Page 289 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 26 : Elaine Showalter: Four Models of Feminism in 'Ferminist Criticism in the Wilderness'

theorists suggest — has been dominated by Europeans so far. Finally there is the isolation that Notes
suggests how problematic it is for feminist theories to relate to any other critical school (s). Is this
isolation enabling or disabling ? It becomes increasingly problematic as feminist theories develop.
I will return to this early essay — ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’ but just for now I’d like to make
one quick point concerning Showalter. How far or how close do you think Showalter is from
Woolf's original constituency ?. Perhaps a quick look at the context in which she writes will
suggest an answer.

26.1 Social and Cultural Background

26.1.1 The Age
With the end of the Second World War, international political and economic influence had shifted
away from Britain — whose Empire was declining. The new superpowers, the United States and
the (then) Soviet Union were emerging. The period of the Cold War — the hostility between these
two power blocs —followed. This period was punctuated by various crises such as the Berlin
Blockade, the Cuban crisis, the Korean and Vietnam wars followed. During this time the American
campus life tried to provide sites of alternative culture to the capitalism of the establishment.
When the United States military intervened in Vietnam many American campuses became centres
of the peace movement and were critical of the government. In 1968, the ‘Paris Spring’ or the
young people’s movement across Europe in favour of peace and liberation was echoed by similar
movements in American campuses. The 1970’s and 1980’s saw an explosion in the field of critical
theory in American campuses especially with reference to women’s writing and to African-American
literature. Outside the academy the Women’s movement and the Black power movement had
begun a long time before this. But within the academy, the theoretical bases of these movements
were developed most extensively during the seventies and the eighties, in other words, during the
time of a great deal of Showalter’s work. This was also the time when the American academy
consolidated its response to European challengers in the field of theory. What — if anything — is
likely to have been the effect of these pressures on the women’s movement and on the question of
women’s writing ?
26.1.2 Position of Women
Within the academy — and this is primarily Showalter’s context — this is a fraught issue. Feminist
theories by this time have formulated three central questions around which—by and large — the
debate is structured. These are set out most clearly perhaps in Annette Kolodny’s 1980 essay
‘Dancing Through the Minefield : Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a
Feminist Literary Criticism. I will list the propositions as Kolodny does, and then offer a quick
gloss of my own.
1. Literary history (and with that, the historicity of literature) is a fiction
2. Insofar as we are taught to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms.
3. Since the grounds upon which we assign aesthetic value to texts are never infallible, unchangeable, or
universal, we must reexamine not only our aesthetics but, as well, the inherent biases and assumptions
informing the critical methods which (in part) shape our aesthetic responses.
In other words, by the time Showalter’s prescribed essay is written, the three points established in
the American academy concerning feminist theories on which there is general agreement are
respectively : feminist theories are about the reconstruction of the canon so as to reclaim a stronghold
of patriarchy , the sensitising of readers to paradigms or theoretical models — concealed within
texts—based on gender-conditioning , and the role of theory in changing the way in which readers
interpret texts. Moreover in terms of bread-and-butter positioning, Women’s Studies had by this
time become a recognised discipline at American universities. Conferences were being held, journals
published, and syllabi framed on feminist theories. What could have been amiss ?

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