Page 315 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

actually generated out of women's lives. In the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term Notes
"woman's sphere" expressed the Victorian and Jacksonian vision of separate roles for men and
women, with little or no overlap and with women subordinate. If we were to diagram it, the
Victorian model would look like this:

Men Women

Woman's sphere was defined and maintained by men, but women frequently internalized its
precepts in the American "cult of true womanhood" and the English "feminine ideal." Women's
culture, however, redefines women's "activities and goals from a woman-centered point of view....
The term implies an assertion of equality and an awareness of sisterhood, the communality of
women." Women's culture refers to "the broad-based communality of values, institutions,
relationships, and methods of communication" unifying nineteenth-century female experience, a
culture nonetheless with significant variants by class and ethnic group (MFP, pp. 52, 54).
Some feminist historians have accepted the model of separate spheres and have seen the movement
from woman's sphere to women's culture to women's-rights activism as the consecutive stages of
an evolutionary political process. Others see a more complex and perpetual negotiation taking
place between women's culture and the general culture. As Lerner has argued:
It is important to understand that "woman's culture" is not and should not be seen as
a subculture. It is hardly possible for the majority to live in a subculture.... Women live
their social existence within the general culture and, whenever they are confined by
patriarchal restraint or segregation into separateness (which always has subordination
as its purpose), they transform this restraint into complementarity (asserting the
importance of woman's function, even its "superiority") and redefine it. Thus, women
live a duality-as members of the general culture and as partakers of women's culture.
[MFP, p. 52]
Lerner's views are similar to those of some cultural anthropologists. A particularly stimulating
analysis of female culture has been carried out by two Oxford anthropologists, Shirley and Edwin
Ardener. The Ardeners have tried to outline a model of women's culture which is not historically
limited and to provide a terminology for its characteristics. Two essays by Edwin Ardener, "Belief
and the Problem of Women" (1972) and "The 'Problem' Revisited" (1975), suggest that women
constitute a muted group, the boundaries of whose culture and reality overlap, but are not wholly
contained by, the dominant (male) group. A model of the cultural situation of women is crucial to
understanding both how they are perceived by the dominant group and how they perceive
themselves and others. Both historians and anthropologists emphasize the incompleteness of
androcentric models of history and culture and the inadequacy of such models for the analysis of
female experience. In the past, female experience which could not be accommodated by androcentric
models was treated as deviant or simply ignored. Observation from an exterior point of view
could never be the same as comprehension from within. Ardener's model also has many connections
to and implications for current feminist literary theory, since the concepts of perception, silence,
and silencing are so central to discussions of women's participation in literary culture.
By the term "muted," Ardener suggests problems both of language and of power. Both muted and
dominant groups generate beliefs or ordering ideas of social reality at the unconscious level, but
dominant groups control the forms or structures in which consciousness can be articulated. Thus
muted groups must mediate their beliefs through the allowable forms of dominant structures.
Another way of putting this would be to say that all language is the language of the dominant

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