she stands outside the death-dealing culture and its power-games, can be a visionary who points the way to redemption.148

Adrienne Rich is a poet committed to change whose poetry documents her struggle to create a new social and political vision. Throughout her work is evidence of her struggle with the fundamental paradox of her position - that the language she must use is not her own: her vision must be articulated in "the oppressor's language" ,1 49 and this makes it difficult for her to assert the validity of her experience. For Adrienne Rich the writing process is therefore fraught with difficulty, and requires discipline and courage. Sometimes she seems to despair about the failures of communication and to ponder gloomily about how to create a reality which would connect her to others.

As Wendy Martin observes, Adrienne Rich explores the possibilities created by erotic love for a "fusion of spirit and matter"l50 and in this respect her poetry is revolutionary, in that it changes the way we perceive and experience the world. Her feminism influences her in a way that makes her radically subjective politically. She analyses and articulates her experience as a woman in patriarchal culture, publicising her private perceptions in her poetry. Her feminist identity and poetic vision have become part of the

148Jong, Erica, "Visionary Anger" in Gelpi and Gelpi(eds.) Ql2....ill., p.173 149Rich, Adrienne, "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" from Diving Into the Wreck (1974) l50Martin, Wendy, "From Patriarchy to Female Principle ... " in Gelpi and Gelpi (eds.) op.cit,. p.183 62 composite reality of our world: "Her poetry, then, like all good poetry changes the way we percieve and experience the world." 15 1

Is Adrienne Rich then, with her appreciation of the significance of language and her exploration of sexuality, the writer Helene Cixous has envisaged? In "Cartographies of Silence" the poet asserts that "Language cannot do everything", and explores the potential of silence as a discourse:

"Silence can be a plan rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence it has a history a form

Do not confuse it with any kind of absence ... " 15 2

This is reminiscent of some of Marguerite Duras' work, notably the film Nathalie Granger, which is discussed in detail further in the chapter. However, Adrienne Rich seems to conclude that a new language is to be formed out of what is ordinary, "common" to women.

In "Transcendental Etude" Rich imagines a whole new poetry beginning from love between women. In it she rejects the language and values of patriarchy to which women are unconsciously attuned, and seeks to centre knowledge back in women's expenence:

... The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. The woman who sits watching, listening,

15li.hid..., p.188 152Rich, Adrienne, "Cartographies of Silence" in The Dream of a Common Language (1978: pp16-20) 63 eyes moving in the darkness is rehearsing in her body, hearing-out in her blood a score touched off in her perhaps by some words, a few chords, from the stage: a tale only she can ten.1 s 3

Here she rejects the notion of poetry as an active performance. Poetry is exceedingly personal, coming as it does through the body of the writer. Poetry is a necessary, emotional, physical act:

We're not performers, like Liszt, competing against the world for speed and brilliancel 5 4

When we let go of competition and reject performance: "Cut the wires,/find ourselves in free-fall", we risk everything and are forced to fall back on the poetic vision. The process of rejecting patriarchal thought is described as a kind of lonely free-fall into the unknown:

But there come times - perhaps this is one of them - when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die; when we have to pull back from the incantations, rhythms we've moved to thoughtlessly, and disenthrall ourselves, bestow ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static crowding the wires. We cut the wires, find ourselves in free-fall, as if our true home were the undimensional solitudes, the rift in the Great Nebula.155

The patriarchal "rhythms we've moved to thoughtlessly" must be shed; any patriarchal baggage should be examined and cast out to allow us to move in undimensional, unrestrictive new ground. Here in a new and necessary isolation we will speak a new language, untainted by patriarchal history/values/preconceptions/demands.

No one who survives to speak

l53Rich, Adrienne, "Transcendental Etude" in i.hid..., p.74 154ibid., p.74 155 i.h.ul.., pp74-5 64 new language, has avoided this: the cutting-away of an old force that held her rooted to an old ground the pitch of utter loneliness where she herself and all creation seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry to which no echo comes or can ever come.15 6

The poetry which will emerge will be personal and feature a domestic landscape. Woman as life-giver will also protect life by putting into poetry the foundations of life untainted by the intellectual displacement of patriarchy .

.. . only care for the many-lived, unending forms in which she finds herself, becoming now the sherd of broken glass slicing light in a comer, dangerous to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound; and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further forming underneath everything that grows.15 7

What will emerge from this poetry is that which has been hidden from us by the patriarchy: the conspiratorial concealment of the knowledge of erotic love of woman for woman.

Birth stripped our birthright from us, tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves so early on and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears like midges, told us nothing, nothing of origins, nothing we needed to know, nothing that could re-member us.

Only: that it is unnatural, the homesickness for a woman, for ourselves .. )58

Recovery of this knowledge will be the way in which women will be able to stand aside from patriarchy once and for all:

15 6i.b.i.d...., p. 75 l57ibid., p.77 158i.b.i.d...., p.75 65 "But in fact we were always like this, rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.I 59

Later in the poem Adrienne Rich writes:

... Vision begins to happen in such a life as if a woman quietly walked away from the argument and jargon in a room ... 160

The woman becomes "the stone foundation", creating language out of what she knows unconsciously, physically: the acceptance of the rediscovered, common, life-sustaining forces:

Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity, the striving for greatness, brilliance- only with the musing of a mind one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing dark against bright, silk against roughness, pulling the tenets of a life together with no will to mastery .. .1 6 1

In "Transcendental Etude" Rich is describing the dream of finding a language with the capacity to free itself from its own history: "the power to escape the lengthening shadows of the patriarchal tradition of poetry in the West." 162 The "common language" enables women to talk about themselves:

in our deepest mode of being, in our nonobjectified mode of being, our own mode of being as opposed to what we had laid on us. I 6 3

"Twenty-One Love Poems" trace the development of a lesbian love affair. In them Adrienne Rich finds that shrugging off a patriarchal view of sexuality and relationships necessarily involves discarding other falsehoods perpetrated on women by the patriarchy. In

159i.hi.d..., p. 75 160ibid., p.76 161 ililiL, p. 77 162oiehl, Joanne Fiet, "'Cartographies of Silence': Rich's Common Language" in Feminist Studies (6, 3, 1980: p.530) I63aelpi and Gelpi (eds.) op.cit., p.112 66 coming to this self-knowledge and attempting to openly express her feelings as they develop during the affair, Adrienne Rich uncovers the possibility and necessity of escape from the confines of patriarchal discourse. She has said that "Heterosexuality as an institution has . .. drowned in silence the erotic feelings between women" ,164 but in these poems placing woman-woman relationships at the centre, she seems to be finding what Joanne Fiet Diehl calls "the experiential basis for a figurative discourse no longer dependent upon the traditional patterns of heterosexual romance." 165:

The rules break like a thermometer, quicksilver spills across the charted systems, we're out in a country that has no language no laws, we're chasing the raven and the wren through gorges unexplored since dawn whatever we do together is pure invention the maps they gave us were out of date by years ... we're driving through the desert wondering if the water will hold out the hallucinations turn to simple villages the music on the radio becomes clear- neither Rosenkavalier nor Gotterdammerung but a woman's voice singing old songs with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute plucked and fingered by women outside the law.166

Here Rich commits herself to change - to creating a new social and political vision - in spite of the risks involved in this exploration of unchartered territory. She imagines a new mythology of women based on images that are not male-identified, outside patriarchal law.

Adrienne Rich has also discussed issues of language and sexuality in her prose. Several essays in the volume On Lies, Secrets and Silences contain a radical critique of literature and an exploration of the significance of poetry for women. In "Power and Danger: Works

l64Rich, "Women and Honour: Some Notes on Lying" (1980) op.cit.. p.190 165oiehl, op.cit., p.536 166Rich, "XIII" (1978), op,cit., p.31 67 of a Common Woman", she says that poetry 1s, among other things, a criticism of language:

In setting words together in new configurations, in the mere, immense shift from male to female pronouns, in the relationships between words created through echo, repetition, rhythm, rhyme, it lets us hear and see our words in a new dimension... Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language .. .1 67

Susan Griffin, Adrienne Rich's contemporary, pursues a similar path, both in her poetry and prose. In Made From This Earth she explores poetry m physical terms, indicating the particular suitability of poetry as a medium for "writing the body":

The poet returns to the knowledge of the body as a source of truth. I am not speaking here of a mute and mystified flesh as our culture sees the body. I am speaking of the body as the seat and author of intellect and imagination which try to be separate from the knowledge of the body,168

But, she believes, poetry cannot deny the knowledge of the body because the medium of poetry is sensuality, and poetic image is physical, precise, and sensual in detail. Furthermore, poetry, she claims, is musical:

and music originates in the body, from the rhythm of the heartbeat, shaped by what the human ear can perceive as beautiful. It moves directly through the body, resonating with the physical heart and the metaphorical heart at once... Through the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the ears, the feeling body, the poem enters consciousness .. _169

To Susan Griffin the mystique and power of poetry is directly related to the fear of sexuality, women, darkness. When we use the language of poetry, "that forgotten self threatens to return to

l67Rich, "Power and Danger... " (1980), op.cit.. p.248 168Griffin, Susan, Made From This Earth (1982: p.243) 169i..1iliL, p.243 68 consciousness. In the censorious mind, poetry speaks the language of wilderness and danger". However, Susan Griffin stops short of prescribing poetry as the answer to Helene Cixous' challenge to create revolution by "writing the body":

What does the poem do? Does it point to a solution? Does it rally for the cause? Does it provide a moral lesson? Does it prove theory? Though it may by chance do any of these, it should not be bent to these purposes. For its most radical purpose is to remind us of ourselves.170

So, does Adrienne Rich write the body? Is her poetry the shattering revolutionary discourse predicted by the French feminists? Carolyn Heilbrun believes that poets, and in particular Adrienne Rich, have begun the task she calls "reinventing womanhood". 171 She quotes Rich's promisory claim that "no-one has imagined us". 172 Poetry, says Helene Cixous, involves gaining strength through the unconscious, "that limitless country where the repressed manages to survive".173 Similarly, for Adrienne Rich, the energy of poetry comes from the unconscious. Despite all this, and the evidence of her work, Adrienne Rich's poetry, as the title of that most significant volume implies, is still a vision of the future. She dreams of a common language; but she has not created one. The obvious similarities between Cixous' exhortation in "The Laugh of the Medusa" and Rich's ambition for her poetry, still do not quite connect. Rich joins the voices of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva perhaps better than any other woman writing in the English language, in reinforcing the connections between language, sexuality and revolution and their importance for the future of women.

It is interesting to briefly consider other forms of expression as possible means by which women could write their bodies.

The use of silence as a means to highlight women's alienation from male language, and to express their oppression is explored by

170ibid., p.249 171 Heilbrun, Carolyn, Reinventing Womanhood (1979) 172ibid,. p.47 l 73cixous, (1983) op.cit,. p.284 69 Marguerite Duras in her 1972 film Nathalie Granger. Marguerite Duras is a French author of international renown, whose texts are often cited as examples of feminine writing. Her theory of writing and difference bears some resemblance to the Irigaray and Cixous schools of thought:

.. .I think the future belongs to women. Men have been completely dethroned. Their rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on to the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body .1 7 4

Marguerite Duras has become increasingly convinced of the differences between male and female language. Her belief is that women have never truly expressed themselves: that they exist in a place outside of the experience of patriarchy and when they write they are translating from the silence, darkness, unknown that is female, into the patriarchal discourse:

I think "feminine literature" is an organic, translated writing . . . translated from blackness, from darkness. Women have been in darkness for centuries. They don't know themselves. Or only poorly. And when women write, they translate this darkness ... 175

Marguerite Duras is also well known as a film-maker. Her 1972 film Nathalie Granger illustrates her theories about women being alienated from male language, existing in the darkness and silences that are voids in patriarchal discourse:

... the film is about the politics of silence, as a female strategy to counter the destructive male urge to articulate, analyse, dissect...! 76

The women in Nathalie Granger find ways to solve a dilemma with a child through a politics of silence that at once exposes their oppressed situation as women within patriarchy and suggests gaps through which change may begin to take place.

174 Duras, Marguerite, "From an Interview" in Marks and de Courtivron, op.cit.. p.238 175illliL., p.174 l76Kaplan, E, Ann, Women and Film (1983: p.9) 70 The film is about silence as a political female strategy to counter the male urge to articulate, analyse, dissect. Duras regards silence as the main way in which women can resist the oppression of language. Silence for her paradoxically becomes a means for entering culture: "it marks a gap, a fissure through which change can possibly take place" .177

The use of silence as a means of expression is not a pos1t1ve step. It is an articulate means by which to portray women's alienation from patriarchal language - "The margin serves as my space," 17 8 writes Quebec novelist France Theoret in Une Voix pour Odile - but it does not seek to fill in the gaps left by the lack of expression of female experience. The point of seeking a peculiarly female means of expression such as that predicted by "speaking the body" is to give voice to the silence in the belief that women have been silent - and silenced - for too long:

'I began to write,' the dancer said, 'to allow the words which had accumulated in my throat to spill onto the page. They came in strange grunts, shapes, grimaces, at first, which I am just coming to recognize. The important thing,' she hoarsely whispered, 'is to speak. Don't be afraid to speak. Silence is death,' she said.1 79

The works of France Theoret and Marguerite Duras on silence, m both film and literature have successfully portrayed the "darkness" to which women are condemned by patriarchal language, but prolonged use of silence as a tool would be ultimately self­ destructive. Some kind of writing is necessary to assert women's voice for silence can only articulate what is negative in women's experience; it cannot express new visions or imaginings.

Helene Cixous presents an alternative option for women seeking to write but also to step aside from conventional discourse. She often uses classical and mythological imagery to convey her ideas. In her

177 ib.id...., p.102 178Theoret, France quoted in Gould, op.cit., p.623 179Metzger, Deena, quoted in Stanley J.P. and Wolfe, S.J. (eds.) The Coming Out Stories (1980: p.xviii) 7 1 writing she has identified variously with Medusa, Electra, Antigone, Dido, and Cleopatra. For Cixous, the world of myth, like the world of fairy tales, is perceived as pervasively meaningful and unified; as Toril Moi observes, it presents a universe where all difference, struggle and discord can in the end be satisfactorily resolved. In this writing water is a powerful feminine image:

We are ourselves sea, sand, coral, sea-weed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves... Heterogeneous, yes.ISO

The mythical world provides a safe space in which to write, reminiscent of the comfort and security of the mother's womb. Toril Moi observes that within this space Cixous' subject is free to move from one subject to another, or to merge oceanically with the world. Ultimately though, this form of writing contains flaws and contradictions, which brings to mind Mary Daly's shortcomings with Gyn/Ecology.

Within her poetic mythology, writing is posited as an absolute activity of which all women qua women automatically partake. Stirring and seductive though such a vision is, it can say nothing of the actual inequities, deprivations and violations that women, as social beings rather than as mythological archetypes, must constantly suffer.181

It is this absence of any specific analysis of the material factors preventing women from writing that constitutes a major weakness of Cixous' utopias. It is possible to acknowledge the power of her vision and feel inspired by the evocation of the imaginative powers of women, while at the same time examining its political implications to try and find exactly what action she is trying to spur women to.

Perhaps women's wntmg will be most articulate - will best convey the body, jouissance - when it is spoken as well as written. In The Comin2 Out Stories - a good example of the cohesion and connection

180cixous, (1981) op.cit., p.260 181Moi, (1988) op,cit.. p.123 72 of women's speaking and wntmg, being a written account of oral recollections - the poet Cherrie Moraga Lawrence recounts her experience listening to another woman poet, Ntozake Shange, give a reading of her work:

Sitting in that auditorium chair was the first time I had realized to the core of me that for years I had disowned the language I knew best - ignored the words and rhythms that were the closest to me. The sounds of my mother and aunts gossiping - half in English, half in Spanish - while drinking cerveza in the kitchen. And the hands - I had cut off the hands in my poems. But not in conversation; still the hands could not be kept down. Still they insisted on moving.18 2

Another poet, Susan Griffin, describes a similar experience, and the empowering feeling it gave her:

It is more that on hearing one leaps. When I first heard poetry read out loud the way it can be, by black American poets. And the joy I felt at that possibility. As if poetry had suddenly broken out of incarceration. And I break out of incarceration. This thing frees me.183

For Susan Griffin poetry which is read and poetry which 1s heard are inseparable:

This work is radiant with will, with desire to speak; it sings with the clear tones of long-suppressed utterance, is brilliant with light, with powerful and graceful forms, with forms that embody feeling and enlarge the capacity of the beholder, of the listener to feeI.184

The question of the importance of speaking the language - not just writing it - is examined from a different angle by Sally McConnell­ Ginet in "Intonation in a Man's World". She suggests the possibility

l 82Lawrence, Cherrie Moraga, "La Guera" in Stanley and Wolfe (eds.), op.cit., p.191 183Griffin, (1982) op.cit.. p.226 184ihid.., p234 73 that the way we speak may be even more important than what we say:

Intonation - the tunes to which we set the text of our talk - may well prove to be the chief linguistic expression in American English of (relative) femininity and masculinity, because it serves to underscore the gender identification of the participants in certain contexts of communication ... Indeed, women's speech may well be discounted in a man's world primarily on the basis of 'how' it is said - the tunes used - rather than because of what is said - the substance of female texts. I 85

Other writers have examined the possibilities raised by McConnell­ Ginet, notably Susan Brownmiller's chapter on 'the voice' in Femininity and in Frankie Armstrong's "The Voice Is the Muscle of the Soul" .186 In "Womantalk: The voice of a very little girl", Sherrill Cheda compiles a list of the unflattering terms used to describe women who dare to speak - few of which are ever applied to men: " ... babbler, chatterbox, fishwife, gossip, harridan, magpie, nag, scold, shrew, tattler, termagant and virago" .1 87 Women have been punished for the sin of talking for centuries. Wives in the Middle Ages could be legally beaten for nagging or scolding their husbands. In eighteenth century England and America women who were ribald or abusive in their speech could be placed on ducking stools and plunged into water. Evidently the theories of interruption and silencing earlier examined with regard to women's writing equally apply to their speech.

The question remains whether women's writing will be better, more appropriate, more articulate if it is spoken or performed. Perhaps 'body language' is an essential ingredient for 'writing the body'. In "The Laugh of the Medusa" Helene Cixous refers to the 'body language' of speech, and affirms the necessary connection for women of oral and written language, at the same time drawing

185McConnell-Ginet, Sally, "Intonation in a Man's World" in fil.gn£ (3, 3, 1978: p.542) 186 Armstrong, Frankie, "The Voice is the Muscle of the Soul" in Saunders, Lesley (ed.) Glancin~ Fires (1987) I87cheda, Sherrill, "Womantalk... " in RFR/DRF (p. 18) 74 attention to the scission between the logic of oral speech and the logic of the text made by the patriarchy:

It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language. Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away - that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak - even just open her mouth in public. A double distress, for even if she transgresses, her words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine ... Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering ... she physically materializes what she is thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she's saying .. .188

Barbara Starrett's article "I Dream in Female" 189 raises another form of expression: the language and symbolism of dreams. Dream imagery is often prevalent in women's writing and shares with poetry the ability to transgress accepted rules of grammar and structure. In relating dreams, women challenge and shift the boundaries of English in ways most often associated with poetic consciousness, lacking the self-consciousness which usually goes with the interpretative creative process.

Dreams and poetry also share a peculiar kind of perception, a dangerous perception because it is different and threatening to the established order of consciousness, coherence, unequivocal meaning.

Perhaps the quest for a blueprint or set of instructions on how to write the body can end here. If women can write their dreams with a lack of self-consciousness; if they can discard the cerebral baggage inappropriately imposed by the patriarchy, and reach back into their unselfconscious selves - their bodies - perhaps a true women's writing can emerge. Adrienne Rich's Dream of a Common Language becomes not a failure - an unattained dream - instead it can be recognized as a successfully realised precedent and vision: that our

l 88Cixous, (1983) op.cit., p.284 l 89starrett, Barbara, "I Dream in Female ... " in The Lesbian Reader (1975) 75 common language is the language of our dreams. "The poem," says Susan Griffin,

is like a dream that while I dream reveals me to myself. My body becomes a chamber of resonance whose sounds I record. The poet returns to the knowledge of the body as a source of truth.190

Women's lives and their writing become interconnected m this language; new images create new space:

Our writing, our talking, our living, our images have created another world than the man-made one we were born to, and continuously in this weaving we move, at one and the same time, toward each other, and outward, expanding the limits of the possible.191

Women's writing must discard the patriarchal bonds that have limited their perceptions and descriptions of their experience; therein lies what Adrienne Rich calls "the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored."192

l90Griffin, (1982) op,cit,. p.243 l 9l Stanley, J.P. and Wolfe, S. "Towards a Feminist Aesthetic" in Chrysalis (6, 1978: p.59) 192Rich, (1980) "When We Dead Awaken ... " op.cit.. p.35 76 CONCLUSION

Foucault argues that language structures our reality since "from the depths of time it has always named."193 Naming has been an "arbitrary and immensely powerful weapon."194 Language has articulated in male terms what is the correct vision of things, and m literature, what is the canon. The absence of language to represent female experience (sexuality, emotions, perceptions, fantasies) relegates women to the position of "Other", outside the realms of what is real, serious or powerful in our patriarchal world. Language is the foundation upon which the reality of everyday life persists: it is the "guardian of the patriarchy." 195 Language preserves the status quo by discouraging transgressions of conventional language boundaries.

For women to create and write and speak their own discourse must be a subversive and revolutionary act:

If all women begin to speak. To tell everything. To say everything. Men will begin to melt. To speak beyond mystificology. Society and politics will undo themselves, 196 forecasts Denise Boucher m Cyprine. Similarly, Muriel Rukeseyer writes:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.197

The contention presented by the so-called French feminists, particularly (though not necessarily identically) by Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous, is that the situation of women cannot change until they have their own discourse, and that women's writing must be based in their bodies. Their writing must articulate sexuality and l93Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (1973: p.103) 194Gould, Karen, "Setting Words Free ... " in ~ (6, 4, 1981: p.621) 19sc ameron, op.c1t,,· p. 2 l 96Boucher, Denise, from Cyprine. quoted in Gould, op.cit.. p.638 197Rukeseyer, Muriel, "Kathe Kollwitz" in Bemikow, Louise (ed.), The World Split Open (1979) 77 sexual pleasure: "jouissance": "I have to talk about it," writes Annie Leclerc,

... the jouissance of my woman's womb, of my woman's vagina, of my woman's senses. I have to talk about these, for it is from there only that new words will appear, which will belong to the woman and originate in her,198

It is the function of l'ecriture feminine to inscribe difference in an instinctive and transforming manner to awaken women to one another and to undermine patriarchy.

Despite the various obstructions thrown up by the patriarchy, women have always written, and they are always exploring new ways of writing. But women's writing has never had the revolutionary capacity - to subvert and ultimately bring an end to patriarchy - that is anticipated by the French feminists. Women writing in the English language have produced a great deal of valuable literature from all points on a spectrum of woman­ identification, but it is hard to find an instance of one who has "written the body" as Helene Cixous exhorted. Fissures have developed but the world remains intact.

The French feminists have posed a riddle which has no answer currently in existence. The riddle is no flippant self-indulgent intellectual exercise. It is a serious attempt to forecast an end to patriarchy by giving expression to female experience, creativity, and sexuality which must be kept mute if patriarchy is to continue to exist. The one clue contained in the riddle they present is the language in which it is couched. The French feminists use language which is itself innovative, metaphoric and unconventional. In employing such language they suggest that women's writing, similarly, must deviate from the norm and step beyond current boundaries.

198 Leclerc, Annie, quoted in Feral, Josette, "The Powers of Difference" in Eisenstein, Hester and Jardine, Alice, (eds.) The Future of Difference (1987: p.93) 78 Developments in poetry by women have shown by far the greatest potential, bringing us to the brink of the faultline which will split open our world. Women are poised to write in that revolutionary, shattering discourse anticipated by the French, which will draw on their history, experiences, bodies, imaginings. The writing will be alarming and inspiring and accessible to women, revelatory to men, and fatal to patriarchy.

79 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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87