DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A FEMINIST LITERARY PERSPECTIVE Susan Koppelman Cornillon A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1975 Graduate School Representativ BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY a. © 1975 SUSAN KOPPELMAN CORNILLON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii 610310 -SM» A'W VMi .^00 ABSTRACT This study examines the need for feminist criticism and how best to fill it. Feminist criticism is needed to restore objectivity to a literature and criticism distorted by sexism. The most pernicious effects of masculine bias upon the cre­ ation and consumption of literature are expressed through the literary-critical establishment--publishers, critics, profes­ sors, and librarians. Sexist criticism in its most insidious form masks biased evaluations as objective description, and removes literature and criticism from its socio-historical context. The subjec­ tive distortion implicit in a sexist perspective is fundamen­ tally hierarchical; it imposes a vertical evaluative structure upon a multi-faceted socio-historical reality. A critical per­ spective that divorces evaluative distinctions from a socio- historical rationale, whilst claiming that these idealistic dis­ tinctions are anything more than objectifications of subjective bias, and uses that structure to determine the creation and con­ sumption of literature, seriously censors writers' and readers' perception of history and society, censorship that for women has proven spiritually crippling and murderous. So traditionally evaluative literary categorizations have been ignored. To liberate the literary-critical establishment from con­ trol by the masculino-centric critical conspiracy, means must be provided to unite feminist critics in creating and propaga­ ting feminist perspectives. An anthology of feminist criticism was an obvious stage in that program. Examination of crucial areas in Joyce Carol Oates' work provided the basis for dis­ covering concerns central to a nascent feminist criticism, con­ cerns that served to inform editorial considerations of femi­ nist critical essays to be included in an anthology. Summaries of essays included show the expanding range of developing femi­ nist criticism. Implementing the feminist critical vision, an examination of feminist literary courses revealed the need for a literary information retrieval system appropriate to feminist concerns. A model for such a system was outlined and illustrated. Ill ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The book, Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, which served as an important background to this paper was in many ways a joint venture. Without the encouragement, support, and kind­ ness of Ray Browne the book would still be a dream. I also wish to thank Louis Howe, Lee Levine, and Dorothy Betts for their endless good humor and technical assistance, and Pat Browne, Dick Fillion, and Nora Erb for their help. My thanks to Larry Anderson and Nancy Stepp for their help with proofreading, and to Linda Harden, Dawn Anderson, and Wayne and Toni Trainer for many hours of child care. I am, of course, eternally grateful to the contributors to this vol­ ume for their cooperation, enthusiam, and good work. In writing this paper and helping me with the book that came be­ fore it, I am grateful to the man I live with, John Cornillon, for re­ lieving me of hours of my share of housework and child care called for in our contract, for endless hours of help with editing and proof­ reading and listening to me think out loud. Thank you for your faith in me, tenderness and love. And thank you Edward Nathan Koppelman Cor­ nillon for helping with Mommy’s book and Susan's dissertation, for helping me test my ideas in perspective and patting me on the head when I got too tired. And thanks to Helen Mehler for her diligent typing, proofreading, comments, love, strength, and devoted persistence despite hectic working conditions. And finally, thanks to the assis­ tance and persistence, criticism and support of the members of my dis- iv sertation committee: Professors Paul Haas, Jim Harner, Howard McCord, f Phil O’Connor, and the Chairman, Ray Browne. V • i TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ......................... I A brief examination of censorship ....... ...... 1 Notes toward a theory of literature ........ .11 The need for Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives...................... .....................21 THE FICTION OF FICTION.............. .. 28 INTRODUCTION TO SUMMARIES OF ESSAYS. INCLUDED IN IMAGES OF WOMAN IN FICTION: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES. ............. .58 What Can a Heroine Do? Of Why Women Can't Write...... .59 Popular Literature as Social Reinforcement: The Case of Charlotte Temple.................. ..............61 The Gentle Doubters: Images of Women in English­ women's Novels, 1840-1920 ...................... ... .63 The Servility of Dependence: The Dark Lady in. Trollope. ...................................... .. .65 Gentle Truths for Gentle Readers: The Fiction of Elizabeth Goudge...................... .. ...........67 The Image of Women in Fiction........ ............. .70 Silences: When Writers Don't Write .............. .. .73 Why Aren't We Writing About Ourselves?. ............. 76 The Women of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales ............. 77 The Abuse of Eve by the New World Adam.......... 79 Sex Roles in Three of Hermann Hesse's Novels. ........... 82 Humanbecoming: Form & Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel............ ...................................... 85 vi A Case for Violet Strange . ........................... 88 Fictional Feminists in The-Bostonians and The Odd Women................ ..............................91 Heroism in To The Lighthouse................ ............93 May Sarton’s Women.. ............................... 95 Feminism and Literature . ..............................97 Modernism and History.............................. .100 The Value and Peril for Women of Reading Women Writers ......................... .............. 102 The Other Criticism: Feminism vs. Formalism........ .. .104 Sexism and the Double Standard in Literature........... 107 Feminist Style Criticism............ .109 SOME BIBLIOGRAPHICAL EXCURSIONS.............. ............ Ill The black woman in literature.................. 132 Feminist fiction......................................... 135 Growing up female: the drama of emergent consciousness........................................... 138 The jewish woman in literature...........................142 Prostitution in literature.......... .145 The rural woman in literature........................ .146 Woman and madness in literature.................... .. .148 The woman as writer in literature.......................150 Work in women's lives............................. 153 BIBLIOGRAPHY 158 1 INTRODUCTION A Brief Examination of Censorship Female Studies I-IV lists over 800 new courses in women's studies in the past few years, and more than half of these are being taught with a focus on literature. Those of us who have looked to . literature, and especially fiction, for answers, for models, for clues ’ ’ 4 ’ s’ _ to the universal questions of who we are or might become are beginning to understand why the answers we have sought have not been there. We are now beginning to understand how we have been alienated from our­ selves and from the literature we loved, or hoped to love, and still do half love, by the biases of what we have been taught and the biases incorporated into the works. People--both women and men--are beginning to see literature in new perspectives opened by the Women’s Liberation Movement. The criti­ cal and creative writings of feminists can enlighten our understanding by helping us distance ourselves from the literature; prevent us from accepting the implications’and prescriptions for behavior, for the li­ miting self-images and aspirations for women embodied in most of the literature we have been taught is important or great. People have be­ gun to question and challenge the value structures that insist that certain kinds of writing, certain kinds of experiences and characters, are worthy of serious consideration while others--often those that we have been taught to disdain--are beneath contempt as well as contempla­ tion. Obviously there is desperate need for re-evaluation of all our 2 shibboleths. The power exerted by those who have been permitted to assume the roles of arbiters of literary taste has been great. It has affected what has been published, reviewed, read by whom, which reading flaunted and which hidden. The arbiters of taste have exercised a control over literature that has been even more insidious than censorship, because it has given people the illusion that the literary world was free from censorship; it has given people the illusion that their reading was freely selected from a free market. But the tax on foreign goods has been so exorbitant that they rarely have reached the marketplace. When I talk of foreign goods, I do not intend to refer to litera­ ture from different nationalities, but rather to literature written from the perspective of and out of the experience of persons, classes, groups foreign to those perspectives and experiences of the powerful in our culture. Those foreigners--women, blacks, third world people, working class people, gay people--have not only often not had the equipment available to them for transforming the raw material of their lives into literature, but even when