Page 305 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

Women's Writing and Women's Language Notes

The women say, the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say, the
language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak
is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated.
—Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres

Linguistic and textual theories of women's writing ask whether men and women use language
differently; whether sex differences in language use can be theorized in terms of biology,
socialization, or culture; whether women can create new languages of their own; and whether
speaking, reading, and writing are all gender marked. American, French, and British feminist
critics have all drawn attention to the philosophical, linguistic, and practical problems of women's
use of language, and the debate over language is one of the most exciting areas in gynocritics.
Poets and writers have led the attack on what Rich calls "the oppressor's language," a language
sometimes criticized as sexist, sometimes as abstract. But the problem goes well beyond reformist
efforts to purge language of its sexist aspects. As Nelly Furman explains, "It is through the medium
of language that we define and categorize areas of difference and similarity, which in turn allow
us to comprehend the world around us. Male-centered categorizations predominate in American
English and subtly shape our understanding and perception of reality; this is why attention is
increasingly directed to the inherently oppressive aspects for women of a male-constructed language
system." According to Carolyn Burke, the language system is at the center of French feminist
theory:
The central issue in much recent women's writing in France is to find and use an
appropriate female language. Language is the place to begin: a prise de conscience
must be followed by a prise de la parole.... In this view, the very forms of the dominant
mode of discourse show the mark of the dominant masculine ideology. Hence, when
a woman writes or speaks herself into existence, she is forced to speak in something
like a foreign tongue, a language with which she may be personally uncomfortable.
Many French feminists advocate a revolutionary linguism, an oral break from the dictatorship of
patriarchal speech. Annie Leclerc, in Parole de femme, calls on women "to invent a language that is
not oppressive, a language that does not leave speechless but that loosens the tongue" (trans.
Courtivron, NFF, p. 179). Chantal Chawaf, in an essay on "La chair linguistique," connects
biofeminism and linguism in the view that women's language and a genuinely feminine practice
of writing will articulate the body:
In order to reconnect the book with the body and with pleasure, we must disintellectualize writing....
And this language, as it develops, will not degenerate and dry up, will not go back to the fleshless
academicism, the stereotypical and servile discourses that we reject. . . Feminine language must,
by its very nature, work on life passionately, scientifically, poetically, politically in order to make
it invulnerable.
But scholars who want a women's language that is intellectual and theoretical, that works inside
the academy, are faced with what seems like an impossible paradox, as Xaviere Gauthier has
lamented: "As long as women remain silent, they will be outside the historical process. But, if they
begin to speak and write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated; it is a history
that, logically speaking, their speech should disrupt" (trans. Marilyn A. August, NFF, pp. 162-63).
What we need, Mary Jacobus has proposed, is a women's writing that works within "male" discourse
but works "ceaselessly to deconstruct it: to write what cannot be written," and according to Shoshana
Felman, "the challenge facing the woman today is nothing less than to 'reinvent' language,... to
speak not only against, but outside of the specular phallogocentric structure, to establish a discourse
the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of masculine meaning."
Beyond rhetoric, what can linguistic, historical, and anthropological research tell us about the
prospects for a women's language? First of all, the concept of a women's language is not original

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