Chapter Wharton and Feminist Criticism 1. Freudian Psychology

Notes Chapter Wharton and Feminist Criticism 1. Freudian psychology, Marxism, and postmodernism have challenged easy understandings of the self and gender. Arguing that psychologi- cal, cultural, and economic forces constrain independent freedom of action to such a degree that a stable identity is perhaps no longer possible, such theorists understand the self as, at best, a temporary if useful story about one’s identity. If the self is unstable, claims about gender identity are even less fixed. Deconstructing traditional categories of male and female, post-structuralist gender critics assert that such binary thinking is too simplistic in assigning innate traits to men and women. Even more problematic, for feminist post-structuralists, is the potential for such binary categories to keep in place the very hier- archical thinking that has been used to exclude women and to devalue female roles and their stories. Separating out the study of women writers in women’s courses and searching for markers of gender in narra- tive style and content, so the argument goes, implicitly retain cultural beliefs that women’s narratives can never be seen as normative and universal. Other feminists respond that social and material conditions construct gender differences that clearly impact the experience of being a woman and her writing. Although it is certainly possible and sometimes useful to deconstruct the notion of a stable self and essential gender traits, most of the time, these theorists argue, we continue to treat each other as men and women. Our gendered bodies have obvious consequences for how we live and think about ourselves and how we tell our stories. 2. For a brief and highly readable summary of feminist criticism from Kate Millet to Kristeva see “Introduction: The Story So Far” by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore in The Feminist Reader. Toril Moi’s Sexual/Texual Politics, although more polemic in tone, provides a more detailed discussion. Moi is much more sympathetic to French feminism than Anglo-American theories. For a good overview of feminist analyses of gender that undergird this literary criticism, see Chapter 5, “Feminism, Stories of Gender,” in Thinking Fragments by Jane Flax. Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” in Coming to Terms edited by Elizabeth Weed offers a histo- rian’s perspective on the postmodernist debate. 158 NOTES 3. Rich talks about the woman writer’s need to heal the split between a sense of herself as a writer and a woman defined by her gender in cultural and material ways. Like T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Rich advocates an understanding of the literary past but, unlike Eliot, she believes this history can be turned to rev- olutionary purposes centered on altered ways of seeing gender and writing: “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (2046). For Rich, “the work of Western male poets reveals a deep, fatalistic pessimism as to the possibilities of change” and only women’s creative energy will generate change (2056). Rich’s implicit assumption that aesthetic change must be related to social change reflects the early Anglo-American emphasis on pragmatic action, ethics, and the transformation of the conditions under which women live and write. 4. Although Showalter’s gynocriticism establishes a rationale and method for examining the gender of writing, her paradigm also risks defining gender differences as innate rather than as social construc- tions by cultures organized around believed differences between genders. Even more problematically, Showalter must sacrifice individual differences between women in order to establish the impor- tance of a universal woman writer. In an effort to locate common ground for women writers founded on the historical and cultural experiences of living and writing as a woman, Showalter separates the woman writer from the very specifics of the historical and cultural conditions that she has argued shaped her as unique and wor- thy of specialized tools of analysis in the first place. The challenge of articulating difference based on the gendered experience of living and writing as a woman is complicated by the seeming paradox of recognizing the common material and cultural conditions of all women’s lives while, at the same time, ignoring the historical and cultural differences. 5. In her early essays, Kolodny, like Rich and Showalter, works to under- score essential differences based on gender in order to rescue women writers who have been devalued and silenced by masculine standards of literary value. Kolodny’s “A Map for Rereading” (1980) argues that feminist critics should look at how women’s writing comes from a nondominant literary tradition and, therefore, may require a different kind of reading. Her “Dancing Through the Minefield” (1980) calls for new critical methods of reading that take into account unequal power relationships and the differing literary histories that have shaped male and female writers. By the end of the decade, however, she has begun to confront those critics who see gender in more fluid ways and to point out the consequences of blurring the gender line. In “Dancing Between Left and Right” (1988), she directly responds to post-structuralist feminists who use the work of Lacan and Derrida NOTES 159 to theorize and complicate the idea of “difference.” Kolodny expresses concern about male appropriation of feminist work and the construc- tion of feminist studies within masculinist paradigms such as Lacan’s psychoanalytic structures or Derridean deconstruction. 6. Cixous, a post-structuralist sympathetic to Jacques Derrida, defined two kinds of writing: the masculine that preserves binary oppositions and the feminine that disrupts the normative structures of male-centered language. Her essays “Sorties” and “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975)—reading more like poetry than prose in their use of puns, paradox, and metaphor—enact her theories and demonstrate a use of feminine language that can never be entirely controlled by author or reader. 7. All page references to Irigaray’s essays refer to the collection of essays translated by Catherine Porter and published as This Sex Which Is Not One in 1985 by Cornell University Press. Reworking Lacan’s concept of desire and language, Irigaray finds “multiplicity” rather than “phallic oneness” (30) in the language of women. In “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids” (1974), Irigaray argues that “woman” exists outside the current language system that is based on properties of the solid, while the “woman-thing . speaks fluid” (111). Irigaray’s essays demonstrate her interest in a theoretical discourse that is allusive, witty, metaphorical, and female. 8. More recent American feminists are struggling to bridge the gap between American criticism and French theoretical discourse. See Essentially Speaking by Diana Fuss, “Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism” by Nancy Fraser, and Linda Nicholson and Linda Alcoff’s “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism.” For a more specific literary analysis, see Alice Jardine’s Gynesis. In her effort to link an American interest in ethics and social practice and French concerns with dis- courses and structures of language that undergird social practice, Jardine argues for the “rethinking of both male and female subjects’ relationship to the real, imaginary, and symbolic” (44). 9. Kamuf asks, “If feminist theory can be content to propose cosmetic modifications on the face of humanism and its institutions, will it have done anything more than reproduce the structure of women’s exclusion in the same code which has been extended to include her?” (45) Kamuf’s important attack on humanism highlights a system of thought that has defined masculine as universal and true, and feminine as the Other. 10. Miller extends her argument in another essay, “Changing the Subject” in Subject to Change. She notes the postmodernist claim for the death of the author “does not necessarily hold for women” who have “been excluded from the polis” and whose “relation to integrity and textuality, desire and authority, displays structurally important differences from that universal position” (106). 160 NOTES 11. Consider, for instance, Anne Bradstreet’s “farewell” to her unborn child in “Before the Birth of One of her Children” written in 1678. Although the story of America in the seventeenth century is usually about taming the wilderness and its native peoples and struggling to create the “city on the hill,” Bradstreet’s poem expressing her fear about giving birth (in a new country and under primitive conditions) suggests a very different, but equally viable story of courage. 12. The Kristeva Reader edited by Toril Moi provides both an overview of Kristeva’s work up to the mid-1980s and ready access to a number of her essays. In “The System and the Speaking Subject,” found in this volume, and Revolution in Poetic Language, translated from La revolution du langage poetique published in 1974, Kristeva sets forth her concept of the split subject and the dialectical relation between the symbolic (associated with patriarchal law and linguistic system) and the semiotic chora (associated with the maternal, pre-oedipal, and pre-linguistic). For further discussion of Kristeva’s view on semi- otics and literatures see Desire in Language. 13. Riley argues that “female persons can be very differently positioned” over time in relation to concepts of the self, soul and body, sexuality, and Nature (2). She believes that admitting the “instability” of women as a “historical foundation” is a way of escaping the current threats of “deconstruction and transcendence” to feminist analyses (5). “It’s not that our identity is to be dissipated into airy indetermi- nacy, extinction; instead it is to be referred to the substantial realms of discursive historical formation” (5).

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