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Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes on the masters. It must find its own subject, its own system, its own theory, and its own voice. As
Rich writes of Emily Dickinson, in her poem "I Am in Danger-Sir-," we must choose to have the
argument out at last on our own premises.
Defining the Feminine: Gynocritics and the Woman's Text
A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only
difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine. —Virginia Woolf
It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this
practice will never be theorized, enclosed, encoded-which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
—Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
In the past decade, I believe, this process of defining the feminine has started to take place.
Feminist criticism has gradually shifted its center from revisionary readings to a sustained
investigation of literature by women. The second mode of feminist criticism engendered by this
process is the study of women as writers, and its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres,
and structures of writing by women; the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the
individual or collective female career; and the evolution and laws of a female literary tradition. No
English term exists for such a specialized critical discourse, and so I have invented the term
"gynocritics." Unlike the feminist critique, gynocritics offers many theoretical opportunities. To see
women's writing as our primary subject forces us to make the leap to a new conceptual vantage
point and to redefine the nature of the theoretical problem before us. It is no longer the ideological
dilemma of reconciling revisionary pluralisms but the essential question of difference. How can we
constitute women as a distinct literary group? What is the difference of women's writing?
Patricia Meyer Spacks, I think, was the first academic critic to notice this shift from an androcentric
to a gynocentric feminist criticism. In The Female Imagination (1975), she pointed out that few
feminist theorists had concerned themselves with women's writing. Simone de Beauvoir's treatment
of women writers in The Second Sex "always suggests an a priori tendency to take them less
seriously than their masculine counterparts"; Mary Ellmann, in Thinking about Women, characterized
women's literary success as escape from the categories of womanhood; and, according to Spacks,
Kate Millett, in Sexual Politics, "has little interest in woman imaginative writers."'3 Spacks' wide-
ranging study inaugurated a new period of feminist literary history and criticism which asked,
again and again, how women's writing had been different, how womanhood itself shaped women's
creative expression. In such books as Ellen Moers' Literary Women (1976), my own A Literature of
Their Own (1977), Nina Baym's Woman's Fiction (1978), Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman
in the Attic (1979), and Margaret Homans' Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980), and in hundreds
of essays and papers, women's writing asserted itself as the central project of feminist literary
study.
This shift in emphasis has also taken place in European feminist criticism. To date, most commentary
on French feminist critical discourse has stressed its fundamental dissimilarity from the empirical
American orientation, its unfamiliar intellectual grounding in linguistics, Marxism, neo-Freudian
and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Derridean deconstruction. Despite these differences, however,
the new French feminisms have much in common with radical American feminist theories in
terms of intellectual affiliations and rhetorical energies. The concept of ecriturefeminine, the
inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text, is a significant theoretical
formulation in French feminist criticism, although it describes a Utopian possibility rather than a
literary practice. Helene Cixous, one of the leading advocates of ecriture feminine, has admitted
that, with only a few exceptions, "there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity,"
and Nancy Miller explains that ecriture feminine "privileges a textuality of the avantgarde, a literary
production of the late twentieth century, and it is therefore fundamentally a hope, if not a blueprint,
for the future."' Nonetheless, the concept of ecriture feminine provides a way of talking about
women's writing which reasserts the value of the feminine and identifies the theoretical project of
feminist criticism as the analysis of difference. In recent years, the translations of important work
by Julia Kristeva, Cixous, and Luce Irigaray and the excellent collection New French Feminisms
have made French criticism much more accessible to American feminist scholars.

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