Page 316 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes order, and women, if they speak at all, must speak through it. How then, Ardener asks, "does the
symbolic weight of that other mass of persons express itself?" In his view, women's beliefs find
expression through ritual and art, expressions which can be deciphered by the ethnographer,
either female or male, who is willing to make the effort to perceive beyond the screens of the
dominant structure.
Let us now look at Ardener's diagram of the relationship of the dominant and the muted group:

x y

Men
Women

Unlike the Victorian model of complementary spheres, Ardener's groups are represented by
intersecting circles. Much of muted circle Y falls within the boundaries of dominant circle X; there
is also a crescent of Y which is outside the dominant boundary and therefore (in Ardener's
terminology) "wild." We can think of the "wild zone" of women's culture spatially, experientially,
or metaphysically. Spatially it stands for an area which is literally no-man's-land, a place forbidden
to men, which corresponds to the zone in X which is off limits to women. Experientially it stands
for the aspects of the female life-style which are outside of and unlike those of men; again, there
is a corresponding zone of male experience alien to women. But if we think of the wild zone
metaphysically, or in terms of consciousness, it has no corresponding male space since all of male
consciousness is within the circle of the dominant structure and thus accessible to or structured by
language. In this sense, the "wild" is always imaginary; from the male point of view, it may simply
be the projection of the unconscious. In terms of cultural anthropology, women know what the
male crescent is like, even if they have never seen it, because it becomes the subject of legend (like
the wilderness). But men do not know what is in the wild.
For some feminist critics, the wild zone, or "female space," must be the address of a genuinely
women-centered criticism, theory, and art, whose shared project is to bring into being the symbolic
weight of female consciousness, to make the invisible visible, to make the silent speak. French
feminist critics would like to make the wild zone the theoretical base of women's difference. In
their texts, the wild zone becomes the place for the revolutionary women's language, the language
of everything that is repressed, and for the revolutionary women's writing in "white ink." It is the
Dark Continent in which Cixous' laughing Medusa and Wittig's guerilleres reside. Through voluntary
entry into the wild zone, other feminist critics tell us, a woman can write her way out of the
"cramped confines of patriarchal space."41 The images of this journey are now familiar in feminist
quest fictions and in essays about them. The writer/heroine, often guided by another woman,
travels to the "mother country" of liberated desire and female authenticity; crossing to the other
side of the mirror, like Alice in Wonderland, is often a symbol of the passage.
Many forms of American radical feminism also romantically assert that women are closer to
nature, to the environment, to a matriarchal principle at once biological and ecological. Mary
Daly's Gyn/Ecology and Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing are texts which create this feminist
mythology. In English and American literature, women writers have often imagined Amazon
Utopias, cities or countries situated in the wild zone or on its border: Elizabeth Gaskell's gentle
Cranford is probably an Amazon Utopia; so is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland or, to take a
recent example, Joanna Russ' Whileaway. A few years ago, the feminist publishing house Daughters,
Inc. tried to create a business version of the Amazon Utopia; as Lois Gould reported in the New
York Times Magazine (2 January 1977), "They believe they are building the working models for the
critical next stage of feminism: full independence from the control and influence of "male-dominated"

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