Page 304 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Henry Esmond, for example, Douglas Jerrold jovially remarked, "You have heard, I suppose, that
Thackeray is big with twenty parts, and unless he is wrong in his time, expects the first installment
at Christmas." (If to write is metaphorically to give birth, from what organ can males generate texts?)
Some radical feminist critics, primarily in France but also in the United States, insist that we must
read these metaphors as more than playful; that we must seriously rethink and redefine biological
differentiation and its relation to women's unity. They argue that "women's writing proceeds from
the body, that our sexual differentiation is also our source." In Of Woman Born, Rich explains her
belief that
female biology . . . has far more radical implications than we have yet come to appreciate.
Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow specifications. The
feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these reasons; it will, I believe, come
to view our physicality as a resource rather than a destiny. In order to live a fully human
life, we require not only control of our bodies... we must touch the unity and resonance
of our physicality, the corporeal ground of our intelligence.
Feminist criticism written in the biological perspective generally stresses the importance of the
body as a source of imagery. Alicia Ostriker, for example, argues that contemporary American
women poets use a franker, more pervasive anatomical imagery than their male counterparts and
that this insistent body language refuses the spurious transcendence that comes at the price of
denying the flesh. In a fascinating essay on Whitman and Dickinson, Terence Diggory shows that
physical nakedness, so potent a poetic symbol of authenticity for Whitman and other male poets,
had very different connotations for Dickinson and her successors, who associated nakedness with
the objectified or sexually exploited female nude and who chose instead protective images of the
armored self.
Feminist criticism which itself tries to be biological, to write from the critic's body, has been
intimate, confessional, often innovative in style and form. Rachel Blau DuPlessis' "Washing Blood,"
the introduction to a special issue of Feminist Studies on the subject of motherhood, proceeds, in
short lyrical paragraphs, to describe her own experience in adopting a child, to recount her dreams
and nightmares, and to meditate upon the "healing unification of body and mind based not only
on the lived experiences of motherhood as a social institution ... but also on a biological power
speaking through us." Such criticism makes itself defiantly vulnerable, virtually bares its throat to
the knife, since our professional taboos against self-revelation are so strong. When it succeeds,
however, it achieves the power and the dignity of art. Its existence is an implicit rebuke to women
critics who continue to write, according to Rich, "from somewhere outside their female bodies." In
comparison to this flowing confessional criticism, the tight-lipped Olympian intelligence of such
texts as Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal or Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor can
seem arid and strained.
Yet in its obsessions with the "corporeal ground of our intelligence," feminist biocriticism can also
become cruelly prescriptive. There is a sense in which the exhibition of bloody wounds becomes
an initiation ritual quite separate and disconnected from critical insight. And as the editors of the
journal Questions feministes point out, "it is ... dangerous to place the body at the center of a search
for female identity .... The themes of otherness and of the Body merge together, because the most
visible difference between men and women, and the only one we know for sure to be permanent
. . . is indeed the difference in body. This difference has been used as a pretext to 'justify' full
power of one sex over the other" (trans. Yvonne Rochette-Ozzello, NFF). The study of biological
imagery in women's writing is useful and important as long as we understand that factors other
than anatomy are involved in it. Ideas about the body are fundamental to understanding how
women conceptualize their situation in society; but there can be no expression of the body which
is unmediated by linguistic, social, and literary structures. The difference of woman's literary
practice, therefore, must be sought (in Miller's words) in "the body of her writing and not the
writing of her body."

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