Page 295 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 27: Elaine Showalter: Four Models of Feminism in “Feminist Criticism in Wilderness”—Biological...

27.1 Critical Importance Notes

Showalter's book Inventing Herself (2001), a survey of feminist icons, was the culmination of a
lengthy interest in communicating the importance of understanding feminist tradition. Showalter's
early essays and editorial work in the late 1970s and the 1980s survey the history of the feminist
tradition within the "wilderness" of literary theory and criticism. Working in the field of feminist
literary theory and criticism, which was just emerging as a serious scholarly pursuit in universities
in the 1970s, Showalter's writing reflects a conscious effort to convey the importance of mapping
her discipline's past in order to both ground it in substantive theory, and amass a knowledge base
that will be able to inform a path for future feminist academic pursuit.
In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter traces the history of women's literature, suggesting that it
can be divided into three phases:
1. Feminine: In the Feminine phase (1840-1880), "women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual
achievements of the male culture, and internalized its assumptions about female nature" (New,
137).
2. Feminist: The Feminist phase (1880-1920) was characterized by women's writing that protested
against male standards and values, and advocated women's rights and values, including a
demand for autonomy.
3. Female: The Female phase (1920-) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says, "women reject both
imitation and protest-two forms of dependency-and turn instead to female experience as the
source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and
techniques of literature" (New, 139).
Rejecting both imitation and protest, Showalter advocated approaching feminist criticism from a
cultural perspective in the current Female phase, rather than from perspectives that traditionally
come from an androcentric perspective like psychoanalytic and biological theories, for example.
Feminists in the past have worked within these traditions by revising and criticizing female
representations, or lack thereof, in the male traditions (that is, in the Feminine and Feminist
phases). In her essay Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981), Showalter says, "A cultural
theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race
nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women's
culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women
writers to each other over time and space" (New, 260).
Showalter does not advocate replacing psychoanalysis, for example, with cultural anthropology;
rather, she suggests that approaching women's writing from a cultural perspective is one among
many valid perspectives that will uncover female traditions. However, cultural anthropology and
social history are especially fruitful because they "can perhaps offer us a terminology and a diagram
of women's cultural situation" (New, 266). Showalter's caveat is that feminist critics must use
cultural analyses as ways to understand what women write, rather than to dictate what they
ought to write (New, 266).
However isolationist-like Showalter's perspective may sound at first, she does not advocate a
separation of the female tradition from the male tradition. She argues that women must work both
inside and outside the male tradition simultaneously (New, 264). Showalter says the most
constructive approach to future feminist theory and criticism lies in a focus on nurturing a new
feminine cultural perspective within a feminist tradition that at the same time exists within the
male tradition, but on which it is not dependent and to which it is not answerable.
27.2 Gynocritics

Showalter coined the term 'gynocritics' to describe literary criticism based in a feminine perspective.
Probably the best description Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Toward a Feminist Poetics:
In contrast to [an] angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to
construct a female framework for the analysis of women's literature, to develop new models based

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