Page 297 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

As the post structuralist critique of identity politics took hold over the following decade and more, Notes
it became unfashionable, in ideas and in dress, it seemed, for the avant-garde of the female
professoriate to identify with either men or women.
English quotes Showalter's controversial 1997 Vogue article:
"From Mary Wollstonecraft to Naomi Wolf, feminism has often taken a hard line on fashion,
shopping, and the whole beauty Monty.... But for those of us sisters hiding Welcome to Your
Facelift inside The Second Sex, a passion for fashion can sometimes seem a shameful secret life....
I think it's time I came out of the closet."
Showalter was reportedly severely criticized by her academic colleagues for her stance in favour
of patriarchal symbols of consumer capitalism and traditional femininity. Showalter's rejoinder
was: "We needn't fall into postmodern apocalyptic despair about the futility of political action or
the impossibility of theoretical correctness as a pre-condition for action" (English).
Academic Teaching
Teaching Literature (2006) was widely and positively reviewed, especially in the American journal
Pedagogy, which gave it three review-essays and called it "the book we wish we had in our
backpacks when we started teaching." It was also harshly criticized by John Rouse in his review of
the book. Rouse lambasted Showalter for what he sees as her "banal" suggestions and mocks that
she describes her revelation that literature should be taught as performance, as a "discovery."
Rouse nevertheless gives her credit, albeit condescendingly, for attempting to make literature
"more attractive to undergraduates." Ultimately Rouse criticizes Showalter's approach to teaching
literature: "the work will be flayed, filleted, and displayed as another specimen of the genre."

27.4 Summaries of Major Works
Showalter's Ph.D. thesis is called The Double Critical Standard: Criticism of Women Writers in
England, 1845-1880 (1969) and was later turned into the book A Literature of Their Own: British
Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1978), which contains a lengthy and much-discussed
chapter on Virginia Woolf.
The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985) discusses hysteria,
which was once known as the "female malady" and according to Showalter, is called depression
today. Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about proper feminine behaviour have shaped
the definition and treatment of female insanity from the Victorian era to the present.
Sexual Anarchy: Gender at Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) outlines a history of the sexes and
the crises, themes, and problems associated with the battle for sexual supremacy and identity.
In the 1990s, Showalter began writing for popular magazines, bringing her work further into the
public sphere than it ever had been during her academic career. Showalter was the television critic
for People magazine in 1996. She explains her impetus to do popular cultural work: "I've always
really loved popular culture, but it wasn't something serious intellectuals were supposed to be
concerned about. … I would like to be able to bring my background and my skills to subjects that
do reach a wide audience" (Plett).
In Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997) Showalter argues that hysteria, a
medical condition traditionally seen as feminine, has persisted for centuries and is now manifesting
itself in cultural phenomena in the forms of socially and medically accepted maladies. Psychological
and physical effects of unhappy lives become "hysterical epidemics" when popular media saturate
the public with paranoid reports and findings, essentially legitimizing, as Showalter calls them,
"imaginary illnesses" (Hystories, cover). Showalter says "Hysteria is part of everyday life. It not
only survives in the 1990s, but it is more contagious than in the past. Newspapers, magazines, talk
shows, self-help books, and of course the Internet ensure that ideas, once planted, manifest
themselves internationally as symptoms" (Plett). This view has caused Showalter to be criticized
by patient's rights groups and medical practitioners, who argue that Showalter, with no formal
medical training, is not qualified to make this determination.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 291