Page 312 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes the Victorian era, and her dubious psychoanalytic assumptions. Showalter's works of cultural
history, particularly The Female Malady and Sexual Anarchy, have received mixed reviews, but
have been generally praised for their broad, interdisciplinary approach to literary, cultural, and
social trends. Showalter's feminist history of psychiatry in The Female Malady has been commended
for raising disturbing and important questions about the politics of interpretation and the power
of gender as a determining factor in psychiatric treatment. Her focus on the psychiatric patient-
rather than the history of the psychiatric profession-has also been viewed as a valuable contribution
to the subject. However, some reviewers have faulted Showalter for her selective use of data and
statistics, and her imprecise use of key terms, such as "hysteria." In later works such as Hystories and
Inventing Herself, critics have hailed Showalter's impressive synthesis of evidence, though some
have found her arguments less substantial and convincing than in previous works. Despite such
shortcomings, Showalter has been highly regarded for calling attention to complex issues surrounding
gender and sexual politics. Many of her works, most notably A Literature of Their Own and The
Female Malady, have endured as staples of feminist literary criticism in university curricula.

28.1 Women’s Writing and Woman’s Psyche

Psychoanalytically oriented feminist criticism locates the difference of women's writing in the
author's psyche and in the relation of gender to the creative process. It incorporates the biological
and linguistic models of gender difference in a theory of the female psyche or self, shaped by the
body, by the development of language, and by sex-role socialization. Here too there are many
difficulties to overcome; the Freudian model requires constant revision to make it gynocentric. In
one grotesque early example of Freudian reductivism, Theodor Reik suggested that women have
fewer writing blocks than men because their bodies are constructed to facilitate release: "Writing,
as Freud told us at the end of his life, is connected with urinating, which physiologically is easier
for a woman-they have a wider bladder." Generally, however, psychoanalytic criticism has focused
not on the capacious bladder (could this be the organ from which females generate texts?) but on
the absent phallus. Penis envy, the castration complex, and the Oedipal phase have become the
Freudian coordinates defining women's relationship to language, fantasy, and culture. Currently
the French psychoanalytic school dominated by Lacan has extended castration into a total metaphor
for female literary and linguistic disadvantage. Lacan theorizes that the acquisition of language
and the entry into its symbolic order occurs at the Oedipal phase in which the child accepts his or
her gender identity. This stage requires an acceptance of the phallus as a privileged signification
and a consequent female displacement, as Cora Kaplan has explained:
The phallus as a signifier has a central, crucial position in language, for if language
embodies the patriarchal law of the culture, its basic meanings refer to the recurring
process by which sexual difference and subjectivity are acquired.... Thus the little girl's
access to the Symbolic, i.e., to language and its laws, is always negative and/or mediated
by intro-subjective relation to a third term, for it is characterized by an identification
with lack.
In psychoanalytic terms, "lack" has traditionally been associated with the feminine, although
Lac(k)anian critics can now make their statements linguistically. Many feminists believe that
psychoanalysis could become a powerful tool for literary criticism, and recently there has been a
renewed interest in Freudian theory. But feminist criticism based in Freudian or post-Freudian
psychoanalysis must continually struggle with the problem of feminine disadvantage and lack. In
The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar carry out a feminist revision of Harold Bloom's
Oedipal model of literary history as a conflict between fathers and sons and accept the essential
psychoanalytic definition of the woman artist as displaced, disinherited, and excluded. In their
view, the nature and "difference" of women's writing lies in its troubled and even tormented
relationship to female identity; the woman writer experiences her own gender as "a painful obstacle
or even a debilitating inadequacy." The nineteenth-century woman writer inscribed her own
sickness, her madness, her anorexia, her agoraphobia, and her paralysis in her texts; and although
Gilbert and Gubar are dealing specifically with the nineteenth century, the range of their allusion
and quotation suggests a more general thesis:

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