Page 291 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

rely on work done in biological and linguistic criticism. This essay would be closer to gynocritics Notes
which examines the characteristic of a distinctively woman’s practice of writing, and would perhaps
be called gynocentric (or woman-centred) as opposed to androcentric (or male-centred).
The data Showalter uses to support her theory of gynocritics is based on four models. Organic or
biological criticism believes that biological differentiation is fundamental to understanding how
women see themselves in relation to society and hence to understanding how they represent
themselves in writing. Its strength is its reliance on personal experience, that verges on the
confessional. Its weakness is that it promotes exclusionism based on biological difference. Linguistic
criticism examines possible differences in the ways women and men use language, explores reasons
for these differences. Its strength is the powerful emotional appeal of the notion of a women’s
language. Its weakness is that it does not examine whether women and men have equality of
opportunity and access to a common language. Thus inadvertently it may perpetuate repression
instead of obtaining freedom by examining it. Psychoanalytical feminist criticism is a model of
difference based on the relationship between gender and the creative process. It has a high degree
of sensitivity when applied to specific texts, authors and groups of cultures. Its limitation as a
theoretical model arises from its inability to explain social, economic or historical processes of
change. Showalter therefore vests her faith in a model based on a theory of women’s culture.
Theories of biology, language and psyche inform such a theory of culture by suggesting a range of
social contexts. Showalter borrows a diagrammatic representation from anthropology to explain
the theory of women’s culture. Women’s culture and men’s culture are represented by two
intersecting circles with a large area of common experience and two slight crescent-shaped areas
of experience. One of these is specific to women and the other is specific to men. Historically
women have been the muted (or silenced) group and men the dominant group. Feminist theories
(according to Showalter) need to articulate the area specific to women and put this at the centre of
women’s writing. The consequences promised are (a) a rewriting of cultural and literary history
so as to include women, (b) a recreation of the canon and (c) an overhauling of literary classifications
based on era and genre.

26.3 Its Contribution

26.3.1 Immediately
Showalter’s earlier work had attracted criticism on account of its refusal to take African-American
writing into account. Barbara Smith’s ‘Toward a Black Feminst Criticism’ complains about
Showalter’s persistent ignoring of any non-white female writing. Smith begins by quoting
Showalter’s sole mention of such writing : ‘Furthermore, there are other literary subcultures (African-
American novelists, for example) whose history offers a precedent for feminist scholarship to use
(Showalter, 172) and goes on to point out that such appropriation — even in the cause of feminist
theory — is racist. “The idea of critics like Showalter using Black literature is chilling, a case of
barely disguised cultural imperialism’. In contrast ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’ tries to
work toward cultural open-endedness in two ways. First she speaks of two cultures : women and
men — as being muted and dominant respectively and thus deliberately avoids the concept of a
subculture. In a sense all women — regardless of race and class comprised the marginalised
culture and this common repression makes all women one, in Showalter’s cultural model. Secondly
Showalter emphasises that such a gynocentric cultural model must — if it is to work — be able to
take into account all the forces — ethnic, academic or economic — so as to ‘plot the precise cultural
locus of female literary identity’. This gain in cultural sensitivity is, I think, the most apparent
impact of Showalter’s essay. It makes gynocritics seem to offer a model that can take on board
cultural variables and say, it can have a receptivity to feminist theories in the developing world.
Nonetheless [see 6.2] it is a claim contested by Indian feminist theorists who feel that gynocritics
is too obviously limited by its inheritance of Western cultural imperialism.
26.3.2 Subsequently
How well has gynocritics worn ? Look at the following comment and see what you make of it
...there is a danger that a ‘gynocriticism’ that emphasises the pathology of women writers’ interaction

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