Page 303 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

English feminist criticism, which incorporates French feminist and Marxist theory but is more Notes
traditionally oriented to textual interpretation, is also moving toward a focus on women's writing.
The emphasis in each country falls somewhat differently: English feminist criticism, essentially
Marxist, stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses
repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression. All, however, have
become gynocentric. All are struggling to find a terminology that can rescue the feminine from its
stereotypical associations with inferiority.
Defining the unique difference of women's writing, as Woolf and Cixous have warned, must
present a slippery and demanding task. Is difference a matter of style? Genre? Experience? Or is
it produced by the reading process, as some textual critics would maintain? Spacks calls the
difference of women's writing a "delicate divergency," testifying to the subtle and elusive nature
of the feminine practice of writing. Yet the delicate divergency of the woman's text challenges us
to respond with equal delicacy and precision to the small but crucial deviations, the cumulative
weightings of experience and exclusion, that have marked the history of women's writing. Before
we can chart this history, we must uncover it, patiently and scrupulously; our theories must be
firmly grounded in reading and research. But we have the opportunity, through gynocritics, to
learn something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literary culture.
Theories of women's writing presently make use of four models of difference: biological, linguistic,
psychoanalytic, and cultural. Each is an effort to define and differentiate the qualities of the
woman writer and the woman's text; each model also represents a school of gynocentric feminist
criticism with its own favorite texts, styles, and methods. They overlap but are roughly sequential
in that each incorporates the one before. I shall try now to sort out the various terminologies and
assumptions of these four models of difference and evaluate their usefulness.
Women's Writing and Woman's Body

Organic or biological criticism is the most extreme statement of gender difference, of a text indelibly
marked by the body: anatomy is textuality. Biological criticism is also one of the most sibylline
and perplexing theoretical formulations of feminist criticism. Simply to invoke anatomy risks a
return to the crude essentialism, the phallic and ovarian theories of art, that oppressed women in
the past. Victorian physicians believed that women's physiological functions diverted about twenty
percent of their creative energy from brain activity. Victorian anthropologists believed that the
frontal lobes of the male brain were heavier and more developed than female lobes and thus that
women were inferior in intelligence.

More body, hence more writing. —Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

While feminist criticism rejects the attribution of literal biological inferiority, some theorists seem
to have accepted the metaphorical implications of female biological difference in writing. In The
Madwoman in the Attic, for example, Gilbert and Gubar structure their analysis of women's
writing around metaphors of literary paternity. "In patriarchal western culture," they maintain, ".
.. the text's author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an
instrument of generative power like his penis." Lacking phallic authority, they go on to suggest,
women's writing is profoundly marked by the anxieties of this difference: "If the pen is a
metaphorical penis, from what organ can females generate texts?"
To this rhetorical question Gilbert and Gubar offer no reply; but it is a serious question of much
feminist theoretical discourse. Those critics who, like myself, would protest the fundamental analogy
might reply that women generate texts from the brain or that the word-processor of the near
future, with its compactly coded microchips, its inputs and outputs, is a metaphorical womb. The
metaphor of literary paternity, as Auerbach has pointed out in her review of The Madwoman,
ignores "an equally timeless and, for me, even more oppressive metaphorical equation between
literary creativity and childbirth." Certainly metaphors of literary maternity predominated in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the process of literary creation is analogically much more
similar to gestation, labor, and delivery than it is to insemination. Describing Thackeray's plan for

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