Page 313 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 28: Elaine Showalter: Four Models of Feminism in “Feminist Criticism in Wilderness”—Psychological...

Thus the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled Notes
with her need for sisterly precursors and successors, her urgent sense of her need for a female
audience together with her fear of the antagonism of male readers, her culturally conditioned
timidity about self-dramatization, her dread of the patriarchal authority of art, her anxiety about
the impropriety of female invention-all these phenomena of "inferiorization" mark the woman
writer's struggle for artistic selfdefinition and differentiate her efforts at self-creation from those of
her male counterpart.
In "Emphasis Added," Miller takes another approach to the problem of negativity in psychoanalytic
criticism. Her strategy is to expand Freud's view of female creativity and to show how criticism of
women's texts has frequently been unfair because it has been based in Freudian expectations. In
his essay "The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming" (1908), Freud maintained that the unsatisfied
dreams and desires of women are chiefly erotic; these are the desires that shape the plots of
women's fiction. In contrast, the dominant fantasies behind men's plots are egoistic and ambitious
as well as erotic. Miller shows how women's plots have been granted or denied credibility in
terms of their conformity to this phallocentric model and that a gynocentric reading reveals a
repressed egoistic/ambitious fantasy in women's writing as well as in men's. Women's novels
which are centrally concerned with fantasies of romantic love belong to the category disdained by
George Eliot and other serious women writers as "silly novels"; the smaller number of women's
novels which inscribe a fantasy of power imagine a world for women outside of love, a world,
however, made impossible by social boundaries.
There has also been some interesting feminist literary criticism based on alternatives to Freudian
psychoanalytic theory: Annis Pratt's Jungian history of female archetypes, Barbara Rigney's Laingian
study of the divided self in women's fiction, and Ann Douglas' Eriksonian analysis of inner space
in nineteenth-century women's writing. And for the past few years, critics have been thinking
about the possibilities of a new feminist psychoanalysis that does not revise Freud but instead
emphasizes the development and construction of gender identities.
The most dramatic and promising new work in feminist psychoanalysis looks at the pre-Oedipal
phase and at the process of psychosexual differentiation. Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of
Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978) has had an enormous influence on
women's studies. Chodorow revises traditional psychoanalytic concepts of differentiation, the
process by which the child comes to perceive the self as separate and to develop ego and body
boundaries. Since differentiation takes place in relation to the mother (the primary caretaker),
attitudes toward the mother "emerge in the earliest differentiation of the self"; "the mother, who is
a woman, becomes and remains for children of both genders the other, or object." The child
develops core gender identity concomitantly with differentiation, but the process is not the same
for boys and girls. A boy must learn his gender identity negatively as being not-female, and this
difference requires continual reinforcement. In contrast, a girl's core gender identity is positive
and built upon sameness, continuity, and identification with the mother. Women's difficulties
with feminine identity come after the Oedipal phase, in which male power and cultural hegemony
give sex differences a transformed value. Chodorow's work suggests that shared parenting, the
involvement of men as primary caretakers of children, will have a profound effect on our sense of
sex difference, gender identity, and sexual preference.
But what is the significance of feminist psychoanalysis for literary criticism? One thematic carry-
over has been a critical interest in the mother-daughter configuration as a source of female creativity.
Elizabeth Abel's bold investigation of female friendship in contemporary women's novels uses
Chodorow's theory to show how not only the relationships of women characters but also the
relationship of women writers to each other are determined by the psychodynamics of female
bonding. Abel too confronts Bloom's paradigm of literary history, but unlike Gilbert and Gubar
she sees a "triadic female pattern" in which the Oedipal relation to the male tradition is balanced
by the woman writer's pre-Oedipal relation to the female tradition. "As the dynamics of female
friendship differ from those of male," Abel concludes, "the dynamics of female literary influence
also diverge and deserve a theory of influence attuned to female psychology and to women's dual
position in literary history."

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