Page 320 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes concerned itself with the deliberate "articulation of women's experience." In 1976 Ellen Moers's
Literary Women tracked "the deep creative strategies of the literary mind at work upon the
fact of [being] female." Another widely influential text was Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's
The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which derived common themes and images in "a
distinctively female literary tradition" from cultural strictures on female expression, creativity,
and authority. "Toward a Feminist Poetics" further distinguished feminist critique, the tough,
demystifying practices of women reading sexist men, from gynocritics, the study of "woman
as writer … with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women." This
distinction apparently pitted critical reading against creative writing, although gynocritics
was, like feminist critique, a feminist reading strategy that assumed women would find
personal resonance reading texts by women. In a related essay, "Feminist Criticism in the
Wilderness" (1981), Showalter stressed "the difference of women's writing" from men's, asking,
"How can we constitute women as a distinct literary group?," answering that women
developed a "double-voiced discourse" from their "muted" position in male-dominant culture.
In The New Feminist Criticism (1985), she championed gynocritics as offering "the most
exciting prospect for a coherent feminist literary theory" independent of male models and
congratulated it for the "massive recovery and rereading of literature by women from all
nations and historical periods." By 1989 in Speaking of Gender, Showalter placed gynocriticism
as a past "phase" of feminist criticism that had moved on to a broader concern with gender.
However, feminist analysis of women's writings continues to flourish.
• Some opponents charged that gynocritical practice was too restrictive because it selected
some women writers over others, preferring poets who rejected marriage to sentimentalist
encomiasts, for example, or condemning prudish novelists in favor of sexually explicit ones
according to prescriptive notions of women's liberation. However, the most common attacks
against gynocriticism fault the category of "writing by women" on which it is based. Some
people believe this category is meaningless because differences in writing are individual, not
sex specific. Pseudonymous authors prove that readers cannot reliably tell authors' sexes,
and no experiments find definitive markers of female style. Some scholars argue that
gynocriticism falls into the "essentialist" error of assigning definitive characteristics according
to authors' biological sex, although gynocritics reply that being a woman is always culturally
defined. Others agree that literature is gendered, but not necessarily to match authorial sex.
Thus proponents of "écriture féminine" claim this practice maintains an antipatriarchal,
feminine "subject position" even under male authorship. Another view sees gender implicit
in literary genres and audience expectations, not authors, so that, for example, Harlequin
romances are "feminine" no matter who writes them.
• For many feminists of color, lesbians, and postmodernists, the category "women's writing"
too often generalizes from privileged white women to all women and their literature, whereas
most feminists now agree that women are not a unified category but are divided by class,
race, language, sexual practices, and many other factors, and that their writings must be
contextualized in historically and culturally specific ways. Some radical feminists fault
Showalter's version of gynocriticism from another direction, claiming it is not specific enough
to women, especially to women's sexual oppression, but rather applies a paradigm of
"dominant" and "muted" powers so that all oppressed groups follow parallel paths of imitation,
resistance, and autonomy. In contrast, these theorists point out that each group has its unique
history, character, and interests, and any writer or reader is shaped and responsive to multiple,
complexly interacting, and possibly contradictory and conflicting forces.
• Although some early gynocriticism now seems naive, feminist criticism of writing by women
is currently thriving. It does not automatically reject theories by men or idealize writing by
women, though it continues to find women's works personally important and politically
relevant to female readers. The most fruitful practice in this area uses the hypothetical

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