The Breakthrough: Feminism and Literary Criticism

...At the same time, it is endlessly suggestive...

...Because Moers poses it as central, we have to decide whether we "buy it" or not—or if we are as skeptical as Spacks's students might have been...

...if women take strength in their independence to act in the world, then Shakespeare's sister, whose coming Woolf asked us to await in patience and humility, may appear at last...

...While it focused on the peculiarities of a man's world and of male critics, it did not investigate women's writing about our common life...

...At the same time, and even more important, it became impossible to maintain that you did not have to pay attention to the gender of an author to understand her work, that you could pretend that she had not had characteristic experiences as a writer and as a woman...

...This view in turn may direct us to a new thoughtfulness about how we conceive of what life and history have to do with the work of a writer, whether a woman or a man...

...They simply meant to give the lives of women writers the same importance that was granted to the lives of male writers—a connection to the writer's purposes and achievements, not a determination of them...

...Harold Bloom explained this intergenerational phenomenon as "the anxiety of influence"—literary "sons" testing themselves against the achievements of their "faRECONSIDERATIONS thers...

...But two remarkable, pioneering books were published before these four...

...Not only would this new perspective add to and deepen our views of these writers, but it might substantially change our understanding of the periods in which they wrote and of the structure of literature in general...

...He or she who soars not above simplicity is most likely to understand the human heart best in either sex, especially if he can make allowance for different modes of education, constitution, and situation...

...She has a talent for the comparative unparalleled in the other books...

...There are various kinds of "heroinisms": "traveling," "loving," "performing," and "educating...

...In this last case, she refers not to a student in this class, but to a student at a lunch a decade earlier, who was concerned about the issue of careers and marriage...

...106 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 Although Spacks has a chapter on "Theorists" that helps to ground her readers (as it must have grounded her students who wanted to find out what these writers had to do with them), Ellen Moers's Literary Women, the Great Writers is a more speculative book, anchored more in a literary tradition than in issues directly affecting today's women...

...Her use of George Sand's life and writing throughout the book calls attention to the differences between women who struggled with the pressure to conform and to minimally fit in and those who tried to break out of the mold and re-create their lives...

...Millett was openly and consistently polemical...

...It strikes me as curious that although so many contemporary critics are also teachers, they DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 105 RECONSIDERATIONS rarely attempt to do this in their work, as if the responses of people in a learning situation can't tell us anything about literature and its many meanings, and as if only licensed critics have anything interesting to say) The opinions of Spacks's students help to stimulate her thoughts on a wide range of subjects, everything from resentment at how characters are treated by a novelist (Jo in Little Women) to not grasping the full meaning of a character (Mrs...

...Our view has been enlarged beyond the imagination, beyond criticism, to the world in which literature is made...

...they did not want to reprise a historicism that would all but eliminate a focus on the work itself...

...The reader couldn't fail to recognize the negative rhetoric and attitudes she exposed...

...These writers participated in the women's movement as they spurred others on to extend the pursuit of knowledge—as opposed to opinions and stereotypes—about women into other fields...

...All of them refer at one point or other in their texts or footnotes to Ellman's and Millett's work...

...That was not her subject...

...Hers is a more compact book but not less illuminating than the others...

...They wondered why they weren't running the show...

...0 F COURSE, if what these four books did was to "start something," they, too, had predecessors...

...In effect, these critical works created a new field...

...she wonders and "what did it matter to literature...

...Her sociohistorical interests lead the reader to understand the links not only among these writers but also between them and other women and between them and their society...

...It is worth reading (or re-reading) to see how criticism ought to be practiced...

...The time span that might seem confining, in fact, provides the opportunity for a study that looks at many writers during the century from this special angle...

...Still, the incident was proof, if it were needed, that a woman's responsibility for "taking care" remains a powerful one, perhaps as powerful as it had been in Jane Austen's, Elizabeth Gaskell's, Louisa May Alcott's, Ellen Glasgow's, George Eliot's, and Virginia Woolf's work...

...It tells us repeatedly that the construction of "the female imagination" is not itself simply "imaginary" but derived from the experience of women—even women today who are young, "naïve," and just beginning to study literature...

...Her work serves as a bracing contrast to more in-depth criticism of women's work and broader generalizations about it...

...And it had that remarkable quality of original work—representing to many readers just what they were thinking but had never said or heard expressed in public...

...Spacks says, "I spoke passionately, and I thought eloquently about the richness of life committed to various kinds of endeavor...

...With differing definitions of their subject and different perspectives, they shared a conviction that much of the greatest literature of the nineteenth century—British, American, and French—could not be fully grasped without a consideration of the posiDISSENT / Spring 2008 n 103 RECONSIDERATIONS tion of women and women writers in society, their views of the world, and their literary preferences and practices...

...It is neither a rigid dogma, fanatically applied, nor a set of blinders that prevent them from seeing the literary work...

...Because each of the four books I've chosen has its own character and point of view, there is no distinct or orderly pattern of development here...

...The difficulties of a woman's life in the nineteenth century are keenly understood and documented in these books...

...Moers writes of Sand's determination enthusiastically and explores the strategies through which this remarkable person fought the restrictions she encountered...

...The field asserted itself on the literary scene, and after that, work in this area grew so rapidly and with such vitality and scope that it seems unfair to focus on only a few books written at the start of this period...

...These critics know that the realities of life and literature are too engaging, too important, to get stuck out there where there is no subject—except a theory and one's own selfconscious use of it...

...We do everything they do," they thought, "organizing, writing leaflets, marching, demonstrating—and then they think we should do the laundry...

...It was provocative...

...Each of them respected the works and lives of women writers without question, describing the ways in which their circumstances affected their creativity and analyzing what they had accomplished...

...Did it indicate a return to a long-discarded biographical style of literary criticism...

...The notion that "the female imagination" was a way of inventing a world and also a way of looking at the existing world through fiction could be demonstrated...

...Though this tactic may seem extraneous to the elevated pursuit of literary criticism, it produces thoughtful links between the reality of readers' lives and the literature, and it supports Spacks's own critical perception that problems that exist in novels also exist in people's lives today...

...On her way, she cut through the history of our culture, identifying male writers who derogated women as fictional characters, writers, and fellow human beings...

...Ellman dissected the ways in which our culture "looked at" and spoke about women—how women's accomplishments, abilities, and talents were treated in common parlance and in some literary work...

...She praises Richardson, not only for his understanding of a young's girl's prospects but for his mentoring of a group of women writers in his time...

...What does it matter...

...Not that the story is all about triumph over adversity...

...A key example is the acknowledgment of the importance of Samuel Richardson in the formation of Austen's work (he was long considered an influence but not in Moers's way) and also for his general attitudes toward fiction writing...

...de Stael, and Mary Shelley and poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sylvia Plath, and many others...

...It took time for the ideas of the new movement to stimulate new attitudes and for these in turn to create powerful connections to intellectual life and academic fields...

...In each case the critic respects the author's life and accepts it as part of the material she draws on in her work, a source and inspiration for her imagination and not simply an obstacle to be overcome by an unfortunate creature...

...Throughout, she emphasizes the relationship that becomes more critical during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for all writers—the relationship between self and society...

...They are able too, to work with the multiple strengths of George Eliot's work and to make sense of how Mill on the Floss reveals the least attractive parts of its heroine's character...

...This chapter then draws the authors into an indepth exploration of individual women writers and of how some, in fact, have worked in the shadow of male influence...

...Even Dissent's own RECONSIDERATIONS founding editor responded only to its excesses and could not credit the authenticity of the critique...

...Probably because of her vision, both Shelley and Barrett Browning's work have risen to their rightful position in literary history...

...In much the same way, we assume that the burgeoning interest in women's literature did not burst forth from the "second wave" in its early days...

...What did it mean to buck the tide and take women writers' works and lives seriously...

...Each of the critics sees this, in varying degrees...

...I i ITERATURE is connected to "real life...

...its readers—and critics—would keep coming back to the opinions that Millett had put out there—if only to question whether they adequately described the observable reality...

...you will not find it in a dictionary, and it does not move trippingly off the tongue or into the mind...

...She becomes a less mysterious figure and a more readable writer...

...Gilbert and Gubar's method is to probe the liter1 08 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 ary detail of each work and at the same time its psychological specificity...

...Their main goals were feminist and their analyses involved literary subjects, although not always directly or consistently: Mary Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970...

...Both Ellman's and Millett's books were published when the other four literary critics must have been thinking about their books and writing them...

...But perhaps the most remarkable work they do is with Emily Dickinson...

...Its sources and content were examined with the assumption that they had both literary and cultural value...

...The very fact of including her life and work in a book that's mostly on the Victorians is itself illuminating...

...Feminist criticism as these four writers practice it returns us (or should have) to one of the basic purposes of criticism—to have and defend a reasoned, coherent point of view...

...The work of women writers was taken far more seriously in this criticism than it had been before...

...She often returns in her analyses of literary work to what the students said, to what they asked, and to what they liked or disliked...

...Moers's comparative approach is distinctive...

...And a key point is, you don't have to be great to be a link in the chain...

...They are able here, as with Austen and Eliot, to explain how a writer's sense of the world, herself in it, and the possibilities for her characters develops along with her literary and human experience...

...You may think you know this material, but it is put into a framework that newly (or once again) illuminates the work...

...But she is nevertheless enthusiastic about the tradition at many points and optimistic for its future...

...Remembering these books should help to rescue the entire critical enterprise from the persistent distractions that threaten to make it irrelevant...

...Because of the book's fierceness, the importance and scope of her arguments were largely ignored...

...It had—or should have had—a considerable effect on everyone who read it...

...Elaine Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing has focused more intently on a group of writers in one country and one century, "from the generation of the Brontes to the present day...

...She seems not only to take flight across channels and oceans, but across generations and genders too: she makes comparisons with male authors as well...

...After these critical works it was no longer possible to claim that women's literary work was tangential to the "tradition" or marginal or derivative...

...If we find them basic, even foundational for the understanding of women's writing and for a way of reading it, do they have any standing today...

...Her story doesn't end with the circumstances of constraint but begins there...

...But four books seized my attention—then and now—and seem of major importance...

...The book had an unmistakable view of its own but was undogmatic...

...Sometimes a message has been so fully absorbed into the literary culture that the work of the messengers no longer exists as a separate resource...

...What these four critics did was not simply to "start something"— create a new field—but to take a crucial step forward in the practice of criticism...

...It could be seen in a century or more of work, from Jane Austen to writers like Isak Dinesen, Lillian Hellman, and Doris Lessing in the twentieth century...

...each of their books has scholarly interest...

...Whatever its flaws, Millett's bold arguments were as unforgettable as Ellman's more subtle musings...

...In some ways this is the most "feminist" of the four books, though not in the sense of any "political correctness...

...She intended to expose patriarchy, in all its ugly particularities, to trace its origins and history (if rapidly), and to begin a radical critique of its insidious presence in our society...

...But the roots of the movement go back even earlier...

...Nor is this link proposed simplistically but is everywhere part of a reading of women's work...

...Problems abound on either side of the channel, but the tools for creating solutions or at least workable lives differed...

...In the 1970s a number of books were written to reappraise women authors and the literature they produced...

...in Spacks's work this essential link is reaffirmed, however much it may have disappeared from contemporary critical conversations...

...She then explores how Richardson's Pamela is related to this view...

...Moers looks at this phenomenon from the eighteenth century to the present time, in Britain, France, and the United States...

...They don't find too much of interest on the surface of the works they examine—or at least not much that hasn't been noted before—but there is more than you ever dreamed of beneath the familiar surfaces...

...Beyond fantasy, beyond androgyny, beyond assimilation, the female tradition holds the premise of an art that may yet fulfill the hopes of Eliot and Woolf...

...These critics had something else in mind...

...For him, the development of literature rested on this dynamic encounter...

...She emerges from the cocoon of a reclusive life with even more distinctiveness than she already had...

...Literary study had been missing a good deal of fundamental significance...

...The authors' treatment of the construction of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its creation in the midst of her ravaged life involves complex psychological reasoning that is at its best hard to follow and at its worst too difficult for one reading...

...0 NE WONDERS if these books that "started something" are read anymore...

...Showalter puts this "literature of their own" into the full context of literary and social history, recognizing the significance of details: the class into which the writers were born, their experiences of marriage and motherhood, their situations in their original families (how many had domineering fathers and passive mothers or were father-oriented or motherless girls), and how they handled their complex relationships to the literary world...

...I remember my astonishment at seeing these perceptions finally and authoritatively in print...

...They focus on close reading of specific works of fiction and poetry and at the same time examine the connections between these works and the world in which they were written...

...They were published from 1975 to 1979: Patricia Spacks's The Female Imagination (1975), Ellen Moers's Literary Women (1976) Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979...

...All this is not to say that Moers strains to RECONSIDERATIONS find good things to say about men but to emphasize that her comparative instinct is continually at work...

...There is always almost too much on a given topic or book...

...In their mining of the texts for every last interpretive nuance, they don't forget the impact social reality has on the writer and on the lives of ordinary women...

...I'm not sure how many there were...

...That, in fact, is their subject...

...Bloom's theory doesn't work for women, but they find a parallel that does...

...Her view is that there is not simply a list of women writers, or even a "group" in this period, but a "female tradition," that is, writers conscious of what comes before and "joining it," entering an ongoing conversation as they add to it...

...Gilbert and Gubar's viewpoint is typical of the approach that these books share...

...I cannot canvass the critics throughout the generations since the nineteenth century who expressed genuine and uncondescending interest in women writers...

...Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer for things they had said and written about women...

...If that weren't enough, they take on the atypical "The Lifted Veil" and situate it in Eliot's fiction as well as constructing its historical context...

...Their "encyclopedia" is one of depths rather than scope...

...Similar issues persist through different periods and genres even in a greatly changed world...

...It traces a complex of relationships in the nineteenth century that are essentially intellectual and literary— relationships between ideas and literary work...

...It had a clear, well-articulated agenda: to demonstrate the existence of patriarchy (if there were any doubters...

...But the team is more than plausible on Charlotte Bronte, unraveling the conflicts in her life and in her fiction so that you learn a good deal more about both, and what you learn seems to enhance your knowledge of the work and the situation of women writers, in the period...

...For the most part these books focused on nineteenth-century Britain (to a lesser extent on the United States and France) and they clearly "started something...

...A re-reading, however, can provide more reflections—that there really are perspectives through which we can give an equality of consideration to works by women and by men, that one can take gender seriously instead of pretending that it doesn't exist, and at the same time that we don't have to think of gender as a totalistic determinant of artistic achievement...

...She begins by noting that so much of the literature of the modern world is written by women...

...AS ONE LOOKS at the length of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's book, The Madwoman in the Attic, The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, one supposes that the authors set themselves a singular agenda that differs from those of the other critics, to embrace the "whole ball of wax...

...None of them is so welded to her theory that the literature before her becomes invisible...

...Even where there is success and triumph, there are conflicts and ambivalences, unresolved and sometimes even unrecognized, which leave marks on these writers' lives and their works that the critic examines...

...What's that about...

...In what is undoubtedly a work of scholarship and criticism, Spacks takes pains to start her discussions from the worries and explorations of her students...

...Her book did not really have a lot to say about literature and literary values, despite its attacks on male writers...

...Its compactness is not a matter of length but of standpoint— she goes at what interests her very directly...

...These were writers, as Ellman had already shown, for whom "female" and/or "feminine" were slurs...

...The anger and passion that she felt about her life and the lives that women were destined for are powerfully reflected in her tales of women at home and abroad...

...They even risk an interpretation of Dorothea (Middlemarch) that asks one to reconsider the portrait of a heroine that Eliot is presumed to have created...

...Gilbert and Gubar do something that no one else attempts...

...Putting her alongside other writers—whose work she knew and commented on—identifies her as a writer of her time...

...There was more here than most of us—the common reader and the scholar— were seeing and acknowledging...

...Without saying much directly about her own ideas, her perspective was implicit, and her critical reflections ranged freely over everyday speech, opinions, beliefs, and cultural habits, examining them closely and commenting on the language used to express them...

...This body of work always has a subject outside of itself, a subject that is as relevant today as it was when the books were written...

...Read through it, and see if you are casually familiar with a third or even a quarter of the list...

...JUDITH B. WALZER is a retired professor of literature who has written for Dissent about fiction and films...

...And the theory is not obsessive and confining: the work and the writer are always paramount...

...With it Moers categorizes the range of different roles women play in their own fiction and so supports the scope and comparisons of her investigation...

...Her text cannot deal with all these writers, but she is able to trace the history of women's writing from Bronte and Eliot—the greats with whom she begins—to the sensation novels (and their appeal to women readers), to early feminist novels, to women writers and the suffrage movement, DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 107 RECONSIDERATIONS to "the female aesthetic," to the development of the idea of androgyny, and to writing "beyond the female aesthetic...

...SPACKS'S BOOK, she tells us, had its roots in a class she taught at Wellesley College called "Women Writers and Woman's Problems...

...Yet even without the stimulus of a popular movement, scholars and critics must have been thinking about women and literature and puzzling over the odd ways in which women writers were categorized, shunted off the main line, ignoring that among them were some of the most important writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

...These books may be the ones that "started something," but now we may take them for granted...

...DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 109...

...By the time you finish with what they have to say about the Brontes, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson, you have a better sense of what there might be in their works to think about...

...Kate Millett's book was equally powerful, if written with an entirely different approach...

...She is, as a result, able to tell a more coherent story...

...But in fact, they want to represent the universe of women's writing in the works they have selected to study...

...She made exceptions for some writers, such as Jean Genet, who mocked the stereotypes of men and women by showing how the homosexual world of his experience imitates them...

...Its radicalism was duly noted, but its significance for achievements in literary criticism was entirely unanticipated by critics protecting established attitudes...

...Most, in fact, refer to one another's work, and to the work of other writers on women and literature...

...It now seems to me a book that was greatly undervalued...

...This is not a book to be read "at one go" but should be delved into on different occasions and used for reference...

...I shall call them "critics," because their works are models for what criticism can do, although they could also be called scholars and/or professors...

...Her chapter on the key concept of "heroinism" begins with a quotation from Richardson: One generally finds in the writing of even ingenious men that they take up the characters of women too easily . . . the two sexes are too much taken as different species...

...They resolved not to use biography or personal history as an excuse for lesser lives and limited accomplishments or as a substitute for them...

...Showalter also includes a thirty-page biographical appendix (in addition to her own bibliography for the book) that contains short sketches of women writers in Britain during this period...

...She was on the attack, and she knew exactly who the enemy was...

...She is keenly aware of and documents all the phases of the tradition in which writers tried to retreat from powerful, uncomfortable realities...

...In a series of chapters exploring these heroinisms, she includes Gothic fiction, fiction about feminists in love, fiction about women as romantic exemplars, and fiction about women who teach (governesses) and learn to rule...

...In a long and typically allusive chapter, Gilbert and Gubar work through their explanation of what such a connection might mean for women writers: women undergo an "anxiety of authorship," struggling always to see if they can write rather than if they can equal or surpass their literary ancestors...

...Her references were sometimes pointed, sometimes associative and oblique...

...She did the same for some literary works—mostly by men...

...These critics have that and use it well...

...She was especially hard on D.H...

...MOERS'S CATEGORIES Support an emphasis on problems that may be universal, however differently they appear in different works and at different times...

...Ellman's book, electing a reflective stance, cannily avoided a precise subject, and it could not be called literary criticism...

...What is remarkable is how their views fit together like the pieces of a puzzle—interlocking at their edges, filling in material that's not covered elsewhere, representing, in sum, a set of compatible if distinct perspectives...

...The common wisdom has been that it began when women who were active in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s took a good, long look at their radical male comrades and began to question their own subservience...

...Again, popular opinion tells us that there was a buildup for some time, at least since the time of the Second World War, when women had to pitch in and were needed for essential work in the "outside" world...

...This interest, too, must have been forming slowly...

...In Gubar and Gilbert's book, Bronte represents most vividly the contradictions and ambivalence that talented Victorian women experienced...

...Certainly, Showalter's critical scrutiny of the idea of "androgyny"— in 1977—must establish her independence from any political line...

...Her sharpest 104 • DISSENT / Spring 2008 observations were presented in a cerebral style concerned to awaken our minds rather than our ire...

...It is perhaps from the example of Sand's life that Moers develops the idea of "heroinism...

...But it had a precise method...

...They connect themselves to the criticism of their own time and to a critic (male) who has focused on relationships among generations of writers that are inherently patriarchal...

...This tradition absorbs her: the "links in the chain that bound one generation to the next...

...She epitomizes the struggle for self-expression as a writer along with the struggle for a personal identity on her own terms...

...It wasn't that Charlotte Bronte had to stay at home or go out to be a governess, and therefore miss the opportunity of being an artist and a great writer—that is, miss the opportunity of "becoming male...

...Ramsay's power in To the Lighthouse) to assumptions that the work of women writers will be second-rate (they could not name important women poets) to concerns about one of Spacks's central issues: women "taking care" of their world...

...The students didn't buy it, and one of them "bursts out, with real passion, 'But do you ever send your daughter off to school with dirty underwear?' " Spacks says that this became a family joke, but it was a serious question for the student, and the teacher regrets that she responded defensively...

...In their work they reestablished the idea that the social environment surrounds us all—writers, too—and that it is different for genders, groups, and individuals...

...Since the women they wrote about had written and published, their circumstances had not destroyed their ambitions however they had marked their literary lives...

...She did not shrink from irony or full comedy, but none of this was to assault the reader...

...Heroinism" is an awkward term...

...She ends her book with a stirring thought: But if contact with a female tradition and a female culture is a center...

...Her book is a study that takes flight, so to speak, from one locale to another, as if the writers she is studying were part of a discourse that moved back and forth across the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean...

...Her comparisons are often dazzling, as she moves through generations and genres, providing arresting interpretations of fiction by Sand, Mme...

...It became harder and harder to sustain habitually dismissive and narrow responses...