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

institutions-the news media, the health, education, and legal systems, the art, theater, and literary Notes
worlds, the banks."
These fantasies of an idyllic enclave represent a phenomenon which feminist criticism must
recognize in the history of women's writing. But we must also understand that there can be no
writing or criticism totally outside of the dominant structure; no publication is fully independent
from the economic and political pressures of the male-dominated society. The concept of a woman's
text in the wild zone is a playful abstraction: in the reality to which we must address ourselves as
critics, women's writing is a "double-voiced discourse" that always embodies the social, literary,
and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant. And insofar as most feminist critics
are also women writing, this precarious heritage is one we share; every step that feminist criticism
takes toward defining women's writing is a step toward self-understanding as well; every account
of a female literary culture and a female literary tradition has parallel significance for our own
place in critical history and critical tradition. Women writing are not, then, inside and outside of
the male tradition; they are inside two traditions simultaneously, "undercurrents," in Ellen Moers'
metaphor, of the mainstream. To mix metaphors again, the literary estate of women, as Myra
Jehlen says, "suggests . . . a more fluid imagery of interacting juxtapositions, the point of which
would be to represent not so much the territory, as its defining borders. Indeed, the female territory
might well be envisioned as one long border, and independence for women, not as a separate
country, but as open access to the sea." As Jehlen goes on to explain, an aggressive feminist
criticism must poise itself on this border and must see women's writing in its changing historical
and cultural relation to that other body of texts identified by feminist criticism not simply as
literature but as "men's writing."
The difference of women's writing, then, can only be understood in terms of this complex and
historically grounded cultural relation. An important aspect of Ardener's model is that there are
muted groups other than women; a dominant structure may determine many muted structures. A
black American woman poet, for example, would have her literary identity formed by the dominant
(white male) tradition, by a muted women's culture, and by a muted black culture. She would be
affected by both sexual and racial politics in a combination unique to her case; at the same time, as
Barbara Smith points out, she shares an experience specific to her group: "Black women writers
constitute an identifiable literary tradition . . . thematically, stylistically, aesthetically, and
conceptually. Black women writers manifest common approaches to the act of creating literature
as a direct result of the specific political, social, and economic experience they have been obliged
to share." Thus the first task of a gynocentric criticism must be to plot the precise cultural locus of
female literary identity and to describe the forces that intersect an individual woman writer's
cultural field. A gynocentric criticism would also situate women writers with respect to the variables
of literary culture, such as modes of production and distribution, relations of author and audience,
relations of high to popular art, and hierarchies of genre.
Insofar as our concepts of literary periodization are based on men's writing, women's writing
must be forcibly assimilated to an irrelevant grid; we discuss a Renaissance which is not a
renaissance for women, a Romantic period in which women played very little part, a modernism
with which women conflict. At the same time, the ongoing history of women's writing has been
suppressed, leaving large and mysterious gaps in accounts of the development of genre. Gynocentric
criticism is already well on the way to providing us with another perspective on literary history.
Margaret Anne Doody, for example, suggests that "the period between the death of Richardson
and the appearance of the novels of Scott and Austen" which has "been regarded as a dead period,
a dull blank" is in fact the period in which late eighteenth-century women writers were developing
"the paradigm for women's fiction of the nineteenth century-something hardly less than the
paradigm of the nineteenth-century novel itself."45 There has also been a feminist rehabilitation of
the female gothic, a mutation of a popular genre once believed marginal but now seen as part of
the great tradition of the novel. In American literature, the pioneering work of Ann Douglas, Nina
Baym, and Jane Tompkins, among others, has given us a new view of the power of women's
fiction to feminize nineteenth-century American culture. And feminist critics have made us aware
that Woolf belonged to a tradition other than modernism and that this tradition surfaces in her

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