Page 319 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

I began by recalling that a few years ago feminist critics thought we were on a pilgrimage to the Notes
promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and
equal, like angels. But the more precisely we understand the specificity of women's writing not as
a transient by-product of sexism but as a fundamental and continually determining reality, the
more clearly we realize that we have misperceived our destination. We may never reach the
promised land at all; for when feminist critics see our task as the study of women's writing, we
realize that the land promised to us is not the serenely undifferentiated universality of texts but
the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself.
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct option:
(i) Carolyn Heilbrun and Cathorine Stimpsen identified ............... poles of Feminist Literary
Criticism.
(a) Three (b) Four
(c) Two (d) One
(ii) The essay “Belief and the Problems of Women was written by ............... .
(a) Showalter (b) Edwin Ardener
(c) Shirley (d) None of these
(iii) The term ‘Gynocritics’ coined in ............... .
(a) Toward a Feminist Poetics (b) Cultural Feminism
(c) A Room of One’s Own (d) None of these
28.3 Summary

• The feminist study of women's writings. The term is sometimes used to mean any literary
criticism devoted to works written by women. More often, it designates a body of literary
criticism principally produced by academic feminists in the United States between the mid-
1970s and the mid-1980s that sought to characterize imaginative writing by women in contrast
to canonical literature written by men. Gynocriticism celebrated a distinctive "voice" in
women's literature across genres and periods that it explained in terms of women's cultural
position as an oppressed group; of women's experiences, especially experiences of male
domination and of female bonding; and of psychological traits supposedly typical of women
such as empathy and fluid ego boundaries. This approach, sometimes simplistically labeled
"American feminist criticism," pioneered feminist literary history and established a canon of
women's literature influential in teaching, publishing, and scholarship. By broadly endorsing
women's creativity, gynocriticism overlaps "cultural feminism."
• Gynocriticism's most important precursor is Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929),
which posed influential questions about "women and literature." Following Woolf, American
feminists of the late 1960s and thereafter saw imaginative literature as an important force
affecting women. While some scholars attacked male writers for stereotyping women, other
feminists sought role models and found energizing identifications in female characters drawn
by women writers. For example, in 1972 Nancy Burr Evans rejoiced to see her "own experiences
mirrored" in fiction by women (in Images of Women in Fiction, ed. Susan Koppelman
Cornillon). Similarly, Louise Bernikow's Among Women (1980) and Rachel Brownstein's
Becoming a Heroine (1982) emphasized the satisfactions of reading women writers who
portrayed female friendships and women's search for identity.
• In "Toward a Feminist Poetics" (1979), Elaine Showalter coined the term gynocritics for the
study of women writers. One exemplar of this tradition was her book, A Literature of Their
Own (1977), which situated English women novelists in terms of "a common heritage" that

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