Page 299 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

literature, but also because it heirs them avoid the problem of tension between their interpretative Notes
approach and the question of aesthetics. When dealing with a male writer feminists face a problem
of resolving the tension of the ethics of his literary text. In fact, this tension between the aesthetic
and moral or political dimensions of texts has been a central problem to the practitioners of the
school of Image of Women criticism. Let us take Josephine Donovan as an example. When discussing
Faulkner's Light in August, Donovan states that she appreciates the formal elements of this text.
She asserts that the work is really magnificent, but she can not bear the huge rank of misogynism
and racism in this text. This made it impossible for her, as a feminist, to accept the ethics of this
text. From Donovan's view we came to know that any literary work written by males which
carries any sort of misogynism or racism should not be treated by feminists; simply because if they
did this would be an undeclared approval of these themes which are against feminism.
But the existence of problems should not prevent us from declaring the importance of Images of
Women criticism. Its major importance reveals itself when reading Kate Millett's Sexual Politics,
Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women, among others. Those feminists tried seriously to
deconstruct androcentrism, and made both women and men think of literature in different terms
through establishing a feminist interpretation for the first time. This interpretation became the
basis for feminist criticism.
I agree with Showalter that gynocriticism is more influential than feminist critique, but I do not
agree that the second is less important than the first. Because the importance of both gynocriticism
and feminist critique, or the Image of Woman critique, relates much to the stage where each
activity should be used and applied. For example, the initial stage of feminist criticism needs a sort
of deconstructing any kind of misogyny against women in literary work by men. Once feminists
deconstructed it, they need to move on to a new stage, a stage which becomes a must especially
after the rediscovery of many women writings.
Through reading Showalter's two complementary essays: "Toward a Feminist Poetics" (1979),
and "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" (1981), it's important to know that practicing
gynocriticism, through celebrating women writings, does not mean to abandon men's forever, or
to stop reading men's writings. We know, very well, how feminists fought to include women
writings into the literary canon. But is the process of including enough? Or do feminists need to
analyze these texts, exactly as they did with men's writings.

27.6 Biological and Linguistic Difference

Pluralism and the Feminist Critique
In a splendidly witty dialogue of 1975, Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson identified two
poles of feminist literary criticism. The first of these modes, righteous, angry, and admonitory, they
compared to the Old Testament, "looking for the sins and errors of the past." The second mode,
disinterested and seeking "the grace of imagination," they compared to the New Testament. Both are
necessary, they concluded, for only the Jeremiahs of ideology can lead us out of the "Egypt of female
servitude" to the promised land of humanism. Matthew Arnold also thought that literary critics
might perish in the wilderness before they reached the promised land of disinterestedness; Heilbrun
and Stimpson were neo-Arnoldian as befitted members of the Columbia and Barnard faculties. But
if, in 1981, feminist literary critics are still wandering in the wilderness, we are in good company;
for, as Geoffrey Hartman tells us, all criticism is in the wilderness. Feminist critics may be startled to
find ourselves in this band of theoretical pioneers, since in the American literary tradition the
wilderness has been an exclusively masculine domain. Yet between feminist ideology and the liberal
ideal of disinterestedness lies the wilderness of theory, which we too must make our home.
Women have no wilderness in them, they are provident instead content in the tight not cell of their
hearts. To eat dusty bread. —Louise Bogan, “Women”
Until very recently, feminist criticism has not had a theoretical basis; it has been an empirical
orphan in the theoretical storm. In 1975, I was persuaded that no theoretical manifesto could
adequately account for the varied methodologies and ideologies which called themselves feminist
reading or writing. By the next year, Annette Kolodny had added her observation that feminist

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