Page 301 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

accommodate and permit. It is very difficult to propose theoretical coherence in an activity which Notes
by its nature is so eclectic and wide-ranging, although as a critical practice feminist reading has
certainly been very influential. But in the free play of the interpretive field, the feminist critique
can only compete with alternative readings, all of which have the built-in obsolescence of Buicks,
cast away as newer readings take their place. As Kolodny, the most sophisticated theorist of
feminist interpretation, has conceded:
All the feminist is asserting, then, is her own equivalent right to liberate new (and
perhaps different) significances from these same texts; and, at the same time, her right
to choose which features of a text she takes as relevant because she is, after all, asking
new and different questions of it. In the process, she claims neither definitiveness nor
structural completeness for her different readings and reading systems, but only their
usefulness in recognizing the particular achievements of woman-as-author and their
applicability in conscientiously decoding woman-as-sign.
Rather than being discouraged by these limited objectives, Kolodny found them the happy cause
of the "playful pluralism" of feminist critical theory, a pluralism which she believes to be "the only
critical stance consistent with the current status of the larger women's movement." Her feminist
critic dances adroitly through the theoretical minefield.
Keenly aware of the political issues involved and presenting brilliant arguments, Kolodny
nonetheless fails to convince me that feminist criticism must altogether abandon its hope "of
establishing some basic conceptual model." If we see our critical job as interpretation and
reinterpretation, we must be content with pluralism as our critical stance. But if we wish to ask
questions about the process and the contexts of writing, if we genuinely wish to define ourselves
to the uninitiated, we cannot rule out the prospect of theoretical consensus at this early stage.
All feminist criticism is in some sense revisionist, questioning the adequacy of accepted conceptual
structures, and indeed most contemporary American criticism claims to be revisionist too. The
most exciting and comprehensive case for this "revisionary imperative" is made by Sandra Gilbert:
at its most ambitious, she asserts, feminist criticism "wants to decode and demystify all the disguised
questions and answers that have always shadowed the connections between textuality and sexuality,
genre and gender, psychosexual identity and cultural authority."" But in practice, the revisionary
feminist critique is redressing a grievance and is built upon existing models. No one would deny
that feminist criticism has affinities to other contemporary critical practices and methodologies
and that the best work is also the most fully informed. Nonetheless, the feminist obsession with
correcting, modifying, supplementing, revising, humanizing, or even attacking male critical theory
keeps us dependent upon it and retards our progress in solving our own theoretical problems.
What I mean here by "male critical theory" is a concept of creativity, literary history, or literary
interpretation based entirely on male experience and put forward as universal. So long as we look
to androcentric models for our most basic principles—even if we revise them by adding the feminist
frame of reference-we are learning nothing new. And when the process is so one-sided, when male
critics boast of their ignorance of feminist criticism, it is disheartening to find feminist critics still
anxious for approval from the "white fathers" who will not listen or reply. Some feminist critics have
taken upon themselves a revisionism which becomes a kind of homage; they have made Lacan the
ladies' man of Diacritics and have forced Pierre Macherey into those dark alleys of the psyche where
Engels feared to tread. According to Christiane Makward, the problem is even more serious in
France than in the United States: "If neofeminist thought in France seems to have ground to a halt,"
she writes, "it is because it has continued to feed on the discourse of the masters."
It is time for feminist criticism to decide whether between religion and revision we can claim any
firm theoretical ground of our own. In calling for a feminist criticism that is genuinely women
centered, independent, and intellectually coherent, I do not mean to endorse the separatist fantasies
of radical feminist visionaries or to exlude from our critical practice a variety of intellectual tools.
But we need to ask much more searchingly what we want to know and how we can find answers
to the questions that come from our experience. I do not think that feminist criticism can find a
usable past in the androcentric critical tradition. It has more to learn from women's studies than
from English studies, more to learn from international feminist theory than from another seminar

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