Page 318 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes work precisely in those places where criticism has hitherto found obscurities, evasions,
implausibilities, and imperfections.
Our current theories of literary influence also need to be tested in terms of women's writing. If a
man's text, as Bloom and Edward Said have maintained, is fathered, then a woman's text is not
only mothered but parented; it confronts both paternal and maternal precursors and must deal
with the problems and advantages of both lines of inheritance. Woolf says in A Room of One's
Own that "a woman writing thinks back through her mothers." But a woman writing unavoidably
thinks back through her fathers as well; only male writers can forget or mute half of their parentage.
The dominant culture need not consider the muted, except to rail against "the woman's part" in
itself. Thus we need more subtle and supple accounts of influence, not just to explain women's
writing but also to understand how men's writing has resisted the acknowledgment of female
precursors.
We must first go beyond the assumption that women writers either imitate their male predecessors
or revise them and that this simple dualism is adequate to describe the influences on the woman's
text. I. A. Richards once commented that the influence of G. E. Moore had had an enormous
negative impact on his work: "I feel like an obverse of him. Where there's a hole in him, there's a
bulge in me." Too often women's place in literary tradition is translated into the crude topography
of hole and bulge, with Milton, Byron, or Emerson the bulging bogeys on one side and women's
literature from Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich a pocked moon surface of revisionary lacunae on the
other. One of the great advantages of the women's-culture model is that it shows how the female
tradition can be a positive source of strength and solidarity as well as a negative source of
powerlessness; it can generate its own experiences and symbols which are not simply the obverse
of the male tradition.
How can a cultural model of women's writing help us to read a woman's text? One implication of
this model is that women's fiction can be read as a double-voiced discourse, containing a "dominant"
and a "muted" story, what Gilbert and Gubar call a "palimpsest." I have described it elsewhere as
an object/field problem in which we must keep two alternative oscillating texts simultaneously in
view: "In the purest feminist literary criticism we are ... presented with a radical alteration of our
vision, a demand that we see meaning in what has previously been empty space. The orthodox
plot recedes, and another plot, hitherto submerged in the anonymity of the background, stands
out in bold relief like a thumbprint." Miller too sees "another text" in women's fiction, "more or less
muted from novel to novel" but "always there to be read."
Another interpretive strategy for feminist criticism might be the contextual analysis that the cultural
anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls "thick description." Geertz calls for descriptions that seek to
understand the meaning of cultural phenomena and products by "sorting out the structures of
signification . . . and determining their social ground and import." A genuinely "thick" description
of women's writing would insist upon gender and upon a female literary tradition among the
multiple strata that make up the force of meaning in a text. No description, we must concede,
could ever be thick enough to account for all the factors that go into the work of art. But we could
work toward completeness, even as an unattainable ideal.
In suggesting that a cultural model of women's writing has considerable usefulness for the enterprise
of feminist criticism, I don't mean to replace psychoanalysis with cultural anthropology as the
answer to all our theoretical problems or to enthrone Ardener and Geertz as the new white fathers
in place of Freud, Lacan, and Bloom. No theory, however suggestive, can be a substitute for the
close and extensive knowledge of women's texts which constitutes our essential subject. Cultural
anthropology and social history can perhaps offer us a terminology and a diagram of women's
cultural situation. But feminist critics must use this concept in relation to what women actually
write, not in relation to a theoretical, political, metaphoric, or visionary ideal of what women
ought to write.

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