Page 307 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

"All that we have ought to be expressed—mind and body." Rather than wishing to limit women's Notes
linguistic range, we must fight to open and extend it. The holes in discourse, the blanks and gaps
and silences, are not the spaces where female consciousness reveals itself but the blinds of a
"prison-house of language." Women's literature is still haunted by the ghosts of repressed language,
and until we have exorcised those ghosts, it ought not to be in language that we base our theory
of difference.
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct option:
(i) ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics was published’ in ............... .
(a) 1979 (b) 1980
(c) 1975 (d) 1978
(ii) The term ‘Gynocritics’ coined by ............... .
(a) Woff (b) Showalter
(c) Perkins (d) none of these
(iii) Feminist criticism in the Wilderness was published in ............... .
(a) 1981 (b) 1979
(c) 1980 (d) 1982
27.7 Summary

• Until very recently, feminist criticism has not had a theoretical basis; it has been an empirical
orphan in the theoretical storm. In 1975, I was persuaded that no theoretical manifesto could
adequately account for the varied methodologies and ideologies which called themselves
feminist reading or writing. By the next year, Annette Kolodny had added her observation
that feminist literary criticism appeared "more like a set of interchangeable strategies than
any coherent school or shared goal orientation."
• There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism, and to conflate them (as most commentators
do) is to remain permanently bemused by their theoretical potentialities. The first mode is
ideological; it is concerned with the feminist as reader, and it offers feminist readings of texts
which consider the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and
misconceptions about women in criticism, and woman-assign in semiotic systems.
• 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.
• Feminist criticism has gradually sifted its center from revisionary readings to a sustained
investigation of literature by women. Showalter starts her essay with the poem of Louise
Bogan, “Women” which opens with the lines:
“Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.”
• With the publication of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1920) a step in the direction
of inspiring women to become writers was taken. This way is called Feminst Bible that
upholds women as creative artist. In the very first paragraph of the essay Woolf emphatically
remarks:
“—a woman must have money and
a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
• Woolf thinks “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.”

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