Page 314 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Like Gilbert, Gubar, and Miller, Abel brings together women's texts from a variety of national
literatures, choosing to emphasize "the constancy of certain emotional dynamics depicted in diverse
cultural situations." Yet the privileging of gender implies not only the constancy but also the
immutability of these dynamics. Although psychoanalytically based models of feminist criticism
can now offer us remarkable and persuasive readings of individual texts and can highlight
extraordinary similarities between women writing in a variety of cultural circumstances, they
cannot explain historical change, ethnic difference, or the shaping force of generic and economic
factors. To consider these issues, we must go beyond psychoanalysis to a more flexible and
comprehensive model of women's writing which places it in the maximum context of culture.
28.2 Women's Writing and Women's Culture

I consider women's literature as a specific category, not because of biology, but because it is, in
a sense, the literature of the colonized.
—Christiane Rochefort, "The Privilege of Consciousness"

A theory based on a model of women's culture can provide, I believe, a more complete and
satisfying way to talk about the specificity and difference of women's writing than theories based
in biology, linguistics, or psychoanalysis. Indeed, a theory of culture incorporates ideas about
woman's body, language, and psyche but interprets them in relation to the social contexts in
which they occur. The ways in which women conceptualize their bodies and their sexual and
reproductive functions are intricately linked to their cultural environments. The female psyche
can be studied as the product or construction of cultural forces. Language, too, comes back into the
picture, as we consider the social dimensions and determinants of language use, the shaping of
linguistic behavior by cultural ideals. A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important
differences between women as writers: class, race, nationality, and history are literary determinants
as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women's culture forms a collective experience within the
cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space. It is in
the emphasis on the binding force of women's culture that this approach differs from Marxist
theories of cultural hegemony.
Hypotheses of women's culture have been developed over the last decade primarily by
anthropologists, sociologists, and social historians in order to get away from masculine systems,
hierarchies, and values and to get at the primary and self-defined nature of female cultural
experience. In the field of women's history, the concept of women's culture is still controversial,
although there is agreement on its significance as a theoretical formulation. Gerda Lerner explains
the importance of examining women's experience in its own terms:
Women have been left out of history not because of the evil conspiracies of men in
general or male historians in particular, but because we have considered history only
in male-centered terms. We have missed women and their activities, because we have
asked questions of history which are inappropriate to women. To rectify this, and to
light up areas of historical darkness we must, for a time, focus on a woman-centeredin
quiry, considering the possibility of the existence of a female culture within the general
culture shared by men and women. History must include an account of the female
experience over time and should include the development of feminist consciousness
as an essential aspect of women's past. This is the primary task of women's history.
The central question it raises is: What would history be like if it were seen through the
eyes of women and ordered by values they define?
In defining female culture, historians distinguish between the roles, activities, tastes, and behaviors
prescribed and considered appropriate for women and those activities, behaviors, and functions

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