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Elaine Showalter
         Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness
         Until very recently, feminist criticism has not had a theoretical
            basis; it has been an empirical orphan in the theoretical storm. In
            1975, I was persuaded that no theoretical manifesto could
            adequately account for the varied methodologies and ideologies
            which called themselves feminist reading or writing.1 By the next
            year, Annette Kolodny had added her observation that feminist
            literary criticism appeared "more like a set of interchangeable
            strategies than any coherent school or shared goal orientation."2
            Since then, the expressed goals have not been notably unified.
            Black critics protest the "massive silence" of feminist criticism
            about black and Third-World women writers and call for a black
            feminist aesthetic that would deal with both racial and sexual
            politics. Marxist feminists wish to focus on class along with
            gender as a crucial determinant of literary production. Literary
            historians want to uncover a lost tradition. Critics trained in
            deconstructionist methodologies with to "synthesize a literary
            criticism that is both textual and feminist." Freudian and Lacanian
            critics want to theorize about women's relationship to language and
            signification.
            ·  1. See my "Literary Criticism," Signs 1 (Winter 1975): 435-60.
            ·  2. Annette Kolodny, "Literary Criticism," Signs 2 (Winter 1976):
            420.
            Elaine Showalter is professor of English at Rutgers University. The
            author of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
            Bronte to Lessing, she is currently completing The English Malady,
            a study of madness, literature, and society in England.
Mary Jacobus
         The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and_The_Mill_on_the_Floss
         A politics of women's writing, then, if it is not to fall back on a
            biologically based theory of sexual difference, must address
            itself, as Luce Irigary has done in "Pouvoir du discours,
            subordination du feminin," to the position of mastery held not only
            by scientific discourse (Freudian theory, for instance), not only
            by philosophy, "the discourse of discourses," but by the logic of
            discourse itself. Rather than attempting to identify a specific
            practice, in other words, such a feminist politics would attempt to
            relocate sexual difference at the level of the text by undoing the
            repression of the "feminine" in all systems of representation for
            which the other (woman) must be reduced to the economy of the Same
            (man).
            Mary Jacobus is an associate professor of English and of women's
            studies at Cornell University. She is the author of a book on
            Wordsworth as well as the editor of a collection of feminist
            criticism, Women Writing and Writing about Women. Currently she is
            at work on a study of Thomas Hardy and a collection of essays on
            Romantic poetry and prose.
Margaret Homans
         Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters'_Instruction
         Despite criticism's collusion with Eliot, there are a number of
            incongruities between Wordsworth's ideas and Eliot's texts that do
            not seem to be simply differences, scenes and passages that Eliot
            invites her readers to find Wordsworthian while she indicates a
            significant pattern of divergence from Wordsworthian prototypes.
            The brotherly instructions that Eliot is most generally concerned
            at once to follow and to deny are contained in Wordsworth's wish,
            in the verse "Prospectus" to The Recluse, to see "Paradise, and
            groves/Elysian" be "A simple produce of the common day" (ii. 47-48,
            55). But when she follows this wish literally, her "common day,"
            the intensely social world of her novels, tests far more
            strenuously the adaptability of the paradisal vision than does
            anything Wordsworth wrote. The generic incompatibility between a
            poet's vision and the form of the novel may account for some of the
            obvious differences, yet, as I will try to suggest later, it may be
            that Eliot's choice of the realistic novel as the form for her
            vision is in part an effect, not a cause of her ambivalent
            divergences from Wordsworth (for example, a series of her sonnets
            articulates these concerns as much as do the novels).
            Margaret Homans, an assistant professor of English at Yale
            University, is the author of Women Writers and Poetic Identity:
            Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. She is
            currently at work on a book of feminist criticism of Romanticism
            and Victorian fiction.
Susan Gubar
         "The Blank Page" and the Issues of Female_Creativity
         Woman is not simply an object, however. If we think in terms of the
            production of culture, she is an art object: she is the ivory
            carving or mud replica, an icon or doll, but she is not the
            sculptor. Lest this seem fanciful, we should remember that until
            very recently women have been barred from art schools as students
            yet have always been acceptable as models. Both Laura and Beatrice
            were turned into characters by the poems they inspired. A poet as
            sensitive as Chaucer to this reification of the female allowed
            Criseyde to recognize and lament her own dilemma: "Allas, of me,
            unto the worldless ende,/Shall neyther ben ywritten nor ysonge/No
            good word; for these bokes wol me shende" (bk. 5, st. 152). Like
            the words written about her, she fears she will be "rolled on many
            a tongue!"6
            ·  6. I am indebted for this view of Criseyde to Marcelle
            Thiebaux's "Foucault's Fantasia for Feminists: The Woman Reading"
            (paper delivered at the MMLA Convention, Indianapolis, 8 November
            1979).
            Susan Gubar, associate professor of English at Indiana University,
            is coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
            Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and coeditor of
            Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, both with
            Sandra M. Gilbert. They are currently working on No Man's Land:
            Feminism and Modernism, the sequel to their book.
Nancy J. Vickers
         Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme
         The import of Petrarch's description of Laura extends well beyond
            the confines of his own poetic age; in subsequent times, his
            portrayal of feminine beauty became authoritative. As a primary
            canonical text, the Rime sparse consolidated and disseminated a
            Renaissance mode. Petrarch absorbed a complex network of
            descriptive strategies and then presented a single, transformed
            model. In this sense his role in the history of the interpretation
            and the internalization of woman's "image" by both men and women
            can scarcely be overemphasized. When late-Renaissance theorists,
            poets, and painters represented woman's body, Petrarch's verse
            justified their aesthetic choices. His authority, moreover,
            extended beyond scholarly consideration to courtly conversation,
            beyond the treatise on beauty to the after-dinner game in
            celebration of it. The descriptive codes of others, both ancients
            and contemporaries, were, of course, not ignored, but the
            "scattered rhymes" undeniably enjoyed a privileged status: they
            informed the Renaissance norm of a beautiful woman.1
            ·  1. On this "thoroughly self-conscious fashion," see. Elizabeth
            Cropper, "On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the
            Vernacular Style," Art Bulletin 58 1976): 374-94.
            Nancy Vickers is an assistant professor of French and Italian at
            Dartmouth College. She has published articles on Dante and Petrarch
            and has recently completed a book, The Anatomy of Beauty: Woman's
            Body and Renaissance Blazon.
Nina Auerbach
         Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian_Freud
         It is commonly assumed that Victorian patriarchs disposed of their
            women by making myths of them; but then as now social mythology had
            an unpredictable life of its own, slyly empowering the subjects it
            seemed to reduce. It also penetrated unexpected sanctuaries. If we
            examine the unsettling impact upon Sigmund Freud of a popular
            mythic configuration of the 1890's we witness a rich, covert
            collaboration between documents of romance and the romance of
            science. Fueling this entanglement between the clinician's proud
            objectivity and the compelling images of popular belief is the
            imaginative power of that much-loved, much-feared, and much-lied-
            about creature, the Victorian woman.
            Nina Auerbach, associate professor of English at the University of
            Pennsylvania, is the author of Communities of Women: An Idea in
            Fiction as well as articles on Victorian women and culture. The
            present essay is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Woman and
            the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, a mythography of Victorian
            Womanhood
Froma I. Zeitlin
         Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae
         Three of Aristophanes' eleven extant comedies use the typical comic
            device of role reversal to imagine worlds in which women are "on
            top." Freed from the social constraints which keep them enclosed
            within the house and silent in the public realms of discourse and
            action, women are given a field and context on the comic stage.
            They issue forth to lay their plans, concoct their plots, and
            exercise their power over men.
            The Lysistrate and the Ecclesiazousae stage of the intrusion of
            women into the public spaces of Athens, the Acropolis and Agora,
            respectively, as an intrusion into the political and economic life
            of the city. The Thesmophoriazousae, however, resituates the battle
            of the sexes in another domain, that of aesthetics, and, more
            precisely, that of theatre itself. Instead of the collective
            confrontation of men and women, the play directs the women's
            actions against a single male target, the tragic poet, Euripides.
            Froma I. Zeitlin, an associate professor of classics at Princeton
            University, is the author of several articles on Greek tragedy and
            on the ancient novel. Her monograph, Under the Sign of the Shield:
            Language, Structure, and the Son of Oedipus in Aeschylus' "Seven
            against Thebes," is forthcoming, and she is presently completing
            The Divided World: Gender and System in Aescylean Drama.
Annette Kolodny
         Turning the Lens on "The Panther Captivity": A_Feminist_Exercise_in
            Practical Criticism
         My purpose here, then, is to reexamine a form which has already
            attracted considerable attention and, more particularly, by
            utilizing precisely that same mythopoetic analytic grid established
            by Fielder and Slotkin to reread on of its most popular
            incarnations, only adding to it a feminist perspective. My reading
            will thus avoid the unacknowledged and unexamined assumption which
            marks their work: the assumption of gender. Nonfeminist critics,
            after all, tend to ignore the fact (and significance) of women as
            readers as much as they tend to ignore the potentially symbolic
            significations of gender within a text. Fiedler, for example,
            obviously focuses on a male audience when he asserts that
            "westering, in America, means leaving the domain of the female"
            (pg. 60). And Slotkin, in making the same mistake, ignores the fact
            that women, too, required imaginative constructs through which to
            accommodate themselves to the often harsh realities of the western
            wilderness.
            Annette Kolodny, the author of The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as
            Experience and History in American Life and Letters, has recently
            completed the first volume of Westering Women, a projected
            multivolume analysis of women's imaginative responses to the
            successive American frontiers. She is presently working on Dancing
            through the Minefield, a study of the theoretical political, and
            methodological concerns of feminist literary criticism.
Judith Kegan Gardiner
         On Female Identity and Writing by Women
         During the past few years, feminist critics have approached writing
            by women with an "abiding commitment to discover what, if anything,
            makes women's writing different from men's" and a tendency to feel
            that some significant differences do exist.4 The most common answer
            is that women's experiences differ from men's in profound and
            regular ways. Critics using this approach find recurrent imagery
            and distinctive content in writing by women, for example, imagery
            of confinement and unsentimental descriptions of child care. The
            other main explanation of female difference posits a "female
            consciousness" that produces styles and structures innately
            different from those of the "masculine mind." The argument from
            experience is plausible but limited in its applications: the
            argument from a separate consciousness is subject to mystification
            and circular evidence. In both cases, scholars tend to list a few
            characteristics of writing by women without connecting or
            explaining them.
            ·  4. Annette Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a "Feminist Literary
            Criticism"", 2 (Autumn 1975): 78.
            Judith Kegan Gardiner is an associate professor of English and a
            member of the women's studies program at the University of Illinois
            at Chicago Circle. The author of Craftmanship in Context: The
            Development of Ben Johnson's Poetry as well as articles on Robert
            Burton, feminist literary criticism, and contemporary women
            writers, she is currently working on a study of twentieth-century
            fiction by women.
Catharine R. Stimpson
         Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English
         The "Kinsey Report" suggests the existence of such a mentality. Of
            142 women with much homosexual experience, 70 percent reported no
            regrets. This consciousness has manifested itself in literature in
            two ways. First, in lesbian romanticism: fusions of life and death,
            happiness and woe, natural imagery and supernatural strivings,
            neoclassical paganism with a ritualistic cult of Sappho, and modern
            beliefs in evolutionary progress with a cult of the rebel. At its
            worst an inadvertent parody of fin de siecle decadence, at its best
            lesbian romanticism ruthlessly rejects a stifling dominant culture
            and asserts the value of psychological autonomy, women, art, and a
            European civilization of the sensuous, sensual, and voluptuous.
            Woolf's Orlando is its most elegant and inventive text, but its
            symbol is probably the career of Natalie Barney, the cosmopolitan
            American who was the prototype of Valerie Seymour.23
            ·  23. See Rubin, introduction to Vivien's A Woman Appeared to Me,
            and George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of
            Natalie Barney (New York, 1976).
            Catherine R. Stimpson, professor of English at Rutgers University,
            is the former editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
            Society. The author of both critical essays and fiction, she
            recently co-edited, with Ethel Spector Person, Women, Sex and
            Sexuality.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
         "Draupadi" by Mahasveta Devi
         I have suggested elsewhere that, when we wander out of our own
            academic and First-World enclosure, we share something like a
            relationship with Senanayak's doublethink.2 When we speak for
            ourselves, we urge with conviction: the personal is also political.
            For the rest of the world's women, the sense of whose personal
            micrology is difficult (though not impossible) for us to acquire,
            we fall back on a colonialist theory of most efficient information
            retrieval. We will not be able t speak to the women out there if we
            depend completely on conferences and anthologies by Western-trained
            informants. As I see their photographs in women's studies journals
            or on book jackets, indeed, as I look in the glass, it is Senanayak
            with his anti-Fascist paperback that I behold. In the inextricably
            mingling historico-political specificity with the sexual
            differential in a literary discourse, Mahasveta Devi invites us to
            begin effacing that image.
            ·  2. See my "Three Feminist Readings: McCullers, Drabble,
            Habermas," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1979-
            80), and "French Feminism in an International Frame."
            Mahasveta Devi teaches English at Bijaygarh College in Jadavpur,
            India, an institution for working-class women. She has published
            over a dozen novels, most recently Chotti Munda ebang Tar Tir, and
            is a prolific journalist, writing on the struggle of the tribal
            peasant in West Bengal and Bihar. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is
            professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. The
            translator of Derrida's De la grammatologie, she has published
            essays on Marxist meminism, deconstructive practice, and
            contemporary literature and is currently completing a book on
            theory and practice in the humanities.
