Page 306 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes with feminist criticism; it is very ancient and appears frequently in folklore and myth. In such
myths, the essence of women's language is its secrecy; what is really being described is the male
fantasy of the enigmatic nature of the feminine. Herodotus, for example, reported that the Amazons
were able linguists who easily mastered the languages of their male antagonists, although men
could never learn the women's tongue. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves romantically argues
that a women's language existed in a matriarchal stage of prehistory; after a great battle of the
sexes, the matriarchy was overthrown and the women's language went underground, to survive
in the mysterious cults of Eleusis and Corinth and the witch covens of Western Europe. Travelers
and missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought back accounts of "women's
languages" among American Indians, Africans, and Asians (the differences in linguistic structure
they reported were usually superficial). There is some ethnographic evidence that in certain cultures
women have evolved a private form of communication out of their need to resist the silence
imposed upon them in public life. In ecstatic religions, for example, women, more frequently than
men, speak in tongues, a phenomenon attributed by anthropologists to their relative inarticulateness
in formal religious discourse. But such ritualized and unintelligible female "languages" are scarcely
cause for rejoicing; indeed, it was because witches were suspected of esoteric knowledge and
possessed speech that they were burned.
From a political perspective, there are interesting parallels between the feminist problem of a
women's language and the recurring "language issue" in the general history of decolonization.
After a revolution, a new state must decide which language to make official: the language that is
"psychologically immediate," that allows "the kind of force that speaking one's mother tongue
permits"; or the language that "is an avenue to the wider community of modern culture," a
community to whose movements of thought only "foreign" languages can give access. The language
issue in feminist criticism has emerged, in a sense, after our revolution, and it reveals the tensions
in the women's movement between those who would stay outside the academic establishments
and the institutions of criticism and those who would enter and even conquer them.
The advocacy of a women's language is thus a political gesture that also carries tremendous
emotional force. But despite its unifying appeal, the concept of a women's language is riddled
with difficulties. Unlike Welsh, Breton, Swahili, or Amharic, that is, languages of minority or
colonized groups, there is no mother tongue, no genderlect spoken by the female population in a
society, which differs significantly from the dominant language. English and American linguists
agree that "there is absolutely no evidence that would suggest the sexes are pre-programmed to
develop structurally different linguistic systems." Furthermore, the many specific differences in
male and female speech, intonation, and language use that have been identified cannot be explained
in terms of "two separate sex-specific languages" but need to be considered instead in terms of
styles, strategies, and contexts of linguistic performance. Efforts at quantitative analysis of language
in texts by men or women, such as Mary Hiatt's computerized study of contemporary fiction, The
Way Women Write (1977), can easily be attacked for treating words apart from their meanings and
purposes. At a higher level, analyses which look for "feminine style" in the repetition of stylistic
devices, image patterns, and syntax in women's writing tend to confuse innate forms with the
overdetermined results of literary choice. Language and style are never raw and instinctual but
are always the products of innumerable factors, of genre, tradition, memory, and context.
The appropriate task for feminist criticism, I believe, is to concentrate on women's access to language,
on the available lexical range from which words can be selected, on the ideological and cultural
determinants of expression. The problem is not that language is insufficient to express women's
consciousness but that women have been denied the full resources of language and have been
forced into silence, euphemism, or circumlocution. In a series of drafts for a lecture on women's
writing (drafts which she discarded or suppressed), Woolf protested against the censorship which
cut off female access to language. Comparing herself to Joyce, Woolf noted the differences between
their verbal territories: "Now men are shocked if a woman says what she feels (as Joyce does). Yet
literature which is always pulling down blinds is not literature. All that we have ought to be
expressed-mind and body-a process of incredible difficulty and danger."

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