-

literary Feminisms
transitions
General Editor: Julian Wolfreys

Published Titles
NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL MATER IA USM John Brannigan
POSTMODERN NARRATIVE THEORY Mark Currie
MARXIST LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY Moyra Haslett
LITERARY FEMINISMS Ruth Robbins
DECONSTRUCTION • DERRIDA Julian Wolfreys

Forthcoming Titles
NATIONAL IDENTITY John Brannigan
GENDER Alison Chapman
IDEOLOGY James Decker
QUEER THEORY Donald E. Hall
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Claire Jones
RACE Brian G. Niro
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE Andrew Roberts
SUBJECTIVITY Ruth Robbins
TRANSGRESSIONS Julian Wolfreys
FORMALIST CRITICISM AND
READER- RESPONSE THEORY Kenneth Womak and Todd Davis
transitions

Literary
Feminisms
Ruth Robbins

St. Martin's Press

New York
LITERARY FEMINISMS

Copyright © 2000 by Ruth Robbins

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without wriuen permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
For information, address:

St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

First published in the United States of America in 2000

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and

made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.

Printed in Hong Kong

ISBN 0-3 12- 22807-4 clothbound

ISBN 0-3 12- 22808-2 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Robbins, Ruth, 1965-
Literary feminisms I Ruth Robbins.
p. cm. - (Transitions)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-312-22807-4. - ISBN 0-312-22808-2 (pbk.)
I. English literature- History and criticism-Theory, etc.
2. American literature - History and criticism-Theory, etc.
3. Feminist fiction-History and criticism - Theory, etc.
4. Feminism and literature- Great Britain. 5. Feminism and
literature- United States. 6. Women and literature- Great Britain.
7. Women and literature- United States. 8. Feminist literary
criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Transitions (St. Martin's Press)
PR I I 9.R63 I 999
820'.82-dc21 99-43176
CfP
Contents

General Editor's Preface ix

Acknowledgements xi
A Note on Editions Used xii

Introduction: Gestures towards Definitions 1

Part I Histories 19

1. Liberal, Materialist and Socialist Literary Feminisms 21

• Mary Wollstonecraft: vindicating the liberal-individual
woman 26
• Analysing materialism: reading as a socialist feminist? 33
• There is always another side, always ... widening the
view 40

2. Images of Women Criticsm 50

• The ways we looked - then 57
• Looking again at looking 65
• The ways we look now? 67

3. The Woman as Writer: Forging Female Traditions 70

• The 'problem' of quality 71
• Early makers of female traditions: Patricia Mayer
Spacks and Ellen Moers 75
• Developing the female tradition: Elaine Showalter,
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar 83
• The limits of one female tradition 94

V
vi Contents

Part II (Psycho )Analyses 103

4. Psychoanalysis and/or feminism? 105

• Freud 108
• Lacan 113

5. Julia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 119

• Reading with mother? 133

6. 'Mirror, Mirror ... ': Luce Irigaray and Reflections of and

on the Feminine 146
• Looking again: images of femininity, lrigaray and
psychoanalysis 150
• Speech is never neuter/neutral 155
• Politics and French feminism 158
• Reading with Irigaray: three Gothic reflections 160

7. Cixous: Laughing at the Oppositions 168

• Reading with Cixous 177

Part III Differences 185

8. Differences of View and Viewing the Differences:

Challenging Female Traditions 18?
• Ain't I a woman? 187
• Ghosts, traces and sexual 'Others': lesbian feminist
theories 199
• Queering the patch: Majorie Garber, Judith Butler
and the slippage of identity 209

Part IV Readings 215

9. Reading the Boys' Own Stories: The Strange Case of

Dr Jekyll and Mr l-Iyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and
Heart of Darkness 217
• Reading the stereotypes 219
• Case-notes: Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde 223
• As pretty as a picture? Wilde's Dorian Gray 227
 Contents vii

• Civilisation and its discontents: Heart of Darkness 232

• About these readings 239

10. Reading the Writing on the Wall: Charlotte Perkins

Gilman's 'The Yellow Wall-paper' 242

Afterword: The Mark on the Wall - Marking Differences,

Marking Time 259
• Where now? How now? 264

Annotated Bibliography 267

Bibliography 274
Index 285
General Editor ' s Preface

Transitions: transition-, n. of action. 1. A passing or passage from one

condition, action or (rarely) place, to another. 2. Passage in thought,
speech, or writing, from one subject to another. 3. a. The passing from
one note to another b. The passing from one key to another,
modulation. 4. The passage fro1n an earlier to a later stage of
development or forn1ation ... change from an earlier style to a later; a
style of intermediate or mixed character ... the historical passage of
language from one well-defined stage to another.

The ai'm of Transitions is to explore passages and movernents in critical

thought, and in the development of literary and cultural interpret-
ation. This series also seeks to examine the possibilities for reading,
analysis and other critical engagements which the very idea of
transition makes possible. The writers in this series unfold the
movements and modulations of critical thinking over the last
generation, from the first emergences of what is now recognised as
literary theory. They examine as well how the transitional nature of
theoretical and critical thinking is still very much in operation,
guaranteed by the hybridity and heterogeneity of the field of literary
studies. The authors in the series share the common understanding
that, now more than ever, critical thought is both in a state of transition
and can best be defined by developing for the student reader an
understanding of this protean quality.
This series desires, then, to enable the reader to transform her/his
own reading and writing transactions by comprehending past
developments. Each book in the series offers a guide to the poetics and
politics of interpretative paradigms, schools and bodies of thought,
while transforming these, if not into tools or methodologies, then into
conduits for directing and channelling thought. As well as
transforming the critical past by interpreting it from the perspective of
the present day, each study enacts transitional readings of a number of
well-known literary texts, all of which are themselves conceivable as

ix
X General Editor's Preface

having been transitional texts at the moments of their first appearance.

The readings offered in these books seek, through close critical reading
and theoretical engagement, to de1nonstrate certain possibilities in
critical thinking to the student reader.
It is hoped that the student will find this series liberating because
rigid methodologies are not being put into place. As all the dictionary
definitions of the idea of transition above suggest, what is important is
the action, the passage: of thought, of analysis, of critical response.
Rather than seeking to help you locate yourself in relation to any
particular school or discipline, this series aims to put you into action,
as readers and writers, travellers between positions, where the
movement between poles comes to be seen as of more importance
than the locations themselves.

Julian Wolfreys
Acknowledgements

To all my colleagues in Literary Studies and Cornparative Literature at

the University of Luton, my thanks. To Jill Barker, Claire Jones and
Karen Sayer, thank you for loan of books, for tolerating frantic
conversation about strange things, and for all-round general kindness.
To Moyra Haslett and John Brannigan, thanks for those things too, but
also thank you for sharing your ideas as well as your time. To the
students who have taken modules in Literary Theory and Women's
\,Vriting over the past couple of years: you have helped immeasurably
by re~inding me of what can be difficult about theory, and still having
the courage to try it out. Thank you all. My gratitude also to the various
library staff at Luton and the University of Warwick who have helped
out in lots of different ways.
To Julian Wolfreys, for all his kindesses and for all his faith, thank
you.
To my parents, who have always encouraged my intellectual
pretensions, and always bought me books, thank you.
And by no means least, thanks to Richard Andrews: for light,
warmth, tolerance, good humour and love. Just what the doctor
ordered. ·
Elizabeth Banett-Browning wrote that the fate of the woman poet
was to be bereft of a tradition: she searched everywhere for
grandmothers and found none. l was lucky in that my grandmothers
were always there when I wanted them. Now they are both gone; this
book is affectionately dedicated to the 1nemories of Elizabeth Robbins
(nee French) and Frances Parkin (nee Green).

RUTH ROBBINS

Xi
Xii A Note on Editions Used

A Note on Editions Used

This book is aimed at student readers. For that reason, as far as
possible, textual references are to readily available, modern paperback
editions. This can have the effect of making references look rather odd:
Mary Wollstonecraft was not still publishing in 1992 - that is just the
date of the edition used. The Bibliography contains original
publication dates for your reference.
Introduction: Gestures
towards Definitions

W is certainly for Woman and Witch. She picked up a nineteenth-

century reprint of an old herbal in a bookshop once, cheap because
second-hand and slightly damaged, the thick laid paper spotted and
foxed, the headband nibbed. She cradled it between her hands, and
then opened it, leafing idly through the index. The male author's
entries for W rivet her: warts; weevils; whites, women's whites, how to
control; witches, how to guard against; wolfbane; womb: women's
weeping therefrom; women in childbed; women's complaints, how to
soothe; women's courses, how to stop, how to bring on; women's
diseases, women's longings; women's pains; worms in the ears. When
she turns the leaves of tl1e index back to M, she finds no correspond-
ing entry for Man.
Michele Roberts, The Visitation

... the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see
something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters

The word, defining, ,nuzzles; the drawn line

Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous,
In [Link] which imagined lines

Can only haunt.

Sylvia Plath, 'Poems, Potatoes'

This is a book about feminist literary theory, though the phrase itself
is contested and cannot be taken for granted. Maybe the place to
begin is with some definitions of the terms I need to use to talk about
that phrase, feminist literary theory. What happens when these three
words - feminist, literary, theory - come together?
First of all, though, a word of warning about definitions. By defini-
 2 Introduction

tion, definitions are exclusive. They operate as much by what they

leave out as by \,vhat they include. The word 'define' co1nes from the
Latin verb definire, derived from the noun finis, meaning a limit. A
definition literally sets limits on meaning. Ideally it does so with the
intention of producing clarity, of outlining those sharp edges which,
in both visual and written fields, are supposed to make things easily
seen and understood. The limit, to paraphrase Ruskin's remark,
permits the reader/viewer to see clearly, and to speak/write clearly of
what she has seen. Definition gives you something firm to focus on;
sornething solid to look at; firm ground from which to speak. The
ideal, however, by definition, is not always what 'really' happens.
As the passage from Roberts's novel suggests, there are power rela-
tionships in definitions. In the old herbal to which Helen, the novel's
heroine, refers, it is assumed that Man needs no definition; he is the
norm against which Woman is defined as an aberration, a pathologi-
cal condition, associated with 'complaints' and 'weeping' and 'pains'.
There is no corresponding entry for Man, no symmetry between the
terms Man and Woman: Man is somehow separated from the pains
associated with the body to the extent that one might wonder if men
have bodies at all. In this set of definitions, Woman is body; Man is
infinite possibility since that which is not definite (defined) is infu1ite
(without li1nits). Or, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it in The Second Sex:

woman is defined exclusively in her relation to man. The asymmetry

of the categories - male and female - is made manifest in the unilat-
eral form of sexual myths. We sometin1es say 'the sex' to designate
woman; she is the flesh, its delights and dangers. The truth that for
woman man is sex and carnality has never been proclaimed because
there is no one to proclaim it. Representation of the world, like the
world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point
of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. (de Beauvoir 1997,
174-5)

De Beauvoir's text insists throughout on what she calls the 'otherness'

of women in relation to the self-declared ' norm' of men. The procla-
mations of female flesh versus male mind are in1portant. They silence
women who are disabled from proclain1ing the sexedness (and sexi-
ness) of men; representation repeatedly replicates women's status as
other; representation becon1es reality, confused with absolute truth.
These are important insights for thinking about literaiy texts and the
 Introduction 3

realities which they supposedly reflect and sometimes create.

Representations, in the word, of the world are confused and confusing.
The definitions 1 want to produce and reproduce here should all
therefore be thought of as provisional, contingent, not that firm in
fact, because I don't want to harm or limit anyone with my defini-
tions. It's not that meaning doesn't matter. Of course it does: femi-
nism and its derivations are not mere words without any status or
power in reality. Rather, it's that my understanding of the word 'femi-
nism', one of the words most at stake in this book, is that it is anti-
totalising: it is not confused with absolute truth. It does not have one
catch-all, all-or-nothing meaning, but many meanings which depend
on contexts, subject positions, languages, the material worlds we
inhabit, and our own psychic spaces, all mixed up together. And one
of feminism's n1eanings has precisely to do with overstepping bound-
aries, defying limits and refusing to be contained in or by ready-made
systems of signification. It is about making meanings as well as refer-
ring to the old ones.
The 'title of this book, with its insistence on feminisms as a plural
noun, is a case in point. The spell-checker on my computer does not
recognise this particular plural, and asks me: 'are you sure?' What a
question. I am sure that the plural was deliberate, that 1 really meant
to write feminisms, not feminism. But I'm not sure why the computer
dislikes it, as it dislikes many of the plural abstract nouns I type in.
Probably the word is rejected because the dictionary from which the
spell-checker was compiled did not contain feminism as a plural
form. There's nothing especially sinister in that. Dictionaries often
don't contain plurals. But just maybe the dictionary is a political tool
which reflects and reproduces power relations: if the word 'femi-
. nisms' does not exist, then I should not use it because it is a neolo-
gism (a new word) and therefore a solecis1n (a breach in language,
linguistic bad manners). It is an improper word, and that sense of its
impropriety is a way of policing and limiting my conceptual frame-
work for the world.
The plural form feminisms is political because it disrupts the notion
that 'feminism' is a single category, with clear limits, fixed in a single
semantic space. The plural form rew-rites the category as something
potentially transgressive or subversive. If there's more than one femi-
nism, feminisms might be anywhere, might do anything, might
spread out like virulently contagious diseases, might be uncontain-
able. This is, of course, the point. Feminisms are multiple. And while
 4 Introduction

this book might have its own views, don't be fooled into thinking that
it's the last word.
If you spend time with dictionaries (there's more than one, of
course, more than one set of meanings, more than one set of limits on
any given word, itself a potentially subversive fac t), there are bound to
be differences in emphasis in how words are defined, not least the
differences that come through time. The three words in the phrase
'feminist literary theory', have to be looked up separately in most
dictionaries and in this context they have what appear to be quite
incompatible sets of definitions. Read those disparate definitions
together though, and some interesting ideas might be thrown up.
The word 'feminist' for example, is a relatively recent word, if the
Oxford English Dictionary is to be believed. It appears first in the
Supplement to the dictionary (1933, reprinted and revised in 1972),
with two meanings: as an adjective it signals 'pertaining to feminism,
or to women'; as a noun, a feminist (since 1895, when the first usage is
recorded) is 'an advocate of feminism'. The entries for 'feminist' refer
us back to the earlier word 'feminism' (which has no plural form in
the OED). In the early editions of the dictionary feminism appeared,
marked 'rare', as 1neaning alternatively ' the state of being feminine ' or
'a fe1ninine, or woman's, expression', neither of which appears to be
what feminism means to us. The Supplement deletes 'rare', gives a
derivation for the word from the French feminisme, and adds two
further possibilities: femjnism is the 'advocacy of the rights of\.voman
(based on the theory of the equality of the sexes)'; it is also a patholog-
ical description of 'the development of female secondary characteris-
tics in a male'. The latter definition may not appear to have that much
to do with this book and its concerns, except that feminism has often
been viewed with hostility: a biological pathology in which men might
turn into women is possibly one reason for the hostilities - men fear
becoming women, becoming feminised. And by extension, they
perhaps also fear women becoming men. 1
In their turn, the definitions of 'feminism' send us further back into
the dictionary to consider the word 'feminine'. For this word there is a
long entry, with six distinct meanings in the original dictionary, and a
further two in the Supplement. Whatever 'feminine' is, it's clearly not
quite secure or fixed. It means first: 'Of persons or animals, belonging
to the female sex, fe1nale. Now rare' (the word or the concept, I
wonder?); second: 'In same sense, of objects to which sex is attrib-
uted, or which have feminine names esp. one of the heavenly bodies'
 Introduction 5

- a metaphorical usage which describes stars amongst other things,

and seems to have relatively little to do with biological sex or with real
women. Thirdly, feminine means 'of or pertaining to a woman, or to
women; consisting of women; carried on by women'. Fourthly:
'Characteristic of, peculiar or proper to women; womanlike,
womanly'. Fifthly, a depreciative usage or insult: 'Womanish, effemi-
nate'. Lastly, the grammar usages of the word, as in the feminine
genders of nouns which describe objects or concepts that are not
inherently female. The Supplement adds to the grammar usages the
phrase 'feminine ending', meaning weak rhyme; and 'Eternal
Feminine' as a translation of Goethe's concept of das ewig-Weibliche,
an interesting addition, since it implies that the Eternal Feminine has
not been around all that long.
I could go on, and look up 'woman', and its offshoots, but I don't
want to reproduce the dictionary so much as to comment on it. The
point of this semantic excursion is that the word feminism does not
have a single secure meaning - as, indeed, no word ever does. The
earliest meanings of feminism recorded in English see it as 'the state
of being feminine' and 'a feminine or woman's word or expression'.
What for later generations has become a term involved in issues of
political advocacy and agency, referred first of all to biology and to
language, terms which might be rewritten as 'nature' and 'culture', or,
indeed as 'bodies' and 'language'. Feminism has to do with bodies
(women's bodies, mostly, I suppose) and with how those bodies speak
in such a way that their sex is registered in their language.
Similarly, the word feminine starts with biology, originally
signalling female sex, though the dictionary regards that usage as rare.
It does not however take long for this word, too, to move from nature
_to culture, from bodies to codes of behaviour, including linguistic
behaviour. The metaphorical usage which associates femininity with
stars is one example. But it is the third, fourth and fifth definitions
that interest me most here. In the third definition, biology returns:
here femininity appears as a natural and defining (li1niting?) charac-
teristic of women. In the fourth, culture returns. The feminine is what
is 'proper' to women where proper means both what 'belongs to
women', but also what is expected of women, what is womanlike or
womanly. In amongst the illustrative quotations for the word under
its fourth heading, however, we find a quotation from Bulwer Lytton's
1835 novel Rienzi which separates femininity from the female sex:
'There was something almost feminine in the tender deference \ovith
6 I ntroduction

which he appeared to listen' (my emphasis). So the feminine is not the

exclusive preserve of women; men can have feminine characteristics
if Lytton's novel is to be believed. What does the dictionary think of
men who have such characteristics? The question is answered indi-
rectly by the fifth 'depreciative' definition: 'womanish, effeminate',
both words used about men rather than about women, and which
imply a derogation of masculinity, of proper maleness in male behav-
iour. A man with feminine characteristics is not a proper man,
whereas a woman who is womanish or effeminate is merely fulfilling
her biological and cultural destinies.
None of which fixes the meaning of the word feminism or defines
feminisms. The dictionary's confusions over female, feminine, femi-
nist signals nonetheless something important for the project of this
book. These three words for contemporary feminist writers in the
Humanities and the Social Sciences describe slightly different things.
Female is a biological category which defines the sexual characteris-
tics of a body: female describes biological sex. Feminine is a sociologi-
cal category which defines the behavioural characteristics associated
in different contexts and at different times with female biology: femi-
nine describes gender, and tends to suggest that gender is not the
natural attribute of sex. Feminist refers to a political category which
suggests that the confusion of biology with culture (sexual character-
istics \,vith socially acceptable behaviour on the grounds of sex) can
and should be questioned: feminist describes politics (see Moi in
Jefferson and Robey 1986, 204-21, for the full working out of these
definitions).
That initial confusion, though, rernains important. Even as I try to
separate out the strands of these three words, I have to remember that
sex and gender are slippery terms. In the attempt to disentangle them
I don't want to forget that it is precisely the confusions of real bodies
with social possibilities, the confusions of nature and culture that
these words articulate, that are the subject of this discussion, not
already foreclosed by neat definition. There's a leakage between
female, feminine and feminism. If the politics of feminisms have
anything in common in all their varieties, they start in some sense
from bodies: the bodies of real women. Feminisms are concerned
with how bodies and the material world, bodies and work, bodies and
reproduction, bodies and culture, bodies and sexualities, bodies and
class, bodies and race, bodies and minds, bodies and representations,
bodies and behaviour, bodies and the law, intersect. Feminisms put
 Introduction 7

real bodies into question 1n the metaphorical realm of the body

politic.
It is not, however, just a question of looking at things, noting them,
and then passing on. If fenunisms are political then presumably the
point is to change things. What happens when feminisms look is that
they often don't like what they see, and they tell of their dislike. All
kinds of bodies have suffered oppression, torture, imprisonment,
enslavement and rape through history. Vvo1nen's bodies - and the
minds inhabiting those bodies - have often suffered more, continue
now to suffer more. So while ferninisms are concerned to define
distinctions between sex and gender, between femaleness and femi-
ninity, they do not, on the whole, want to forget biology completely.
There are strategic reasons for remembering bodies. There is a neces-
sary activism in feminis1ns, an activisn1 that wants to change what
happens to biological women because of the social structures of
gender. Sex and gender are not, however, the only sites of women's
oppression - one can be oppressed because one is poor, Black, under-
educated, lesbian, enslaved, imprisoned. But where entire groups are
oppressed, women often get it worse. Feminisms are therefore poHti-
cised discourses which uncover the symptoms of oppression, \>vhat-
ever their grounds, diagnose the problem, and offer alternative
versions of liveable realities. But their primary focus is on the female
bodies which have been oppressed perhaps most forcefully because
they are female bodies.
Literature, especially in its more traditional formulations, might
seem light years away from such concerns. Early attempts to define it,
by critics like Matthew Arnold who sought in literature 'the best that
has been thought and said', or William Empson who saw a poem as a
'well-wrought urn', an artefact without political meaning, are wishy-
washy. The question of defining literature is a notoriously difficult
one as the first chapter of Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An
Introduction amply demonstrates in its suggestion that we should
think of literature 'less as some inherent quality or set of qualities
displayed by certain kinds of writing ... than as a nwnber of ways in
which people relate themselves to writing' (Eagleton 1996, 8). The
consequence of this insight is that the nature of 'the best that has
been thought and said', the qualities of the 'well-wrought urn' are
relative, historically and culturally specific, not absolute, neither tran-
scendent nor transhistorical. Without a working definition of what
literature is., it is presumably also impossible to say what the 'literary'
8 Introduction

is either. The OED tells us of literature that it is one of several possibil-

ities:

1. Acquaintance with letters or books; polite or humane learning;

literary culture. Now rare and obs. ...
2. Literary work or production; the activity or profession of a man
of letters; the realm of letters ...
3. (a) Literary production as a whole; the body of writings produced
in a particular country or period, or in the world in general. Now
also in a more restricted sense, applied to "vriting which has
claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or
emotional effect. (This sense is of very recent emergence in
England and France.)
(b) The body of books and writings that treat of a particular
subject.
(c) colloq Printed matter of any kind. (My emphasis)

To have literature is to have a particular kind of education - 'polite or

humane learning' - but that's rare and obsolete (1 wonder if that's the
education in question, or the meaning invoked by the definition).
Literature is also just about anything produced by a n1an (sic] of
letters. A woman of letters does not exist in this dictionary. But litera-
ture is also writing which is valued because of its 'beauty of form and
emotional effect'. Who decides what beauty is, or whether a given
piece is emotionally effective is not made clear. The dictionary at once
disguises the power relations of definitions even as it also articulates
them. When one looks at the definition of 'literary', however, it seems
unlikely that such judgements might be made by women. The literary
pertains to 'letters or polite learning', 'to books and written composi-
tions'; it refers to texts that have 'value on account of [their] qualities
of form.' Someone who is literary is one who is 'engaged with litera-
ture as a profession, occupied in writing books. Of a society, etc.:
consisting of literary men' (my italics).
What seems to come from these definitions is an emphasis on
education and on the value that accrues to certain written forms, and,
by extension, in the gaps of the definitions, an assumption that
education and value accrue to men not women. The two tern1s,
education and value, are connected. Only those who have an
acquaintance with 'letters or books, polite or humane learning, liter-
ary culture' are fitted to pronounce on the value of the letters, books,
 Introduction 9

learning or culture. This is an important issue for feminist theory, for,

throughout much of history, it is precisely education that has been
denied to women. The denial has, of course, occurred in different
degrees for different classes. Aristocratic or upper-class women have
often been taught to read, though they were denied university educa-
tion in Britain and the United States until the end of the last century.
Working men and women seldom had even limited educational
opportunities until the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, a
very large majority of Western populations, and particularly women,
has traditionally been excluded from achieving the means by which
they might comment on 'value'.
Thus, whiJe the definitions of 'literature' and the 'literary' appear to
be radically separate from the category of politics, there is a political
dimension bu1ied under the apparently objective voice of the dictio-
nary. Who tells us what is valuable;' what is in or out in literary
culture? Who decides on the qualities of form that produce and repro-
duce literary value? vVhat I want to suggest here is that literature must
be understood as a powerful political term. Indeed, the major feminist
theorist, Julia .Kristeva, as Leon S. Roudiez notes in his introduction to
her Desire in Language, goes so far as to refuse the term literature
because of its abilities to exclude certain types of writing and to exalt
other pieces into an untouchable category where criticism cannot
reach them (Roudiez 1981, 5). Kristeva replaces 'literature' with
'poetic language' to signal any kind of writing in which form is more
sjgnificant than transparent communication and to slip away from
literature's constraining implications.
That is one kind of political gesture which has strategic importance
for feminist theory. The other kind of gesture is to re-think the term
'.l iterature' to make it inclusive and for readers to be more reflective
about what is in or out of the category, and why. I have a marginal
preference for the second route precisely because literature is a politi-
cal and powerful term that I want to be able to use for political
reasons. I want to push at the boundaries of its definition in order to
make it include some of those 'other' things which have not tradition-
ally been valued, or whjch have been displaced from representation
as inappropriate, improper, obscene. The literary text at once reflects
(often in a very indirect way) and [Link] the world in which it is
written and read. The aesthetic is not therefore, as it is sometilnes
constructed, apolitical. The what and how of literature, the content
and its formulations, matter. The forms writing takes, the events it
I 0 I ntroduct io n

expresses, the whole aesthetics of literature, are political. Political

theories of literature - Marxisms, feminisms, post-colonialisms -
enable me to say this and to claim some of the value as my own, and
to take away from the notion of 'value' as self-evident and untouch-
able.
Literary studies has been a fn1itful space in feminist theory.
Although, as Miriam Brody says, no one went to the barricades for
sexual equality after reading Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the
Rights of Woman (1792), because literature is an expressive mode
which enables us to think that which has never happened yet, and
indeed that which may not ever happen, the literary text can be a
mind-expanding experience. As Rita Felski puts it: 'Literature does
not merely constitute a self-referential and metalinguistic system ...
but is also a medium which can profoundly influence individual and
cultural self-understanding in the sphere of everyday Ufe, charting the
changing preoccupations of social groups through symbolic fictions
by means of which they make sense of experience' (Felski 1989, 7).
What appears to be impossible can be narrated as possible; if we can
imagine something, then just maybe it might happen; and if we can
express our imaginings in the value-Iich category of literature, then
the imaginings themselves partake of some of that value.
And what of theory? The OED has much to say, producing six sepa-
rate meanings. The first two definitions derive from the word's
etymology in the Greek word thea, which is the root word for looking
at, viewing, contemplating. A theory is therefore 'a sight, a spectacle'
(though the word in this meaning is both rare and obsolete); it is also
a '1nental view, contemplation' (also obsolete). It is in definitions 3 to
6 that we come closer to the more common contemporary uses of the
word:

3. A conception or mental scheme of something to be done, or of

the method of doing it; a systematic statement of rules or princi-
ples to be followed ...
4. (a) A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an expla-
nation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothe-
sis that has been confirmed or established by observation or
experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for
the known facts; a statement of what are held to be general laws,
principles, or causes of something known or observed ...
(b) That department of an art or technical subject which consists
 Introduction I I

in the knowledge or state1nent of the facts on which it depends,

or of its principles or methods, as distinguished from the practice
of it ...
5. In the abstract: Systematic conception or statement of the prin-
ciples of something; abstract knowledge or the formulation of it:
often used as implying more or less unsupported hypothesis (cf.
6): distinguished from, or opposed to, practice (cf. 4 b): In theory.
according to theo1y, theoretically (opposed to in practice or in
fact) ...
6. In loose or general sense: A hypothesis proposed as an explana-
tion, hence, a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture; an idea
or set of ideas about something; an individual view or notion.
(Emphases in original)

I've reproduced almost all of that definition because it shows clearly

that the word theory is very slippery indeed. The original Greek word
thea, from which theory derives, is a word that has to do with looking.
The theorist might be thought of as being a kind of onlooker, one who
looks but does not touch, one who is objective perhaps, has a proper
perspective, one who sees only what is there to be seen, appearing to
let the facts speak for themselves. This meaning comes back to haunt
later parts of the definition, especially those vvhjch oppose theory and
practice. In those definitions, theory doesn't get its hands dirty.
At the same time though, the middle definitions set up a relation-
ship between theory and practice, in which practice depends on
theo1y: theory is a statement of the facts on which practice depends.
The word implies an interplay between distance and perspective on
the one hand (the clean hand?), and proximity and praxis on the other
(5:iiltier?) hand. Theory, in this formulation, is at once objective and
subjective - what one sees when one looks is as 1nuch a matter of how
one looks as of what is there to be seen. The ghost of subjective
looking rather than an objective position based on 'fact' is traced in
the gloss words 'speculation' and 'conjecture', and especially in the
phrase 'an individual view or notion.' Speculation also has to do with
looking. It comes from the Latin verb specere, to look at. But it
contains the idea that seeing is not believing, since speculation often
has to do with guesswork. Conjecture similarly has a Latin route and
etymologicaJly means 'throwing things together': a conjecture is a
piece of guesswork whose results derive fro1n putting disparate
elements together. Hence the phrase 'individual view (another
I2 Introduction

looking word] or notion' implies that theory might also have to do

with the idiosyncrasies of the individual as much as with the institu-
tional views of a given art or technical subject. Definitions 3 and 4 are
the ones that make theory respectable. They limit it to what can be
tested by practice, method, experiment or the close observation of the
facts. They make theory objective, rigorous, scientific.
In these terms, a feminist theory - of life, of art - under those
rubrics might welJ appear a contradiction in terms, since in the
phrase 'feminist theory' both politics and subjectivity come into play
to disrupt the objectivity, rigour and science that theory claims for
itself. And feminist literary theory produces all kinds of contamina-
tions between the terms. The adjective feminist, with its implications
of political action and political viewpoint is an attack on both the
supposedly inherent apolitical value of literature and on the objectiv-
ity of theory. Feminist theory is a 'doing' as well as a way of seeing -
practice impinges on the purity of theory. Literature is also modified
by theory alone, since the will to theorise a thing i1nplies that its value
is not self-evident. And literature modifies feminism by putting the
category of the aesthetic into a political sphere (politics resists
aesthetics as often as aesthetics resists poHtics) , and by providing an
expressive forum for a politicised vision. The phrase feminist literary
theory is quite a mixture, overspilling the old boundaries of definition:
it makes quite a soup.

In her 1981 essay 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', Elaine

Showalter identified three common modes of feminist literary theory,
and placed them as modes belonging to different national groups. She
wrote: 'English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses oppres-
sion; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses
repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses
expression. All, however, have become gynocentric. All are struggling
to find a terminology that can rescue the feminine from its stereotypi-
cal associations with inferiority' (Showalter 1986, 249). Showalter was
keen to emphasise the difference in method but the similarity of aim.
British feminist criticism, described by Showalter by the terms
Marxism and oppression, is a materialist approach. lt is interested in
the material conditions of real people's lives, how conditions such as
poverty and undereducation produce different signifying systems
than works produced and read in conditions of privilege and educa-
 Introduction 13

tional plenty, for example. This kind of approach is likely to be most

interested in the content of a literary text as symptomatic of the
conditions of its production. It is an overtly political approach. French
feminist literary theory, defined here as psychoanalytic in approach
and focusing on issues of repression is a psychological study. It
focuses the text as a tangle of psychic symptoms to be unravelled and
explained in relation to desires repressed to the unconscious, which
surface to rupture the text's apparent seamless unity. It is political,
though it is not necessarily associated with political activism.
American feminist criticism is described as textual in focus and
primarily interested in expression. Here, criticism has been institu-
tionally based, and feminist criticism, in order to achieve for itself a
measure of respect in the institutional context, has n1ade use of tradi-
tional - often New Critical - methods, but with a different emphasis
and for quietly subversive ends. Unlike British criticism, while it
focuses on the 'how' and 'what' of literature (expression), it does not
seek sociological explanations in the Marxist terms of class for what
gets written, and often eschews the psychic consequences of material
oppression.
These terms, oppression, repression, and expression map - with a
little jiggling - onto the phrase feminist literary theory. If feminism is
most commonly understood as meaning the 'advocacy of the rights of
woman', then separate from both literature and theory, as well as in
conjunction with them, feminism has to do with oppression. Feminist
relationships with psychoanalysis have been both productive and
fraught, as I shall show later. The theory of psychoanalysis nonethe-
less offers [Link] explanation for woman's oppression in terms
of her repression: in the phrase feminist literary theory, some of the
most powerful theories derive from psychoanalysis. The category of
the literary is where Showalter's 'expression' takes place.
This book is about all of these terms and their interconnections. No
single explanation is enough. Causes and effects are multiple. That's
why we need 1nore than one kind of explanation, more than one kind
of feminism. It is also why in so much contemporary feminist writing
the boundaries between categories of oppression, repression, expres-
sion, feminisms, theories and literatures are broken down.
Showalter's separation of these categories was strategic rather than
strictly accurate. She wanted to show the energy of feminist theory,
and to demonstrate that, far from being in the wilderness in a starved
and defeated state, feminist theory was actually at the frontier of
14 Introduction

thinking, and was coping rather well under difficult conditions.

Feminist theories are pluralist. They borrow from wherever they find
what is useful. A feminjst literary theorist might weU be a Mandst
materialist with psychoanalytic leanings and fingers in several post-
structuralist, post-colonialist and postmodernist pies, all of which
help her to read texts closely, but also to read them against the grain.
For if women have been oppressed by more than one set of struc-
tures, then they may need more than one set of explanations to
describe their current conditions, and to prescribe for future improve-
ments.
Where Showalter's description of feminist approaches was defi-
nitely right, though, was in the identification of feminism with gyno-
centrism - woman-centredness. My defining limitation on feminisn1
is this: all literary feminisms worth the name share a_ dou_ble commit-
1nent to place women at the centre of their literary-critical discourses,
and to do so as part of a wider political process. The sexual politics of
the world outside the text, and the sexual politics of the world inside
the text, however self-evident or disguised, are part of a continuum of
political critique and action in feminist theories. The analysis of the
text is linked to an analysis of the world as lived experience (whether
the experiences are material or psychic). Literature is, after aU, a social
and economic product as weU as a space for expression, for pleasure,
for pain, for readers and \'\/Titers. It provides us with ways of seeing
ourselves and others. We might weU act on what we see and on how
we see it. It behoves us therefore to be aware of what we do when we
read, when we write about what we read, and when we act on what we
think.
What is shared by all feminist theories, then, whether literary theo-
ries or not, is a focus on women. 2 That bald state1nent conceals a
multitude of possibilities and differences between women across
history, class and geography. But whilst the plural nouns (women,
feminisms) signal multiplicity and differences, they also 'semantically
mark a collectivity' (Fuss 1989, 4). Women are not aU the same, but
they do share similarities in subject positions related to the cultures in
which they live. The focus on wo1nen, however politically difficult the
term's 'unity' may be, constitutes feminism's main impetus. If, for
example, a Marxist critique tends to suggest that particular economic
conditions are formative of the human psyche, a feminist critique
might agree that this is the case, but then go on to suggest that
women are troubled by other structures of oppression as well, struc-
 Introduction I5

tures that are dependent on their female bodies as well as on their

economic sin1ation. Alnongst the social and psychic structures in
which feminism is interested are: social deprivations which are not
unique to women, but which in a space of disprivilege may itnpinge
more on women than on men (poor access to education or well-paid
work, poor access even to food); physiological oppressions which
attack women by virtue of their bodies (childbearing and rearing
defined as 'women's work', or the fact that women are physically less
powerful than men, and can be subjected to violence and rape);
cultural oppression (where women are viewed as objects rather than
subjects); psychological oppression (where women internalise a view
of themselves as inferior). The name given to the intersections of
these structures is patriarchy, which means literally the 'rule of the
father'. Feminist theories, in literature and beyond, identify patri-
archy at work in the home, the state, religious institutions, the law,
education systems, the work-place, in culture at large and even in
women themselves, since women as well as 1nen are formed under
patriarchy and come to subjecthood under its aegis.
The reading of literary texts might well seem to be a long way from
the kinds of overtly political actions which could lead to changes in
the social systems to which all human beings are subjected. And yet,
reading in its broadest sense (reading of not just texts, but behaviours,
clothing, social situations) is what we do as part of the process of
becoming who we are, so that there is always a sense in which reading
is a kind of doing, a mode of political praxis. There is some kind of
relationship between words and the world they describe. It is not a
transparent telationship, nor even a coherent one, as the insights of
structuralist critics have suggested, with their emphasis on
Saussurean arbitrariness and structures of difference. But that does
not mean that words are divorced from the real; merely that tracing
the relationships between reality and language is difficult. For femi-
nist literary theory, one of the key assumptions, therefore, is that
reading is part of the process of learning to be, of writing the self, as it
were, into its social roles. The move towards 'reading differently',
then, which feminisms prescribe, offers the possibility of alternative
modes of 'being'. Literature is not some transcendent space in which
the contingencies of everyday life are elided or absent. In literate
cultures, literature is part of reality. It reflects the real, though 'the
mirror is doubtless defective' (Eliot 1985, 221); it creates the real,
acting as a 'mediating, moulding force in society rather than as an
 I6 Introduction

agency that merely reflects or records' (Hawkes 1977, 56); and it

thereby recreates the real, offering both critiques of the present world
and alternative ways of being in fantasies, utopias, dystopias or
science fictions.
And if literature and the real are related, however tenuously that
relationship may be articulated, reading is political, and has to do
with power. Texts may seek to coerce their readers, representing and
encoding 'proper' (limited?) forms of behaviour and belief. Texts may
also be subversive, attacking dominant modes of understanding, and
offering alternative ways of being and thinking. The force of the text,
however, whatever its content and intentions, comes from the
process of reading it. Reading is a political act that defines the reader's
response to the text she is reading. She may read and be caught up in
the text; she may read against the text - either position is politicised.
As a feminist reader, however, she is determined to see the possibility
of a better future in the real. Hence she diagnoses the sy1nptoms of
social and psychic sicknesses and meditates on appropriate prescrip-
tions to alleviate the pain or to amputate the diseased parts of the
body politic.

This might be seen as a slightly idiosyncratic book. It makes no claim

to say everything there is to say on this subject, which is at least
consistent with my view that feminisms are plural, and that they are
also anti-totalising. The choices I've made about what to discuss are
often prag1natic. This is, after all, an introductory book. A lot of
French theory remains to be translated. And while I would wish to
signal that a 'canon' of feminist theory is not entirely desirable, I have
focused on materials that are easily available to student readers.
Economic considerations always play their part in literary production
and in literary theory. My aim is to show the relationships between
theories and practices - to do feminist readings whilst elucidating
feminist theories. A certain amount of familiarity in 1naterials need
not breed contempt, and helps to show how different approaches
n1ight .vork. I say again that this is not in any sense the last word; but I
hope that for some readers it will act as first words on their way to
speaking for themselves.
The organisation follows broadly chronological lines, though I
would also wish to warn against the 'history' of feminist literature. The
narratives of history, with their tendency to assume progress and tele-
 Introduction I 7

ology, are not an honest representation of feminist litera1y theory. It is

not the case that the early feminist critics were well-intentioned but
naive readers whilst contemporary writers are sophisticated and
cunning ones. The various strands I draw out from the story of femi-
nism supplement and complen1ent each other, and no part of the
story is over yet. Psychoanalytic readings make use of Marxism, post-
structuralism depends, says Derrida, on structuralism, and Kristeva's
subject in process rewrites but does not invalidate Mary
Wollstonecraft's will to create human female selfhood. Critics, like
writers, use the materials at their disposal. Thinking and the condi-
tions in which thinking occurs change, \¥hich does not mean that the
thinking of previous generations is invalid for our time, nor that we
cannot borrow its models and reuse them in our own context. Rosi
Braidotti (1994) speaks of the fe1ninist reader as a nomadic subject,
wandering to find sustenance. It is a useful metaphor for literary femi-
nisms. Forage where ye may, use the useful, move on.

Notes

1. Rachel Bowlby makes similar points to these in her essay 'Still crazy
after all these years' in Theresa Brennan (ed.), Between Feminism and
Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1990, 40- 59.
2. The words woman and women require some complication. Athough we
all 'know' what a woman is, there is a problem with a so-called
'common-sense' simple definition. Recently a number of critics, espe-
ciaUy Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter
(1993), have suggested that sexual identity is precisely what its at stake
in feminism, and that the easy identification of women with biology is
problematic. See below, Chapter 8, for the development of this point
Part I

Histor i es
I Liberal, Mate r ialist
and Socialist Literary
Feminisms

... uru1atural generally means only uncustomary, and ... everything

that is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being
a universal custon1, any departure from it quite naturally appears
unnatural.
John Stuart Mill, 'The Subjection of Women'

Almost all the early forms of feminist political thinking based them-
selves firmly in the assumptions of liberal individualism and material-
ism. Broadly speaking, liberal individualism implies that the
individual person, usually designated as male, is valued in his own
right, and has certain rights (legal, social, economic, political, familial
and rights of property) attached to his personhood. The individual is
su pposed to be understood as unique, and yet he is also part of a
community of like-minded men who share most of the same views,
privileges an.d rights. Raymond Williams, writing in his dictionary of
culture and soE:iety, Keywords, traces the modern sense of individual-
ity to the break-up of the medieval feudal system and the emergence
of capitalism which stressed 'man's personal existence over and
above his place or function in a rigid hierarchical society'. He aligns
the development of the individual in Britain with the rise of Protestant
Christianity, which stressed the personal relationship of the individ-
ual soul with God as opposed to Catholicism's relationships which
were mediated through the priesthood. He also sees the move from
living on the land to living from trade and manufacture as the defin-
ing economic mode of Western European life, with the emphasis
shifting from community benefits to personal profits (Williams 1988,
161-5). In other words, the economic and spiritual organisation of
societies profoundly affects the meaning of personhood within them.

2 I
22 Histories

An individualist definition of personhood tends therefore to be a

materialist definition, since it focuses on the materials that the indi-
vidual owns or has access to. 'A man's Self,' w-rote William James in
1890, 'is the sun1 total of what he can call his; not only his body and his
psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and his chil-
dren, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands
and horses, and yacht and bank account' (quoted in Hobsbawn1 1989,
165). The qualities of the individual's life can be measw·ed in material
terms: wealth and the status it brings, a privileged relationship with
the law, education and even religious establishments, and power over
others such as wives, children and e1nployees. Material things have
therefore both practical and psychic consequences; they bolster up
the sense of valuable personhood for the individual who does the
'owning', producing and reinforcing a measurable estimate of his
worth. Provided that the individual remains within certain limits of
action - primarily that he does not infringe the rights/privileges of
others who share his status- he is very free in the actions he is permit-
ted. As Williams points out, liberal is a word which implies freedoms ,
but those freedoms take place within limits (Williams 1988, 179-83);
for those with power, however, the limits were/are widely drawn.
One of the insights of early feminist writing was to notice that
liberal individualism is an ideological formation that privileges male
existence over female. The difficulties of the wotct 'ideology' are by
no,,v legenda1y, though it is an indispensable word for political and
theoretical thinking. 1 It is used in two distinctly different ways. First,
and this is the usage rnost common in everyday language, it describes
a set of consciously held beliefs. One might describe oneself as
Muslim or Catholic, fo r example, or as Socialist or Conservative. The
description aligns the 'believer' to a set of transparently codified rules
of conduct and faith. The rules are set down, and anyone can 'know'
what they are. In this sense, ideology is often used as a term of insult
to attack syste1ns of belief with which one disagrees. Second, and for
our purposes more importantly, however, ideology has also co1ne to
mean the unconscious beliefs of a given society or group, the struc-
tures in which we believe without being quite aware of where our
belief comes from, the things we take, as it vvere, to be 'natural'.
'Ideology signifies the imaginary ways in which n1en [sic) experience
the real world,' writes Teny Eagleton. Ideology tells us 'what it feels
like to live in particular conditions, rather than [providing us with) a
conceptual analysis of those conditions' (Eagleton 1976, 18). Liberal
 literary Femin i sms 23

individualisn1 is ideologically constructed since it is a social and

historical formation (people have not always conceived themselves in
this way) that presents itself as natural and immutable. It is very
unwilling to examine the bases of its own formation.
Take, for example, the way in which George Eliot introduces the
character of Dorothea Brooke in the opening paragraph of
Middlemarch:

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into
relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that
she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the
Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile, as well as
her stature and bearing, seemed to gain the 1nore dignity fron1 her
plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the
impressiveness of a fine quotation fron1 the Bible, - or from one of
our elder poets, - in a paragraph of today's newspaper.... Miss
Brooke's plain dressing was due to mixed conditions ... The pride of
being [a lady] had something to do \<Vith it ... Young women of such
oirth, living in a quiet country house, and attending a village church
hardly larger than a parlour, naturally regarded frippery as the ambi-
tion of a huckster's daughter. Then there was well-bred economy,
which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted
fron1, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of
rank. Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain
dress, quite apart from religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke's case,
religion alone would have detennined it. (Eliot 1965, 29-30, my
emphasis)

Throughout this passage, and for 1nuch of the rest of the novel, Eliot's
na1Tator pokes gentle fun at Dorothea Brooke, treating her with a
· certain irony. 2 The irony, however, is also tempered with admiration,
for the novel is predicated on the fact that this individual wo1nan's life
and tbe narrative of her dilemmas are sufficiently interesting and
important to keep us reading for around a thousand pages. Thus we
are asked to consider in detail a figure who is presented to us as an
aesthetic anomaly - she is beautiful desejte the fact that she wears
poor dress. She is remarkable in contrast to the work~<!,Y figures
among whgm she moves. She is a lady, with a lady's sensibility that
grevents ber dressing like a 'hu~rers-ctaughter "; af[d unusuaJ!yJ sue
has fine [Link]~which the novel ~tablish~ ~s gie sou!:S~ol.
the split she feels so n ly betwe - and desire.
24 Histories

What Eliot's apparently-knowing na1Tator disguises, however, is

that this individual, no matter how ironically presented, depends for
her existence on unseen networks of relations with other people and
with various economic systems. Dorothea's apparent poverty, for
example, is very relative. The hand and wrist that her plain sleeves
throw into relief are beautiful because they are not scarred with work;
Dorothea never has to bare her arms to the elbows and immerse them
in soapy water to do her laundry because someone else - we never see
who - does it for her. She can indulge in the 'strange whim' (31) of
staying up all night to read tl1eological books, and can use her time to
learn passages from Pascal by heart because of the economic condi-
tions she inhabits. At the most basic level, she is lucky enough to have
been taught to read when it seems unlikely that the maid who does
her laundry has such an accomplishment. Moreover, she has the
leisure to stay up all night - something that people who have to get up
in the morning to work do not have. And she lives in a house where
books are plentiful and she is allowed to read them, as presumably,
the servant-girl would not be, even had she the time, the inclination
and the education to do so.
Put like that, of course, Dorothea's aesheticised poverty looks rather
more like privilege. But the thrust of the novel, for all its interest in
networks of social relations, buries the econon1ics of the situation
under the surface. The reader is not encouraged to think these things;
indeed, the reader is called into a position of admiration in relation to
Dorothea, who, for all her limitations, is presented as remarkable. The
point is that her particularity validates ours. The implied reader of
Eliot's novel lives in a world very much like the one that the novel
itself presents. As readers within liberal individualist societies, we too
are reliant on invisible networks of relations for our relatively
comfo11able position. If we are reading Middlemarch, in some sense
we share Dorothea's privileged position; we have the means to read
(the education, the text itself, owned or borrowed as a material
commodity, the leisure). We are encouraged to buy her image. Not
only is Middlemarch a 'classic', so is its main protagonist, who
appears like a line from good poetry or the Bible, who looks like a
Renaissance Madonna. These are touchstones of value and beauty
that we are called to share as markers of our own decency and good
taste. We buy Dorothea's liberal individualist self because we are
supposed to recognise our own liberal individual selves in her. Like
Dorothea, and like Eliot's narrator, it does not do for us to delve too
 Literary Feminisms 25

deeply into the implications of our construction of identity. It is far

less threatening to take our liberal individualist notion of ourselves as
read, as natural and immutable, as merely a function of human
nature.
The activist feminisms of the last two hundred years, in Western
Europe and the United States, have taken place both within and
against the ideological formatio n of the liberal individual. They have
been against the traditional formulation of the liberal individual
because they recognise that 'he' is to be understood as male and
middle or upper class. William James's definition of a man's selfhood
is to be understood entirely as a masculine phenomenon bolstered by
the materiality of class privilege: in his terms, not only does no
woman (of whatever class or race) have any significant selthood to
speak of, large numbers of unprivileged men are also excluded from
the definition of the liberal-individualist self. There has therefore
been a move to widen the definition of the individual to include some
of those others who also make up a society, and in particular, to
extend personhood to middle-class ·women. While there is a sense in
which such a stretching of the meaning of individualism to include
women is politically significant, it is also problematic because it
leaves the basic structures of oppression (including those of class and
race, for example, as well as of gender inflected by class/race disprivi-
lege) intact. Nonetheless, the significant successes of feminist
activism have been in the realm of extending individualism to include
some women. In particular, the opening up of higher education and
the professions to (bourgeois) women at the end of the nineteenth
century, the ~xtension of the franchise to women in the early years of
the twentieth century, and the more recent institution of equal-rights
legislation, maternity rights, the availability of safe and reliable
contraception, have been successes of feminisms in its liberal guises.
There are ongoing battles to achieve affordable child-care for working
parents, and to undo the prejudice that still prevents some women
from reaching the heights of their professions. These legislative and
cultural changes are the logical correlative of a philosophical position
that divorces sex from gender, and that insists that biology need not
be destiny. The changes are very significant, and have made real
differences to real people's lives. But liberal feminisms sometimes
forget that their allegiance to the liberal individual is also an alliance
with competitive capitalist economics, and that wherever there is
competition, there are losers as well as winners.
26 Histories

Mary Wollstonecraft: vindicating the liberal-individual woman

When an early feminist writer like Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97)

examined the society in which she lived, a society in which liberal
individualism was becoming the dominant ideological formation of
(male) personhood and social organisation, what she uncovered was
the syste1natic inequality of women in all areas of life - the family,
work, culture, economics, the law, education - as well as the inconsis-
tency of the ideological positions that held this inequality in place.
Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a response to that
inequality. She examines the 'naturalness' of women's inequality and
discovers that it is not in fact natural at all - natural, indeed, may be
one of the most ideologically loaded words in the English language.
Women's inequality, says VVollstonecraft, is socially constructed to
shore up the position of the privileged liberal-individualist male.
Either, she says, 'Nattue has 1nade a great difference betv,een man
and man, or ... the civilisation which has hitherto taken place in the
world has been very partial'; furthermore, she argues that 'women, in
particular, are rendered weak and vvretched, by a variety of concur-
ring causes', amongst which are inadequate parenting, bad educa-
tion, the lack of property rights, and exclusion from the political
sphere, as well as the negative effects of literary-cultural life: the ideol-
ogy of romantic love which makes women mere creatures of senti-
ment, and bad novels which reproduce a false picture of reality rather
than an intelligent analysis of it (Wollstonecraft 1992, 79).
A small, but ilnportant example of her analysis is from her discus-
sion of Dr Gregory's A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774). a
conduct 1nanual which focused on properly feminine behaviour. In
his book, as Wollstonecraft describes it, Gregory advised his daughters
to:

cultivate a fondness for dress, because a fondness of dress, he asserts,

is natural to them. I am unable to co1nprehend what either he or
Rousseau n1ean when they frequently use this indefinite tenn
[natural]. If they told us that in a pre-existent state the soul was fond
of dress, and brought this inclination with it into a new body, I should
listen to them with a half-smile, as I often do when I hear a rant about
innate elegance. But if he only meant to say that the exercise of the
faculties will produce this fondness, r deny it. lt is not natural; but
arises, like false ambition in men, from a love of power. (111- 12)
 Literary Feminisms 27

The argument is that if something is natural, then one will do it natu-

rally, without the advice to cultivate the position advocated. If the
'fondness for dress' is not a natural attribute of women, why should
they be encouraged to cultivate it? The answer - the 'love of power' -
comes from the larger context of the book, in which Wollstonecraft
suggests that while women are denied other forms of po\.ver (political,
educational, legal), they will make use of whatever power is left to
them: in particular their sexual power to attract men because they are
taught, and have learned their lesson well, that they can only draw
power from sexual relationships rather than having any autonomous
potency of their own. This sexualisation of femininity, noted also by
de Beauvoir's comment that women are often designated 'the sex',
supports male privilege in two distinct ways: firstly it shores up a posi-
tion that emphasises the attractiveness of masculinity and its
potency; secondly, it keeps women actually weak, while pretending to
offer them (very limited) power.
This short passage shows the inconsistency of the ideological posi-
tions which insist that women are unequal to men. On the one hand,
their liking for clothes is labelled 'natural', and the word 'natural' is
heavily invested with positive value. In culture, however, women are
routinely disparaged for liking clothes too much, a trivial, unimpor-
tant preference. So when they are told to cultivate their 'natural' taste
for clothes, they can be once more labelled as trivial unimportant
people, incapable of serious thought. Ideology has a circular logic,
and it is difficult to break tl1e spell.
vVhile Wollstonecraft herself could not have used the words 'ideol-
ogy' and '-liberal individualist', her critique demonstrates the
constructedness of social formations, and the inherent bias towards
_masculinity in those constructions. What she seeks is to improve the
situation of women within the existing structures of society. Her work
suggests that society is to blame for female oppression and for the
general weakness of women. Women are not educated to do or know
any better. Society has created won1en's foolishness and has then
proceeded to blame women for their weakness, indeed has come to
regard wo1nen's weakness as natural.
For all her anger at the systematic oppression of women, however,
Wollstonecraft is not quite a revolutionary W1iter, and her insights
remain within the fun its proposed by a liberal-individualist version of
the world. What she proposes is an extension of (n1ale) individualist
privilege to women. She does not propose to undo the very notion of
28 Histories

privilege per se. Neither The Vindication nor Wollstonecraft's fiction

demand a dismantling of contemporary social structures. Instead The
Vindication is basically a plea for bourgeois woman's equality with
bow·geois man in the areas of educational, legal and political systems.
It is also an attack on an ideal of femininity that constructs female
inequality as 'natural'. What is being demanded, therefore, is not so
1nuch a revolution towards an ideal of equality as a reapportioning of
privilege to ensure that so1ne (middle- and upper-class) women get
some share of the spoils usually reserved to some (middle- and
upper-class) men. As such her vvorks dramatise the pervasiveness of
ideological formations. On the one hand, her writings diagnose a
social problem; on the other, they articulate that problem within its
own terms. Wollstonecraft collld not, in her social c1itique, imagine a
world in which won1en might be equal to men in a different social
formation from the one in which she lived, in which other kinds of
inequality {the inequality of class, for example) would continue to
exist. She addresses herself specificalJy to women of her own class,
women who recognise the attractive power of male privilege because
the males with whom they associate are privileged. A feminism
derived from the experience of a working-class woman would very
likely have different aspirations. And this is a point that liberal femi-
nisms have had to adapt to cover. Liberal/materialist feminisms,
which generally originate from bourgeois positions of relative comfort
have had to stretch their renuts, and to notice the structures of
oppression that afflict women who occupy positions of multiple
marginality by virtue, for example, of class and gender, race and
gender, sexuality and gender, or any combination of these facets .

The class, race and sexuality biases of Wollstonecraft's writing have to

be taken into consideration when thinking about the symptoms she
uncovers (fe1nininity is a kind of sickness) and the diagnoses she
produces in the Vindication, not least because of the significant space
she apportions to literature in the formation of the attenuated femi-
ninity she so deplores. In an age before widespread literacy, writing
was necessarily addressed to the privileged few who could read. Her
fe1ninism is historically deternuned, depending on the ideological
positions she deplores. It is also class detennined, addTessed not to
'ladies' {81),3 but to middle-class women, with some education, but
who did not suffer the debilitating effects of tl1e excessive femininity
 Literary Fem i nisms 29

of dependence, invalidism, frailty and false modesty that she suggests

is cultivated by the aristocracy of the late-eighteenth century.
In her fictions, Mary: A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman
(1798), left a fragment at her death, Wollstonecraft dramatises the
material effects of male-dominated liberal individualis1n on fe1nale
subjects. The novella, Mary, describes the dissatisfaction of her
heroine with the role models and opportunities that life offers to her.
Despite her relatively comfortable social position - Mary becomes the
heiress to a substantial fortune following the death of her brother -
the heroine is trapped in the social roles that society has mapped out
for her. Her father is tyrannical and adulterous; her mother, described
by the narrator as a 'mere nothing' (Wollstonecraft 1980, 2), is a
shadowy figure who has retreated into the invalidism she associates
with attractive aristocratic feminin ity. For all their patent inadequacy
as parents, however, Mary is both obedient and sincerely dutiful to
them. She obeys her father, and marries against her own inclination;
and when her parents die, she sincerely mow·ns them both. Her
mother's long illness 'called forth all Mary's tenderness, and exercised
her compassion ... continually' (5); and her father's death produces
real grief: 'he was not a friend or protector; but he was her father' (18).
On the one hand, then, Mary has the intellectual capacity to see that
there is quite a lot that is wrong with her world; on the other, the
affection for and obedience to her parents that has been instilled in
her, and that we might read as oppressive ideological formations,
prevent her from making real judgements of them or of what they
represent Sensibility - the cultivation of feeling - is both the require-
ment of femininity, and a tool that also oppresses women: Mary
remains obedient .to her father even when he is wrong because 'he
_was her father'. Coupled with this doubled vision - knowing there is a
problem, and yet feeling that to act would be wrong - Mary's social
context would, in any case, prevent her from acting on any judgement
of her own. The novella thus traces social circumstances as the causes
of psychic discon1fort in its heroine who is caught between intellect
and sentiment within the realm of a social and historical specificity.
The projected novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, is structured
around the repeated telling of stories, the life-stories of the three
major characters. These narratives eventually explain how they all
come to be inhabiting the madhouse which is the novel's setting. The
two upper-class characters, Maria and Henry Darnford, are there as
inmates/prisoners; Jemima, the lower-class woman, is the keeper. In
J0 Histor i es

1nany ways, it is Jemima's story that is most pertinent to a liberal

feminism that is more inclusive than exclusive. Jemima belongs to the
most oppressed of all classes, being poor, fe1nale and illegitimate; her
weak social and economic position is exacerbated by the fact that she
has also lost her 'respectability', having worked for some tin1e as a
prostitute. Her degradation represents the logical conclusion of the
social constructions of fenlininity and legitimations of 1nale power
versus female weakness within a framework of liberal individualism
that does not recognise Jemima as an individual with rights. She has
no stake in society, having been 'an egg dropped on the sand, a
pauper by nature' (106), and consequently she preys on society, by
thieving and prostitution - she dramatises what happens to liberal
individualism when no rights are guaranteed and no responsibilities
are required of the individual. Her story touches Maria as analogous
\Nith her own, though, of course, the details are different because of
the different social positions of the two women. Maria speculates that
'Jemima's humanity had rather been benumbed than killed, by the
keen frost she had to brave at her entrance into life' (120). The recog-
nition of a common hu1nanity is a partial recognition of the
constructedness of the class system that oppresses Jemima more
keenly even than it oppresses Maria herself. Jemima is attacked on
many different fronts. Maria's main source of dis-ease is her gender.
Wollstonecraft's middle-class heroines are 'innocent', by which she
1neans uneducated, unprotected by family or law, subjected to tyran-
nical family life and inappropriate marriages to unsuitable husband<;,
from which there is no escape. This is the argument also of the
Vindication. If women are not educated, and if marriage is not
reformed, the results spiral: women have no choice of career bar
marriage, no realistic choice of marriage partner, no escape from bad
marriages. Moreover, even within marriage, they are unfit even for
their very limited role as mothers. Rich won1en, Wollstonecraft
described as not working as mothers at all, since they had no care
over their infants. Babies were sent out to wet-nurses, and children
were left in the care of servants. The rich woman who did care for her
children was so ill-educated that she could teach them nothing except
for coquetry and false modesty. Her argument is that women,
deprived of real social functions, have no stake in society, are 'mere
nothings', who live bored and wasted lives. Thus Mary's story ends
with the heroine waiting for death as a blessed relief from the disap-
point1nents of female life. The Wrongs of Woman, left unfinished at
 literary Feminisms 3 I

Wollstonecraft's death, ends either with the legal demolition of

Maria's divorce case against her husband or, cheerfully, with a cata-
logue of disasters: 'Divorced by her husband - Her lover unfaithful -
Pregnancy - Miscarriage - Suicide' (202).
For Wollstonecraft, literature has to be understood as a powerful
tool - a tool both of social control and oppression, and a tool which
enables the transformation of a painful reality. In the Vindication, she
rails strongly against novels, which she sees as a mode of writing that
invokes sensibility and sentiment in their female readers at the
expense of intellect and analysis: 'There are women who are amused
by the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human
nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all
retained in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the
taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties' (Wollstonecraft
1992, 313). In that reading, the novel text is dangerously powerful. It
leads to stereotyped writing by unimaginative writers, which leads in
turn to infantilised readers. On the other hand, she does not believe
that wQ'men should never read novels. Indeed, reading novels is better
than not reading at all (314); and the habit of reading even light work
can be seen as the foundation for a habit of reading more weighty
matter. It is the simple acceptance of unrealistic fictional dreams to
which she really objects, the 'stale tales' of stereotyping 'Which bolster
up prejudice. Moreover, she shows the inequalities of the roles
proposed for male and female readers in her discussions of Rousseau
and Dr Fordyce's sermons. Women, she argues, are always presented
as angels, limited to one view; men, on the other hand, can be what-
ever they want to be:

Men are allowed by moralists to cultivate, as Nature directs, different

qualities, and assume the different characters, that the same
passions, n1odified almost to infinity, give to each individual. A virtu-
ous 1nan may have a choleric or a sanguine constitution, be gay or
grave, unreproved; be firm till he is aln1ost overbearing, or, weakly
submissive, have no will or opinion of his own; but all women are to
be levelled, by meekness and docility, into one character of yielding
softness and gentle compliance. (197-8)

Literary representation is a straitjacket for femininity, limiting women

to very narrow social roles and insisting on a uniformity of good quali-
ties.
3 2 Histories

Her own fictions are diagnostic pieces rather than cures for social
ills. The stories are even rather depressing, and she holds out little
hope for social transformation, while at the same time producing the
argun1ents which ought lo lead to it. In the 'Advertisement' to Mary,
however, she puts forward an ideal of what a literary text might be
when it is acting as a political document. Her heroine, she says is no
Richardsonian Clarissa Harlowe, no Rousseauian Sophie - not a maJe-
defined, passive version of pleasing femininity. Texts like
Richardson's or Rousseau's are not about transforming reality. They
merely reproduce the unthinking acceptance of ready-made models.
Such authors stay on the 'beaten track, solicitous to gather expected
flowers, and bind them in a wreath, according to the prescribed rules
of art'. The stereotypes, she suggests, are deathly - both to the reader
and to the art of fiction itself. Her intention is different, and it might
operate as a first model for feminist readings and writings of litera-
ture:

In an aitless tale, without episodes, the mind of a woman who has

thinking powers is displayed. The female organs have been thought
too weak for this arduous employment; and experience seems to
justify the assertion. \iVithout arguing physically about possibilities -
in a fiction, such a being n1ay be allowed to exist; whose grandeur is
derived from the operations of its own faculties, not subjugated to
opinion; but drawn by the individual from the original source.
(Wollstonecraft 1980, np)

First, Wollstonecraft eschews 'art', since art has rules which would
keep her tale on the 'beaten track'; and anyway, artists 'wander
greatly from nature' when they merely impersonate the rules laid
down by greater artists. Second, she states (not quite trutllfully) tllat
tllis is a fiction witllout episodes: 4 tlle events here are in the female
mind, derived from a woman's ilnagination ratller than from a male-
defined reality. There is then tlle irony of her agreement that wo1nen
are probably too weak to think in reality; but this tale is a fiction, and
in a fiction, anything can happen, even things that received opinion
would object to. She is appealing, she suggests, to her own experi-
ence, which implies both that her experience is sorne kind of guaran-
tor of autllenticity, and tllat it is an idiosyncratic version of reality,
rather than a totalising one.
Having castigated the unreality of representations of women by
 Literary Feminisms 33

other writers, Wollstonecraft is perfectly prepared to admit that her

own fictions draw on a kind of fantasy life. While others do not repre-
sent the real, Wol1stonecraft herself insists on the fictionality of Mary.
This is a contradiction in her work, but it is an important contradic-
tion. If literature can be one of the sites of the oppression of women, it
can also be the site of an imagined alternative. Fiction is powerful
because it is liberated from the necessity of telling observable truths.
Instead it can tell any possibility. Wollstonecraft herself does not fulfil
the pro1nise of her Preface in the novel she ,,vrites. Mary is so hemmed
in by her social limitations that despite her ' thinking powers' she
proves unable to do anything to better her own situation.
Wollstonecraft's writing - both her fictions and her more obviously
political work - does, however, signal two of the important directions
of feminist thinking that will be undertaken during the next two
centuries within tl1e framework of liberal, individualist and materialist
thought. The Vindication provides an analysis of women's material
oppression and psychic repression. The Preface to Mary holds out the
promise of the literary expression of a different world in which
women with 'thinking powers' exist, in which wornen can be imag-
ined as bourgeois indjviduals.

Analysing materialism : reading as a socialist feminist?

What Wollstonecraft's writings show above all is that social forma -

tions have both practical and psychic effects on their subjects. Under
certain kinds of social organisation people can be hungry and dispos-
sessed; their hunger and their aspirations are formative of tl1eir world-
view. For this reason, the analysis of social structures and their effects
·has been one of the most important approaches to literary texts in
recent times. Marxist and socialist critics, following on from Marx's
insight that Man is an economic animal whose attitudes are con-
structed in relation to his economic needs and his class position, have
sought to see the literary text not as the p roduct of transcendent indi-
vidualism, but as the result of a matrix of social forces. The book is a
product. It requires labour, materials, knowledge, a 1narket, a distrib-
ution network, a technology of printing, to exist. Treating texts as if
they were the outpourings of the individual's soul, as many traditional
humanist approaches to literature tend to do, disguises the economic
imperatives that lie behind the writing and the reception of the book.
34 Histories

This is true on both the macro level of economic systems and on the
micro level of the individual writer's work processes. Writing, after all,
is not a natural attribute. Unlike the learning of spoken language
which takes place almost by a process of osmosis, learning to write
requires a deliberate investment of time and effort. It also requires a
technology: the biros we write with today may not seem like ve1y
technical instruments, and the paper on which we write is taken for
granted, but both are the products of capitalist industries. The prereq-
uisites for writing, then, include investment in some kind of educa-
tional system, the personal investment of time, the very small
investment (for Western societies) in writing materials. 5 When
Virginia Woolf argued that for the woman writer to write, what was
necessary was a private incon1e and a room of one's own (Woolf
1993a), she registered her own very privileged position. Before the
income and the room, what one needs to write is to learn to write, and
to have the materials fo r writing. The income and the room are luxu-
ries on the grander scale ofthings.6
One of the key examples of the bringing together of Marxism, femi-
nism and literature is Terry Lovell's 1987 book, Consuming Fiction,
the very title of which emphasises that the novel is a consumer
commodity invented in a capitalist system. Lovell's text is a history of
literature that rev;rites earlier histories, in particular Ian Watt's The
Rise of the Novel (1957), with both gender and class as key terms of the
analysis. She criticises Watt's book on several grounds, including the
sociological, the historical and the idea of literary value. The Rise of
the Novel was written in the wake of F. R. Leavis's establishment of a
narrowly defined canon of English literature. When Watt looked at the
eighteenth century, he admitted that the vast majority of novels
published in the period were by women. But his own focus is on
Defoe, Fielding and Richardson, since his deftnition of the novel
derives from what he calls the properties of 'formal realism', the prop-
erties of writing that eventually informed the ideals of literary value
found in Leavis's The Great Tradition. His finding that Fielding et al.
were the founders of the novel is historically inaccurate, based not on
the facts of what was being published in the period, but on the later
establishment of the criteria of 'literariness', criteria which son1ehow
always excluded women writers.
Watt also hypothesised that the rise of the novel was the direct
result of the rise of the middle-class woman reader, a reader who had
both the ability to read and the leisure in which to do so. Lovell's text
 Literary Feminisms l 5

provides a corrective explanatory gloss on this view. She argues that

reading was the leisure activity that interfered least with domesticity
as a marker of class, and with the domestic middle-class woman's
other occupations, the unpaid labour of housework and child-care:

1t isdoubtful whether middle-class women ... had more leisure time

than middle-class men. What is true is that the ways avaiJable to
them of deploying their leisure tin1e ,,vere very 1nuch more restricted,
and that the pattern of work/leisure was less differentiated for
women. Women read in their leisure tinle because reading was
cheap, and because it is a leisure activity which is most readily
adapted to an undifferentiated work/leisure routine. A novel could be
picked up and put down, read as and when, unlike the leisure
pursuHs of husbands and brothers which typically required blocks of
free time which women, once married, did not usually have. (Lovell
1987, 39)

These factors, Lovell argues, also had their effects, not only on women
as readers, but also on women as writers. Novel-writing was also an
activity that could be presented as an occupation that did not inter-
fere with domesticity. The woman writer could be self-assertive and
economically independent in her fictions, while continuing to func-
tion as wife, mother and domestic manager. But self-expression was
mediated through the lens of whatever ideologies of femininity were
current at a given moment. Lovell identifies, therefore, specifically
feminine modes of address in fiction. Taking the example of Elizabeth
Gaskell's 1848 novel, Mary Barton, she shows how Gaskell worked
creatively within the discourses of Victorian ideologies of domestic
femininity. Gaskell occupied an apparently subordinate feminine
.position when she disclaimed any knowledge of political economy in
her preface to Mary Barton; but she simultaneously claimed the fe1ni-
nine authority to tell her audience about how people feel, and argued
that the analysis of feeling was just as important as particular knowl-
edge of official politics and economics through the plot and structures
of the novel. She addressed a male audience fro1n a woman's posi-
tion, with powerfully subversive results.
Lovell seeks to complicate the ways in which social constraints are
both felt and evaded, and argues through the lenses of both feminism
and Marxism to shovv how both gender and class are implicated in the
structures adopted by women's writing:
36 Histories

the ideology of do1nesticity in the nineteenth century could not be seen

as an alien and oppressive imposition upon the middle-class woman -
a narrow straitjacket which men forced her to wear. Neither could it be
seen as a set of garn1ents willingly donned by the silent sisterhood and
worn with no consciousness of the tight corsets and constricted feet.
Rather the ideology set the terms within which or against which
women had to negotiate their sexed identity and their social relatjon-
ships. And it was backed by punitive legal and social sanctions which
made open defiance a costly and painful business. (95)

For Lovell, the intersections between class and gender and culture at
large mean that no single formation provides a complete explanatory
framework in its own terms. She argues that women experience life in
tenns of 'a systematic ambiguity n1ore or less deeply felt by all women
engaged in the business of constructing a sense of self and social
identity' (70). The markers of gender and class may even be in conflict
with each other, exposing the extent to which neither is a complete
explanation for women's generally subordinate positions in life, liter-
ature and culture.
A rather different example of a Marxist-inflected feminist approach
to literature is Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments: The Ideological
Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1989). Like Lovell, Poovey
is interested in uncovering the intersections of various discourses in
the formation of individual experiences. She describes herself as a
literary critic first and foremost, with an interest in how textuality
mediates experience. And, indeed, Uneven Developments contains
some very interesting and challenging readings of literary texts,
including Jane Eyre and David Copperfield. But alongside that focus
on textuality, Poovey also provides a contextuality. The literary texts
are to be read in the light of 111edical discourses, legislative changes,
and the competing languages of gender, class and national identity. In
this kind of reading, the literary text is resolutely not to be understood
as transcendent individual self-expression. Rather it is to be seen as
the mediated product of the individual's responses to the various
formations of his or her own identity. Thus, \,vhile Poovey argues
strongly that class is one of the fundamental sites of the individual's
identity, she resists the possibility that either class or gender act alone
to produce identity or, by extension, textual meaning. In this, she
signals her depa11ure both from the classic Marxist position, and the
classic feminist position:
 Literary Feminisms 37

I do not think that class position is always or at all times more impor-
tant than other constitutive categories, such as gender, race, or
national identity ... My object here has been to examine the relation-
ships among such categories. It seen1s to me that plotting the chang-
ing interaction of these determinants within a culture and within
individual texts is more important than relentlessly subordinating
any combination of these factors to an ahistorical master category.
(18- 19)

The master categories (class or gender), Poovey suggests, are not

universal or trans-historical. They are inflected by time and place. The
obligation of a Marxist-feminist textual approach, therefore, is to pay
serious attention to the specific history and contexts of production of
the text that one examines. For Poovey this n1eans an attention to all
the discourses that formed both masculinity and femininity (gender
refers to both men and women). Her literary critique takes place in
the contextualising frameworks of discussions of the Victorian
medical establishment's view of femininity, and of the Matrimonial
Causes' Act of 1857 (the first act of Parliament that made divorce
possible for those other than the very rich). Moreover, she does not
focus entirely on the ideology of femininity, but shows the extent to
which masculinity was also the result of ideological formation.

Given that social and economic disprivilege are often felt more
acutely by women than by men, a Marxist/socialist approach to the
analysis of literature is a fruitful space for feminist thinking, too.
Linking the ·effects of capitalist production and class structures to
issues of gender provides a range of possible analytical tools with
·which to diagnose the problems of oppression that are specific to
women, and thence enable the development of hypotheses that might
relieve the effects of oppressive structures. Moreover, since social-
ist/Marxist approaches to literature are both explicitly politically-
engaged critiques, what should happen by bringing the two
approaches together is that the politics of feminism and the politics of
the left learn from each other, modify each other, and together
change the world. That is the ideal.
The relationships between socialism/Marxism and feminism,
however, have not always been happy. Elaine Showalter, in 1979,
suggested that:
38 Histories

The most natural direction for feminist criticism to take has been the
revision and even the subversion of related ideologies, especially
Marxist aesthetics and structuralism, altering their vocabularies and
1nethods to include the variable of gender. I believe, however, that
this thrifty fen1inine making-do is ultimately unsatisfactory. Feminist
criticisn1 cannot go around forever in men's ill-fitting hand-me-
downs, the Annie Hall of English studies ... (in Showalter 1986, 139)

She argued that the feminist appropriation of Marxism was a form of

dependency on male models; and she suggested that feminism added
to l'vlarxis1n tended to modify feminism more than [Link], that the
'conversation' between the two discourses was 'one way': Marxism
spoke and feminism listened. It was a discomfort that was often
repeated, as Cora Kaplan has shown. She quotes the critic Heidi
Hartmann who saw the 'marriage' of Marxism and feminism as being
like 'the marriage of husband and wife in English common law:
marxism and feminism are one, and that is marxism' (quoted in
Kaplan 1986, 147). It appears as a very unequal marriage.
Nonetheless, Kaplan argues passionately for a fen1inism that takes
the analysis of social formations seriously, and which 1nakes intelli-
gent use of those pre-existing models. Masculinity and femininity, she
writes:

are always, already, ordered and broken up through other social and
cultural terms, other categories of difference. ... Class and race
ideologies are ... steeped in and spoken through the language of
sexual differentiation. Class and race meanings are not metaphors for
the sexual, or vice versa. It is better, though not exact, to see them as
reciprocally constituting each other through a kind of narrative invo-
cation, a set of associative tern1s in a chain of meaning. To under-
stand how gender and class ... are articulated together transfonns our
analysis of each. (149)

Identity is complicated by the different places in which it resides. In

the nineteenth centu1y, for example, femininity meant different
things depending on the class position of the female subject. A
middle-class woman inhabited one set of structures of femininity, a
working-class woman inhabited rather different structures. A femi-
nism that does not take the classed differences of gender into consid-
eration is missing quite a large part of the plot.
Other problems for the alliance of Marxism and feminism as an
 L itera r y Fem i n is ms 39

approach to literary texts have to do with the category of the aesthetic.

If Marxists and feminists both seek social transformation, both have
equally often found the realms of the arts and literature of rather
marginal concern. The revolution does not co1ne through books and
pictures, particularly if the emphasis on the 'great' books and pictures
is on the unquestioning acceptance of their 'value' and of the values
that they impart (2) . Wollstonecraft's passionate view that revolution-
aries have to take literature seriously often gets lost in Marxist
approaches that do not wish to invest too much time in examining the
conventional pieties, and which dismiss the possibility that the
aesthetic (the definitions of beauty and value in art) is also political.
Kaplan argues that the aesthetic is not just to do with taste and
feeling, with a subjective view of "''hat is beautiful. Rather it is also
socially constructed, and the ways in which it operates can be
analysed in the service of understanding the exclusions of the
aesthetic - what do the 'great' books have in common? what are the
ideals of feminine beauty through the ages? what kinds of book and
kinds of beauty are excluded from the definition of greatness, and
why? The answers to these kinds of questions will expose the ideologi-
cal contents and the historical specificities of aesthetic judgernents.
Instead of allowing the category of 'great literature' to be unques-
tioned and unexamined, instead of tamely allowing it the privileged
positions of universality, truth and transcendence, an approach to
literature that focuses on gender and class, on modes of production
and points of exclusion, could actively subvert the ideal of literary
greatness that is a part of the underpinning of current systems of
oppression. It is an approach that requires historical as well as literary
research, that has to focus on contextualily as well as textuality.
. But reading texts in relation to social contexts may not quite be
enough. Cora Kaplan's important collection of essays, Seachanges
(1986), is remarkable for the ways in which she seeks to combine
social and psychological/psychoanalytical perspectives, so that a
politicised criticism could also account for the illogicality of human
responses to texts. Material conditions have psychic effects: feminist
literary theory has to account for both. It has to be able to say, argues
Kaplan, why one can be an intelligent grown woman with impeccable
feminist politics and still like to read 'trashy' romance novels,
con1modity fiction that makes no real claim of literariness or value,
fiction, indeed, that is overtly hostile to one's consciously held beliefs.
A Marxist-feminist critique cannot concentrate on the content of
 40 Histories

books; it cannot only be interested in the economic networks that

make book production possible for some and impossible for others.
Kaplan describes with glee and also embarrassment her readings of
Margaret Mitchell's Gone with Wind and Colleen McCullough's The
Thorn-Birds, neither of which are 'respectable' from either the point
of view of Marxist-feminism or of liberal humanist definitions of 'liter-
ature'. She explains her attraction to these texts in terms of her
context: an adolescent in the gender-repressive 1950s who also lived
in a liberal, left-wing household. She could feel herself being called to
ape the models of fe1nininity that society provided for her, and her
attraction to them was at least in part because such slavish confor-
mity to lipstick and petticoats was actually also an act of rebellion
against her progressive parents. In addition, the block-buster
romance, with its hundreds of pages and cast of thousands 'invite[s]
... the female reader to identify across sexual difference and to engage
with narrative fantasy from a variety of subject positions and at
various levels'. A novel like The Thorn-Birds 'confirms not a conven-
tional femininity but women's contradictory and ambiguous place
within sexual difference' (120) . Kaplan speaks of identifying with both
male and female characters, of imagining herself in different times,
places, classes and genders. It may be politically-conservative
commodity fiction: but readers do not always read the obvious
content and do not always buy the 'proper' political message. For
Kaplan, in other words, approaches to literature have to deal with the
pleasure of the reading subject in the commodity of the text. That
requires a psychic as well as a social analysis. Oppression and repres-
sion are not separate spheres.

There is always another side, always ... widening the view

Kaplan's guilty pleasure is a pleasure that I have shared, though in my

case, the book also has a claim to literary value within the traditional
academy: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. l read it first when I was ten,
the same age as the heroine when the book opens. And although I
cannot claim equivalence between Jane's childhood and my own, I
decided there and then that she and I were soul sisters, both of us
hideously oppressed (in my case, only by the relative powerlessness of
childhood, not by any 'real' structure of oppression - no one ever
threw a book at me, and I was always faintly disappointed by this
 Literary Feminisms 4 I

since it meant I had no consequent necessity to develop Jane's

heroism); both of us far more significant and attractive personalities
than anyone else had noticed; both of us cleverer and nicer than our
peers; both prepared to put up with many tribulations; both of us
ready for and deserving of the inevitable happy ending with our ugly-
duckling prince charming. I do not suppose for a moment that this is
a unique experience. Indeed, Jane Eyre, with its structural silnilarities
to the fairy story is probably a common transitional text for girls
moving between childhood and puberty towards ... whatever the
endpoint is. It's a guilty pleasure I continue to indulge, having reread
the book probably around once a year since that first reading, in the
beginning for pleasure, increasingly now for work (though pleasure is
still part of it).
Like the narrator of Middlemarch, despite all the important differ-
ences between them, Jane Eyre's narrative voice speaks as one indi-
vidual in conversation with another - her reader. Her experience
validated mine. But as time went on guilt became attached to plea-
sure because it became increasingly evident to me that Jane's
wonderful success in life was bought at the expense of the lives of all
the other women in the text. The bad Reed family, mother and sisters,
are disposed of, as is Jane's putative rival for Rochester's affections,
Blanche Ingram. The foolish but harmless Adele Varens, Rochester's
daughter from an illicit liaison, is sent to school to have her nasty
French ways trained out of her. Mrs Fairfax is sent into retirement.
Rosamund Oliver is left disappointed in her love for St. John Rivers
and fades from the story. Even the more positive figures that Jane
has met have no part in the triumph of her story: Miss Temple and the
Rivers sisters are happily married off, and in the process they are cut
.off from Jane. Helen Bums dies. It is as though there is only the space
for one bourgeois liberal-individual woman's triumph in this society.
Most spectacularly, Jane's success is a function of the utter defeat of
Bertha Rochester Mason, who is killed as she leaps from the tene-
ments of Thornfield Hall, trying to escape from the fire that she has
herself set. Because for Jane-happiness equals Rochester, she can only
achieve happiness if Bertha is dead. Chillingly, for all the apparent
perfection of her future life with her husband, Jane's freedom is thus
built on the mangled body of her predecessor, as well as on
Rochester's mutiliation. Moreover, the text presents this outcome as
both inevitable and desirable, because Jane's insistent narrative voice
so invades the consciousness of the reader that any other ending than
42 Histories

the one that satisfies her desire to be happy is unthinkable. 7 Naive

readings of the novel, such as my first readings were, never notice
this, never dignify the other women in the text with a consciousness
and individuality that equal Jane's. Indeed, many very sophisticated
readings take Jane's point of view as the only view of significance in
the text. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has noted, there is a tendency
to take Jane for a real person, rather than as an ideologically
constructed character operating within a very specific set of literary
conventions and historical circumstances. Marxist critics might
concentrate, therefore, on her anomalous social position as a
governess; and feminist critics, anxious to assert the significance of
Jane's subjectivity, read the text as a psychological parable in which
Bertha functions only as Jane's dark double. The text operates by
making the reader into Jane's accomplice, and to do this it requires us
to see Jane as an individual like ourselves (Spivak in Gates 1986,
262-7). \f\/e forget therefore the uncomfortable underlying facts (facts
of class as well as of gender, of the history of imperialism as well as the
history of the individual) that make Jane's position \,vhat it is, and we
take her at her own assessment of herself.
In other words, one of the fundamental problems attendant on a
literary critique grounded on material conditions of the individual is
that such a critique permits us - encourages us, even - to forget that
the individual does not arise naturally as a function of 'hwnan
nature', but that the meaning of the individual is hisroricaUy and
culturally specific, created out of material conditions, and is a
construction rather than a naturally occurring phenomenon. Because
the individual in the fiction appears to be more or less 'like us', ques-
tioning that construction is tantamount to questioning our own moti -
vations. In the case of Jane Eyre, we take a sample of one, Jane herself,
and use her as the evidence for unquestioning support of our own
extra-textual norms. If we question Jane, we question the basis of our
certainities about our own identities, and we are forced to confront
some rather uncon1fortable questions about our own position. What
are we saying if we say that we are happy when Jane marries
Rochester? That we sanction her triumph even though it depends on
another woman's grisly death? That we do not care about that death
much because we have not recognised that other woman as human?
That even in a book so clearly dedicated to one version of feminism,
victory for one woman necessitates defeat for another? What price
sisterly solidarity now? No wonder my 'pleasure' is 'guilty'.
 Literary Feminisms 43

As Rosemary Hennessy comprehensively argues in Materialist

Ferninisni and the Politics of Discourse (1993), a narrow version of
materialist feminism, one that talks about equal-rights legislation for
women in the West for example, is inadequate as a 1nodel. Hennessy's
book is very dense and theoretically sophisticated, using models from
Marxist and post-Marxist theories alongside psychoanalysis to mount
a critique of conventional materialist positions, and to suggest ways in
which materialist ideas can be used in feminist thinking. Her focus is
not primarily literary, but political. But because literature is one of the
privileged discourses in political formations her commentary is very
useful for thinking about the ways in which texts call their readers into
unquestioning allegiances to particular points of view. In the case of
Jane Eyre, one of the reasons that the novel has been so often
discussed in feminist literary criticism and theory is that it appears to
announce a possible female victory under the restrictive and related
conditions of patrirarchy, capitalism and imperialism. The costs of
Jane's victory are disguised. But the logic of imperialis1n in the nine-
teenth century, like the logic of the capitalist global economy of today,
suggests that there must be connections between the comfort and
privilege of (some) Western women (and men) that are largely borne
by women (and men) in other places. At its most basic, I can buy
mangetout in the supermarket all year round because suppliers in
Africa have put aside their own more immediate need for food in
order to supply a cash crop. My varied diet is supported by the low
wages paid to African workers and by the inequality of economic
conditions between Western Europe and South West Africa. The
problem is . thus both individual and systemic. My privilege is
subsidised by the labour of African women. I know this; l'm often
ashamed of it; and yet - there is still mangetout, airfreighted from
·zambia, in my fridge because, bourgeois liberal individual as I am, the
systems in which I live do not encourage me to look too closely at the
whole picture.
The literary sphere, argues Hennessy, is connected to these
economic conditions in part because literature is very often a repre-
sentation of reality; it represents the economic sphere, though it often
does so implicitly rather than explicitly. Moreover, literature is also a
commodity within that self-same economic system, a circulating
discourse, just as mangetout is a circulating product. The literary text
with its claims to transcendence likes to pretend that it has no real
truck with capitalism, just as I like to pretend that I am not implicated
44 Histories

in a global economy that exploits other people's labow· and disrupts

their cultures and ecologies. The radical requirement of Hennessy's
book is that we need to start to examine more closely those net.,vorks
of social, economic and cultural relations. To understand their forma-
tion is a prerequisite for changing them; and the goal for all kinds of
feminisms must be the liberation of all women, not just the ones we
happen to know, who live nearby, or who share our views of selfhood,
not just the ones who appear to be like us.
Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea provides a striking
example of tracking the relations - both economic and personal -
between one character's triumph and another's defeat. The novel tells
the story of Bertha Mason Rochester, largely from her point of view. It
takes Bertha's ending as written by Charlotte Bronte as a 'given'. The
reader knows from the outset that Bertha, now known by her 'real
name', Antoinette Cosway, will set fire to [Link] House, and will
die leaping from the roof. In the sense that the ending has already
been written, over a century before, then, it is inevitable. But the
telling of the story from Antoinette's perspective demonstrates that
her madness and death are not inevitable in other terms. Her life
might well have turned out differently, had circumstances been differ-
ent, and her death becomes a tragedy, not the supplementary neces-
sity in someone else's plot. In Jane Eyre, Bertha's story is one of
tainted heredity; she is 'the true daughter of an infan1ous mother'
(Bronte 1996, 345) who inevitably inherits her mother's madness.
Wide Sargasso Sea rebukes the trusting reader of the earlier narrative.
As Antoinette tells Rochester, 'There is always another side, always'
(Rhys 1985, 106).
The very structure of Rhys's novel ilnplies that different discourses
intersect in the making of subjects and of lives. The novel has three
parts, the first narrated by Antoinette Cosway, the second by
Rochester (though he remains unnamed in the text), and the third
again by Antoinette. This structure dramatises the fact that the impe-
rialist project was a two-way process in which both coloniser and
colonised were materially affected by exposure to the other. Although
it is a story about imperialism, however, its emphasis is not primarily
on the relationships between White imperialists and their Black
victims. Antoinette Cosway is white, 'a Creole of pure English
descent', and she is therefore a racially suitable mate for Rochester.
But she is also a native of the Caribbean, and is therefore culturally
unsuited to him. As her Black servant, Christophine, tells Rochester,
 Literary Feminisms 45

Antoinette will not be satisfied with him because 'she is Creole girl,
and she have the sun in her' (130). Consequently, she lives a life based
on feeling, and has no understanding of the abstract concepts with
which Rochester orders his world - law, justice, n1easured time mean
nothing to her. But her version of the world, if Rochester would only
listen to her 'side', would provide a useful corrective to his cold
certainties. The novel offers not only a critique of Jane Eyre, but also a
critique of the whole perspective of realist narrative which cannot
admit that there is always another way of seeing things, that there are
many subject positions that might have equally significant views but
which nonetheless realisn1 excises from its 'authorised' version of the
truth. There is a sense in which Antoinette is neither quite white nor
black, and her existence shows that the process of seeing things
in black and white with which Jane's narrative presented us, is
dangerously prescriptive and inaccurate: a blinkered view, not a clear
one.
The materialist experience of living in one place as opposed to
another is one \vay in which a subject position might begin to be
formed. But the problem that the novel addresses is that it is highly
likely that any individual will take the evidence of her own specific
subject position as evidence for universal laws. On their wedding day,
Antoinette and Rochester discuss where they come from - England
and the Caribbean, and cannot reconcile the two at all:

'Is it true,' she said, 'that England is like a drea1n? Because one of my
friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said
this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to
wake up.'
'Well,' I answered, annoyed, 'that is precisely how your beautiful
island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.'
'But how can rivers and 1nountains and the sea be unreal?'
'And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be
unreal?'
'More easily,' she said, 'much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a
dream.'
'No this is unreal and like a dream,' I thought. (67)

These two perspectives cannot meet, in part because they cannot see
the other side, in part because the power relations between the
couple are so unequal. In law (that dangerous abstraction),8 Rochester
46 Histories

owns all Antoinette's property and has complete control over her
person. Why would he vvant to 1nodify his own perspective when the
view he already has is what sustains his power? By the end of the
novel, Antoinette's only resistance to his point of view is to insist that
Thornfield is a 'cardboard house where I walk at night', and to refuse
to believe that it is in England (148). England is a dream built on
paper: no wonder it burns so easily.
For all its interest in drearnscapes and the chimerical nature of
reality, however, the novel is nonetheless founded on rationalist and
n1aterialist explanations of how Antoinette Cosway came to be
Rochester's mad wife Bertha. For Rhys, the story arises out the histori-
cal specificity of the afterrnath of the abolition of slavery in the
Caribbean. Slavery was certainly wrong. But those who had owned
slaves were often financially ruined by its abolition. It is not easy to
feel sympathy for the slave-owners, but the loss of caste and property
is nonetheless the immediate context of Antoinette's mother's
descent into insanity, and Annette is presented as a figure worthy of
syrnpathy. The Cosway family are forced to live with the very natural
hostility of the Black population whom they had once owned. They
have no money with which to leave, or buy protection; they have no
contacts or friends. Both Annette and her daughter are lonely and
isolated and afraid. The sim1nering resent1nent of the forn1er slaves
only spills over into overt violence when the family fortunes are
restored by Annette's marriage to Mr Mason. Now they are no longer
among the dispossessed, no longer 'white niggers', and resentn1er.t
grows until a mob attacks their home, setting it on fire, killing
Antoinette's younger brother, and driving her mother to a degraded
insanity in which she is abused by her keepers. It is this insanity that
Antoinette will relive when she is rejected by Rochester. But she goes
mad not because she is the 'infamous daughter of an infamous
mother', as he calls her, but because she has lived through many of
the same experiences as her mother, has lived with the aftermath of
the abolition of slavery and the deadly logic of imperialism. Finally
she has lost the apparent security of Rochester's love. She becomes
mad from a combination of causes, in other words, including the
material and social deprivations of her childhood, the betrayal of her
friends and family, the failure of her husband to try to understand her,
and his decision to take revenge on her for what he perceives as the
trickery of his marriage. Had any of the links in this chain of cause and
effect been broken, Antoinette need not have become Bertha.
 Literary Feminisms 47

As Rosemary Hennessy argues:

the discourse of political equality is often unevenly articulated within

one social forn1ation 1 empowering some women at the expense of
others, and ... the systemic workings of power are invariably not
dismantled by campaigns aimed solely at the redistribution of politi-
cal liberties. (Hennessy 1993, 26)

If the power relations between the West and the rest of the world
remain intact, to put the sa1ne point in reverse, Jane's campaign for
personal liberty will always be at the expense of Bertha
Mason/ Antoinette Cosway, and indeed, at the cost of Christophine,
Amelie and Hilda, the women who service Antoinette's existence. The
materialist analysis that Hennessy advocates requires the political
comrnit1nent to uncover systemic injustice in our favoured narratives;
it also - perhaps even more radically - requires the reader continually
to question her own position in relation to the systems she discusses.
By uncovering the buried stories of material oppression, Hennessy
suggests, we diagnose the problems and begin the process of finding
solutions. But when we face towards others, we must also rethink and
reassess the materiality of our own existences, presumably with the
goal of changing ourselves as well as the systems. This is a materialist
feminism that takes the position of the individual (bourgeois and
liberal, or otherwise) and the systems in which individuals function
equally seriously. It is, perhaps, utopian. But it certainly provides us
with tools to examine the relationships between oppression and what
is/is not expressed.

·Notes

1. For a more thorough investigation of the term 'ideology' in relation to

materialist readings of literature, see Moyra Haslett's Marxist Litera,y
and Cultural Theory, London: Macmillan, 1999. ln addition James
Decker's forthcoming book Ideology (London: Macmillan) provides a
very useful explanatory discussion of the term.
2. Dorothea, for example is consistently compared with St Theresa of
Avila, an epic figure who founded and reformed religious orders, and
who found a suitable outlet for her gifts in the religious life. Thls
comparison is itself also ironic; Eliot suggests that a figure like St
48 Histories

Theresa, living in contemporary England, would probably be some-

thing of a pain in the neck to live with in ordinary life. This self-
conscious irony, however, does not quite extend to the view of
Dorothea's 111aterial privileges.
3. 'Lady' is a designation of class as well as of gender. From the context in
A Vindication, Wollstonecraft sees the lady as one who is outside the
realm of economic necessity. Middle-class women, she argues, are
more in touch with reality, because although they are not in actual
material want, they nonetheless have 'useful' work to do in the sphere
of the home (where the work of the lady's home is delegated to
servants), and someti1nes they may also be involved in their
husband's/father's business. This version of the middle class is very
probably derived from the mercantile classes, the authors and benefi-
ciaries of the individualism that Williams argues arose side by side with
capitalism. At later points in history, 'lady' will mean other things.
4. In fact, the Fiction is packed with incident. Mary loses first her brother,
whose death makes her an heiress, and therefore a person of some
importance; next she loses her mother, having first married an
unwanted suitor at her mother's deathbed. The husband conveniently
disappears onto the continent to pursue his education. Her farnily is
finally wiped out by the death of her father. She has a very close
emotional friendship with Ann, a poor girl from the neighbourhood
who suffers from consumption. On acceding to her fortune, and having
gained her h usband's permission, she takes Ann to Portugal for her
health, where Ann eventually dies, having tested Mary's faith in her to
the li1nit. Mary also faJJs in love with another man, Henry, while in
Portugal. Their relationship remains platonic, and when they return to
England, Henry also dies of consumption, leaving Mary alone, awaiting
death. So, whilst there are no incidents in the sense of a traditional plot,
where action begets action, there are lots of incidents.
5. When I was on holiday in Egypt some years ago, the profoundest
culture shock I suffered came from the realisation that 01ost of the chil-
dren I met begging wanted neither money nor food; they wanted pens
and paper. What was/is for me a small investment was/is for them a
wild aspiration towards the luxurious necessity of education.
6. For a detailed exposition of Marxist approaches to literature, see Moyra
Haslett's Marxist Literary and Cultural Theories.
7. In fact, it is not quite unthinkable. Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not
the Only Fruit (I 985, London: Vintage, 1991) has a striking rewriting of the
novel at its centre. The heroine's mother, a zealous Evangelical Christian,
rewrites the ending ofJane Eyre so that Jane does not return to Rochester,
but marries St. John Rivers and becomes a missionary in India.
 Literary Feminisms 49

8. As Gayatri Spivak points out, when Antoinette is taken to England and is

visited by her brother, she attacks him when he tells her that he cannot
interfere legally between husband and wife. The word 'legally', which
represents a lying abstraction, makes Antoinette mad. See Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism' in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed), "Race", Writing and
Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 262- 280, p.
269 and Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea [1966], Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1985, p. 150.
2 Images of Women
Criticism

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been

split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male
gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure , which is styled
accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simulta-
neously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for
strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote
looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of
erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby
Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire.
Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'

Woman becomes plant, panther, diainond, 1nother-of-pearl, by

blending flowers, ftus, jewels, shells, feathers, with her body; she
perfumes herself to spread an aron1a of the lily and the rose. But
feathers, silk, pearls and perfutnes serve also to hide the animal
cn1dity of her flesh, her odour. She paints her 1nouth and her cheeks
to give them the solid fixity of a mask; her glance she imprisons deep
in kohl and mascara, it is no more than the iridescent ornament of
her eyes; her hair, braided, curled, shaped, loses its disquieting plant-
like mystery.
ln woman dressed and adorned, nature is present but under
resu·aint, by hu1nan will remoulded nearer to man's desire. A wotnan
is rendered more desirable to the extent that nature is more highly
developed in her and 1nore rigorously confined: it is the 'sophisti-
cated' woman who has always been the ideal erotic object.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Given, as I've aJready suggested, that the word 'theory' derives from a
root that has to do with looking and spectacle, it should perhaps come
as no surprise that moden1 feminist literary theory began as a critique
of images, and began especially as a critique of the stereotypical

so
 Images of Women Criticism 5 I

images of femininity that literary texts present. One of the things that
Simone de Beauvoir's comments above suggest is that woman is the
object of obsessive looking (usually, but not exclusively, she is looked
at by men). By extension, one might also say that woman has had to
be concerned with her own image, has had to spend time looking at
herself and at other women to see whether or not she measures up.
She looks at herself because her cultural value is bound up in her
looks, her image. This concentration on images of femininity,
however, is potentially destructive. It limits the female subject to the
status of object; and it makes ideal images that are not often congru-
ent with reality, into powerful ideological tools for the control of
\-Von1en who have been devalued if they do not have 'good' looks; and
devalued, too, as surface over content, as brainless but lovely, vain
fools, if they are too concerned with image. In other words, the image
is one of the places in which the double bind of proper femininity can
be seen at work: woman is dan1ned if she does, and damned if she
doesn't pay attention to her look, to her image, to how she looks and
how she·is seen.
And if literature is one of the privileged sites of representation, if the
images presented in literaiy and artistic texts are po"verful because of
the power accorded to literature, images of women are an obvious
starting point to begin a critique of the place of wo1nen in society at
large. Representation is not the same thing as reality, which is, of
course, part of the problem. It might also be seen, however, as a part
of the solution. The analysis of literary representations of women and
their differences frorn real women's lives might well be a fruitful place
to begin a politicised analysis of that reality, through the means of
representation. Furthermore, representation might not be the same
$ing as reality, but it is a part of reality. The images we see or read
about ai·e part of the context in which we live. If we can read these
images differently, against the grain, as it were, we cai1 go some way
to altering our perceptions of reality, we can see a need for change:
and when we have seen the need, perhaps we can bring it about.
For Maiy Wollstonecraft, the prevalence of misconceived represen-
tations of women as meek, obedient, passive and pretty, was an evil
because such representations had real effects in the development of
real women's lives. Her criticism of the literary representation of femi-
ninity was firmly placed in a wider political context: representation
was part of the larger picture. This emphasis on the troubled relation-
ships between images and realities has remained a significant feature
S2 Histories

of feminist cnt1c1sm. More than a hundred years after

Wollstonecraft's Vindication, for example, Viriginia Woolf, began to
make similar points. She took as the apotheosis of femininity the
female wife-figure from Coventry Patmore's poem The Angel in the
House (1854-62). Patmore's poem speaks of the impossibility of
expressing woman's true perfection in words:

No mystery of well -woven speech,

No simplest phrase of tenderest fall,
No liken'd excellence can reach
Her, the most excellent of all ...
For she's so subtly, simply sweet,
My deepest rapture does her wrong.
'The Paragon', II. 24-36

Nonetheless, he has no higher wish than to 'live her laureate all my

Life', and in the writing of his poem, he seeks to have an effect on the
world beyond the text:

I'll teach how noble man should be

To match with such a lovely mate;
And then in her may move the more
The woman's wish to be desired,
(By praise increased,) till both shall soar,
With blissful emulations fired.
'The Paragon', 11. 43-8

His apparent inability to fix and define feminine perfection in poetry

is no bar to his sense that his poems might teach both men and
wornen to emulate his own version of the ideal. But the positions of
maJe and female readers and their aspirations are very different. Man
must learn to be worthy of female perfection; \,voman must learn to be
1
more desired and more desirable. Won1an s own desires have no
place here. Her position is certainly that of a docile and dependent
figure, although Patmore could nbt quite say so even in his 'deepest
rapture.'
Like Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf remarked on and disap-
proved of the incapacitating effects of such docile images on the
woman who aspired to be a writer, something that Patmore's Angel
would never have sanctioned as an appropriate role for a woman. 1
 Images of Women Criticism 53

The terms of Woolfs hatred for the Angel precisely mirror

Wollstonecraft's criticism of Rousseau's image of idealised woman-
hood, though her suggested remedy is n1ore violent and self-assertive.
Woolf knew that she had to kill the Angel in the House if she were to
enjoy any career of her own - though her narrative throws so1ne
doubt on whether she actually succeeded in suppressing the mode of
life that the Angel represented:

[The Angel in the House] was intensely sympathetic. She was

immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the
difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily.... (S]he was so
constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but
preferred to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others.
... And directly I came to write I encountered her with the very first
words .... Directly ... I took my pen in my hand ... she slipped behind
me and whispered: 'My dear, you are a young w01nan. ... Be syn,pa-
thetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex.
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.' (Woolf
19·9 33, 102-3)

This particular image demonstrates the extent of women's interpella-

tion into constructed ideas about gender. 2 Woolf's 111urderous fantasy
('She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It
is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality' [103]) shows how insidi-
ous ideal femininity can be: it appears to be sympathetic and charm-
ing - usually positive terms, supposedly virtues to vvhich ,,vomen
should aspire. At the same ti1ne, as Wollstonecraft also noted, this
version of femininity is hypocritical, dishonest, deceptive. It twists a
woman's mind.
. The image has also mattered a great deal inside works of literature
by women where the critique of the ideology of idealised femininity
has often been a significant part of the plot in poetry and novels.
Charlotte Bronte, for example, deliberately chose women who were
not conventionally attractive as her heroines in Jane Eyre (1847) and
Villette (1851). Her point is that the emphasis in fiction on physical
attractiveness need not imply that a plain woman cannot be interest-
ing and attractive in other ways. Of Jane Eyre, she wrote, 'I will show
you a heroine as small and plain as myself who shall be as interesting
as any' extant heroine in fiction. Jane indeed represents herself as a
'Governess, disconnected, poor and plain' in contrast to the portrait of
54 Histories

an 'accomplished lady' she sets herself to paint when she fears that she
is beco1ning presumptuous in her attraction to Rochester. The images
of the governess and the lady are supposed to act for her as lessons in
humility, in knowing her own place which is defined by her apparent
Jack of physical attractions (Bronte 1996, 183-4). The novel itself, of
course, belies the supposed message of this lesson in fe1ninine submis-
sion and humility for the plain woman, since it is Jane who manies
Rochester in the end, not the accomplished beauty, Lady Blanche.
Images of women serve an even more didactic purpose in Villette,
when Lucy Snowe ventures out alone and attends Villette's art gallery,
where she muses on the 1neanings of the representations of feminin-
ity that she sees there. The first picture she sees is one which repre-
sents Cleopatra in voluptuous half-undress. Lucy's disapproval of this
image is presented as being practical and also funny: Cleopatra's
image is unrealistic, it does not 1natch the reality of women's bodies
and women's lives that she has observed. Cleopatra is painted as
larger than life, semi-nude despite the 'seven-and-t\-venty-yards' of
material in which she is draped, reclining on a sofa ('why, it would be
difficult to say; broad daylight blazed around her'), and surrounded
by scattered objects (pots and pans, Lucy calls them, before modify-
ing her remark to 'vases and goblets, I should say') that suggest that
she is a poor housekeeper with no proper sense of tidiness (Bronte
1979, 275). The picture, she thinks, is indecent; Cleopatra is excessive,
larger than life, extremely well fed, and like no woman that Lucy has
ever seen in either physique or apparent temperament.
Her thoughts on this picture are interrupted by the arrival of M.
Paul, who will one day be her lover. M. Paul does not want her to look
at the picture of Cleopatra because it n1ight put sexual ideas into her
head. (He is also shocked, by the way, that she has wandered the town
alone, without a male chaperone, suggesting the practical limitations
that proper femininity might impose on a woman in the mid-nine-
teenth century.) He n1oves her on to examine pictures of \rvomen that
seem to him to be n1ore in keeping with what a woman should kno\>v
of her sex. He shows her a set of pictures entitled 'La vie d'une fen1me'
(the life of a woman). Lucy, however, objects to these four images of
proper femininity with more indignation and less good humour than
she showed in responding to the Cleopatra:

They were painted ... in a remarkable style - flat, dead, pale and
formal. The first represented a 'Jeune Fille, ' coining out of a church-
 Images of Women Crit i cism 55

door, a n1issal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down,
her mouth pursed up - the image of a most villainous little preco-
cious she-hypocrite. The second, a 'Mariee' witl1 a long white veil,
kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chan1ber, holding her hands plasrered
together, finger to finger, and showing the whites of her eyes in a
1nost exasperating n1anner. The third, a 'Jeune Mere,' hanging
disconsolate over a clayey and puffy baby, with a face like an
unwholesome full moon. The fourth, a 'Veuve,' being a black woman
holding by the hand a little black girl, and the twain studiously
surveying an elegant French monument, set up in the corner of some
Pere La Chaise. All these four 'Anges' were grim and gray as burglars,
and cold and vapid as ghosts. What wOJnen to live ,.vith! insincere, ill-
humoured, bloodless, brainless nonentities! As bad in their way as
the indolent gipsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers. (277-8) 3

As with the Cleopatra, Lucy objects to these pictures on both aesthetic

and moral grounds. The quality of the painting is one problem, and its
' flat, dead, pale and formal' lines imply also something of her
response to the content of the pieces. These are didactic pieces,
deemed by M. Paul as appropriate images to present to a young lady:
indeed he instructs Lucy to sit and observe them until someone
should come and chaperone her back home, as though these pious
pictures will keep her pure by their very nature. The pictures of a
woman's life emphasise piety, domesticity and dependence, qualities
that Lucy clearly neither has nor wishes to have.
These ilnages all depend on the woman's supposed relationship with
the male. The absent male figure to whose love the young girl aspires,
who marries the young ,.vife, fathers the young mother's baby and dies
leaving the ,,vidow, suggests the extent to which femininity is supposed
to exist only in terms of its dependent relationships with the male. His
presence is deathly, imaged in his metonymic presence/ absence in the
funeral monument. He hems in and frames femininity and creates it in
his own ideal image. Like Wollstonecraft and Woolf, Bronte presents us
with a critique of in1ages of women that are based on hypocrisy, vapid-
ity and stupidity. The various pictures represent the angels in opposi-
tion to the whore Cleopatra whose overflowing sexuality also disgusts
Lucy Snowe. But the story she makes these pictures tell is about her
resistance to being framed into these in1ages of the either/or of fen1i-
ninity. She seeks a third way. She is called by these images, and she
rejects the interpellation into the roles they depict.
56 Histories

The pictures that Lucy Snowe sees are not merely literary represen-
tations of pictorial art. The four images that make up 'La vie d'une
femme' had their real counterparts in mid-nineteenth-century paint-
ing, as Lynda Nead has shown, and these 'real' pictures were powe1fuJ
ideological tools. In Myths of Sexuality, Nead discusses a triptych of
paintings by George Elgar Hicks, entitled Woman's 1'1ission, ,,vhich
were exhibited in 1863 in the Royal Academy exhibition in London.
The paintings depict in tu1n a woman in her roles as Guide to
Childhood (a woman guides a child along a wooded path),
Companion to Manhood (the same woman supports her husband
when he has received bad news, though she also signals her depen-
dency by leaning on him) and Comfort of Old Age (she ministers to her
sick father). Woman's mission, that is, is entirely bound up with her
familial role as mother, wife, and daughter. As such, they appear to
typify Victorian views about proper femininity:

Woman's Mission re-forms and re-works already familiar 1noral

values and social relationships; it invites its audience to make a moral
as well as an aesthetic judgement - to recognise the truthfulness of
this representation of femininity and to approve of its picturing of
female virtue ... .it would appear that Hicks's picture is a straightfor-
ward confirmation of bourgeois definitions of respectable femininity.
(Nead 1988, 14)

These images are, in other words, a direct call to tl1e banner of proper
femininity. But as Nead goes on to show, contemporary responses to
these images were not necessarily positive, and reviews of the exhibi-
tion even criticised Hicks's pictures for their vulgarity, sentimentality
and emphasis on 'millinery' and furnishings. Nead suggests that one
reason for hostility towards such images in so1ne sections of the press
was that 'the definition of respectable femininity was far from
resolved; the ideal of "woman's mission" was frequently contested
and this instability posed a potential problem for any representation
of the contemporary woman in high art' (16). The single idealised
version of a woman's life was undermined by the multiplicity of reali-
ties of real \,vomen's lives.
The point that I want to derive from this brief excursion into nine-
teenth -century art and literature is that images are not simple
n1essages transmitted between canvas or text and viewer or reader.
We may each respond very differently to a given in1age. And it would
 Images of Women Criticism 57

be naive to assume that because a given set of images exist or were

once prevalent, that they map easily onto either the experiences of
real women's lives, or onto their own sense of what they should strive
to be or to beco1ne. Admittedly, Lucy Snowe is a somewhat unusual
character; but her responses to the 'brainless nonentities' represented
in 'La vie d'une femme' are presented by the text as co1nmon-sense
responses that any intelligent woman might share. Images, I repeat,
are not quite the sa1ne thing as reality. 'Looking' is after all, an
ambiguous concept. The way a woman looks might mean either a
description of her own appearance, or a description of her act of
looking at others; the two kinds of looking ,night even be modified by
each other. As such, the images at which one looks can be simultane-
ously both a call towards or a warning against a particular way of
looking ('La vie d'une femme' versus Cleopatra), and an opportunity
to look differently, to criticise or refuse tl1at look in favour of another
way of looking.

The ways we looked - then

The early feminist classics of the post-war era, like Simone de

Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), and of the 1960s such as Mary
Ellmann's Thinking About Women (1968) and Kate Millett's Sexual
Politics (1969), though very different kinds of book, all share a
commitment to pursuing the image as a way of analysing the ideolog-
ical force of literature, and as a n1ethod for pursuing political analyses
in the [Link] the text.
De Beauvoir's Second Sex is a thoroughgoing politicised discussion
<?f the place of women in society and culture. Her discussion is
extremely wide-ranging as a sample of chapter titles suggests. She
writes of biology, psychoanalysis, history, literature, politics, myth, of
'woman's life today', of the various roles of women from childhood to
marriage to materruty and old age, and she ends by positing a future
for the 'independent woman'. Her argument begins from the premise
that there is no natural reason why women should be regarded - or
should regard themselves - as inferior to men in society. That in
almost every known societywon1en are seen as lesser beings is a func-
tion not of nature but of a mode of thought in which Man is taken as
the norm and the ideal, and Woman is his defirung 'other', the being
who validates his importance because of her differences from him.
S8 Histories

humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as rela-
tive to him; she is not regarded as an autonon1ous being.... she is
simply what man decrees; thus she is called 'the sex', by which is
meant that she appears to the male as a sexual being. For him she is
sex - absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with
reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the inciden-
tal, the inessential as opposed to his essential. He is the Subject, the
Absolute - she is the Other. (de Beauvoir 1997, 16)

This kind of thinking has, however, to be understood as a habit rather

than as a fact of life. De Beauvoir suggests that it is more difficult for
women to analyse their own situation because they are dispersed
through society, and they therefore have very little sense of them-
selves as an alienated, oppressed group. Unlike the Jew in the anti-
Semitic culture, or the Black man in the racist society, or the worker in
a hierarchical capitalist system, women are not oppressed into a
geographical ghetto which makes their oppression visible, and this
makes it more difficult to recognise the terms of their oppression
since they are without a strong sense of either individual or collective
subjectivity:

Proletarians say 'We'; Negroes also. Regarding then1selves as subjects,

they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into 'others'. But women do
not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal
demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in
referring to themselves .... women lack concrete n1eans for organizing
themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correla-
tive unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and
they have no such solidarity of work and inlerest as that of the prole-
tariat.... They live dispersed a1nong the males, attached through resi-
dence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to
certain men - fathers or husbands - more firn1ly than they are to
other w01nen. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity
with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white,
their aJlegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. (19)

Passages such as this suggest the complexity of de Beauvoir's argu-

ment, where a concept such as subjectivity - apparently a personal,
even private, sense of selfhood - is shown to stand in an important
relation to communal politics, to public life, and to ideas such as
history, religion, work, race and class.
 Images of Women Critic i sm S9

For de Beauvoir, representation, whether it be the representation of

the self to the self on a private, individual basis, or whether it is how
one represents or is represented in or by a larger social group, is
crucially bound up with subjectivity. If women do not see themselves
as subjects, either individually or communally, they are robbed of the
ability to represent themselves. In The Second Sex, the unage of
woman comes from outside her. Woman is a myth, an object of male
fantasy created out the minds of male subjects who represent her as it
suits their purposes, as objects within their fantasies (174- 5). As such,
femininity is a profoundly contradictory state. It is the apotheosis of
both nature and culture, as the epigraph to this chapter suggests, in
its evocation of the superabundance of apparently natural supple-
ments which make up the cultured body of the sophisticated woman
who is the erotic ideal of male fantasy. It is precisely the contradic-
tions in the edifice of femininity which deny women individuated
subjectivity, since the subject is supposed to exist as self-consistent
and coherent. Thus a subject who inhabits contradictions is not quite
a subject at all. This, de Beauvoir suggests, is the technique of 'other-
ing', of rendering so1neone as 'other'. Patriarchal thought has created
an incoherent version of femininity, in which the women who live it
are trapped, and for which they are blamed. Their 'nature' is cultur-
ally constiucted; but the construction is disguised - and, after all,
nature is precisely the thing that one cannot change.
In her readings of 'The Myth of Woman in Five Authors', de
Beauvoir writes about five male writers and their various evocalions
of fe1nininity in fiction and poetry. For Montherlant, woman is a
danger; the Eternal Feminine is a threat to virile masculinity. For D. H.
Lawrence, both men and women are 'animal' - but woman is
~omehow more 'animal' than man, and is the willing object of his
phallic animality. In the works of Claude!, Woman is a mass of contra-
dictions: she is at once the dangerous siren who brought about the
Fall from the Garden of Eden, but she is also a figure of redemption
who brings about the possibility of Heaven. For Breton, woman is a
concrete figure who represents the abstractions of poetry and love,
but who has no subjectivity of her own. And for Stendhal, women are
'flesh and blood' (268), and are to be understood in relation to the
social li1nitations placed on them, not as abstracted figures in an
imaginary landscape. Of all the writers, Stendhal's view is to be
preferred since it 'presupposes that wo1nan is not pure alterity: she is
subject in her o,-vn right .... he gives [his heroines] a destiny of their
60 Histories

own'. Her conclusion from these discussions is, unsurprisingly, that

the majority of male writers recreate woman in their own image. She
is presented as Other to the 'self' that they p1ivilege: 'When he
describes woman, each writer discloses his general ethics and the
speciaJ idea he has of himself (282). And she objects to the majority of
these representations because they are not realistic, because they say
more about the male writer than about Woman or women, and
because they insist on constituting femininity as the mystery which
foregrounds the knowability and coherence of male selfhood - this
despite the fact that each man 'still needs to learn more fully what he
is' (277, 1ny emphasis). Woman's mysteriousness and inconsistency
relieves the 1nale writer fron1 having to recognise won1an's humanity
and subjectivity. The image of women - in life as well as in literature -
de Beauvoir suggests, is man-made; and it is less a representation of
reality than the icon of an unrealisable ideal.
The Second Sex is a classic and important book because of its insis-
tent connection of apparently disparate ideas. Politics and literature,
history and anthropology, sociology and culture are shown to be part
of a network which contribute to the making of meanings about
women. No single aspect of life is isolated; everything is presented as
interdependent: the personal is political, as the feminist slogan of the
1970s was to put it. This process of thinking through the connections
between discourses is possibly the most important legacy of de
Beauvoir's text to subsequent generations of feminist readers and
thinkers.
Like de Beauvoir, Ellmann's book Thinking About Women pursues
the image relentlessly as the articulation of what she sees as an unten-
able sexual analogy in which the supposedly natural relationships
between men and women and relative positions of the sexes perme-
ate every aspect of life. The sexual analogy refers primarily to the idea
that superior male physical strength and the prolonged nurturing role
of women in tJ1e bearing of children are metaphors for every human
action, even when these 'facts' have no apparent bearing on the
matter in hand. Given the 'natw·al' facts of physiology, Ellmann ironi-
cally suggests that:

[a]n utterly practical (though not an ideal) society would be one in

which these facts were of such importance that all men and women
were totally absorbed in their demonstration - that is, in the use of
strength and the completion of pregnancies. Both sexes would live
 Images of Women Criticism 6 I

without intermissions in which to recogn ise their own monotony.

(Ellmann 1968, 2)

In other words, if the sexual analogy really held true - if women were
mere childbearing machines, and men were simply physically strong
- the whole of society would revolve around war and reproduction:
childbearing would have as its sole function the supply of more
soldiers. Given that this is not actually the case in the Western soci-
eties to which Ellmann lilnits her observations, the views that derive
from this analogy must be stereotypes, images which reproduce and
are themselves reproduced by a false sexual analogy.
Ellmann's focus is primarily on literary texts (which are a relatively
small part of The Second Sex), and she announces that she will focus
on 'women as words - as the words they pull out of people's mouths'
(xv). Her assumption seems to be that the words that the idea of
'woman' produces are themselves the product of lazy stereotypical
thinking, a laziness she seeks to expose and deflate. She considers a
number of stereotypes of femininity as they appear in contemporary
(1950s and 1960s) fiction. These include: formlessness, instability,
confinement, piety, materiality, spirituality, irrationality and compli-
ancy; she ends her discussion with a focus on two ' incorrigible stereo-
types' of the feminine, the shrew and the witch.
The book is wonderfully funny in its demolition of the logic of the
sexual analogy as it is dramatised by these stereotypes. For example,
Ellmann mocks the assumption that image and substance are the
same thing by mounting an attack on the view that regards women's
bodies as softer and rounder than those of men: 'soft body, soft mind'
is the analogy, but what have bodies actually got to do with brains?
_(74). Or, elsewhere, her discussion of piety disentangles the argument
that women are more likely to be pious than men because they are
less intellectually curious or able: 'To prove this stereotype [of piety],
religions must work like washing machines: men construct them and
women run them. To found a religion is inventive, but to keep its rules
is pious' (93). In other words, women are socially constructed to
concentrate on immediate duty, whilst men are licensed to search for
variety and excitement. The lilnitations placed on women are socially
constructed, but although they are trapped by these limitations,
women also show themselves to be socially responsible. After all, if no
one runs the washing machine, then the male adventurer will have to
be inventive in dirty smalls. The tone of the text is elusive and ironic.
 62 Histories

Ellmann does not state_ her objections directly - indeed one might
even go so far as to suggest that she is 'ladylike'. Rather than become
the stereotype of the shrew in her objections to the sexual status quo,
she juxtaposes incongruous images and allows the reader to 1nake up
her own mind: the result is bewitching, though not witch-like or
monstrous (tern1s very often used against clever won1en). Piety, for
example, she suggests, is a mainstay of fiction, without which 'we
would lose that store of short stories and novels which faithfully and
regularly bring our attention to women's special vulnerability to reli-
gious enthusiasm'. This appears a gentle statement, but look at the
words in which she writes: 'faithfully' is a word that ironically registers
a male author's piety, as well as that of the female character; 'regu-
larly' implies that the male author is not nearly so inventive as he
,,vould like to claim. She does not say that the loss of such a 'store' of
fiction would be a great loss, indeed rather implies that the world
might be better for it, since this store is so full of stock notions. Her
parting shot on piety is that in robust male writing, 'the Henry Miller
solution is standard: if the woman is nubile, she can be redeemed
from piety by copulation' (94-5). The juxtaposition of redemption and
copulation suggests, but does not quite state, that she does not think
much of either, and that Henry Miller is hardly to be viewed as a good
example.
This is image criticism of a very sophisticated kind. Ellmann takes
the exan1ples she has uncovered, and uses the1n as the springboard
for a critical but also creative performance of her own. Thinking
About Women exemplifies extremely careful writing and its poise and
irony unsettle the reader's cenainties. It is a text that probes the
connections between nature and culture, between sex as biology and
gender as behaviour determined by social rules. Indeed, it uses those
rules against the grain. Elhnann's prose is 'feminine' in that it is
elegant and poised, 4 strangely well-mannered considering its revolu-
tionary implications. It is moreover possible to read it 'straight', to
miss its irony, so that like a revolutionary fe,ninist version of Woolf's
Angel in the House, it flatters to deceive. It treads a fine line, and not
all 'ilnages ofwo1nen' criticism has such suppleness and subtlety.
Thinking About Women is a short book which created little stir
when it was first published. In Janet Todd's words, it 'mocked
assertive masculme criticism' and found 'female experience in a kind
of style rather than in the choice of peculiar expehence' (Todd 1988,
21, my emphasis). In other words it is a very 'literary' book, taking
 Images of Women Criticism 63

literature as its subject, and reading literature through the medium of

a style inflected by literature. In contrast, Todd reads Kate Millett's
Sexual Politics as a 'socio-hlstorical' text, which takes literatw·e as
source material for a hypothesis about the relationshlps between the
sexes in the non-literary world from the late-nineteenth century to the
present. Millett assumed that literature was 'n1imesis', a relatively
transparent reflection of life as it is lived; and she used this assump-
tion to develop an idea of gender 'as a culturally acquired sexual iden-
tity, not a natural given, as women had been hoodwinked into
thjnking' (Todd 1988, 22). And Sexual Politics became a 'World Best-
seller' as a red banner on my edition announces. Compared to
Ellmann's book, it caused a massive stir, and it probably did so for
two related reasons. It is a sensationalist book which focuses primar-
ily on the sex scenes of a number of male-authored texts; and it is an
angry book, which is infuriated by the 1nisogynistic images of women
it finds in these scenes. In other words, both its tone and its content
are a vigorous assault on conventional ways of thinking about litera-
ture, and they found a new way of thinking about women.
In the Introduction, I suggested that literature is often defined as a
kind of 'polite' writing, 'fine' writing; a correlative of that view of liter-
ature is that literary criticism is supposed equaJly to be polite and in
some sense 'objective'. Millett's criticism upsets these positions in its
insistence that literature is often not polite at all, and her criticism
takes place in a tone of outrage at the material that is being presented
under the guise of 'literature'. Her first chapter exemplifies her rhetor-
ical strategies; she extracts three sexually explicit passages from
novels by Norman Mailer, Hem)' Miller and Jean Genet on which she
comments in order to demonstrate that there is some relationshlp in
all three writers between sex and power. Her argument is that the
apparently private sexual relationships between men and women (or
between macho and feminised males in the case of Genet) 'can
scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum'. In defining what she
means by sexual politics, she broadens the definition of the political
away from merely meaning party-political or governmental struc-
tures, to a meaning which refers 'to pow·er-structured relationships,
arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another'
(Millett 1977, 22). In other words, she shifts definitions of power and
politics towards the private and personal sphere, as well as consider-
ing politics in terms of its 1nore public n1anifestations. In exan1ining
sexually graphic excerpts from novels, Millett connects the assump-
 64 Histories

tions that regulate apparently private activity with the assumptions

that govern the wider world. Her move from literary text to real world
can be criticised as under-theorised (how are the text and the world
related?); but the book's importance, as Toril Moi notes, is in its insis-
tence that 'social and cultural contexts must be studied if literature
was to be properly understood, a view she shares with all later femi-
nist critics regardless of their otherwise differing interests', and in its
proposal that the (woman) reader's point of view had equal value to
the male author's supposed intentions (Moi 1985, 24).
Sexual Politics, like both The Second Sex and Thinking About
Women, concentrates its attention on writing by men. The images of
women in sexual relationships that Millett uncovers are images
inflected by her sense of the inequality of power in these relation-
ships: the women are largely seen as passive and helpless in the
clutches of the strong male lovers/writers, who control both the
sexual encounters and the points of view from which they are written.
Millett is angry about these repeated representations which she sees
as perpetuating a misognynistic patriarchy; but because the images of
which she disapproves are repeated, so are her arguments. The book
depends on a rhetoric of anger at least as much as it depends on argu-
ment. Moreover, Millett decisively rejected psychoanalytic theory as a
tool with any value for feminism, seeing Freud's works as simply
another foundation for the edifice of patriarchy. Because of this rejec-
tion, it is not possible for her to account for the ways in which women,
both as beings in the world and as readers of literary texts, can be
called into the roles that she sees as so degrading. There are, after all,
women readers who enjoy the works of Mailer, La\.vrence and Miller.
How can that happen when, for example, Henry Miller n1erely
expresses: 'the yearning to effect a complete depersonalisation of
woman into cunt, a game sexuality of cheap exploitation, a childish
fantasy of power untroubled by the reality of persons or the complex-
ity of dealing with fellow hu1nan beings and, finally, a rude species of
evacuation hardly better than anal in character' (Millett 1977, 313)?
Sexual Politics is an important book because it spotted a certain set of
stereotypes, because it tried to explain those stereotypes, because it
insistently placed literary texts in social and historical contexts, and
because it championed the wo1nan reader. But feminist literary criti-
cism and theory still had more to do than ilie models offered by
de Beauvoir, Ellmann and Millett.
 Images of Women Crit i cism 65

Looking again at looking

As Toril Moi argues, certain types of image criticisn1 are bound to lead
to a critical dead end. She takes as her example a collection of essays
edited by Susan Koppelman Cornillon, and entitled Images of Women
in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, first published in 1972. This volume
contained 21 essays about various nineteenth- and twentieth-century
male and female writers. The book is in1portant, as Moi suggests,
because of its influence on a whole generation of American college
graduates for whom it defined what might be meant by a feminist
perspective on literature. The definition it offered had certain key
assumptions: that literature is supposed to be a more or less unrnedi-
ated reflection of life; that experience and fictional representation
ought to map onto each other; and that the purpose of literature for
the (won1an) reader is to find her own experience replicated in the
fictional world - she should be able to 'identify' with the characters in
the books she reads. These are also the assumptions that partially
underlie the works of de Beauvoir (insofar as she deals with litera-
ture), Ellmann and Millett. But to limit fe1ninist approaches to these
ideas would lead, as Moi suggests, to a cul-de-sac. The critic would
read a novel, look at its women characters and say either: 'that is
accurate, it is like my life, this is a good book'; or, alternatively, 'that
woman is like no one I've ever met, she's certainly not like me and
this is a bad book because of it'. A literary criticism that relies only a
'reality test' has several potential problems. It could only be a
repeated critical gesture, looking for the same things over and over
again; the crjtic assumes that her own reality (if such a thing can be
categorised), stands for a kind of universal reality; such a criticism
does not itself lead to an analysis of the social context in which certain
views about women came about; it offers little in the way of a political
future - it does not attempt to answer the question of how the situa-
tion of real wo1nen might be changed for the better; and in its concen-
tration on content, it forgets the literariness (the forms and languages)
of the literary text (Moi 1985, 42-9).
This is not to say, however, that images of women are unimportant,
nor that they cannot provide a focus for feminist theories of literature.
On the contrary, looking at looking can be a fruitful exercise, depend-
ing on how it is done. Useful examples for feminist litera1y theory can
be found in the fields of feminist art history and feminist cultural
history, both of which are very much concerned with images of
 66 Histor i es

women, but which are also significantly focused on placing images in

contexts, and on historicising representation. In their insistence that
images of women are not autonomous, art and cultural historians
have traced developments in ideas about representation. They show
that ideal images of femininity have a history that maps onto cultural
changes through time; the ideal is not then a fixed entity, timeless and
immutable, but something that has changed through diffe1ing social
and historical circumstances, and something, therefore, that can
change again: perhaps this time through the agency of female
subjects reclaiming their images for themselves.
I have already briefly mentioned Lynda Nead's important book on
images of women in nineteenth-century art and literature, Myths of
Sexuality (1988). Her method in this book is to examine the relation-
ships between social constructions of femininity and its representa-
tion in the 'high' cultural spheres of paintings and literary texts in the
context of more 'ephemeral' forms of contemporary writing such as
journal and newspaper articles. The detailed historical research which
is the foundation for this work enables her to demonstrate an histori-
cised consciousness that complicates our conten1porary view of the
Victorian age. It is not simply the case that women were uniformly
oppressed in the 1860s. Oppression took place, but would have been
felt differently by different groups and individuals: working women
had very different experiences from middle-class women. Indeed,
when one looks closely at the context of art production in the period,
one can discern the tensions and contradictions inherent in the sepa-
rate spheres ideology of the period. The apparent dominance of one
view of male female relations ('Man for the field, Woman for the
hearth', as Tennyson put it), is belied by the raging debates current in
the mid-century, that were taking place in contemporary journals, in
political articles, in art criticism and in literary cornmentary. Those
debates also find their way into the contradictory representations of
women in books and pictures of the time. Nead demonstrates a rela-
tionship between text and context which moves in both directions:
paintings, for exarnple, helped to form artistic taste and political alle-
giances, but were themselves formed out of a radically unstable
context. In the end, they did not create a homogenous audience, in
which everyone 1nore or less agreed that femininity was to be w1der-
stood as 'this' and not 'that'. The complications thrown up by histori-
cising our understanding of a particular period show the extent to
which 'looking' at images is itself detennined by context. lt also
 Images of Women Crit i cism 67

suggests that we are ourselves historicised beings who may be looking

for what we want to find, subject to our own contexts of looking.
Similarly, some of the works of cultural history produced by a writer
like Marina Warner can help to politicise the image, and render
looking more than something passive. In books such as Alone of All
Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) and Monuments
and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), Warner looked
at ideal images of fen1ininity as they have changed across time and
place. Her argument in the latter book is that the prevalence of female
forms to represent nations (Britannia, the Russian Motherland, the
French Republique) and abstract nouns (Justice, Liberty, Freedom,
Immortality, Democracy) is strangely at odds with the subordinate
positions of real women in western and other cultures. As she ruefully
notes, 'Liberty is not represented as a woman ... because women were
or are free' (Warner 1985, xix-xx). Instead, the allegory of the female
form is a kind of double-speak, a hypocritical raising of femininity
onto a high pedestal that disguises women's real place in culture.
Femininity may be an ideal, but real women are not. In diagnosing
the distinctions to be drawn between image and actuality in different
times and places, she shows us why [Link] should not accept the space of
the pedestal at face value. Indeed, idealising Woman may be little
more than a confining strategy that judges and limits real women in
relation to an impossible standard. The 'allegory of the fe1nale form'
displaces the multiple realities of female forms, and tries to have us
scrabbling after an image that we cannot replicate because we are too
fat or too thin, to black, too muscular - too different. Once we know
that it's a trick, once we have a diagnosis, we can see the images
through different eyes, and stop listening to their siren calls. Well - if
only...

The ways we look now?

It would be nice to think that images can no longer interpellate

women into untenable roles or positions. It would be heartening to
believe that the rigorous analysis of the image has freed the female
viewer from the need to conform to the impossible. The real case is
rather different and more complex than that. As non-literary books
like Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (1991) amply de1nonstrate,
women are still called to ideal images, and still respond to the call.
68 Histories

Knowing that there is something wrong with an image does not

necessarily mean that we are not attracted to it, not tempted by it.
Because of the proliferation of images around us, from television, an
expanded print 1nedia, from film and advertising hoardings, more
than any previous generation, we can see what we are supposed to be:
we are even sold the products that are alJeged to enhance this image -
advertisements in women's magazines are all about clothes, make-up,
perfume and cosmetic surgery. Simone de Beauvoir's evocation of the
eroticised female ideal, supplemented by fur, feathers, perfume and
kohl, is still there: and we still buy it, or the products that promise that
we can attain it. In1age criticism has largely shifted away from discus-
sions of the representations of women in literature, and focuses
instead on the iinage-rich media. As Wolf suggests, we are living in a
time of '"beauty pornography" - which for the first time in wo1nen's
history artificially links a commodified "beauty" directly and explicitly
to sexuality.' While many of the material battles of feminism - the
vote, reproductive rights, equal pay, equal access to education -
appear to have been 'won', at least partially, and only in Western
countries, 'eating disorders rose exponentialJy, and cosmetic surgery
became the fastest growing medical specialty' in the TJnited States
(10-11). The image obviously still matters.
It is probably unreasonable to expect that any theoretical approach
to literature can bring about absolute changes in human conditions.
And a critique that exposes a problem is still worth doing, even, it
cannot change the world. It is a tool, a part of an ongoing process -
not an answer in itself. What is still needed is a better explanation of
how ilnages produce tl1eir calJs; and of why viewers continue to
respond to them. Image criticism, if it is to retain its usefulness, needs
to combine the ideas of psychoanalysis with the more materialist
sociological views about why and how the image counts.

Notes

1. There are, of course, at least two kinds of image. There is the negative
image which limits feminine sensibilities; and there is the 'positive'
image, the role model, who imaginatively opens up alternative versions
of female life which may then be taken up by women in the real world.
2. 'Interpellation' is a tenn derived from the writings of the Marxist thinker
Louis AJthusser. It literally means the process of being 'called into' a
 Images of Women Criticism 69

particular set of social conventions and beliefs. Althusser does not

simply argue, however, that people are called and that they respond
unproblen1atically to the call. Rather, he suggests that whilst interpella-
tion is a poweiful tool of social control, people nonetheless have some
capacity to resist insistent conformity. For more information on this,
see Moyra Haslett's Marxist Literary and Cultural Theories, London:
Macmillan, 1999.
3. The four women in turn are a young girl ('jeune fille'), a bride (mariee),
a young mother ('jeune mere') and a widow ('veuve'). The use of the
word 'anges' (angels) is clearly ironic.
4. This is, of course, a very dangerous thing to say. But I n1ean 'feminine',
not female - indeed ladylike, the term 1 used earlier, might be a better
word. I'm obliged to qualify my position because of Tori! Moi's stric-
tures on the ways in which Ellmann's book has been read. Tn
Sexual/Textual Politics, Moi argues that to see Thinking About Women
as 'fe1ninine' is to fall into exactly the trap of 'ad feminam' criticism,
fuelled by the sexual analogy, that Ellmann is attacking. It's a fair point,
given that Patricia Mayer Spacks, the critic Moi cites as saying that
Ellmann has developed a technique of 'feminine elusiveness', does not
differentiate between femininity and femaleness. When I say 'feminine'
though, it is in the light of the argument that there is a distinction
between sex and gender. It seems to me that Ellmann has very deliber-
ately adopted the mask of a particular version of femininity in order at
once to disguise and to express her views. Her femininity is a kind of
masquerade, a performance, that defuses criticism (we cannot say she
is a bitter old harridan) whilst still allowing her to make her point. In
other words, femininity need not just be a trap; it can be creatively
harnessed for subversive effect. See Tori! Moi. Sexual/Textual Politics:
Feminist 'Literary Theory, London: Methuen, 1985, 31-41, and Patricia
Mayer Spacks, The Female lmaginaion: A Literary and Psychological
Investigation of Women's Writings, London: George Allen and Unwin,
1976.
3 The Woman as Writer:
Forging Female Traditions

At its most naive, image criticism leaves feminist literary theory at an

impasse. It is very noticeable that all of Millett's and de Beauvoir's
main literary case studies, and a large majority of Ellmann's examples,
were taken fron1 male-authored texts. They noticed the dishonesty of
the images, but their works did not interrogate the literary quality of
the models they examined. There was no question that the works of
Lawrence or de Montherlant or Mailer deserved to be read as litera-
ture. \IVhile each of the three feminist critics mounted a critique of the
content of the works they described, they did not suggest that women
readers might be better off reading the works of female writers in the
hope of finding 'better' content. Their works thus risked merely reiter-
ating that men do not write well or accurately about women. They did
not, in other words, expand the canon of works that are supposed to
be worth reading to texts authored by women. Why not?
The answers are many. For de Beauvoir, in particular, literature w&s
not her main focus after all, and she can hardly be bla1ned for not
taking a revisionist attitude to the question of the meaning of literari-
ness. But fundamentally, the problem for women writing in the 1940s
and at the end of the 1960s about litera1y texts was that what
'counted' as literature was an inherited concept, derived from
humanist and New Critical traditions of Great Britain and the Unjted
States. The emphasis was on the inherent qualities of literature, which
were presented as being self-evident to any attentive reader. Western
Europe had its canon of 'great' ,-vriters, to whose glories the sensitive
reader was attuned. As Terry Eagleton puts it, the humanist critics and
the New Critics established a map of English literature 'from which
criticism has never quite recovered ... "English" included two and a
half wo1nen, cow1ting Emily Bronte as a marginal case; ahnost all of
its authors were conservatives' (Eagleton 1996, 28). Not to put too fine
a point on it, Elhnann and Millett belonged to a generation for whom

70
 The Woman as Writer 7 I

women did not write literature - or rather, only very exceptionally

were they admitted to write literature, if they were women such as
Jane Austen, George Eliot, and, 'exceptionally', Emily Bronte.
In order to write about women writers, and remain respectable as
critics, a new definition of literature was going to have to be estab-
lished. 'English' 1 needed a new map. On top of that, it requires a
different conception of the practice of criticism to take the sex of the
author into consideration. Image criticis1n emphasises the reader's
interpretation; as such it represents a creative threat to the autonomy
of the text, which can no longer be said simply to pass down a trans-
parent n1eaning to its audience. Moreover, it unsettled the assump-
tion that the reader was 'man', that generic category of humanity that
is supposed to include women, but often radically excludes them. By
positing a woman-reader image criticism offers a new point of view.
But it does not inherently threaten the status of the literary text as a
special kind of writing, as important, as having a certain 'quality' that
defines its literariness. If, on the other hand, we are encouraged to
read a text simply because it is by a woman, what might we end up
reading? There's no guarantee that it will be 'literature', that it will
have those ineffable qualities which have defined literature since
around, say, the early nineteenth century, when many of the key
assumptions about literariness were articulated by Romantic theorists
such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb.
Now, it would not be t1ue to say that no one wrote about women 's
novels or plays before 1970; but it was rare that the woman writer was
treated as a woman writer (unless the term was used pejoratively) or
that she was placed in the supportive context of other women writers,
rather than always being measured up against the men. The uncover-
jng of a women's tradition in literature offered the opportunity to
locate the significance of 'literature' elsewhere. It suggests that instead
of being 'sensitive' readers, we might choose to be politicised readers.
Instead of looking for value in the autono1nous text, we could search
out new values in a contexualised historicised text. Indeed, we nlight
even ask whether the study of literature needs a concept of value at all.

The 'problem' of quality

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, deter-
mined by the particular quality of silJiness that predominates in them
72 Histories

- the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture
of all of these - a composite order of feminine fatuity, that produces
the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the
mind-and-millinery species. The heroine is usually an heiress, proba-
bly a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an
amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers
in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the
middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated
beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her
morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a
superb contralto and superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed
and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in
the original tongues. (Eliot 1990, 140)

These words appeared anonymously under the title 'Silly Novels by

Lady Novelists' in the Westminster Review in October, 1856. The
anonytnity was merely a journalistic convention of the time - most
articles were unsigned during most of the nineteenth century. The
original readers of the article, unless they were sornehow 'in the
know', would have assumed tl1at it had been written by a man, since
rnost articles in journals would have been assumed to have been
written by men, though anonymity could, of course, have masked a
woman's voice as much as a man's. In this case, though, the tone of
the piece is deliberately constructed to imply rnale authorship. The
two terms 'silly novels' and 'lady novelists' suggest infallible mascu-
line judgement. The objections to such texts, their piety or pedantry,2
their focus on hats, the unrealistic attainments of the heroine, and the
proliferation of unlikely lovers who pine at her feet, conspire to
suggest that no man would write such a thing as a mind-and-
millinery novel. Moreover, since such novels are allegedly specifically
aimed at a female audience, an audience which presun1able enjoys
their escapist fantasy, the seriousness of the critique of such silly
novels tends to presume male authorship.
These words were, however, written by a woman, albeit a woman
who went to great lengths to disguise her gender at the beginning of
her novel-writing career, under the conspicuously masculine pseudo-
nym, George Eliot. The ai.1icle is not exactly a sisterly gesture on the
face of it, though Eliot does go on to argue that plain-speaking criti-
cism will result in improvements in wnmen's writing; and that unde-
served panegyrics are as dangerous to fen1ale literary achievements as
 The Woman as Writer 73

critical indifference and hostility. And while the article ends with the
exhortation that women writers must think before they write, Eliot
also suggests that women can (and, indeed, already do) achieve at the
highest level in the writing of fiction:

fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their

kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names ... rush to our memo-
ries in evidence that won1en can produce novels not only fine, but
among the very finest ... No educational restrictions can shut women
out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which
is so free fro1n rigid requirements. (162, my emphasis)

The novel, relatively speaking a 'new' genre, was something that

anyone who knew how to write could, in theory, write: it did not
require a classical education and women could write novel fiction
because its content was the content of their own lives. Eliot's warning
is against the assumption that knowledge of life constitutes a knowl-
edge of how to write about life - technique in fiction matters just as
much as technique in playing the piano, she argues. But the phrase
that seems important here is 'after their kind'. Women write in their
own way, achieve in their own way. They 'fully equal men', but they
are different from them because of different opportunities for the
observation of life, because of different educational experiences,
because of sexual {and/ or gendered) differences.
Two consequences follow on from Eliot's view that women write
after their kind, though equal in quality to men. First: the critic who
seeks to cons_ider texts largely or exclusively by women writers will
find differences in the kinds of writing produced by women when
they are compared to writings by men, who presumably also write
'after their kind'. Eliot's comments imply, that is, that women writers
share feminine content or feminine coding in their works. This femi-
ninity of writing is the quality that the feminist critic of women's
writing might seek out and analyse. Second: if writing exhibits femi -
ninity as opposed to masculinity, the critic may well be required to
define different criteria of value in women's writing from those that
are supposed to inhere in male writing of the so-called Great
Tradition. In this way a concentration on women's writing might be
expected to call into question assumptions that have traditionally
defined the category of literature as a whole. Thus might the canon of
important works be expanded to include rather more than the two
74 Histories

and a half women identified by: Eagleton; indeed, thus might the very
idea of a canon of great writing be called into question. If images of
women criticism opened up a space for the woman reader to interpret
texts from a politicised position, reading women's writing potentially
gives reader and writer a more equal stake in interpretation in relation
to the issue of gender. Most radically of all, it permitted women
readers to claim literary qualities for texts by women that might other-
wise have been dismissed.
In an important essay first published in 1979, entitled 'Towards a
Feminist Poetics', Elaine Showalter surveyed the current state of play
in academic literary criticism's response to feminist interventions. She
suggested (with considerable corroborato1y evidence) that universities
and academic journals had been very hostile towards feminist criti-
cism. On the one hand, it was attacked (usually by n1en) as phallus-
obsessed and insufficiently academically or theoretically grounded; on
the other, it was attacked by activist feminists outside the universities
precisely for being too theoretical and insufficiently political.
Showalter's essay does not, in fact, seek to answer either objection in
this double bind (feminist criticism is not academic, feminist criticism
is too academic). Instead, she sets out to describe possible practices for
feminist criticism, of which she argues that there are two basic kinds:

The first type is concerned with woman as reader - with woman as

the consumer of n1ale-produced literature, and with the way in which
the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a
given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes. I shall
call this kind of analysis feminist critique ... Its subjects include
images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and
misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male-
constructed literary history. (in Showalter 1986, 128)

This is the kind of criticism that l have already designated as 'images

of women criticisn1'. Showalter argues that although feminist critique
is powerful and necessary in diagnosing what we might call 'the
woman problem',3 it has two basic difficulties: it is 'male-oriented'
because it focuses particularly on the representation of women by
men; and, more importantly, it has 'a tendency to naturalize women's
victimization by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of
discussion', and it therefore comes dangerously close to being 'a cele-
bration ofvictinlization, the seduction a/betrayal' (130-1). 4
 The Woman as Writer 7 5

In contrast, she advocates that academic feminism could concen-

trate its energies on writing by women, on · the woman as writer. The
focus would then be on:

wornan as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, genres

and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the
psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of
fe1nale language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female
literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular
writers and works. (128)

To describe this new discipline in litera1y studies, Showalter coined

the term 'gynocritics' (a word she derives from the French language,
meaning criticism about won1en and by women). Gynocritics, she
argued, 'begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear
absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between
the lines of male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible
world of female culture' (131). This is George Eliot's point - that
women write 'after their kind', and that they write as well as men, but
differently from men - rewritten in different terms. The problem that
gynocritics set itself, then, was to invent or to discover an alternative
but coexisting literary tradition for wo111en writers. This would be a
tradition in which the values of feminine culture and female biology
(the early critics did not distinguish rigorously between gender and
sex) could be explored and valued on their own terms, and with as
Uttle reference as possible to pre-existing male traditions, since such
references w9uld represent a dependency on men and on n1ale
approval that fe1ninist criticism needed to resist.

Early makers of female traditions: Patricia Mayer Spacks and

Ellen Moers

One of the first writers to attempt to map a specifically female literary

tradition was Patricia Mayer Spacks. Her book The Female
Imagination: A literary and Psychological Investigation of Wo,nen's
Writing was first published in 1972. The stated aim of the book was
find out \>vhether there were aspects of women's writing that were
trans-historical - that remained as constants despite the vagaries of
time, history, geography, or social class. Spacks set out to 'look for
76 Histories

evidence of sharing, [to] seek persistent ways of feeling, [to] discover

patterns of self-depiction that survive the vagaries of change ... to
investigate how women use their creativity to reveal and combat their
characteristic difficulties' ($packs 1976, 3). And she began with the
assumption that such evidence would exist: 'there appears to be
something that we might call a won1an's point of view - except that
that sounds like a colun1n in the Ladies Home Journal - a vague
enough phenomenon, doubtless the result of social conditioning, but
an outlook sufficiently distinct to be recognisable through the
centuries'. Since men and women 'represent separate cultures', it is
reasonable to assu1ne that a C\.ventieth-century woman writer such as
Doris Lessing will have more in common with an eighteenth-century
writer such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu than either writer is likely
to have with 'a male writer even from her own time and space in
history' (4- 5).5 The assumption is that wo1nen do indeed write after
their kind, and that their kind produces identifiable patterns of
gendered difference.
There are problems with some of Spacks's assumptions, and I will
return to them at the end of the chapter. But one of the things that is
most interesting in the text is Spacks's method of investigation. In the
preface, she writes that not only is she trying to find a female tradition
of writing, but she is also interested in how the problems of the
woman as writer affect the woman reader. This claim is dramatised
throughout the book by constant references to the responses to texts
from the female college students that she has taught. Often the
students are not saying anything particularly profound; instead, they
are responding very personally to the texts, empathising with charac-
ters and situations, discussing what they would do if similarly placed,
trying to analyse how they feel when they read about a given heroine.
The text juxtaposes these often naive, but nonetheless heartfelt
responses, with the measured, academic musings of Spacks herself.
Those student voices are a kind of revolutionary gesture in The
Female Imagination. Their opinions are valued, given space in a
serious published work, 1naking the individual untheorised, uncritical
response important in the academic field of literary criticism.
Spacks's book focuses on the woman writer, but her method drama-
tises the ,.vays in which readers and writers are related through the
texts that the one writes and that the other consumes.
The book itself examines a range of different kinds of text. It opens
,.vith a discussion of the current state of feminist thinking about litera-
 The Woman as Writer 77

ture, and provides readings of Virginia Woolfs A Room of One's Own,

Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex, Ellmann's Thinking About Women
and Millett's Sexual Politics, to suggest that won1an-centred criticism6
often finds itself in various double binds which dis-able its effective-
ness. Woolf, for example, disapproved of female anger in literature
and criticism, seeing it as a distortion of her measured, controlled
aesthetic sense; she moves towards an ideal of androgyny which is not
quite, suggests Spacks, what a female tradition 1night need. De
Beauvoir's method is seen as playing the men at their own game by
amassing vast heaps of scholarly evidence in support of her argu-
ment. In doing so, however, her impersonation of a masculine rnode
risks excising femininity completely. Ellmann's technique is that of
ladylike irony: it is devastating as a critique if the reader sees the
irony, but elusive and impotent if she does not. Spacks then moves on
to Millett, of whose method she strongly disapproves, feeling that her
polemic outweighed her judgement. Millett's anger provoked anger,
and was widely read, but it generated more heat than light and was of
relatively little service in thinking through the features of a female
tradition. The implication is that there needs to be a new method for
woman-centred criticism, a method tl1at takes women seriously;
which does not make women disappear into androgyny or masculin-
ity, a criticism which is neither ladylike propriety nor unladylike fury.
The student responses are part of this new method. These are
voices that are not usually heard, or rather, not heard as if they have
anything important to say. When Spacks reads her various texts, she
intersperses relatively traditional (if woman-centred) practical criti-
cism witl1 these other voices in an argument that is rnore accretive
than explicit. She notes over and again how femininity - for charac-
ters in novels, for the women writers of novels and for tl1e women
readers of novels - is a double bind. In the next three chapters, 'Power
and Passivity', 'Taking Care' and 'The Adolescent as Heroine', through
commentaries largely on well-known books by nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century women writers, she de111onstrates this. Passivity, for
example, is to be understood as both attractive and dangerous to
women (as characters, writers and readers). It is attractive because it
provides a way in to power over men in marriage, since the proximity
to men it grants to women is a prerequisite for manipulating them.
On tl1e other hand, it is also deceptive, and may not in fact produce
the power it appears to promise, as say, Gwendolen Harleth (a major
protagonist in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda) is to find out to her cost
78 Hiscories

when she discovers that her husband has no intention of permitting

her power in their marriage, indeed, intends rather to 'break' her, as a
trainer breaks a horse. This passivity is very dangerous. Similarly, the
femininity of adolescence is also double, and is acutely felt by young
women as the choice between childishness and adulthood is played
out. Spacks contrasts the ways in which the heroines of Jane Austen's
novels (especially Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice) achieve
maturity, whereas many later writers (her examples are taken from
Emily Bronte, Doris Lessing and Sylvia Plath) arrest their heroines'
developrnent and sink them into madness and/or death. She laments
the fact that there is no female equivalent to James Joyce's A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), or J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the
Rye (1951), 'no literary work by a woman that celebrates female
adolescence' (Spacks 1976, 157-8), because adolescence is more
ambiguous for girls than for boys. Sex and sexual aspirations mean
very different things for women and for men.
The next two chapters, 'The Artist as Woman' and 'Finger Posts',
concentrate on women's autobiographies, a genre that had not
received much critical attention at this period in the early 1970s. In
these chapters Spacks invokes the double bind that wornen ,.vho clain1
the role of artist (for example, Isadora Duncan) 7 are unattractively
self-centred, but won1en who live more ordinary lives see life as a
service to others to such an extent that they abnegate their selves.
They are 'finger posts' in that they point out the way for others (espe-
cially their children and husbands); they live through others in
contrast to the woman artist who lives for herself. She concentrates
on ideas of feminine propriety which make the v.,oman artist a
dangerous or monstrous figure in her egotism, and which simultane-
ously create ordinary women into vicarious and contingent beings
who depend on others for their self-definition. There appears to be no
middle course in the autobiographies of the Duchess of Newcastle
(Margaret Cavendish, 1623-73), Mrs Thrale (1741-1821, Bluestocking
friend of Fanny Burney and Samuel Johnson), Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, feminist and activist, and Mabel Dodge Luhan, friend and
financial sponsor of D. H. Lawrence. Spacks excavates the hidden
anger about their social positions, displaced rather than expressed in
their writings, and sees this displacement as a female strategy
imposed by social constraints: anger cannot be expressed by any
proper lady. Marriage, too, is a traditional limitation on women, and it
too is a double bind, as Chapter Seven, 'The World Outside', demon-
 The Woman as Writer 79

strates. Marriage appears to be a private contract between two

people, but its attendant duties (hostessing, taste, taking care of chil-
dren, guests and husbands) are all socially oriented and socially
conditioned, leaving no space for the private individual woman.
Across history, Spacks argues, women have chosen different solutions
from 1nen to the problems they live with because the problems them-
selves are different given the social set-up that prescribes such differ-
ent lives for men and women.
Spacks's book is one example of a gynocritical method in action. A
good fifteen years before Showalter attempted to define feminist
poetics, Ellen Moers had also begun to write the essays that would
eventually be collected into her gynocritical book, Literary Women:
The Great Writers (first published in 1976). The book is very wide-
ranging, describing writer's biographies, historical contexts, networks
of literary influence (often in quite surprising places), the significance
of finance in women's writing; it also elaborates a theory of the
'female gothlc' which is both an explanation and a celebration of
women writers' propensity to 'scare' their readers. The essays were
written over a ten-year period, but what unites them, despite occa-
sionally disparate subject ,natter, is their concentration on the
woman as writer - 'gynocritics' before there was a word (at least in
English) for it. Moers's introduction opens with the bold statement:
'The subject of this book is the major women writers, writers we shall
always read, whether interested or not in the fact that they happened
to be women' (Moers 1985, ix). The statement is bold because of its
uncompromising assumption that great wo.m en writers do indeed
exist. It is, of course, an old accusation thrown at feminists that
women have produced neither a Shakespeare nor a Beethoven, that
they are incapable of 'greatness'. Virginia Woolf, indeed, in A Roo,n of
One's Own, notably agreed that the bishop who said that women
could not write the plays of Shakespeare was right, though she went
on to suggest that this was not a congenital failure of femaleness, but
a socially, educationally and economically constructed failure of the
social constructions of femininity (Woolf 1993a, 42-5). But while
Moers says unequivocally that great women writers exist, she is
careful throughout the book never quite to align herself with any
political feminist cause: the fact that these 'major women writers'
'happened to be women' is disarmingly presented as irrelevant to
their greatness.
On the other hand, a little later in the introduction, Moers is
80 Histories

anxious to signal the importance of women writers being in the \tvorld

as women, and suggests that the fact of their sex is a matter that criti-
cism might legitimately seek to consider:

Being women, women writers have women's bodies, which affect

their senses and their imagery. They are raised as girls, and thus have
a special perception of the cultural imprinting of childhood. They are
assigned roles in the fa1nily and in courtship, they are given or denied
access to education and employment, they are regulated by laws of
property and political representation which, absolutely in the past,
partly today, differentiate women from men. If they denied their
bodies, denied whatever was special about being a woman in their
time and place, they would be only narrowly human and could hardly
be much good as writers. (Moers 1985, xi)

In this passage, several ideas that will recur through the development
of fen,inist theory are brought together. Moers suggests that social
conditioning, legal, political and economic rights and the various
positions of women in the family and wider society, matter in the
formation of both women's humanity and their writing. More signifi-
cantly, but less polemically, she also points to physical differences
between men and women, who because of their different bodies are
likely to perceive the world differently, and are therefore likely also to
represent it differently. The implication of the book as a whole, in its
juxtapositions of different themes and writers and strands of thought,
is that women's writing will reflect the social formations and biologi-
cal givens of femininity and femaleness. There are links between
women writers because they are women, Literary Women suggests,
sexed as female, gendered as fen1inine.
Moers's examples, however, tend to suggest that female responses
to social and/ or biological limitations are, in fact, ve1y varied. It is the
social limitations that are shared by women (and they are a matter of
biography, how ,,vomen have been made to live), rather than the
woman writer's responses to them (literary responses, what women
have chosen to write). Chapter One, for example, 'The Literary Life:
So1ne Representative Wo1nen', takes the French novelist George Sand
(1804- 76, pseudonym of Aurore Dupin) and the English poet
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) as women writers who repre-
sent two possible modes of life for women writers. Moers describes
how Barrett made a space for herself to write by retreating into a
 The Woman as Wr i ter 8 I

convenient invalidism, 'a luxurious scholarly idleness', that allowed

her to evade the feminine domestic responsibilities that would have
taken away from her writing time (7). She closed her world to one
room in her father's house, where she was utterly shielded from the
mundane cares of housekeeping, and where her illness protected her
from the social duty of receiving visitors. Her way of life was a virtual
parody of the domesticity and dependency that characterised
Victorian femininity: but it was an apparently submissive perfor-
mance that had unexpectedly subversive results in that it produced a
major poet who was also a woman. George Sand, on the other hand,
could scarcely have led a more public life, a life she achieved by prac-
tising both a literal and a literary transvestism. 8 In contrast to
Barrett's exaggerated physical debility, Sand was physically very
strong, with an 'extraordinary physical robustness' that allowed her to
live a full life during the day, to entertain her lovers in the evening,
and to write her novels well into the night (12). 9 The point here is that
these are quite contradictory ways of dealing with the 'problem' of
being a woman writer in a constricted society. The examples are fasci-
nating, but they do not demonstrate that the two writers in question
shared anything but their sex and perhaps a certain deviousness.
Again, in Chapter Three, 'Women's Literary Traditions: The
Individual Talent', Moers argues that networks of female influence,
where one wo1nan writer influences another, are not often direct. She
writes that George Eliot's Adam Bede was written 'not because of what
Jane Austen wrote but because of what she chose not to write' (51-2).
The character of Adam Bede is Eliot's version of Robert Martin, the
tenant farmer who loves Harriet Smith in Austen's Emma. Moers
describes how Eliot breaks out of the highly cultivated but narrow
fictional garden made by Austen, and is negatively inspired by her
female precursor, reacting against her narrow aesthetic, implying that
this is not so much a tradition of female writing as willed iconoclasm
by Eliot. If Eliot and Austen belong to the same tradition, then, it is a
tradition of disruption and reaction, not one of continuity or unques-
tioning obedience to a pre-existing standard: 'tradition', indeed,
might not be quite the right word to describe this process.
Probably Moers's most influential point in Literary Women is her
identification of one specific strand of a female tradition: she terms it
'the female Gothic' as it appeared in nineteenth-century fiction (and
occasionally poetry) by women. Her definition of the female Gothic is
bound up with a physical bodily response. She interestingly begins
 82 Histories

her discussion by quoting a description of a new-born baby from

Benjamin Spock's influential book on child-care. This description, she
quite rightly suggests, makes the child monstrous - scary because
naked, pink, hairy and screaming. This emphasis on the 'monstrous
body' is feminine in that women are generally closer to it than men
because of the biology of maternity (they give birth to children, and
they care for the monstrous infant); but they are also closer to it
because of social constructions in which the female body is both
idealised and demonised because of its proximity to unacculturated
child. Women inhabit, that is, a body that is both fetishised as perfect
and exco1iated as vile. This ambivalent body informs Moers's defini-
tion of the female Gothic:

what I mean ... by 'the Gothic' is not so easily stated except that il has
to do with fear. In Gothic writings, fantasy predominates over reality,
the strange over the co1nmonplace, and the supernatural over the
natural, with one definite authorial intent: to scare. Not, that is, to
reach down to the depths of the soul and purge it with pity and terror
(as we say tragedy does), but to get to the body itself, its glands,
muscles, epidermis, and circulatory system, quickly arousing and
quickly allaying the physiological reactions to fear. (70}

This concentration on the body is decisive for Moers in her thinking

about the Gothic in general, and about the female Gothic in particu-
lar. This is nor a cerebral literary mode; it doesn't make the reader
think; it makes her feel physical sensation - it makes her flesh creep.
rn an age when female education was often inadequate, the high
emotions of pity and fear produced by tragedy, were not available to
women writers, just as the classical authors who taught pity and fear
were closed books to them. But their bodies, their physical sensations,
were available to them. So Moers reads the female Victorian gothic
tradition inherited from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) as arising
either from the feminine situation of domesticity and pregnancy, or
from the feminine experience of sexual repression in which their
bodies experienced desire in a social context where female desire was
understood as monstrous. She argues that novels like En1ily Bronte's
Wuthering Heights (1847), or a poem such as Christina Rossetti's
Goblin Market (1862), bear the mark of feminine do1nesticity experi-
enced as both desire and terror. In particular, the domestic space of
the nursery loomed large for Victorian women writers: 'it was the only
 The Woman as Writer 83

heterosexual world that Victorian Literary spinsters were ever freely

and physically to explore' (105). It is represented as a time of innocent
physicality, before the ravages of puberty absolutely separated male
and female experiences, and it is represented with both passion and
nostalgia. The fear that the female Gothic expresses is the fear of the
unruly female adult body. For Moers, ' nothing separates fe1nale expe-
rience from male experience more sharply and more early in life, than
the co1npulsion to visualize the self' (107). She suggests that visualis-
ing the self, especially through puberty, makes wo1nen peculiarly
aware of their own potential for monstrosity. It is this potential that
the female Gothic both articulates and displaces: the stories of the
female Gothic tell of the fear, but keep it in the world of fiction, where
fear is safe.
The importance of this argument is that it defines a female tradition
as the result of both physiology and of cultural mores. Biology and
sociology are the con1bined explanation of a strand in ,,vomen's
writing in the nineteenth century. Moers's discussion of the female
Gothic fulfils many of the conditions of Showalter's gynocritics, with
its emphasis on the woman writer, an analysis of the genre and struc-
ture of writing by women, the psychodynamics of the choice of that
genre, and its attempt to map a history of a collective female litera1y
career. But there is another focus to Moers's work. She concentrates
explicitly on the woman as writer; but it is implicit that the readers of
the texts of female Gothic are also women, who experience a pleasur-
able physical frisson when they read and are scared. After all, the same
conditions of repression, poor education and domesticity apply to
women reade_rs as well as to women writers. There is an underlying
belief here in the commonality of all wo1nen's experiences, whether
they are writers or readers - or even characters. The commonality of
female experience - a sisterhood of suffering - is perhaps an attrac-
tive proposition; but it is not without its problems, as we shall see
later.

Developing the female tradition: Elaine Showalter, Sandra

M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

In 1977, Elaine Showalter produced her own gynocritical book, enti-

tled A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to
Lessing. The title bas two reference points. First, it is a quotation from
84 Histories

John Stuart Mill's 1869 essay, 'The Subjection of Women' in which

Mill argues that women do not have a Literature of their own because
of the social situation that forces them to be either pale imitators of
male writing, producing only pseudo-masculine writing which palls
because of the paucity of their education and experience in compari-
son to the education and experience of their male models; and in
addition, they have no literature of their own because women have to
kow-to,v to a male-defined view of appropriate matter and manner in
their writing - there were so many things that a nice girl could not
think about, let alone write about or publish in the Late 1860s. Second,
the title is an allusion to Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay A Room of One's
Own, in which Woolf argues that a woman writer must have a certain
level of income and a private space (the room of her own of the title) if
she is to be able to write. The two sources of the title indicate the two
points of emphasis in the book; the sense of a larger tradition into
which a woman vvriter might place herself and against which she can
measw·e her own achievement, and the individual, practical needs of
the woman writer. Showalter sets out to investigate, that is, a larger
historical narrative, and to place individual social and psychological
situations into that larger context.
From that brief description, it is already clear that [Link]'s book
represents a development from tl1e idea ofu·adition outlined by either
Spacks or Moers. Rather than a trans-historical idea of the female
imagination, A Literature of their Own is a more nearly historicist
approach which identifies historical phases in women's writine: if
Showalter describes various kinds of continuity, she also identifies
historically specific changes in the kinds of writing that women
produced between ilie 1840s and the 1970s. Broadly, she names these
phases the feminine phase (fro1n 1840 to the death of George Eliot in
1880), the feminist phase (from 1880-1920) and the female phase
(from 1920 to the present, with a resurgence in the wake of second-
wave feminism in the early 1960s). Instead, then, of seeing wo1nen as
linked by sex, she pronounces herself 'uncomfortable with the notion
of a "female imagination'" because it risks 'reiterating the familiar
stereotypes' and suggests permanent deep differences bel:\.veen men
and won1en in writing. And if the differences are permanent and sex-
determined, then analysing them and describing them probably
merely fixes iliem fwiher. Instead, tlle emphasis here is 'not on an
innate sexual attitude, but [on) the ways in which the self-awareness
of the woman writer has translated itself into a literary form in a
 T h e Woman as Writer 85

specific place and time-span', suggesting the possibility of change

and development (Showalter 1978, 12). For if the differences between
men and wo1nen writers are culturally, historically, geographically
and socially constructed, they change through time and those
changes suggest something quite different from a fixed structure.
For Showalter, ""omen constitute a sub-culture within literature in
much the same way as Black, Jewish, Anglo-Indian, Canadian or even
American writers began their existence as members of literary sub-
cultures in relation to a dominant literary 1node (in this case the mode
favou~ed by the white, heterosexual, English 1nale). Her three phases
of the female tradition - feminine, feminist, fe1nale - map onto the
three phases identified by the historians of other kinds of sub-culture:

First, there is a prolonged phase of imitation of the prevailing modes

of the dominant tradition, and internalization of its standards of art
and its views on social roles. Second, there is a phase of protest
against these standards and values, and advocacy of minority rights
an<;I. values, including a demand for autonomy. Finally, there is a
phase of self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the
dependency of opposition, a search for identity. 03)

For women writing in the specific circumstances of Victorian England

and its long aftermath, the female sub-culture was characterised by
secrecy, in particular the secrecy of the physical experience of being a
woman - '[p]uberty, menstruation, sexual initiation, pregnancy,
childbirth and menopause - the entire female sexual cycle - consti-
tuted a habit of Living that had to be concealed'. Women could not
write directly 'a bout these_experiences, but they .could encode them
into their texts for other women to notice and understand, as secret
markers of shared femininity, as a 'covert solidarity that sometimes
amounted to a genteel conspiracy' (15- 16). The relationship of the
sexed body to the contingencies of a particular historical period and
its social mores is what Showalter tries to trace: sex and gender at
work together in forming modes of women's writing at different
times.
As well as her co1nmitment to some kind of historicisation of
women's experience, though, Showalter's book also atte111pts to
widen the terms of the debate around women's writing and literary
quality. Spacks and Moers focused on writers who were more or less
accepted as writers of some limited literary quality, as the subtitle of
86 Histor i es

Literary Women - The Great Writers - attests. A Literature of their

Own, although it concentrates on Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mrs
Gaskell, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, already writers with
established literary reputations, also opens its pages to the works of
far less well-known women writers, in particular those of the mid-
nineteenth century whose names had (at least in 1977) virtually
vanished from serious discussion of nineteenth-century literature.
There has been, notes Showalter, a tendency for women writers to
disappear. Even those who were successful in their own times drop
out of sight in the histories of literature, so that women writers have
very often found themselves 'without a history, forced to rediscover
the past anew, forging again and again the consciousness of their sex'
(11-12). Trying to work out what might make a female tradition,
therefore, involves historical excavation work which must include
writers who seem to subsequent generations 'irreparably minor. And
yet it is only by considering them all - Millicent Grogan as well as
Virginia Woolf - that we can begin to record new choices in a new
literary history, and to understand why, despite prejudice, despite
guilt, despite inhibition, women began to write' (36). True to her
word, she does indeed examine the works of forgotten \,Vomen,
tracing patterns and relationships between the so-called Great
Tradition ofJaneAusten, George Eliot and half a Bronte sister, and the
writers of pot-boilers, best-sellers and prim religious tracts who were
their contemporaTies.
A Literature of their Own is a very important signpost book that
atte1npts to offer a theory and a methodology for reading women's
writing in its own terms. It does however have its blind spots.
Probably the most important of the blindspots is the elision of differ-
ences between wo1nen, and the failure to see ,,.,,omen as inhabiting
sub-cultures within sub-cultures. When she sees women's writing as a
literary sub-culture as equivalent to Black, Jewish, Canadian or
American sub-cultures, she forgets that these sub-cultures are also
made up of women: the Black or Jewish woman writer does not fit
into the tradition that she forges, even though, like the white woman,
these women are excluded from the traditions of their race. This is an
important failing in the book to which l will return later.
Another of those blind spots relates to the issue of value in relation
to any female tradition. In describing the novel Lady Audley's Secret
(1861) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (a forgotten novel in 1977, remem-
bered now at least pa1tly because of Showalter's championship),
 The Woman as Writer 87

Showalter saw it is a book that has been much underrated by twenti-

eth-century critics:

Lady Audley's Secret, though it is often brash and hasty, has been
much underrated. It is not only a virtual manifesto of female sensa-
tionalisn1, 10 but also a witty inversion of Victorian sentimental and
domestic conventions, certainly equal to the work of Wilkie Collins
and Charles Reade. In Braddon's novels generally, women take over
the properties of the Byronic hero. The bigamist is no longer
Rochester, but the demure little governess. Readers responded by
making the novel one of the greatest successes in publishing history;
there were eight editions in the first year alone, and it was never out
of print in Braddon's lifetime. (164- 5)

Braddon's book is clearly a text that Showalter has enjoyed, for all its
brashness and hastiness, ,vhich are presumably terms of disapproba-
tion. It was also a subversive book, undermining the idea] of proper
femininity in its treatment of 'the demure little governess' who is not
only a bigamist, but also a forger, an arsonist and a potential
murderer. Lady Audley's Secret can quite easily be read as a feminist
protest against the limitations placed on women; indeed, as
Showalter also notes, the physician who eventually commits Lady
AudJey to a 1nadhouse, argues that she is not mad - her actions are all
rational so that her real secret is 'that she is sane, and, moreover,
representative'. But the feminist protest of this book remains
disguised by the feminine proprieties that constrain the author. At the
end of the novel, Lady Audley is treated as if she were 1nad 'to spare
the woman reader the guilt of identifying with a cold-blooded killer'
(167). Moreover, the protest is also contained in a book that, for all its
'faults' in literary 'quality', is a rip-roaring, page-turning, good read.
In other words, Lady Audley's Secret has political content, but it is
not overt. Showalter clearly favours this 'disguise' of protest over
almost every production of the 'fe1ninist phase' she discusses, in
which she argues that the protest is the fiction. In ilie feminist phase,
'lfleminist ideology temporarily diverted attention from fe1nale expe-
rience to a cultist celebration of womanhood and motherhood'; '[t]he
high spirits and comic exuberance of the sensationalists were soon
submerged in the portentous anthems of the feminists' (181). There is
a clearly stated view in A Literature of their Own that political writing
is not literary writing, that protest overwhelms quality, and that it is
88 Histories

for this reason that the New Woman writers between 1880 and 1920
'have not fared well with posterity' (193-4). In her discussion of Olive
Schreiner's 1883 novel The Story of an African Farm, she quotes
George Moore's contemporary view of the book, that he had found in
it 'more than he wanted to know about sandhills, ostriches and
women, "but of art, nothing; that is to say, art as I understand it -
rhythmical sequence of events described with rhythmical sequence of
phrase'" (199). Moore's misogynist confusion of ostriches and women
passes without comment, and Showalter endorses his view of 'art' as a
kind of ineffable quality even as she uncovers a forgotten history of
New Woman writing. ln her introduction she laments that the Great
Tradition has left its residue on Engtish criticism and literary history;
she is not quite untouched by its residual ideals of value and quality
herself.
Only two years after the publication of A Literature of their Own,
when Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar produced their massive and
very influential tome The Madwoman in the Attic: The Place of the
Woman Writer in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, the
idea of a female tradition in writing was apparently secure. In their
Preface, they cite the works of both Moers and Showalter as having
established without doubt that 'nineteenth-century literary women
did have both a literature and a culture of their own - that ... by the
nineteenth century there was a rich and clearly defined female literary
sub-culture, a community in which women consciously .read and
related to each other's works' (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, xii). The
[Link] in the Attic sets out to chart both the patterns of plot and
metaphor in nineteenth-century women's writing and the psycholog-
ical reasons for women's recurrent choices of certain images, stories
and fantasies of escape, confinement and 1nadness. Their theoretical
impetus derives not only from Moers and Showalter, but also from the
aggressively masculist critic Harold Bloom, in pa11icular his 1973 book
The Anxiety of Influence. Bloo1n's argument here is that writers situate
themselves in a tradition through violent reactions against their liter-
ary forebears. A poet is validated by his (Bloom's examples are all
1nale writers) hostile rewritings of the texts of the past. The male
writer is always engaged in a quasi-Oedipal struggle with his literary
fathers for supremacy and value. The terms of Bloom's book imply
that poets are never won1en, that they have no mothers (either literal
or figurative), no significant relationships with wo1nen as women, or
with women as writers that their works have to address.
 The Woman as Writer 89

The Madwoman in the Attic adopts this virtually psychoanalytic

model, but attempts to apply its logic to the position of the woman
writer, who is clearly differently situated in relation to the 'family
ro1nance' that Bloom's masculinised idea of tradition suggests. 11
Gilbert and Gubar's text opens with the faintly shocking rhetorical
question, 'Is the pen a metaphorical penis?' It answers the question
with a quotation from a letter by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who 'seems
to have thought so', writing that the artist's 'most essential quality':

... is masterly execution, which is a kind of male gift, and especially

marks off men from women, the begetting of one's thoughts on
paper, on (sic] verse, or whatever the matter is ... on better considera-
tion it strikes me that the mastery l speak of is not so much in the
mind as a puberty in the life of that quality. The male quality is the
creative gift. (Hopkins, letter to R. W. Dixon, 1886, quoted in Gilbert
and Gubar 1979, 3)

Gilbert and Gubar view this statement as a common nineteenth-

century opinion, and conclude from it that 'male sexuality ... is not
just analogicalJy, but actually, the essence of literary power. The
poet's pen is in some sense (even more than figuratively) a penis' (4).
For the woman who seeks to write, this conflation of male biology and
creativity, wilJ clearly be a problem.
Through a reading of the story of Little Snow White, Gilbert and
Gubar argued that the woman artist always found herself in a creative
double bind. She was permitted to be the object of the male-authored
literary text (the passive, dependent image of male desire, figured in
Snow White's incarceration in a glass coffin); but she was not
supposed to be the author of her own destiny, or the active subject-
author of her own text. The creative assertive woman in the Snow
White story is the 'wicked' stepmother, who creates her own image
before the mirror, and who also, in a literary metaphor, 'plots' her
daughter's downfall, but who is herself destroyed at the end of the
tale, dancing herself to death in red-hot iron shoes at Sno\,v White's
wedding to her handsome prince. Snow V-lhite's story is an alJegory of
women's social and psychological positions under patriarchy. Snow
White has to choose a role model - either her 'good' natural mother,
who pricks her finger while sewing and conforming, and dies; or her
'bad' unnatural stepmother, who is assertive, creative, plotting and
non-conforming - and who also dies. It's not much of a choice.
90 Histories

Interwoven with this reading, Gilbert and Gubar set out to show that
art depends for its definition on patriarchal authority, on the father's
silent approval. Only what patriarchy views as art is seen as art. At the
same time, outside certain rigidly defined spheres, female creation is
in1proper. For the nineteenth century, prevailing definitions of femi-
ninity resided in passivity and dependency, and insisted that a
woman's proper sphere was the hom.e. The woman who chose to
assert her active intellectual mind, and her economic independence,
in writing, and in writing for money, could be labelled as an improper
woman - as unladylike, unfeminine, unwornanly. To attempt to write
was to usurp what was regarded as a male sphere. The woman writer,
then, would necessarily fail as an artist because she was a woman and
therefore lacked the patriarchal authority of art; she would fail also as
a woman because she was arrogating a male power, failing through
the in1propriety of her female creation. Because the standards of liter-
ary value against which the woman writer had to compete were male-
identified as well as male-defined, the works she produced were in
turn defined as 'less than' art. The woman writer suffered therefore a
double-pronged attack: as a woman and as an artist.
Gilbert and Gubar took Bloom 's model from The Anxiety of
lnjluence and rewrote it from a feminist perspective. They discovered,
not surp1isingly, that in the male tradition of aggression against the
father, 'a woman writer does not "fit in''. At first glance, indeed, she
seems to be anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider'
(48). For the woman writer, they suggest, the anxiety of influence is
rewritten as the 'anxiety of authorship' - the fear that literary writing
is impossible for a wornan; that she has no models against which to
define herself, and that she will not herself become the model against
which future generations of women writers will define thernselves in
their turn. The model of influence is therefore different in the female
tradition than in the 1nale. The woman writer actively seeks precur-
sors, a tradition into which she can insert herself, not to define herself
against her foremoth ers, but in order to find a model who 'proves by
example that a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible'
(49). At the sa1ne time, the woman writer is engaged in a struggle for
valuation with the n1ale tradition that deliberately excludes her. The
consequences of social and psychological [Link] i1nposed on the
woman writer are surrunarised as a literary timidity (I'm only a
woman, and I only write about women's things), or competitive
protest (I'm as good as a man). The limitations lead 'an obsessive
 The Woman as Wr i ter 9 I

interest in these limited options ... [and an) obsessive imagery of

confine1nent that reveals the ways in which fe1nale artists feel trapped
and sickened both by suffocating alternatives and by the culture that
has created them' (64).
After the first three chapters that set up the problen,atic of female
literary creativity, Gilbert and Gubar turn their attention to nine-
teenth-century novelists and poets - there are sustained and impres-
sive readings of the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emjly Bronte,
Chailotte Bronte, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti and E1uily
Dickinson. There is not the space here to discuss all their readings
which remain very important documents of feminist criticism.
Instead, I will concentrate briefly here on their reading of Emily
Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) to highlight their typical mode of
argument.
Chapter 8 of The Madwoman in the Attic occurs as the third chapter
in a section entitled 'How are we fal'n?: Milton's Daughters', which
contains also chapters on 'Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers'
and on -Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. These two preceding chapters
provide a double context for the reading of Wuthering Heights.
Bronte's novel is seen as a feminist myth to rival the myth of 01igins
contained in Milton's Paradise Lost, the archetypal patriarchal poem
tl1at keeps woman 'in her place'; and it is read as a different, though
related, feminist myth to that written by Shelley in her fantasy of male
scientific creation, also written as a direct and explicit response to
Milton. Bronte's novel is thus placed into two distinct traditions: a
tradition of male-defined literature, and a trailition of women's revi-
sions of male writing. The chapter focuses on the nature/culture
binary inherent in all Bildungsromane (novels of development or
formation). A child is born as nature incarnate, but must learn the
rules of culture in order to function properly in the world: in this kind
of story, nature represents a dangerous anarchy whlch has to be
suppressed. In the reading of Wuthering Heights, however, Gilbe11
and Gubar see the novel as a 'Bible of Hell', 12 as a novel which vali-
dates the natural over the cultural, the anarchic over the world of
organised repression. Wuthering Heights, the house of the title, is
hellish by conventional standards, but for the first Cathy and
Heathcliff, her double, it represents the kind of non-hierarchical
social space in which they are pern1itted a degree of power which
would be denied them elsewhere, since she is female and he is illegiti-
mate, and they are both thereby excluded from power in the conven-
92 Histories

tional world. Thrushcross Grange across the moor, home of the

Linton fa1nily, represents the standards of patriarchal culture which
will be triumphant at the end of the story. but which the novel itself,
through its sympathies for Cathy and Heathcliff, implicitly attacks.
Embedded in this argument about the reversals of structured
meanings in the novel, the chapter also tries to establish relationships
between Wuthering Heights and other kinds of text, both male- and
female-authored. Byron and Blake provide constant sources of refer-
ence, with Thrushcross Grange, for example, being seen as a
'Urizenic' realm - a reference to Blake's unpleasantly righteous God
figure, Urizen; and with Heathcliff and Cathy's relationship being
read in terms of Byron's verse drama Manfred (1817, a story of quasi-
incestuous brother-sister love). The chapter opens comparing the
structures of Wuthering Heights (its use of letter and fran1e narratives)
with the structures of Shelley's Frankenstein. There is no evidence in
fact that Bronte had read either Shelley or Blake (though the Bronte
sisters certainly read Byron compulsively). The logic of a female tradi-
tion, however, does not require this kind of absolute knowledge, since
the female tradition is constructed both consciously in relation to
knovvn models and precursors, and also unconsciously, in relation to
the shared experiences of oppression, and the shared desire to
protest, of the woman writer. Gilbert and Gubar's version of female
tradition looks both backwards and forwards: backwards to an
American Indian myth from the Opaye tribe, that reflects the shape of
the Wuthering Heights plot, but which Bronte could not have knoV'.n;
and forwards to the poetry of Sylvia Plath whose images of confine-
ment, starvation and madness might or might not be explicitly
derived from Bronte's model.
The reading is a tour de force, which mixes a traditional approach of
close reading of the text and wide citation from other critical sources
with an accumulation of more eclectic detail. Its sheer weight of allu-
sion makes it very persuasive. For all its potency, however, this
version of the fernale tradition is actually produced through parallel
quotation and allusion. The readings of individual texts are fascinat-
ing and important, but the conclusions about the nature of a female
tradition drawn from the larger contexts are open to question. In
particular, as Nancy Armstrong has persuasively argued in Desire and
Domestic Fiction, Gilbert and Gubar's approach is dangerously ahis-
torical, and inasmuch as they deal with history, it is a history that
takes place outside of women's sphere:
 The Woman as Wr i ter 93

They argue that [Link] authors, in contrast with their male counter-
parts, had to manage the difficult tasks of simultaneously subverting
and conforming to patriarchal standards. But when understood in
this gendered frame of reference, the conditions for women's writing
appear to ren1aiu relatively constant throughout history because the
authors in question were women and because the conditions under
which they wrote were largely determined by men.... Gilbert and
Gubar virtualJy ignore the historical conditions that women have
confronted as writers, and in so doing they ignore the place of
women's writing in history. For Gilbert and Gubar ... history takes
place not in and through those areas of culture over which women
may have held sway, but in institutions dominated by men.
(Armstrong 1987, 7- 8)

In other words, the story Gilbert and Gubar ,,vrite is not quite a tradi-
tional history, but nor is it quite a feminist history. By concentrating
on literary protest inside the text, they do not account for historical,
social and geographical differences beyond the text. While they
rewrite 'w omen's literary histo1y, they take history itself as a prede-
fined grand narrative.
In their second major collaboration, the three-volumes of No Man's
Land: The Pwce of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century
(1988-94), t3 Gilbert and Gubar moved away from the more strictly
gynocritical approach of The Madwoman in the Attic. Although their
central concern remains with the woman artist, the literary histo1y of
the twentieth century is figured as a battle of the sexes, of action and
reaction by men and women working against each other, and in order
to tell this stbry, they are obliged to investigate the writings of both
sides. If The Madwoman opened with one shocking rhetorical ques-
tion, The War of the Words opens with another: 'Is a pen a metaphori-
cal pistol? Are words weapons with which the sexes have fought over
territory and authority?' The question is answered with a quotation
from the British poet, Ted Hughes, widower of Sylvia Plath, and
author of a poem with the ironic title 'Lovesong':

His words were occupying armies

Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bulJets daggers of revenge
Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing. (Gilbert and Gubar 1988, 3-4)
 94 Histories

For Gilbert and Gubar this poem represents the fundamental rela-
tionshjp between men and women in literature in the twentieth
century: Literary words are will-to-violence, weapons in a war that
crosses and recrosses the same territory, alternatively imagining male
victories, male defeats, fen1ale victories, female defeats. Like
Showalter, they offer a chronology of the battle whlch begins in the
mid-nineteenth century, and brings us to the present day. In this
battle, women were defeated in the nineteenth century, but became
more powerful in the modernist period. The immedjate post-war
years saw the reimagination of rnale victory; second-wave feminisn1
brought about a new conception of feminine triwnph (4-5). This is
also a sweeping story, founded on extrapolation from the particular
literary text to the general picture of literary history. It is also a rather
exclusive version of literary history, notwithstanding tlle massive
sweep of three large volu1nes, concentrating on 1najor figures and on
the literary movements already validated by the academy.
Armstrong's critique of Gilbert and Gubar's n1asculist vie,v of history
is scarcely answered by their writing of a history of war.

The limits of one female tradition

When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on
the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They
n1ight mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few mo!"e
about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontes and a sketch of Haworth
Parsonage under snow; some witticisms, if possible, about Miss
Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs
Gaskell, and one would have done.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar had elaborated a

story of the vvoman writer that depended on her embattled relation-
ship with male tradition, and on her desperate search for grandinotll-
ers, for a female tradition to which she could belong, tllrough which
she would be validated, whlch would provide a support system that
aIJowed her to write. In tl1e twentieth century, the story went on witll
a continued battle against male supremacy in the literary battlefield,
but with an altered relationshlp for the woman writer with the female
tradition. If the male author in a ,,veil-established masculine tradition
 The Woman as Writer 95

is, in the Bloomian model, engaged in an Oedipal struggle with his

forefathers, the woman 'Arriter, once her tradition has also been estab-
lished has a not dissimilar problem. In Gilbert and Gubar's words, in
the twentieth century the woman writer is 'not unequivocally ener-
gized by the example of her female precursor', and begins to suffer the
same kind of anxiety that Bloom idenlified in his male texts:

Jf she simply adn1ires her aesthetic foremother, she is diminished by

the originatory power she locates in that ancestress; but, if she strug-
gles to attain the power she identifies with the mother's autonomy,
she must confront ... d1e peril of d1e mother's position in patriarchy ...
To have a history ... may not be quite so advantageous as son1e femi-
nists have traditionally supposed. (Gilbert and Gubar 1988, 195-6)

In other words, No Man's Land tells a story not only of the battles
between the sexes, but also of the battle within the female sex as well.
The fanilly romance of literary tradition with its powerful metaphors
of matf)mity and paternity, inheritance and exclusion, has Oedipal
co1nplexities for both sexes. Mothers are ... well, both wonderful and
terrible. Ask any group of women, no matter how good their relation-
ships .[Link] their mothers are, whether they want to be like their
mothers, and the majority will answer 'no'. Yet if we seek to be 'our
own women', we are always in a sense defining ourselves against the
model of the mother. The famil y, with its networks of physical and
emotional resemblances and differences, with its apparent ideality
and its often concealed monstrosity, is a useful metaphor for thinking
about female traditions in life as well as literature. One of the prob-
lems of a female tradition, then, is its insistent recuperation of family
resemblance: it behaves as if Jane Austen had Fanny Burney's eyes,
Charlotte Bronte had inherited Ann Radcliffe's freckles, or Virginia
\IVoolf was 'just like' her grandmother, George Eliot, in character if not
in looks. The search for female family likenesses in a tradition of
women's writing conceals differences. And just like the male Great
Tradition, it tends to bastardise some of the female children, and
disinherits some branches of the female family, just as patriarchy has
always done.
This is not to say that seeking a tradition is unimportant or wrong. It
is one of the key ways in which sub-cultures and marginalised groups
seek out their own identities. For Black women writers, for lesbian
women writers, for working-class wo1nen writers, finding voices that
 96 Histories

identify a community has been an early step in the process of achiev-

ing visibility. But in that sentence alone one of the major limitations
of the female tradition so far outlined is exposed: where, in the works
of Moers, Spacks, Showalter, and Gilbert and Gubar, are those 'other'
women? De Beauvoir argued that woman was man's Other. It would
seem that to one version of the female tradition, woman's other is any
woman who is not educated, white, middle or upper class, straight.
The female tradition attacked a male tradition made up of dead white
European men, but it's a problem if it did so at the price of elevating
only dead white women, and leaving those 'others' outside its validat-
ing frame. That problen1 is co1npounded by the recurrent names of
the female tradition - the emphasis on nineteenth-century writing by
an apparent fen1ale great tradition of Austen, the Brontes, and Eliot,
with Virginia Woolf's twentieth-centu1y writing being given the last
word.
One way to co1nbat this exclusionary bias is to propose not one
tradition, but many, connected by the commonality of femaleness,
but not limited to the Western white femaleness so far beloved of the
academy. Plurality might mean unsightly, unfeminine competition;
but more positively it could also mean creative coexistence between
female traditions which inform and modify each other, and which
have the valuable political results both of calling into question defini-
tions of literature iliat depend on conservative versions of literary
value, and of recovering and republishing works that have disap-
peared from view. One exan1ple is Mary Helen Washington's Invented
Lives: Narratives of Black Women (1860-1960), first published in 1987,
a book which challenges older versions of literary history, whether
masculist or feminist in origin. Invented Lives is a work of bibliograph-
ical research in the sense that it rediscovers texts that have been out of
print, or that have never been published. It is a criticism that uncovers
patterns in Black women's writings, and which also focuses on the
position of ilie Black woman reader. If white wo1nen were searching
for grandmothers for a literary tradition, as Elizabeth Barrett
Browning put it, Black women had an even more difficult struggle,
fighting not just against a definition of literature that absolutely
excluded iliem, but also against a culture which kept iliem poor and
largely uneducated - which, indeed, before 1860, kept the1n literally
as slaves. The disease of femininity felt by white women was (and
probably still is, in white-dominated societies) much more acutely
experienced by Black women. And the common bond of being female
 The Woman as Writer 97

did not feel much like a bond between, say, women who were slave-
owners and women who were slaves. The idea of tradition evokes a
sisterly solidarity; but it must not be allowed to do so at the cost of
disguising the often appalling attitudes of white women to Black
women.
Barbara Smith's landmark essay 'Towards a Black Feminist
Criticism' discusses the implicit racism of an acade1ny that simply
ignores Black women, and argues for the political necessity of Black
feminist criticism as a 'precondition' for the gro\.vth and visibility of
Black female consciousness. She argues that where Black women
writers are dealt with in current criticism (she wrote this piece in
1977). they are usually lumped in with Black men, with the conse-
quence that the significance of sexual politics in their writing is
ignored. She is disgusted and outraged by criticisms that simply don't
see that Black women have impo11ant lives too. Her ideal is of a criti-
cisn1 that deals with the intersections of class, race, gender and sexu-
ality in the formation of identity. As such it is a major challenge to the
white woman tradition - for, after all, white women in white-domi-
nated societies do not see the1nselves as having a race that needs
analysis at all. Similarly, heterosexual women tend not to analyse their
sexuality, taking it as a natural 'given'.
Smith argues otherwise, and asks her readers to consider how the
connections between sex, race, politics, identity and class are mixed
up in the writings specifically of Black women, but also in the writings
of white wo1nen, even if they don't notice: the Black wo1nen, she
suggests, don't have the choice of not noticing. She argues that Black
feminist criticism has to take the existence of Black female literary
u·aditions as its starting point. These traditions share something of the
histories of Black male traditions and white female traditions, but
'thematically, stylistically, aesthetically, and conceptually Black
women writers manifest common approaches to the act of creating
literature as a direct result of the specific political, cultural, social, and
economic experience they have been obliged to share.' Black women
writers use common metaphors, common images, common fantasies,
and write deliberately in the language used by Black women in the
world beyond the page. The common ground of Black women writers
'takes their writing far beyond the confines of white/male literary
structures' (Smith in Showalter 1986, 174). The consequence of this
would be that the Black feminist critic 'would think and write out of
her own identity, not try to graft the ideas or methodology of
 98 Histor i es

white/male literary thought upon the precious materials of Black

women's art'. The consequence would be a Black feminist criticism
that was both cause and result of Black feminist activism. The rather
genteel disclaimers of Spacks and Moers that they were not really
feminists, since politics and objective criticism could not go together,
is very ungently and urgently rebuked in this clarion call for a truly
radical, politicised critique.
Exclusiveness is certainly the most important criticism of 'tradition'
fonnation as exemplified by the 'canon' in Moers, Spacks, Showalter,
and Gilbert and Gubar. But there are others which are important too.
Several feminist critics including Dale Spender (Mothers of the Novel,
1986), Janet Todd (Feminist Literary History, 1988 and The Sign of
Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1600- 1800, 1989) and Jane
Spencer (The Rise of the Woman Novelist, from Aphra Behn to Jane
Austen, 1986) implicitly and explicitly de1nonstrate that all these
writers situate women's literary histoty almost entirely in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. Moers commented in her preface that
'The historical boundaries of the book have been set not arbitrarily
but by the subject itself ... For all practical purposes, literary profes-
sionalism for women began with the rise of the Richardsonian novel
[which heralded) their chance to achieve, to influence, and to be
decently paid' (Moers 1976, ix). Professionalism, however, is not the
only criterion of 'greatness', "vhatever that is; moreover, the claim of
Aphra Behn for the status of professional woman writer predates the
Richardsonian novel, as do the works of several other eighteenth-
century women. A tradition that takes 1800 as its real start date is
something of a problem. As Marion Wynne-Davies suggests in her
recent essay, 'Abandoned Women: the Middle Ages', there were quite
a lot of wo1nen writing in the more distant past, and for all the diffi-
culties of recovering their texts, patteins of female resistance can
nonetheless be discerned, including the validation of personal experi-
ence against abstract authority, and - in mystic writing - the love of
God recurs as a trope tl1at allowed the woman writer to evade or tran-
scend 1nan-made laws that confined her (Wynne-Davies in Shaw
1998, 9- 36). Toril Moi wrote of her concern that there would come a
time when the libraries were exhausted of new works for feminist
critics to excavate. While that must be literally true, it has not
happened yet, and female traditions go back further than Moers et al.
suggest, and can be traced in wider social, racial and sexual commu-
nities.
 The Woman as Writer 99

Residual Great Traditionalism is also a problem. In other words, the

tradition critics measure depends on an ideal of value in women's
writing. Even Showalter, who also wrote about less-valued women
writers, measured their achievements in terms of the humanist ideals
represented by the 'great women' writers. Literature - after all, a privi-
leged term - preserves its privileges in a narrow definition of a
woman's tradition. In Consuming Fiction, Terry Lovell noted that
what she terms woman-to-woman fiction - that is, fiction written
clearly fro1n a female perspective for a female reader - tends to get
'coded out of "literature" . ...Woman-to-woman forms are not permit-
ted to become part of the general stock of cultural capital' (Lovell
1987, 132). Lovell is here writing about the politicised fiction of the
New Woman writers of the 18.90s; but her point holds true for other
woman-to-vvoman forms, in particular the mass-market romance
such as those published by Mills & Boon, or the fictions of Catherine
Cookson, as well as for modern equivalents of the 'mind-and-
millinery' novel, the sex-and-shopping blockbuster or the airport
novel. These are traditions which have been very deliberately
excluded from the academic studies that define 'literature'. A book
like Rosalind Coward's Female Desire: Women's Sexuality Today
(1984), which examines the reasons for \,vomen readers' interpellation
into conservative fantasies of masculinity and femininity in rornantic
fiction, 1nakes these apparently lesser fictions into important objects
of study, and in the process calls into question the exclusivity of 'liter-
ature' as defined in terms of masculist humanist ideals of value.
Coward's analysis shows that there is something .important to say
about women's compensatory fantasies of powerful ideal men: litera-
ture is about aspiration as well as about the accurate reflection of real
authentic experience. Readers read to see themselves as they might be
in different circumstances - they can see the1nselves as they are in
any old realist mirror.
The question of form is another potential weakness of feminist
tradition formation. As Gilbert and Gubar establish, the novel is the
pre-eminent mode of women's writing. For reasons to do with the
ways in which literary value is apportioned, poetry in particular has
been a difficult form for women to write and achieve literary success.
The concentration on fiction, however, is problematic because of the
kinds of criticism it tends to attract. Before the twentieth century,
novels tended to have extractable content - plots and characters
could be paraphrased to produce a narrative of what the novel 'is
 100 Histories

about'. Criticism based on content aJone though tends to privilege

message over form, recovering a literary politics without uncovering
more abstract literary structures. While this is indeed an important
process in making a politicised literaty critique, it is sometimes at the
expense of the re-evaJuation of the literariness of women's writing.

The attempt to establish traditions has been and continues to be an

important foundationaJ stage in different feminist traditions. For the
student reader, it is the glue that cements the gynocriticaJ courses that
are now available in many universities. The patterns of femaJe experi-
ence represented by feminine images and plots make sense of other-
wise quite disparate 1naterials. But traditions, like all histories, are
founded on exclusions. A tradition is what it omits as well as what it
includes. When we think about women's traditions, we must think in
the plural, and not try to make one white woman's middle-class story
the story of all women's experience. If female traditions merely repli-
cate the strategies of exclusion enacted by conventional literary criti-
cism, they are hardly radicaJ. The onus on the feminist literary
historian is to be aware of disruptions as well as continuities, to vaJue
those differences, and to be honest about what her own core defini-
tions leave out, and why. Whatever commonaJity women share, the
stories we tell of our definitions must be alive to our differences too.
Tradition criticism, like image criticism, must not be naive. Perhaps,
to paraphrase George Eliot, it would be truer to say that women
[Link] write after their many kinds; that their kinds of writing fully
equal the kinds of writing produced by the many kinds of men; and
that if we are aJert to their kinds, we may aJso be alert to differences
that enrich the field of literature even as they aJso subvert its own
traditionaJ assumptions.

Notes

1. As most of rny examples are dra\>\rn from EngUsh literature, I've stuck
with that designation. But despite locally djffering circumstances,
similar points can be made about American literature, as well as about
the canons of the major Western European languages. Eastern
European w01nen writers have faced exacerbated versions of the same
problems of women writers in the West; and in any area where fe1nale
 The Woman as Writer IOI

education has been slow to arrive (or has not yet arrived) the same
implicit devaluation of women's writing continues to exist. The Third
World woman writer has her own very specific problems.
2. It's instructive to remember that Mary Ellmann, more than a hundred
years later, identified piety as one of the feminine stereotypes
presented by novels by men; plus va change, as the French might say,
plus c'est la meme chose [the more things seem to change, the more
they stay the same].
3. The Woman Problem is a rather tongue-in-cheek phrase in this
context. The phrase was used in the nineteenth century to discuss in
turn, the problem of surplus women who could not marry because
there were not enough men (fron1 around the 1850s and 1860s), then
the 'problem' of women's suffrage at the end of the century. Debates
in and around feminism demonstrate the unwillingness of the
problem woman to go away, even when she acquires education, train-
ing, employment and the vote.
4. Showalter's reference here is to Elizabeth Hardwick's book, Seduction
and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York: Random House), first
P,Ublished in 1974, which considered women seduced and betrayed in
nineteenth-century fiction.
5. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1792) was a travel writer, dramatist
and political commentator for much of the eighteenth century. Doris
Lessing (born 1919) is a writer of both political realist novels, and of
politicised science fictions.
6. I'm using this phrase rather than 'feminist criticism' because Spacks
herself refuses the term, arguing that her focus is 'literary and psycho-
logical rather than political' See Patricia Mayer Spacks, The Female
Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women's
Writing, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976, p. 7.
7. Isadora Duncan (1877- 1927), Alnerican dancer who published her
autobiography, My Life, in 1927.
8. Literal, because Sand actuaUy did dress up as a man at various points
in her life, in order to achieve the freedom to roam the streets at will,
unencumbered by female clothing, unbothered by feminine propriety.
Al1d what is a pseudonym like 'George Sand' if not a kind of literary
uansves tis1n?
9. Moers is here quoting the American novelist Henry James's assess-
ment of Sand's physique.
10. Sensationalism is the term used to describe a genre of popular fiction
in the mid-nineteenth century. The plots of sensation fiction were fast-
moving and con1plicated; they involved dubious inheritances, power-
ful women, sinister men and quasi-gothic domestic settings. The
10 2 Histories

fashion for such fiction caused smnething of a moral panic in the

1860s, not least, as Lyn Pykett has argued, because these were books
largely written by women for women, which had dubious moral
content, and could be seen as threatening conventional pieties about
'proper femininity'. See Lyn Pykett, The Improper Fe1ninine: The
Woman's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, London:
Routledge, 1992, for more information on the genre. For information
on the reception of sensation texts, in particular, women's enthusiastic
readings of them, see Kare Flint's The Woman Reader: 1837-1914,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
11. Although Gilbert and Gubar adopt a psychoanalytical model in this
book, The Madwoman in the Attic is nonetheless not really a psycho-
analytically-informed critical model. The main technique of the book
is a New-Critical attention to close reading. The family romance is the
context for the reading of the woman writer's position, rather than the
centre of attention, and the woman writer is seen more as a psycholog-
ical than a psychoanalytic subject.
12. The full title of the chapter is 'Looking Oppositely: Emily Bronte's Bible
of Hell'.
13. The three volumes are entitled: The War of the Words (1988);
Sexchanges (1989); and Letters from the Front (1994).
Part II

(Psycho)Analyses
4 P s ychoanalysis and / or
Feminism?

The relationships between psychoanalysis and feminisms have been

both fraught and fruitful. For many of the early writers in feminist
criticism, the t'vvo modes of thinking were distinctly incompatible. The
'and/ or' of this chapter's title represents the discomfort that the theo-
ries of Sigmund Freud and his followers in the field caused to a
critique that was avowedly materialist, historical and politjcised. In
those early days, Freud was read as having only negative connotations
for women in general, and for women as readers and writers. For Kate
Millett, Freud was 'beyond question the strongest individual counter-
revolutionary force in the ideology of sexual politics' of the twentieth
century (Millett 1977, 178). Her critique is based on her sense that
Freud's writings rendered biology as destiny, and forgot to account
for the specificity of social acculturation in the Western European
family of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She criti-
cises his refusal to separate '[Link] radically different phenomena,
female biology and feminine status' (190), objects strongly to his defi-
nitions of femininity as aligned with passivity, masochism and narcis-
sism, and attacks his 'scientific' language (she calls it jargon) which
. renders what she sees as his Victorian views of masculinity and femi-
ninity into the powerful discourse of apparently objective science:

Dressing the thing up in jargon ... one gives the old myth of feminine
'nature' a new respectability. Now it can be said scientifically that
women are inherently subservient, and males dominant, more
strongly sexed, and therefore entitled sexuaJJy to subjugate the
female, who enjoys her oppression and deserves it, for she is by her
very nature, vain, stupid, and hardly better than a barbarian, if she is
human at all. ... psychoanalysis promised [female] fulfilment in
passivity and masochism, and greater fulfilment, indeed, the very
meaning of woman's life lay in reproduction, and there alone. (203)

105
106 (Psycho)Analyses

She attacks in particular the theory of penis envy, in which the little
girl, realising that she is 'castrated' and suffering from lack and Joss,
wishes for a psychic wholeness which is denied her because it is
figured solely in the male sex organ. For Millett, this theory is prob-
lematic on logical grounds - why would the girl child assume that the
penis is 'better than' her own sexual organs? But it is alsd discounted
because it does not recognise that, in a patriarchal society, a girl may
envy a boy on grounds other than those of biology - the social
grounds of masculine privilege such as freedom, education, and
status, rather than the biological grounds of possession or otherwise
of a penis.
Millett is by no means the only critic of psychoanalytic theory in
relation to a feminist critique of society. Mary Ellmann, whose stated
interest in Thinking About Women was in 'women as words' (Ellmann
1968, xv), is disturbed by the potency of defining words about wo1nen
derived from psychoanalytic discourse (21). Even some of the French
feminist theorists most associated with pyschoanalysis in the minds
of anglophone critics have had much to say about the problems of
mixing up biology and culture that psychoanalysis appears to risk.
Helene Cixous, writing in 'Sorties', her contribution to The Newly
Born Wonian, proclaims that fen1ininity is not defined by lack so
n1uch as by difference: 'not that I desire to stop up some hole, to over-
come some flaw ofrnine', she says. Her version of woman is heteroge-
nous and multiply-erogenous, not defined by a single lack (Cixous
1986, 89). And Luce Irigaray, herself an analyst, rails rhetorically
against Freud's construction of the Oedipus complex:

So we must admil that THE LITTLE GIRL IS THEREFORE A LITTLE

MAN. A little man who will suffer a more painful and complicated
evolution than the little boy in order to become a normal woman! A
little man with a smaller penis. A disadvantaged little man. A little
n1an whose libido will suffer a greater repression, and yet whose
faculty for sublimating instincts will ren1ain weaker. Whose needs are
less catered to by nature and who will yet have a lesser share of
culture. A more narcissistic little man because of the mediocrity of
her genital organs (?). More n1odest because ashamed of that unfa-
vorable comparison. More envious and jealous because less well
endowed. Unattracted to tl1e social interests shared by men. A little
man who would have no other desire than to be , or remain, a man.
(Irigarary 1985b, 26)
 Psychoana l ysis and/or Fem i nism? 1 07

More recently still, Janet Todd has described herself as ' mystified' by
the influence of Freud and Lacan on feminist thought, arguing that
the concentration on psycho-linguistics is both ahistorical and apolit-
ical (Todd 1988, 52-4), history and politics being precisely the things
that she defines as essential to a feminist poetics. As Rita Felski
suggests, psychoanaltyic feminism can risk overestimating 'the
radical effects of linguistic indeterrninacy'. 'The defamiliarizing
capacity of literary language and form does not in itself bear any
necessary relationship to the political and social goals of feminism'
(Felski 1989, 5-6). It is very easily understandable that feminist criti-
cism has objected to psychoanalysis as a tool for feminist criticism.
From its content and assumptions, it represents precisely the kind of
female dependency on male models of culture and philosophy that
feminism supposedly exists to combat. and merely retells the old
story of femininity in different words.
These are serious objections to the relationships berw-een the
avowedly political discourses of feminism and the apparently apoliti-
cal discourses of psychoanalysis, and they should not be trivialised.
And yet, the materialist positions that the earlier part of the book
charts do not quite explain everything either. For most people, sex
and gender remain related to each other. Whilst on the one hand I can
know that social formations have played a very great part in my
construction as a fe1nale human being with some fenunine attributes,
in a different order of knowledge, I also know that the body I inhabit
somehow also constitutes my selfhood. Sociological or materialist
accounts of subjectivity are very important. After all. if fen1inisms are
concerned with changing an u njust status quo in the material world,
they have to be concerned with the things that can be changed: and
the conditions of the material world are changeable as basic biologi-
cal conditions are not. But even after the revolution, you and I will be
men and women still, still experiencing the world through biologically
sexed bodies even if definitions of gender have changed in the 1nean-
time. And it may just be that there are psychic consequences to the
sexed bodies we live in, consequences which can be analysed, diag-
nosed, and perhaps even also changed. Psychoanalytic discourses
offer radical ways of looking at how material conditions (both social
and biological) have psychic effects, and in particular they provide us
with ways of describing the distinctively gendered nature of those
effects in \.Yhich women are differently effected than men. In order to
suggest why psychoanalysis has seemed so hostile and yet has also
 1 08 (Psycho)Analyses

had ve1y radical theoretical effects in feminist literary theoiy, it is

probably a good idea briefly to revisit some of the key ideas of the
discourse before we go on to look at what some feminist theorists
have done with them.

Freud

At its most simple level, the two most significant things that the
writing of Sigmund Freud offers to contemporary thinking are: his
djscoveiy of the unconscious, and his view that individuals achieve
gendered adulthood through social processes rather than through
innate biological ones. His description of the Oedipus complex
provides a psychic as well as a social explanation for heterosexuality
as an acquired, not an innate, sexual mode.
Freud argued that a newborn chiJd is, in a sense, bisexual. He 1 has a
biological sex but no gendered behaviour to go with it. Instead , the
child is a bundle of oceanic desires, seeing himself as the centre of his
own universe, and having no sense of differentiation (he does not yet
recognise others in the world beyond himself); the child's 1nother is,
at this stage, not recognised as a separate being, but is mis-recognised
as a part of the child himself. His desires are polymorphous (many-
shaped): for example, he takes pleasure in sucking, and this pleasure
is sexual because it exists even when the child is not taking in milk; it
is independent of the function of nourishment. He also discovers
other pleasures in hjs body that originate in biological necessity
(eating, defecating), but which are also pleasurable in their own right,
and in bodily pleasures that defy biological necessity, such as mastur-
bation, the pleasure of the penis. At this point, the child has no real
sense of self, seeing the world and himself as continuous. Only at the
point at which his desires are not immediately gratified (when the
mother does not immediately provide milk on demand, for example),
does he start to grasp that his world and himself are separate. His self-
hood is therefore constructed on the grounds of a loss which ensures
that the child recognises the mother as 'other' than himself rather
than continuous \,vith himself. Freud suggests that this sense of loss
institutes desire (an 'I want' demand which is not met). and that
desire produces language (the demand 'T want' has to be formulated
in language).
For both male and female children, the first object of desire is the
 Psychoanalysis and/or Fem i n i sm/ 109

mother, the provider of nourishment, care and of the physical needs

of the child. But in order to become separate selves, male and female
children must split away from the mother, despite their desires to
unite with her because she is the source of pleasure and comfort. The
process by which this occurs is named, by Freud, the Oedipus
complex. For the boy child, it begins at the moment when he first
discovers that female people have no penises. This shocks him horri-
bly, and he postulates to himself the idea that girls and women must
have been mutilated by castration, which institutes a fear of a similar
'punishment' being enacted on his own body as the consequence of
his powerful desire for his 1nother, a desire that eventually becomes
recognised as forbidden because incestuous. Since, at the time when
Freud was writing, and beyond, the father of the fan1ily was the source
of punishment and power in the family, the boy child decides that
discretion is the better part of valour. To protect his [Link] sign of
masculinity, his penis, he ·works to please his father, to identify with
his father, and he relinquishes and represses his desire for his mother.
The reward for this act of repression and abnegation is that the boy
child will eventually come to share the power of the father as a reward
for giving up his mother's body. Heterosexual orientation is estab-
lished when the boy decides to be like his father, and to direct his
desires towards ,vomen like his mother.
Now, straightaway, it is evident that the girl child does not have the
saine experience in the move a,-vay fron1 the mother. Freud's
pronouncen1ents on the female Oedipus complex demonstrate a far
more tortured path for the little girl to achieve an individuated
personhood. Like the boy child, the girl is also a bisexual baby with
polymorphously perverse tendencies, with oceanic desires and an
inability to differentiate between self and other, irI particular to differ-
. entiate between herself and her mother. Her only difference at this
poirlt from the male child is in the physical location of her pleasures -
the masturbation of the clitoris, rather than the penis. And the
process of differentiation begins at the moment when the girl child
catches sight of a n1ale anato1ny and discovers that she has no penis,
that she is, as it were, already castrated. Freud made it clear that this
was a very trawnatic experience for the little girl. What she has discov-
ered is her own lack in comparison to the plenitude of the male body:
'She makes her judgement and her decision irI a flash. She has seen it
and knows that she is without it, and wants to have it', he wrote in his
essay on 'Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical
 I I 0 (Psycho)Analyses

Distinction Between the Sexes' (Freud 1986, 406). The consequence of

this glimpse of the penis is that the girl child becomes angry with her
n1other, blaining her for what appears to be her own mutilation.
Having decided that she 'wants to have it', the girl child turns her
desire towards her father as the possessor of the penis, so that her
desire becomes suitably heterosexual and passive, and her behaviour
1naps onto the femininity desired by the adult male. Eventually
she will decide that it is not a penis that she wants, but a baby, thus
instituting her female selfhood within the realm of heterosexual
reproduction.
From that rather bald summary, it is perhaps no surprise that Kate
MiHett objected so strongly to Freud's account of fe1nale sexuality.
Why, she wonders, would a little girl think that having a penis is better
than not having one? With no experience of the penis, she might
equally decide that it's comic, or ugly, not that attractive or desirable
in fact (Millett 1977, 182-5). The manifest content of Freudian theory
looks dangerously essentialist and positively misognynistic.
And yet: as literary critics, we do not read only the content of any
discursive formation. There is context and 1node of expression th-at
should also be taken into consideration. In 1974, Juliet Mitchell
published Psychoanalysis and Feminism as part of the process of
recuperating Freud for contemporary feminist concerns. One of the
first things that she points out is that Freud was describing the
contemporary conditions of his own context, that he was thinking
about the Western European family at a ve1y precise ti1ne in history,
and that his views are not therefore to be taken either as pronounce-
ments on how psychic development always takes place, or on how it
should or n1ust take place. As a writer who began her critical career in
Marxist/Inaterialist dfacourses, Mitchell is very aware of the contexts
of history, geography and economics. And she valued Freud's writing
for its atten1pt to offer 'objective kno,.vledge' of the subjective
phenomena of the psyche in its social contexts (Mitchell 1974, 6).
Moreover, what Freud also offered to feminism, despite what
Millett sa\,v as his profound hostility to it, was a description of femi-
ninity that was not merely biological. From the account offered above,
the body clearly does matter to Freud's theoretical interventions. But
it is a body in a context (a content within a textual context), and it is a
body which is naturally sexed, but not naturally gendered. Male and
female 1nay always already exist, but masculinity and femininity are
presented as processes rather than givens; and if they are processes
 Psychoanalysis and/or Feminism? I I I

which take place in social contexts as well as in biological bodies, the

processes and their meanings can be changed. The analysis and diag-
nosis of the symptoms of femininity could therefore be placed at the
service of political ends. So while Janet Todd is right to be suspicious
of the apparent depoliticisation and ahistoricity of psychoanalysis,
that need not disable the feminist critic from using it for politically
motivated and historicised ends. Feminisms forage amongst
discourses, and use what they can for their own purposes. Freud gives
us both the means to view femininity as socially constructed, and the
means to analyse the ways in which women have internalised views of
themselves which are harmful to their social and econo1nic c.ircu1n-
stances as well as their psychic well-being. Psychoanalytic theory is a
tool to be used, not an idol to bow down before.
The second strand of Freudian theory that has been seized on by
Utera1y criticism in general, as well as by feminist theory in particular,
is the concept of the Unconscious. The Unconscious is the psychic
real1n to which the forbidden desires for the mother are consigned
during the Oedipus complex, when the child accedes to what Freud
called 'the reality principle' - the realisation that his desires, if
unchecked, would lead to disaster, because they would bring down
punishment on him. The acculturated adult person has many desires
of many kinds. Buts/he realises that these desires must be reined in
rather than acted on willy-nilly. As part of the Oedipus complex, the
child modifies his/her desires to ends acceptable in his/her social
context, or displaces those desires onto other objects than the forbid-
den mother. The desires, however, do not just go away, according to
Freud. They are consigned to the unconscious, an unregulated
psychic space which is not subject to conscious control. In dreams,
slips of the tongue, neurotic sy1nptoms or physical tics, the uncon-
. scious surfaces during everyday life. For Freud, then, a 'healthy'
human being is one who has managed to put up a front of self-
control, but also one whose unconscious motivations can and do
surface from time to ti1ne to disrupt the carefully constructed self
which is the result of the Oedipus complex. And since the Oedipus
complex has to do precisely with constructing the gender of the self,
the Unconscious may displace the mask of gender. A feminist criti-
cism that takes the unconscious seriously, then, is a criticism that can
see femininity as a performance, wo1nanliness as masquerade as Joan
Riviere put it in 1929. And if femininity is not innate, it can be rewrit-
ten, re-imagined, constructed along different lines.
 I I 2 (Psycho)Analyses

As a clinical practice, pyschoanalysis is about the uncovery of the

unconscious as it manifests itself to conscious life, and its subsequent
regulation through analytic explanation. Psychoanalysis, like litera-
ture, is a ldnd of narrative structure. The analyst reads the analysand's
texts; the patient speaks, and the analyst interprets both the content
of the speech (sometimes the narrative of a dream, for example, since
dreams are the 'royal road to the Unconscious'), but also the context
of that speech (body-language, nervous tics), and the discourse of the
speech (how it is put together, the hesitations, sentence structures,
what is, or appears to be, 1nissing, the images which may be
metaphors of displaced desire). Freud identified two main modes of
analysis in the patient's speech, which he named condensation and
displacement. Condensation refers to a single image around which
are clustered a whole range of unconscious desires and memories;
displacement occurs when a single dangerous desire is displaced onto
an apparently harmless single image. As Lacan was later to note,
condensation and displacement work like the poetic figures of
metonymy (comparison by contiguity or proximity) and metaphor
(comparison of like and unlike). If the constructedness of gender
identity in psychoanalysis maps onto the political analysis of femi-
nisms, the realm of the Unconscious maps onto the realm of the Uter-
a1y theoretical concerns of feminis1ns. The analyst is a reader whose
reading offers a model for literary-critical readings.
Early psychoanalytic readings focused on the biography of the
author as if the text could be read as a simple manifestation of the
writer's unconscious, or they focused on the analysis of literary char-
acters within a text. More recently, psychoanalytic readings have
tended focus on the unconscious motivations of the text itself - that
is, they concentrate on the textuality of the text rather than on a
purely thematic account of its workings. Such a reading can, and
perhaps ought, to account also for textual contexts (of production and
of reading), so that the text's psyche is understood as part of a matrix
of meanings which include the social and economic realms as the
formative background for what goes on in the head. The feminist
critic making use of psychoanalysis must not forget her cormnitments
to politics and history as part of the process.
 Psychoanalysis and/or Feminism? I I 3

Lacan

As the above summary suggests, feminist theory does not sit unprob-
lematically with Freudian psychoanalysis, for there remains the
underlying problem that Freud's account of gender development
depends dangerously closely on the essentialist basis of biology. On
the other hand, however, that concentration on bodies is exactly one
of the things that feminism is bound to replicate since female bodies
are part of its subject. It is perhaps for these reasons that much
contemporary feminist psychoanalytic theory draws heavily on the
writings of Jacques Lacan, despite the fact that, in some ways, his
views on \¥Omen are just as troubling as those of Freud himself.
Indeed, as Jane Gallop rather mischievously puts it, Lacan was 'The
Ladies' Man' who wanted to take a stroll 'as cock of the walk', and
enjoyed staging his own masterful masculinity for audiences largely
made up of women (Gallop 1982, 33- 42). What Lacan offers, however,
is a psychoanalytic critique which bases itself firmly in language -
hence its attractiveness to literary theorists. Because his view of
language is derived from Saussurean linguistics, moreover, taking
account of arbitrariness and difference rather than fixing things by
naming them, his description of identity as [Link] place in language
also resists solidifying and essentialising selfhood in any terms, and
perhaps especially the terms of gender. Moreover, the language in
which Lacan wrote was French, a language which is absolutely gender
inflected, so that the relationships between language and the body are
ideas that can be pursued through a Lacanian lens.
Lacan's thinking is rigorously post-Freudian. lt could not exist
without Freud's descriptions of the psychic field; and yet it is no
slavish recapitulation of Freud's views. Rather it is a development and
a rewriting of them, a model of reading and rewriting that is also
undertaken by feminist appropriations of psychoanalytic models.
Lacan takes on many of Freud's fundamental concepts, and then
reviews them through the prism of language studies, especially the
version of linguistics developed by Ferdinand de Saussure. His most
famous statement is that 'the unconscious is st1uctured like a
language', and the model of language he takes up is that proposed by
Saussure's structuralist linguistics. Saussure's most important point
was that words have no intrinsic relationship to the things they
describe. The relationship between a word and a thing is arbitrary,
maintained by conventional agreement rather than by a God-given
 I I 4 (Psycho)Analyses

link. He argued that signs (words or images) have two components:

the signifier (a sound image or written/graphic equivalent) and the
signified (that to which the signifier refers). While signifier and signi-
fied are apparently like two sides of a piece of paper (inseparable),
their relationship is in fact arbitrary, signalled by the fact that differ-
ent languages have different signifiers for the same signifieds. This
view might imply that meaning is impossible. In fact, Saussure's posi-
tion is that meaning is contingent rather than absolute - there are
meanings, but they are not fixed. Meaning comes from differentia-
tion, from the differences between words as sound or written images,
and from differences of syntactical positioning. The consequences of
this view of langauge for psychoanalysis are: that if the unconscious is
structured like a language, it is structured in such a way that its struc-
tures are recoverable and describable, but also that it is structured in
such a way that the meanings attached to its content (semantics) are
multiple, contingent, unfixed, unstable.
Lacan's description of the process of human development, then,
draws on the Freudian model of the Oedipus complex, but insists on
its basis in language. Lacan's hurnan infant (a word that derives from
the Latin infans, meaning without speech) is in some ways much like
Freud's, a creature of oceanic and undifferentiated desires. The child
still sees the world and himself as continuous, with no separation
between self and other. Lacan names this pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal
phase the Imaginary realm, signalling its non-realistic fantasmatic
nature. As time goes on, the child passes through 'the mirror stage';
either actually or figuratively, he catches sight of himself in a mirror,
and identifies the image as hin1self. Thjs identification of self with
image is labelled a 'nlisrecognition · by Lacan because the image is a
substitute for the self, a signifier of the self, not the self itself.
Nonetheless, on the basis of this misrecognition, the child begins to
see himself as a separate individual, differentiated from the rest of the
world. At this stage, he also begins to speak. The development of
language, Lacan argues, is constituted by lack - a need is not n1et, and
it requires language to formulate that need as a demand: 'I want'. This
development, too, refers to Saussurean linguistics, since words are not
the things they represent, but merely substitutes for them. The reali-
sation of the separation of self and world is what produces language.
The entry into language is an entry into a realm with pre-existing
rules (of grammar, socialisation, acceptable behaviour and so on).
These rules are a form of prohibition: don't say that, don't do that.
 Psychoanalysis and/or Feminism! I IS

And in many (perhaps most) societies, prohibitions are associated

with the father, the locus of power and restraint within the family, and
representative of the fanilly in the world outside. The father here is
both the literal father ('just wrut till your father gets hon1e!'), but also
he is the symbolic father of society at large, representing the institu-
tions of socialisation - the church, the law, education etc. The
achievement of acculturation, then, depends on an identification with
the laws of the father, nained by Lacan the norn du pere, a pun in
French on the No of the Father/the Name of the Father. The father's
naine is the naine the legitimate child takes when it starts the process
of becoming a socialised being; and the No of the Father represents
the prohibitions placed on behaviour by literal and symbolic fathers
in social and psychic life. The realm the child enters through his
acquisition of language is called, by Lacan, the Sy1nbolic realm. It is
the realm of consciouness, rules, order, differentiation, logic (logos is
the Greek for word), power, in contrast to the Imaginary realm of the
Unconscious with its anarchic, uncontrolled desires. •
Laca,n's ideas suggest a number of quite shocking things for our
general sense of ourselves, as well as for feminis t literary theory.
Perhaps his single most important move is the shift from seeing the
conscious self (the Freudian ego) as central to personhood, to seeing
the unconscious as the 'kernel of our being'. His writings suggest that
subjectivity takes place in words. What I am, and what I am able to
imagine myself as being are linguistic features because they take place
entirely in language. And if words are merely substitutes for some-
thing that is missing, my selfhood is as arbitrary, unfixed, unstable
and contingent as the language in which I express it. Moreover, his
discussions of the Symbolic and Imaginary realms tend to imply that
the ordering of the one and the anarchy of the other coexist in the
· single self, which is always therefore more than one self at a single
time. The word 'I' is multiple. lt is at once the word I use to designate
myself and the word that you use to designate yourselves. That
marker of my unique identity is therefore always plural rather than
single, a signifier that appeals to oneness, but which has infinite
numbers of signifieds.
The significance of these views for literary theo1y in general lies in
part in what they do to a humanist notion of self as unique and indi-
vidual. Neither writers nor characters are as coherent or whole as the
language in whlch they are written likes to pretend. Rather, they are
functions within language: and, more worryingly, in the world beyond
 I I 6 (Psycho)Analyses

the text, so are we. It is not so much that we speak language as that
language speaks us. Moreover, the Unconscious is structured like a
language, so that even as we enter the Symbolic order of language,
there is always a residue of that anarchic, arbitrary psychic space of
the Unconscious and the Imaginary. Rationality and disorder coexist
in the speaking subject.
The relationship between these ideas and the literary text is
twofold. First, the Symbolic order is that mode of language which
appeals to reason, and it here that one finds the discourses of power -
science, philosophy, medicine, and the authoritative and vaJued liter-
ature of Realism. Poetry, with its creative disruptions of grammatical
rules, syntax and vocabulary partakes of the Imaginary, even as it also
functions within the Symbolic. The Lacanian critic, then, is concerned
with investigating breeches in the Symbolic discourses of authority
and with tracing competitive and creative relationships between the
Symbolic and tbe Imaginary, seeing hO\<V each does and undoes the
work of the other. Second, Lacanian thinking offers a way of rethink-
ing the processes of reading and writing which rebound on the
conception of subjectivity. If characters, and their writers, and their
readers, are effects in language, then \Ive can rethink our positions in
the world. Language has underlying rules; but it also contains the
possibility that those rules can be broken - deliberately or uncon-
sciously - to creative effect within the literary text, to psychotic effect
in real lives, producing alternative scenarios of selfhood for readers
and patients in their worlds.

rn Thinking About Women, Maiy Ellmann spoke of her interest in

women as \.vords. The value of combining structuralist linguistics with
psychoanalysis for feminist thinking is that it points out that words
are not things even whilst the words have real material and psychic
effects: thinking about language and n1inds, we have to recall that
'women' is a signifier, not a signfied, and meanings, as dictionaries
demonstrate, can and do change. Although language may be related
to reality, it is not identical with it. So, because words are not directly
transcripted from reality, they can be used to open up new realms, to
fantasise alternative futures in both material and psychic frames.
This section of tbe book, then, considers the relationships that
psychoanalysis and postrnodernisms ascribe to women and language,
to women as spoken subjects, and to women as speaking subjects.
 Psychoanalys i s and/or Feminism? I I 7

The next chapters consider the thinking of the three most influential
French feminist theorists for the English-speaking world, Julia
Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. There are as many differ-
ences as similarities between these writers, but they each share a
serious intellectual interest in language as a constitutive function of
subjectivity, and they come to this position through an engagement
(sometimes hostile) with psychoanalysis. Their interest in language is
what has made them so usable in feminist literary theory. They
dramatise the demand that the literary aspect of feminist litera1y
theory has to approach the literariness of texts as well as their themes
and contents. Politics is not just a matter of what is said but is also a
question of form and language. This is an important point for the
sexual politics of literature, for if feminism refuses any claim to the
value attached to the word/concept of literature, it risks a reposition-
ing of women readers and writers as somehow less in1portant, more
marginal to the claims of' real' literature.
Postmodernist and post-structuralist accounts of texts (accounts to
which contemporary psychoanalysis is often very much indebted
which is why these chapters appear together), take the argument yet
further. A theory that relies on psychoanalysis still has one key
assumption in place - that we all kno\,v what a won1an is, and that we
are accustomed to being able to tell what one is, just by looking, as it
were. But what if woman is more a word than a body? Thinking
through the works of Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler, as well as
through the insights of lesbian-feminist and Black-feminist criticism,
the fen1inist critic is forced to confront the possibility that the fen1inist
appeal to wo1nen's bodies, and their experiences in those bodies,
might just be a false start. These are unsettling ideas which w1struc-
ture our habitual modes of thought, and there are reasons for resist-
ing these ideas, as well as for embracing them. What these critics do is
to resist even the n1ost residual essentialism, even the essentialism
that is a political strategy of fen1 inism. For this reason, they remain
controversial, and dramatise one of the key underlying positions of
this book - that feminisms are pluralist not totalitarian.2

Notes

1. Freud starts his analysis with the presumption of a rnale child. This
presu1nption has serious effects when he comes to describe the devel-
I I 8 (Psycho)Ana l yses

opment of girl children. But for the time being, I wiJJ stick with his
presumption of masculine gender.
2. There are many kinds of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism
that I have not dealt with here. A notable omission in a book dealing
with feminist literary theory is the 1nodification to psychoanalytic
theory made by some of Freud's O\•vn female followers, in particular,
Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney and especially Melanie Klein. Klein's
work in object-relation theory, and her partial relocation of the infant's
object of desire to the mother's breast and away from the (father's)
phallus, is clearly highly significant for ferninist theory generally. My
emphasis, however, is on the 'fathers' of psychoanalysis, since it is the
1nodifications of their mthinking undertaken by writers like Irigaray,
Cixous and Kristeva that has been highly influential for feminist
thought in the last twenty years. And without their work, it is difficult to
imagine the writings of theorists like Judith Butler and Rita Felski. For
detailed discussions of the 'mothers' of psychanaJysis, see: Janet Sayers,
Mothering Psychoanalysis: Helene Deutsch, Karne Horney, Anna Freud,
Melanie Klein, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991. For a helpful descrip-
tion and discussion of Klein's object-relations theory, see Elizabeth
Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticsm: A Reappraisal (2nd edition),
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, and Andrew Roberts, Psychoanalysis and
Literature, in chis series (forthcoming).
5 J u lia Kristev a:
Rewriting the Sub je ct

The writings of Julia Kristeva bring together several discourses which

are more usually separated, which tends to make her writing difficult
to begin to read since she assumes a range of knowledge in her
readers that we may not always quite possess. lier career as an acade-
mic began in the discipline of linguistics, the systematic study of
language. Born in Bulgaria in 1941, she came to consciousness under
an intensely politicised system of Communist government, and
learned to think politically as a matter of course. She was profoundly
influenced in her linguistic research by the thinkers of Eastern Europe
(she speaks Russian), in particular the Russian Formalists who argued
that literary language is a kind of double agent, a writing which at
once advertises content and form. They attempted to analyse the
'literariness' of literary languages. On her arrival in France in the mid-
sixties, she added to her knowledge of political and linguistic theory
by an intense engagement with the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques
Lacan. Her work is of particular interest to fen1inist literary theorists
because it touches therefore on all three of the bases of such thinking
established by Elaine Showalter, namely oppression, expression and
repression .
The works of the Russian critic Mikhail Bahktin were formative in
Kristeva's thinking, and some of her early published essays (in partic-
ular, 'Word, Dialogue and Novel' and 'Semiotics: A Critical Science
and/or a Critique of Science', Kristeva 1986, 34-88) bear the imprint
of Bahktin's ideas. Bahktin's importance lies in his critique of struc-
turalist linguistics, and its assumption that the system of language
(called by Ferdinand de Saussure, la langue) operates as a fixed struc-
ture that can be defined and analysed. He proposed instead that
language must always be understood as a process of making meaning,
dependent for its force on extra-linguistic features such as context or
tone. As such, language is never a closed system, but rather a series of

I I 9
120 (Psycho)Ana l yses

gestures towards meaning directed at an other - the reader or hearer

of writing or speech. As such, it is the site of contradictions and strug-
gle. Writers/speakers always communicate in a contingent way. Their
meanings are never fixed or final, since their audiences are always
heterogeneous (multiple) and hear or read in tenns of their differ-
ences. Bahktin wrote of what he caJled the dialogic nature of language
which he saw as doubled because it involves both hearer and speaker,
reader and writer. Literary language is particularly 'doubled' because
of its advertisement of the importance of form as well as content. For
him, words are material things. They circulate in specific contexts,
and they cannot be fixed to one catch-all, all-or-nothing significance
precisely because words are oriented towards an audience that makes
up its multiple minds about what the words 'really' mean in the
various contexts of their reception.
In themselves, these ideas are significant for all literary theory in
their dispersal of the possibility that any text is coherent or whole,
that any piece of writing could act as an untouchable artefact contain-
ing pre-detennined meaning. And for feminist theory, these ideas are
important in that they open up the fissures in the apparently closed
systems by which patriarchal thought dispossesses ,,vomen. In refus-
ing the stability of fixed significance, Bahktin's ideas provide leverage
on any systen1atic and apparently unchanging, immutable set of
ideas. In her own work, Kristeva helped to bring Bahktinian thinking
to the West, and further developed and modified his thinking. Her
1977 book Polylogue, for example, gestures in its title towards
Bahktin's notion of the dialogic nature of language, and takes it
further, suggesting that language is multiple rather than only double.
As she comrnents in an interview about the book, 'Talking about
Polylogue': 'The theoretical work that interests me involves the analy-
sis of the work of language, not as something possessing an arbitrary
but systematisable nature ... but rather as a verbal practice whose
economy is complex, critical and contradictory (poetic language
offers the most striking example of such a practice)'. (Kristeva in Moi
1987, 115, my emphasis). 1 Her emphasis is on the' work of language',
language as a process, something that does work, and as something
tl1at works, though its workings are complex, critical and contradic-
tory. Her linguistic investigations, then, are investigations into a
language system that is not really a system at all, since it cannot be
described except temporarily and locally. Her work is a series of anti-
totalising gestures.
 Ju l ia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 121

In these terms, then, for Kristeva the analysis of language is always

also political. Her relationship with conventional politics in general,
and with Liberal feminist politics in particular, however, is not an easy
one. As Leon Roudiez notes, 'her feminist position is no more ortho-
dox than her other stands', and he quotes an interview between
Kristeva and Jean-Paul Enthoven to demonstrate her heterodoxy. In
the interview she says:

l am quite dedicated to the feminist movement but r think feminism,

or any other movement, need not expect unconditional backing on
the part of an intellectual woman. I think the time has come to
emerge out of the 'for-women-only' practice, out of a kind of mythi-
cizing of femininity.... I have the i1npression Isome feminists) are
relying too much on an existentialist concept of wo1nan, a concept
that attaches a guiJt complex to the maternal function. Either one has
children, but that means that one is not good for anything else, or one
does not, and then it becomes possible to devote oneself to serious
undertakings. As far as I am concerned, childbearing as such never
seemed inconsistent with cultural activity, and that is the point I try
to make when talking to feminist groups. (Roudiez 1981, 10) 2

And in the Preface to Desire in Language, she writes that her function
as an analyst of and in language is 'to describe the signifying phenome-
non, or signifying phenomena, while analyzing, criticizing, and dissolv-
ing, "phenomenon," "meaning," and "signifier"' (Kristeva 1980, vii). If
part of the process is always to criticise and dissolve the very subjects of
study, the very tools which enable the study in the first place, as a polit-
ical analyst, J(risteva's \i\lOrk is likely to undermine the very concepts
that underpin activist political movements. In her comments on femi-
nism, she is refusing the conceptual framework that makes feminism
as activist politics possible. She will not see the culture/nature debate
surrounding childbirth as the binary opposition that some feminists
have claimed it to be. The so-cailed ' natural' process of childbeadng is
always already also a 'cultural' process, since its 'product', the child,
will become a subject in culture, and since the woman who gives birth
inhabits both poles of the opposition of culture and nature in her very
being. In other words, she attacks the terms of the liberal feminist
agenda because she sees them as reinscribing precisely the oppositions
(between culture and nature, between subjectivity and mate1iality) that
she believes it is the role of feminism to attack.
122 (Psycho)Analyses

What, then, makes her an appropriate study for feminist thought? If

Kristeva had gone no further than her study of language and its poli-
tics, she would remain an iinportant thinker, whose contribution to
linguistics was recognised by significant contemporaries such as
Roland Barthes. But in her bringing together of linguistics with
psychoanalysis she made her most significant move. As Toril Moi has
noted, she arrived iI1 Paris in 1966, the year in which Jacques Lacan 's
Bcrits were first published (Moi 1986, 1), which is, of course, just a
coincidence. Similarly coincidental were the so-called evenements of
May 1968, when students and workers banded together in a short-
lived atte1npt to overthrow the French state and to establish a more
egalitarian society along Marxist lines. That revolution, however,
never quite happened, partly because the French Co1nmunist Parry
had opposed it from the outset. The disillusionment of the idealistic
young men and women and the workers of France was cemented by
elections which returned a massive centre-right majority later that
year. For those who wanted a leftist state of some description, the
betrayal of the Communists was a turning point. At the same time, the
Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to end the revisions of Marxism
that were taking place in Prague; and the French Left could not look to
the United States because of its iI1volvement in the Vietnam War,
increasingly seen by Europeans as an imperialist and unjustifiable
conflict.
The Tel Quel group of avant-garde ,.vriters in France, with which
Kristeva was involved from the mid-sixties to the late seventies,
looked to China for a different version of the state, one that was
neither Stalinist nor Imperialist. For Kristeva, who had been brought
up in a Communist state, China did not make an unproblen1atic third
way. She was troubled by the iI1tellectual poverty of left-leaning politi-
cal groupings and their purely materialist explanations of the world,
especially in what she saw as their 01nission of individual subjects
from their political analysis. It was in order to re-place what she called
the 'speaking subject' (Kristeva 1980, viii) into political and linguistic
analysis that she turned to psychoanalytic theory. What interested her
about the speaking subject was that individual emotions are not
explicable merely by traditional political or philosophical forn1ula-
tions; or rather that they are not explicable by those formulations
alone. She became mterested in the ways in which the speaking
subject disrupts explanations of cause and effect, and undoes the very
structures of totalising explanation. The speaking subject is therefore
 Julia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 123

always a political and politicised subject. The importance of psycho-

analysis is that it is a discourse that gives space to the individual
speaking subject, values his/her interventions, and can have 'real'
effects, in that the psychoanalytic speaking subject may even get
'better', be cured of his/her neurosis or pain. One person's cure,
however, does not amount to a once-for-all explanation; nor does it
represent a cure for all speaking subjects.3
The move towards psychoanalysis did not mean that Kristeva aban-
doned her earlier subjects of study. The real importance of her work,
on the contrary, is in her rigorous combination of different
discourses. Not for nothing is she credited with introducing the
concept of 'intertextuality' into critical discourse, a concept that
depends on discourses competing with and modifying each other
within a single text. As Michael Payne has suggested, her work 'is at
once a major study in semiotics, psychoanalysis, philosophy and liter-
ary criticism', and its rigorous combination of these discourses into
an intertext leaves none of these disciplines 'undisturbed' (Payne
1993, 163). In her essay 'Word, Dialogue and Novel', she praised
Bahktin for being 'one of the first to replace the static hewing out of
texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist, but
is generated in relation to another structure'. She argues that
Bahktin's work is involved in tracing an 'intersection of textual
surfaces', not in tracking down a single point or fixed meaning. It
makes his writing dynamic and energetic, as it seeks the traces of
multiple other discourses within any textual formation. She writes:

Bahktin situates the text withjn history and society, which are then
seen as texts read by the writer, and into which he inserts hi1nself by
rewriting them. Diachrony is transformed into synchrony, and in light
of this transfonnation, linear history appears as an abstraction. The
only way a writer can participate in history is by transgressing this
abstraction through a process of reading-writing; that is, through the
practice of a signifying structure in relation or opposition to another
structure. ... The poetic word, polyvalent and multi-determined,
adheres to a logic exceeding that of codified discourse and fully
comes into being only in the margins of recognized culture. Bahktin
was the first to study this logic, and he looked for its roots in carnival.
Carnivalesque discourse breaks through d1e Jaws of a language
censored by grammar and semantics, and, at the same time, is a
social and political protest. There is no equivalence, but rather, iden-
124 (Psycho)Analyses

tity bet\,veen challenging official linguistic codes and challenging offi-

cial law. (Kristeva in Moi ed. 1986, 36, emphasis in original)

This passage articulates in linguistic, formaljst and political terms the

concerns which Kristeva's interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis will
enable her to formulate in terms of the speaking subject - a subject
who is necessarily connected to language, to forms and to politics, but
who also experiences him/herself as transgressing the boundaries
between these discourses. Individuality is, as it were, the excess d1at
cannot be contained by any single system.
The speaking subject is a kind of text. But the meaning of an individ-
ual person, like the 1neaning of any text, is not a fixed point. Because
people are born into cultural and historical specificities of which they
have boili collective and individual expe1ience (dley are members of
groups, as well as being individuals separate fro1n dlose groups), they
are texts overwritten with tl'aces of oilier texts or contexts. They bear
me marks of dlese traces, and have ilieir meaning in their intersec-
tions. They cannot be simply be explained: and if they could, it would
be tantamount to being 'explained away', having dleir individual
subjectivity removed from the1n. Jt is for mis reason that Kristeva
resists ideas such as 'feminine language', and argues instead that
women, ovenNritten by the traces of a dominant 1nasculine culture,
must analyse that culture from wiiliin. ln me interview, 'Talking about
Polylogue', she says that what is at stake in her writing is the 'funda-
mental re-examination of those identities and laws by which we live':

how can !he new values offered by !he arts, !he sciences and politics
... respond to the psycho-social characteristics of women, and so
propose another ethics in which women could partake? Or in olher
words: how can an enquiry into the nature of motherhood lead to a
better Lu1derstanding of the part played in love by the woman, a role
no longer of the virgin, forever promised to the third person, God, but
that of a real w01nan whose essentially poly1norphic sexualiry will
sooner or later have to deal with a ,nan, a woman, or a child? ... It is
unfortunately the case that son1e feminists insist in adopting sulking,
and even obscurantist attitudes: those, for example, who demand a
separate language for won1en, one rnade of silence, cries or touch,
which has cut all ties with !he language of so-called phallic communi-
cation; or !hose who attack logic, the sign, currency, and !he very
principle of exchange on !he grounds that wo1nen function as objects
of exchange in !he constitution of the patriarchal social order. ... the
 Julia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 125

time has come for each and every won1an, in whatever way we can, to
confront the controversial values once held to be universal truths by
our culture, and to subject them to an interminable analysis. In a
sense this may be a theoretical task; it is above all a matter of ethics.
(115-17, my emphasis)

Kristeva cannot conceive of a 'feminine language', an ecriture femi-

nine, or a parter-femme (see below, Chapters 6 and 7 on the works of
Irigaray and Cixous), and certainly does not believe that such a
language, were it possible, would dissolve the sexed inequalities of
human existence. The system has to be dealt with in its own terms.
One has to analyse so-called universal truths to show that they are
neither universal nor t1ue, and that analysis has to take place in a
process that both uses and questions the terms that already exist.
Nonetheless, although she resists the idea of feminine language, she
focuses on female bodies, and their relationships with language and
institutions. She is interested not in Woman as a philosophical,
explicable, totalising category, but in a real woman, who has relation-
ships with men, with other women, and ,vith children, relationships
which are not the same as every other woman's relationships, though
they may share something in common, too. Her appeal is individual-
istic rather than the traditionally communal position of liberal femi -
nism, since her focus is on the individual speaking subject. The
language that appeals to the communal, the universal (all women,
Woman) explains the speaking subject away, and leaves no space for
her in the system. Indeed, even when it has good intentions, it may
just end up replicating in a different order the very system it was
supposed to displace.

In her 1974 book, Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva developed

her most influential ideas. The book bears the traces of both her
linguistic training and her more recent training as a Lacanian analyst.
Her writing is not a simple application of Lacan's ideas, but a modifi-
cation and rewriting of them. The book is split into two parts. In the
first she expounds her ideas of language and 'literariness' in ways that
register both her formalist linguistic training and her analytic prac-
tice. In the second part of the book, she provides readings of a
number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century avant-garde writers
(Mallarme, Lautreamont, Joyce), in order to demonstrate the ways in
 126 (Psycho)Analyses

which the speaking subject in the literary text has changed because of
a 'revolution ' in the conceptual frameworks that language provides
for the world fron1 the nineteenth century onwards. 4 The title's allu-
sion to 'poetic language' as opposed to 'literary language' is certainly
derived from the Russian formalist linguistics. Kristeva refuses the
term 'litera ture' because it implies a kind of writing that is beyond the
reach of analysis because of the values attached to it, untouchable
because perfect, a position she wishes to resist because of its implica-
tion in ideological fonnations which enact power relations. She
chooses poetic language as the subject of her study to evade those
power relations.
But whilst the tern1 derives from formalist concerns, Kristeva is also
anxious to avoid the idea that poetic language might simply function
as a kind of sub-cultural code within dominant versions of language.
For her, as Roudiez notes: 'it stands for the infinite possibilities of
language' (Roudiez 1984, 2); and it is revolutionary because it is 'an
exploration and discovery of the possibilities of language; ... an activ-
ity that liberates the subject from a number of linguistic, psychic, and
social networks; ... a dynamism that breaks up the inertia of language
habits'. As such, it 'grants linguists the unique possibility of studying
the becoming of the signification of signs' (2-3).5 It is not that our
reading/speaking poetic language will lead us to 1nan (woman?) the
barricades. Rather, poetic language stretches our conceptual frame-
works and liberates our thinking. It is language distinct from that
ordinary language used for communication, the language of everyday
speech, though it is recognisable within the terms of such ordinary
co1nmunication. But it is also a language which draws attention to
itself as language, a language of materiality, rather than the apparent
transparency of ordinary speech in which the reader/hearer is
encouraged to forget the words and to move straight to the world to
which the words are supposed to refer. Poetic language advertises the
writer/speaker's efforts to encase concepts or objects in sounds and
rhythms. The recipient of such a language is therefore encouraged to
notice language in use, rather than moving directly to the ' reality' or
the abstraction to which the words are supposed to refer. Poetic
language includes the works of 'literature', especially avant-garde
literature: it includes Shakespeare, Racine, Mallarme; it includes the
Marquis de Sade and the works of Antonin Artaud; and it also
includes the language of psychosis and might include the babble of a
child who is learning to speak.
 Julia Kristeva : R ewriting the Subject 127

The key terms that Kristeva elaborates in the opening chapters of

Revolution certainly bear the traces of their formalist linguistic
origins. But they are also marked by a serious attempt to theorise the
speaking subject within language, an attempt which requires psycho-
analytic insight. For Kristeva, following Lacan, the speaking subject is
always a split subject, divided between unconscious and conscious
motivations, inhabiting both nature and culture since the physiologi-
cal processes of speaking (the breath we have to take, the way tongues
move around teeth, the way we sit, stand or hold a pen in order to
speak or \I\ITite) are derived from the body, but speech itself is also
constrajned by culture. Her insistence is that we must take both the
conscious and the unconscious, both the mind and the body, both the
cultural and the natural, seriously as being absolutely necessary to the
process of forming meaning. In n1aking connections between linguis-
tics and psychoanalysis, between systems and individual speakers
within those systems, Kristeva's concept of the split speaking subject
maps onto her insight that any text is polyvalent, polylogical, plural,
unfixed. It is the obligation of the analyst (whether in literary criticism
or in psychoanalytic practice) to read the pluralities of both text and
speaking subject.
Like the text, then, the subject cannot be fixed. The subject is not
only split, but is also a 'subject in process', in French sujet en proces.
The French word proces contains the double ideas of process and
trial. The subject is always in process in that s/he is not fixed, but
always developing. But also, the subject is always in process because
s/he is always on trial, being tested against the various contexts in
which s/he .has his/her being. The idea of processive subjectivity is
attractive to feminist thinkers because of its inherent resistance of the
. fixity of sexual or gendered identity which can trap women in the
feminine mode. In Oscar Wilde's The Tmportance of Being Earnest
(1895), Gwendolen Fairfax announces to Jack Worthing after he has
told that she is quite perfect: 'Oh! I hope I am not that. It would leave
no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many direc-
tions' (Wilde 1994, 364). Her words are a joke, but they make a serious
point. Perfection is fixed. One might as well be dead. To be a subject
in process, even if it means being often sorely tried, also means that
one can develop.
In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva accounts for the split of
the speaking subject in tenns that derive from, but whlch also modify,
Lacanian analysis. She suggests that there are two kinds of signifying
 I 28 (Psycho)Ana l yses

process at work in the making of meaning, and the two modes are
locked together. She names the two modes the Symbolic and the
Semiotic. The concept of the Symbolic mode of communication is an
adaptation from Lacan's writings. ft is the language of transparency,
power and conformity, and, as such, is aligned [Link] patriarchal func-
tions in culture - le non/nom du pere-which signals the father's name
and the father's prohibitions in social and psychic formations. The
Symbolic content of language is what is manifest or obvious, the
language of content, the language from which general principles can
be abstracted, the language which is open to paraphrase. It is tradi-
tionally the language of scientific discourses, of ne..,vspapers and
history, the language into which authority is written. In Kristeva's
model, as in Lacan's, the developing child comes to subjectivity in
relation to the Symbolic functions of language. The child inserts
him/herself into culture by submitting to the father's 'no', by
conforming to the linguistic rules of grammar, syntax and propriety in
vocabulary, and this process is related to the child's insertion into
social rules. Since the social world is a patriarchal world, to learn the
language of that world is necessarily to learn the language of the
father. The process is instigated by the child's separation from the
mother, his/her recognition that s/he is separate and different from
the mother. The learning of symbolic language, therefore, necessi-
tates a submission to masculine functions and a farewell to the femi-
nised pre-Oedipal space of the mother-child bond.
Only, no speaker ever speaks entirely in the Symbolic language of
patriarchy, which is where Kristeva's concept of the Semiotic comes
in. Her use of this word is itself a kind of revolution, since semiotics is
usually understood as the 'science' of signs, and it is usually therefore
aligned with the Symbolic since it seeks to analyse meaning functions
into a totalised system. When Kristeva uses the phrase 'the Semiotic',
however, she is signalling a realm of meaning that resists any such
systematisation. The process of learning to speak may well be a
process that has as its goal the complete insertion of the speaking
subject into the Symbolic function. A child's language, however, is a
language of babble, incoherence, rhyth1n and sound, which are not
exactly meaningless, but which are not susceptible to rationalfatic
systematic analysis. A child's babble cannot be paraphrased. This pre-
linguistic language, which will eventually be rnore or less successfully
repressed by Symbolic functions, is what Kristeva terms 'the
Sen1iotic'. She identifies it not only in children's developing language
 Julia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject I 29

skills, but also in 'poetic' language, and in the language of psychosis,

all of which are languages where the relationships between words and
concepts privileged by the Symbolic, are significantly disrupted. They
are languages of materiality; they each draw attention to themselves
rather than inscribing an easy, transparent relationship between
words and the world.
The concepts of the Symbolic and the Semiotic are not, however, to
be simply understood as masculine and feminine relations with
language and culture. The Symbolic may indeed be a function of
patriarchy, but most women nonetheless successfully internalise its
rules and learn to speak and function within its structures. Moreover,
men as poets or mad men, can make use of serniotic pulsations
against the rules of the Symbolic. These realms within the signifying
process define potentialJy shifting relations to culture, not biological
positions that cannot be altered. Kristeva sees these two concepts as
interdependent, as absolutely inseparable, in the making of meaning.
Even the most symbolically inflected authoritative language (such as
the language of a scientific treatise, for example), bears the traces of
the Semiotic: the words used even in such a context are still materi-
alised, and the speaker/writer still has obligations to form as well as to
content. Kristeva writes:

These two modalities [the Symbolic and the Semiotic) are inseparable
within the signifying process that constitutes language, and the
dialectic between them determines the type of discourse (narrative,
metalanguage, theory, poetry, etc.) involved; in other words, so-
called 'natural' language allows for different modes of articulation of
the semiotic and the symbolic. On the other hand, there are nonver-
bal signifying systems that are constructed exclusively on the basis of
the semiotic (music, for exa1nple). But ... this exclusivity is relative,
precisely because of the necessary dialectic between the two modali-
ties of the signifying process, which is constitutive of the subject.
Because the subject is always both symbolic and se1niotic, no signify-
ing system he produces can be either 'exclusively' semiotic or 'exclu-
sively' symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an
indebtedness to both. (Kristeva 1984, 24)

This is a restatement in psychoanalytic tenns of the Bahktinian idea

of the dialogic, with the emphasis shifted from text to speaking
subject. The language the subject speaks is not fixed; and since
 130 (Psycho)Analyses

language 'constitutes' the subject, the subject is not fixed either.

Meaning, like the subject, is always en proces, in process, on trial.
The Symbolic and the Semiotic, then, are not quite binary opposi-
tions at different ends of a rigid scale. Rather they are part of a contin-
uum in the process of making meaning. They flow into each other,
and as such they resist easy analysis. Central to Kristeva's notion of a
continuum bet\.veen the apparently meaningless babble of the
Semiotic and the alleged transparency of the Symbolic in language is
her concept of the chora. The word chora is derived from Plato's
Timaeus where it has several possible meanings, including womb,
enclosed space, nurse, receptacle and mother. As Jacques Derrida has
shown, it is a figure of multiple contradictions, which has so many
1neanings that it threatens to collapse into utter uninteUigibility
because it refuses to be fixed:

what Plato in the Timaeus designates by the name of khora seen1s to

defy that 'logic of noncontradiction' ... that logic 'of binarity, of yes or
no' .... The khora, which is neither 'sensible' nor 'intelligible', belongs
to a 'third genus'. One cannot even say of it that is neither this nor
that or that it is both this and that. (Derrida, in Wolfreys ed. 1998, 231)

1t is a word that refuses definition, and resists translation and abstrac-

tion; and yet chora is a real word that functions within Symbolic
language fonnatlons, whilst at the sa1ne time enacting the Semiotic
disruptions of those self-same formations. As Julian Wolfreys argues
in his introduction to Derrida's text, 'Formulations of the sort "khora
is/is not ... " miss the point and are neither true nor false inasmuch as
khora is not determinable according to the conceptual framework
which posits such questions in the first place' (Wolfreys 1998, 39).
We are anxious about words that we cannot define because they
threaten the illusory stability of our linguistic universe. Inasmuch as
the chora 'is' anything, it is a metaphor and a rhetorical device which
expresses the idea that meaning may exist in places where it cannot
be defined or abstracted. In a helpful commentary on Kristeva's
concept, Michael Payne returns to the Platonic text, to show that Plato
uses t11e word in a range of ways: it means receptacle, nurse, mother,
space. Kristeva, Payne argues, 'seems determined to retain both
Plato's maternal image and his more abstract fonnulation' of the
tenn:
 Ju lia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 13 I

This is a remarkable rhetorical decision because when Kristeva writes

about the body, unlike Lacan and Derrida, she gives it a sense of
having bone and flesh and hormones. For her the body both is and is
not external to language. (Payne 1993, 168)

Payne connects the chora to the Aristotelian concept of 'chorion', the

membrane that encloses a foetus in a womb, and thus signals the
codependent limits of the mother's and the foetus's bodies. It is a
limit which expands and contracts with the movement and growth of
each of the two bodies, enacting both their separation and their inter-
dependence. Like language itself, it is a doubled structure, which
'defines the semiotic space of the other within the mother, and within
its double structure, the first communication between the fetus and
(1n)other occurs' (169).
A question that might help in figuring out the concept of chora is: is
your body nature or culture? The question establishes a bina1y oppo-
sition - an 'either/or' formulation which presupposes that bodies
must belong to one realm or the other. The classic answer to the ques-
tion, an answer derived from Enlightenn1ent thought, is that bodies
belong to the realm of nature: it is the mind or the soul or the intellect
that is cultured. But it is precisely this kind ofbinarism that Kristeva's
thought unsettles. In two essays that 1neditate on maternity,
'Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini' and 'Sta bat Mater',
Kristeva shows that you cannot divide the world into opposing cate-
gories, indeed, that such categories are n1erely theoretical. She opens
her Bellini essay with the following remarks:
'
Cells fuse, split and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and
body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the
body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is
present within that simultaneously dual and alien space, co signify
what is going on. 'It happens, but l'm not there.' 'I cannot realize it,
bu t it goes on.' Motherhood's impossible syllogism. (Kristeva 1980,
237)

The word syllogism refers to a subtle rhetorical argument, usually

made up of two propositions and the conclusion that necessarily
follows on from them in the terms of philosophical logic. The logic
that Kristeva proposes here, in her evocation of the early stages of
pregnancy, is that the maternal body does certain things in order to
 I32 (Psycho)Analyses

support its foetus; the pregnant woman knows these things are
happening inside her, but her knowledge is not susceptible to the
rational analysis available in Symbolic language. The pregnant
woman is the site of a particularly acute realisation of the inadequacy
of Symbolic knowledge, which categorises by opposition, to represent
Semiotic experience. There is almost a sense in which pregnancy is
unspeakable in the language of Symbolic authority. 6 She goes on to
suggest that the discourses of both science and established religion
fail to account for the collapse of the nature/ culture binary opposition
in the figure of the pregnant wo1nan. And she sees such a woman as 'a
thoroughfare, a threshold where "nature" confronts "culture"' (238).
As such, the pregnant woman might be understood as one of many
possible images for the metaphor of the chora. She represents the site
of continuation between apparent oppositions (a thoroughfare, a
threshold), not their absolute separation. Symbolic and Semiotic
coexist in her.
In the slightly later essay, 'Stabat Mater', Kristeva picks up on this
same image of pregnancy and maternity, and expands its force and
range. Her underlying argument is that Love, whatever form it takes,
is a disruptive force in culture - a force that both shores up and
undermines the institutions of culture: it is necessary, for exarnple, to
Western conceptions of the family; and yet it can also unsettle family
life by authorising illicit activities such as adultery, or marrying out of
the group of \,vhich the family approves. In 'Stabat Mater', we see
Kristeva reflecting on the idea of mother love. The essay's title comes
from a Roman Catholic hymn and prayer, 'Stabat mater dolorosa'
[stood the mother, full of sorrows] in which the Virgin Mary is
described sorrowing over the dead body of the body of Christ, her son.
If the most common ilnage of the Virgin in religious iconography is
the image of her nursing the infant Christ-child, the second most
common image is the pieta, the image of her cradling his dead body
after the Crucifixion. The hymn takes the pieta image as its focus, and
is thus an expression of the pain of love rather than of its wonders or
pleasures. Kristeva's meditation on maternity dramatises the split
subject of language. On the right hand side of the page is a learned
discourse on the cult of the Virgin Mary, that most cultural of
mothers, the acceptable face of maternity in Western Christian soci-
eties.7 On the left-hand side of the page is a discontinuous narrative of
Kristeva' s O\,vn experience of maternity - a narrative that speaks poeti-
cally and evocatively (not logically or analytically) of love, pain,
 Julia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 133

horror, delight, and which radically calls into question the 'authorized
version' of motherhood. The typographical practice of the essay
destabilises the Symbolic order which speaks of ,,voman as a category
rather than of a woman as a speaking individual. The co-existing and
opposing discourses of the piece - Symbolic, authoritative historical
narrative and Semiotic poetic musings - dramatise the idea that
language is made up of meaning in process, particularly because
there is a kind of leakage or contamination between the two types of
writing, where history becomes personal, and personal experience is
placed in the context of history. The writing subject here is most defi-
nitely a split subject, and also a subject in process. Kristeva, the
philosopher and academic does not cease to exist in Kristeva, the
maternal figure, and vice versa. Nature and culture, and all other two-
term oppositions, are exposed as fictions. And there is power in this
exposure. Thinking through the chora-body of the mother means
over-turning the taxonomies that hold meaning into fixed categories.
The chora offers a different model for conceptualising the world and
our place in it.
Kristeva's importance for feminist literary criticism comes from
several strands in her work. The combination of politics, linguistics
and psychoanalysis is especially powerful. The idea that the speaking
subject is always 'in process', developing, changing, tried and tested,
is also a helpful intervention for the feminist reader. She is also an
attractive figure because, for all the theoretical difficulty of her work,
she is also genuinely interested in real people. For her, the ethics of
reacting and writing are finally about relationships in the realm of the
real. Thus, as Payne argues, although she is rigorous in dismantling
inadequate ideas of what is meant by the hun1an derived fro1n the
.Enlightenment, she is not anti-humanistic (Payne 1993, 195). All her
writing returns to people in fue end; and the people she refers to have
a solid materiality - flesh, blood and bone, hormones, cells, skin and
hair - such as we recognise in our own bodily lives, but from which we
often tum away in our so-called intellectual pursuits.

Reading with mother?

How might such ideas be used? There is a danger with offering readings
influenced by certain [Link], that they encourage slavish imitation of
inadequate models. The examples presented here and in subsequent
I 34 (Psycho)Ana l yses

chapters are in no sense definitive. They are to be read as possible ways

in to thinking, not as the last word in how to 'do' a Kristevan reading.

There are many things that one might choose to say about D. H.
Lawrence's novel, Women in Love (1920), and it is indeed a novel
about v1.1hich feminist critics have been very vocal. This is no surprise
since the novel is largely about mapping possible and even ideal (for
Lawrence) relationships between men and women. Lawrence's views
are idiosyncratic, and can certainly be read as masculist and destruc-
tive for women in terms of the ways in which he positions them mate-
rially in the world, as well as in his readings of female psychic and
cultural development. Feminist readings of Lawrence, therefore, have
tended to concentrate on issues of representation, and of the politics
implied by that representation. He has been much attacked.
Both Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett have something to say
about the text. In de Beauvoir's reading, Lawrence's works preach a
message of self-abnegation, a self-denial that both men and women
undertake in order to come together in mutual (sexual) fulfilment.
She sees the relationship between the central characters, Birkin and
Ursula, as a kind of ideal: 'the sexual act is, without annexing, without
surrender of either partner, a marvellous fulfilment of each one by the
other. ... Having access to each other in the generous extortion of
passion, two lovers have access to the Other, the All' (de Beauvoir
1997, 246). This supposed ideal of sexual equality- or rather, of equnl-
ity in sexual encounters - is, however, undercut in Lawrence's work
because of the physical, psychical and social inequalities of the
couple. She summarises his position thus:

Not only does man play the role in the sexuaJ life, but he is active also
in going beyond it; woman remains shut up in it. Thought and action
have their roots in the phallus; lacking the phallus, woman has not
rights in either the one or the other: she can play a man's role, and
even brilliantly, but it is just a ga,ne ... For won1an 'the deepest
consciousness in tl1e loins and the belly'. If this is perverted and her
flow of energy is upwards to the breast and head, woman may
become clever, noble, efficient, brilliant, competent in the n1anly
world; but, according to Lawrence, she soon has enough of it, every-
thing collapses, and she returns to sex, 'which is her business at the
present moment'. (248) 8
 Julia Kristeva : Rewriting the Subject 13S

As de Beauvoir goes on to say, Lawrence may appear to be saying

radical things about sexual practice, but he is also reinscribing the
bourgeois ideal of the separate spheres (male - active and external,
female - passive and domestic), and there is no material gain for
women from his thinking. Woman remains fixed as Other to the
Lawrentian male ego.
Millett's reading is, as might be expected, powerfully polen1ical and
angry. For her, the trajectory of Women in Love is Ursula's retreat into
passivity, docility and virtual nothingness. The decline is a result of
her relationship with [Link], who uses 'psychological warfare' against
her in a very modern battle of the sexes (Millett 1977, 263). Millett
notes that Birkin tries to establish his relationship with Ursula as an
ideal of n1odern sexual relations, but comments that his wish to
produce a perfect equilibrium between them 'is betrayed over and
over by tl1e obvious contradictions between preachment and practice'
(262). In particular she objects to the assumption that the balancing
act depends on 'a denial of personality in the woman', on Ursula
becoming 'more and more her husband's creature' (264), as she
resigns her job and becomes Birkin's disciple in her marriage.
There is no correspondence between these content-based readings,
however important they might be, and how a reading inflected by
Kristeva's tlunking might approach the Lawrence's text. Her tech-
nique in readings, arising fron1 her training in linguistics, would tend
to approach texts far more closely, and to submit shorter passages to
rigorous analysis rather than drawing large conclusions from gener-
alised readings. Her interest in the novel-genre's rnultivocal ity, and in
the relationships between abstractable content and the material
forms of language, make close textual study a more appropriate route
jnto critical practice. Moreover, large generalisations cannot be the
aim of a theoretical perspective that is constituted precisely to resist
the totalising critical gesture.
In general terms, Women in Love is certainly open to readings
xefracted through Kristeva. In particular there is a marked tension
throughout the text between the will towards expression and the
narrative's pained realisation of the inadequacy of words to do the
work of expression. Passage after passage is constructed through
sentences whose syntax is on the verge of collapse, and whose
content directly contradicts what is said immediately before and
itnmediately after. The pressure of the Semiotic pulses against the
Symbolic order throughout the prose. Lawrence also reuses words
 136 (Psycho)Analyses

against the grain of their conventional meanings: for example, a word

like 'perfect' is a term of disapproval since perfection is fixed and
undeveloping. He undercuts conventional semantics and enacts his
own revolution (albeit probably a conservative revolution) in the
poetic languages of his texts. What follows is a discussion of a short
passage from the text, chosen deliberately partly because both Millett
and de Beauvoir also mention it, and partly because its content also
allows me to reflect on Kristeva's concept of the chora and on her
thinking about the maternal body as a critical site for the interroga-
tion of the norn1s that structure Western thought.
In Chapter 7 of Women in Love, 'To tern', Gerald Crich, the Midlands
industrialist, a conventional and mechanistic man of whom the novel
disapproves, has found himself in the bohemian milieu of a group of
London artists, friends of Rupert Birkin. He spends the night at the
flat of a man named Halliday, and sleeps with an artist's model called
Puss um. 9 When Gerald gets up in the morning, he is already out of his
depth, feeling threatened by the unconventional behaviour and atti-
tudes of the group, who are, for example, uninhibited about naked-
ness, and perfectly prepared to wander about the house with no
clothes as the sign of their scorn for social norms. The nudity of the
other men disturbs him, seeming 'to detract from his own dignity'
and to reduce his sense of the importance of his hu1nanity (Lawrence
1982, 132). Their bodies in their 'natural state' undermine Gerald's
sense of his own cultured humanity. The totem of the chapter's title is
an African carved figure which represents a woman in parturition.
Gerald does not understand this image, and asks Birkin to explain it to
him:

Birkin, white and strangely present, went over to the carved figure
of the negro woman in labour. Her nude, protuberant body crouched
in a strange clutching posture, her hands gripping at the ends of the
band, above her breast.
'It is art,' said Birlcin .... Strangely elated, Gerald ... lifted his eyes to
the face of the wooden figure. And his heart contracted.
He saw vividly with his spirit the grey, forward-stretching face of
the negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical
stress. It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into
1neaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath. He saw the
Pussum in it. As in a dream, he knew her.
'Why is it art? Gerald asked, shocked, resentful.
 Julia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 1 37

'It conveys a complete truth,' said [Link]. 'It contains the whole
truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.'
'But you can't call it high art,' said Gerald.
'High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of develop-
ment in a straight line, behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of
culture, of a definite sort.'
'What culture?' Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer
African thing.
'Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness,
mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme.'
But Gerald resented it. He wanted to keep certain illusions, certain
ideas like clothing. (133, emphasis in original)

This object is strangely out of place in 'an ordinary London sitting-

room in a flat, evidently taken furnished, rather common and ugly'
(127). It does not belong there, and when Gerald first sees it, he
wonders if it is 'obscene', and is shocked when Birkin pronounces
that it is 'art' . As Lynda Nead has suggested, 'obscene' is a word of
obscure etymological origins, but it is possible that it is derived from
the Latin word 'scena', thus meaning 'what is off, or to one side of the
stage, beyond presentation ... the art/obscenity pairing represents the
distinction between that which can be seen and that which is just
beyond representation' (Nead 1992, 25). The staging of the totem
figure in a suburban London flat is a context that alters its possible
readings. An African context would render the totem as an object of
veneration, as a symbol of something more than itself, and as a focus
for worship. When Birkin describes it as 'art' he places it as a fetish or
totem of a different kind: he displaces the original purpose of,Norship
from an African culture and claims it for a westernised aesthetic that
robs it of its original power.
One of the interesting things about this passage, then, is the extent
to which both men are somehow 'wrong' in their response to the
object. Gerald's disgust is explicitly set up as a poor response to the
artefact; Birkin 's position is more ambiguous, since in naming the
statue as art, he is at least giving it a kind of value that can be under-
stood by himself and his European friends. But the naming of an
object as 'art' (like the naming of a text as 'literature') renders it
untouchable, unsusceptible to analysis. Birkin's comment that the
statue 'conveys a complete trutl1', that it 'contains the whole truth of
that state whatever you feel about it' is intensely problematic. The
 1 38 (Psycho)Analyses

idea of cornplete or whole truth fixes the figure into a single state. He
goes on to say that the statue expresses 'really ultimate physical
consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final,
supreme.' But would a woman examining this figure feel the same? It
is, after all, the representation of a process. Neither parturition nor the
birth itself are final. They are, as it were, beginnings of something
other than themselves - the outset of maternity for the woman, the
beginning of life for her child. Thus, although Birkin's naming of this
figure as 'art' values it, he is also submitting the figure to something
that orders and fixes it into the Symbolic realm. The message he
abstracts from the statue's text is not quite true to what the statue-text
itself represents as a process (proces), both an ongoing motion and a
trial.
Moreover, both men in their different responses to the statue insist
on its inarticulacy, its speechlessness or rneaninglessness or n1ind-
lessness. The wornan lacks language - or rather, they are incapable of
hearing or reading her message. For although the figure represents
'utter physical stress', an animality that appears to undermine her
humanity, it is also a figure of culture, created out of a culture that
values the image of the childbearing woman as an object of power. It
is an object that has a specific form which, in the context of an ugly
London flat, draws attention to itself; it is a material object that is out
of place. But it is also an object that has 1neaning, even if that
meaning cannot be clearly articulated, as Lawrence's description of
Gerald's reaction, with its accumulated and contradictory adjectives,
suggests. Like the figure of the Kristevan chora, the tote1n contains
oppositions and thereby undoes the oppositional structure of
either/or which is how both Birkin and Gerald understand their
world. Birkin's symbolic pronouncement, 'it is art', cannot in the end
fix the figure into a Symbolic structure that absolutely contains it. His
struggle to 'explain' the figure to Gerald ends in failure since Gerald
wants 'to keep certain illusions, certain ideas like clothing'. The syntax
of that sentence with its confusion of whether 'ideas like clothing' is a
simile comparing ideas to clothing (ideas shrouding the nakedness of
natural man and rendering him human and cultured), or whether it
means that Gerald more literally prefers to keep his clothes on (in the
context of a scene full of naked men) impHes in language the polylogi-
cal realm in which form and content collapse into each other.
For Kate Millett, the toten1 figure is 'a rebuke to the dangerous
personal and artistic aspirations' represented by Ursula's sister,
 Ju l ia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 139

Gudrun, in the novel. The statuette reduces woman 'to the level of a
suffering animal, her face "transfixed and rudimentary'". Birkin
'lectures on her meaning, proving that in the ;'savage woman" one
sees the perfection of female function' (Millett 1977, 268). And
Simone de Beauvoir reads the statue as Lawrence's emblem of
perfected female self-abnegation: 'Nothing could be more beautiful
than that little statue of a \>voman in labour', since she signifies
LawTence's view that 'it is not by asserting his singularity, but by
fulfilling his generality as intensely as possible that the [male or
female] individual can be saved' (de Beauvoir 1997, 245). Both of
these readings, for all their differences, focus their attention on a
content they can abstract from the text; and both also regard the text,
and Birkin's position in it, as representative of Lawrence's own views.
A closer attention to the tensions in the writing gives a different
perspective. And if one follows Ursula's relationship with Birkin to its
end in the novel, it is clear that Birkin's views are modified by his
contact with his wife: he may have the novel's last words, but they are
not necessarily triumphant or assertive. What Millett sees as his
Symbolic authority, his phallic pride, is always under pressure from
the pulsations of Ursula's opposition. A reading inflected by Kristeva's
ideas of the contemporaneous existence of Symbolic and Semiotic
utterance, and by her sense of speaking and writing as a process
rather than a fixed position, allows us to reread Lawrence's book for
the unconscious motivations that unsettle his supposedly entrenched
masculist position and 1nake fissures in his prose.

1 have chosen 1ny second example because Kristeva's own work on

'poetic' texts has concentrated its attention on avant-garde or
·modernist writing, on texts that are inherently 'difficult' because of
their refusal of transparency. Kate Atkinson's 1995 novel, Behind the
Scenes at the Museum, perhaps feels like an odd choice here, sirlce it is
not a difficult book, indeed has enjoyed a great deal of popular
acclaim, and was on the best-selJer lists in Britain for several weeks
after its paperback publication in 1996. What I want to suggest here is
that Kristeva's thinking has somethirlg to say to us even in relation to
texts that do not advertise an explicitly avant-garde impetus.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum is the story of Ruby Lennox from
her conception (with which the novel opens) to her mature reflections
on life after her mother's death some forty-five years later. Alongside
 140 (Psycho)Analyses

the focus on Ruby's story as she grows to maturity, there is a second

narrative strand, chapters which are titled throughout as footnotes.
The footnote chapters tell Ruby's fanilly history on her mother's side,
starting with an errant great-grandmother named Alice who ran away
with an itinerant French photographer with devastating results on the
children she left behind; there is the story of the woman who replaced
Alice in the family as a stepmother; there are the stories of Alice's
surviving children, Lillian and Nell (who will eventually be Ruby's
grandmother) and their brothers; and finally, there is the sto1y of
Bunty, Ruby's mother. The status of the footnotes is difficult to gauge.
The narrator's voice throughout the novel is Ruby's voice. It is clear
that the story of the past is supposed to be seen as informing the
present. And yet Ruby tells us things that logically she cannot know -
the secret responses of various ancestors to particular events are
reconstructed and then presented as fact by an uncannily omniscient
narrator, who nonetheless does not know about the most important
event of her own life (the death of her twin sister) until near the end of
the text, thus calling into question her knowledge of all the other
things she describes. The footnotes also deal with personal responses
to official history. They chart, for example, the two world wars and
their effects on the life of the family. Ruby's life is similarly punctu-
ated by large events. Her early memories include a family gathering
around the television to see the Coronation in 1953. Later, she is
bridesmaid at a wedding that takes place unfortuitously on the same
day as England's victory in the 1966 World Cup, an event duri!:1g
which her father dies of a heart attack in a farcical illicit coupling with
a waitress at the wedding reception. Small lives and big events are
juxtaposed, registering the ways in which people's lives are experi-
enced both as personal and individual and as mediated by allegiances
to larger groups. The experience of selfhood is very much presented
as a both a process and a trial; tragedy and farce coexist and inform
each other, neither taking precedence in the narrative's structure.
A second point about the footnotes is that they impose a partial
patterning on events as the past leaks into the present. It is hinted, for
example, though never stated, that 'Auntie Doreen', Ruby's father's
'bit on the side' in the 1950s is the san1e girl who slept with her cousin,
over from Canada during the war, left pregnant and bereft by his
death when he is shot down in a plane in a bombing raid over
Germany. The pattern is there, but it is only half-glimpsed, making
the narrative of history- even personal history combined with official
 J ulia Kristeva: Rewriting the Subject 141

history - only a very partial explanation of the past. Behind the Scenes
is, in other words, a novel in part about the limitations of story-telling,
the inability of narrative to tell ail. Sin1ilarly, the recurrent pattern of
twins in the family seems to be significant but its precise significance
is never brought to the surface: it is just there as a pressure on the
seamless present, appearing sometimes as comedy, son1etimes as
tragedy.
The tensions between knowing and being - the tension of the
speaking subject in process - are present from the outset with Ruby's
appearance on the scene as an incongruously knowing emb1yo at
conception:

I exist! I an1 conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock on the

mantelpiece in the roo1n across the hall. The clock once belonged to
my great-grandmother (a woman called Alice) and its tired chime
counts me into the world. 1'111 begun on the first stroke and finished
on the last when my father rolls off my 1nother and is plunged into a
dfeamless sleep, thanks to the five pints of John Smith's Best Bitter he
has drunk in the Punch Bowl ,,v:ith his friends, Walter and Bernard
Belling. At the n1oment at which J moved from nothingness into
being my mother was pretending to be asleep - as she often does at
such moments. My father, however, is made of stern stuff and he
didn't ler that put him off.
My father's na1ne is George and he is a good ten years older than
my mother, who is now snoring into the next pillow. My mother's
name is Berenice but everyone has always called her Bunty.
'Bunty' doesn't seem like a very grown-up name to me - would I be
better off with a mother with a different name? A plain Jane, a mater-
naJ Mary? Or something romantic, something that doesn't sound
quite so much like a girl's comic - an Aurora, a Camille? Too late now.
Bunty's name will be 'Mummy' for a few years yet, of course, but after
a while there won't be a single maternal noun (mummy, mum, mam,
ma, n1ama, 1nom, marmee) that seems appropriate and I n1ore or less
give up caJling her anything. Poor Bunty! (Atkinson 1996, 9)

ln that passage, we can see the glorious illogicality and exuberance

with which the text as a whole is written. It is a novel that overspills
boundaries and thus exemplifies the function of the chora established
by Kristeva as a realm which refuses the logic non-contradiction, of
either/or by inhabiting the spaces of and/both. It is clearly impossible
for the embryo who will beco1ne Ruby to proclaim her [Link] existence.
 142 (Psycho)Analyses

It is even more impossible - if degrees of impossibility are imaginable

- for Ruby to situate that existence in the terms of literary beginnings,
in her reference to the chimes of the tired dock. Like both Tristrarn
Shandy and David Copperfield, the clock is essential to her beginning.
But her ability to know the clock rather suggests that the tune is out of
joint.
Alongside these references to the 'high' cultural form of literature,
Ruby is also situated by the low cultural references of her individual
family circwnstances: the five pints of John Smith's Best Bitter, her
mother's sexual indifference and her father's sexual persistence, all of
which will recur as themes through the novel, are always already
constitutive of her world and her place in it. While the text is illogical
in terms of its structuring of time and knowledge accoriling to
common-sense versions of reality and to conventional linear narra-
tive of time, it is also a version of polylogic. Ruby cannot know these
things now. But she can know them retrospectively through the imag-
inative reconstruction of her parents' marriage, and through the
process of education that she undergoes as a growing child. Indeed
they are the circumstances that have formed her. Like James Joyce's
Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, nan1ing
things and people is a significant part of the process of develop-
1nent. LO The world one names is the world one knows. Ruby's careful
naming of her father and mother in the second paragraph, and her
concern over how she ceases to name her mother because no name
for her seems to fit Bunty's rather morose reality, at once demonstrate
the necessity of language and its contingency. The failure of words
that name the 1naternal function registers a theme that will be
returned to throughout the novel, that Bunty is an inadequate
mother, and that her inadequacies have to do with her inarticulacy -
what Ruby will later call her 'autistic mothering' (374); Ruby cannot
nan1e her mother because she cannot reconcile Bunty with the
cultural images of maternity that she has grown to expect.
Even that earliest of words - the word that names a parent as
'mummy' or 'daddy' - registers the doubled presence of both
Syinbolic and Se1niotic in language because it names both a de1nand
on the parent (a call for a physical need to be met), and articulates a
social relationship. Ruby's chain of possible mother-words are each
socially and historically inflected. When she calls her mother
'mummy' for a few years, as well as signalling the mother's maternity,
she also articulates her own dependence - mun1my is a small child's
 Ju l ia Kristeva; Rewriting the Subject 14 3

word in contemporary English culture. 11 The contractions 'mum',

'roam' and 'ma' dramatise the contraction of the n1other's role in the
life of the growing child. 'Mama' exists in her vocabulary as a literary
allusion to nineteenth-century novels she may have read; 'mom'
signals an exposure to American culture, and 'marmee', the name
given to Mrs March by her daughters in Little Women, combines the
literary and the Amedcan. Bunty's reality, for alJ that she imagines
herself as a latter-day Deanna Durbin or Vivien Leigh, simply will not
match up to any of the words that encase the concept of mother.
Their 1nateriality does not suit her version of maternity.

Kristeva's work is complex and difficult, but it is also rewarding. It has

the potential to liberate the feminist critic fron1 repeated gestures of
critical disapproval of literary representation. Her sense that language
is polyvalent, and that the speaking subject is always speaking 'in
process', opens up textual spaces in which readers can see and
analyse the contradictions and fissures inherent in all textual prac-
tices. Her co1nbination of linguistic, political and psychoanalytic
discourses is a major contribution to feminist thinking. And whilst it
may be neither possible nor desirable to reproduce an accurate
textual impersonation of her readings of poetic language, it is both
possible and desirable to make use of her insights in fanning readings
of our own.

Notes

1. Poetic language is Kristeva's preferred term for what most people

might caU literature. For an explanation of the term, see below.
2. The details for the interview are: Jean Paul Enthoven, Interviewer,
'Julia Kristeva: a quoi servent les intellectuels?', Le Nouvel Observateur,
June 20, 1977.
3. For a clear exposition of Kristeva's intellectual history see: Leon S.
Roudiez's Introduction to Julia Kristeva. Desire in Language: A
Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981 ,
pp. 1-20; Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory,
London: Methuen, 1985, pp. 150-73; Toril Moi, Introduction to The
Kristeva Reader, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 1- 22.
4. The English language translation of Revolution in Poetic Language, by
 1 44 (Psycho)Analyses

Margaret \!Valier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), is in fact

only a partial translation. It reproduces Kristeva's theoretical frame-
work which constitutes the first half of the book; but it 01nits her
specific readings of such njneteenth-centwy avant-garde writers as
Stephane Mallarme.
5. Roudiez is here quoting Kristeva's own words, from Recherches pour
une semanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1969, pp. l 78-9.
6. Adrienne Rich's book, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution (London: Virago, l 977) makes a simjJar point in different
terms. Rich's argu1nent is that female experiences of maternity are
invalidated by the social formations (the institutions of the title) that
appear to celebrate maternity, but which often undermine it.
7. Kristeva acknowledges her debt to Marina Warner's book, Alone of All
Her Sex: The Myth and Cult ofthe Virgin Mary (London: Picador [1976).
1990), for the treatise that occupies tl1e right-hand side of her essay.
Warner's book is significant here because of her insistence that Mary,
far from being an embodiment of the 'eternal feminine' is in fact a
figure who takes on the attributes of each historical period in which
she appears. That focus in Warner's writing supports Kristeva's
contention throughout her writing that all images are culturally and
historically specific rather than universals. That tl1e cult of the Virgin
Mary has a history is significant for any feminist reappropriation of her
myth because it shows her as a changing dynamic figure, not as a
fixed, perfected image of [Link] to which all women must aspire
and to which no woman may ever attai.11.
8. De Beauvoir is quoting Lawrence's book, Fantasia of the Unconscious
(London: Heinemann, 1961 [19231) in this passage.
9. Pussum's name is, of course, an obvious sexual pun, and there is
indeed a sense in the novel that her role is to act as available 'pussy' for
a nun1ber ofmaJe characters.
10. In the early part of Joyce's novel, the young Stephen is obsessed with
naming the world, and with workjng out how he fits into it. Joyce's
point is that we can only conceptualise what we can name; our
language constitutes our notion of reality. The making of the real in
language, however, is an inexact science. As time goes on, we discover
the extent to which words do not fit our world: there are ugly sounds
for beautiful things and vice versa. Language is therefore [Link]
contingent in his novel. It makes but does not fix reality.
11. In other parts of the British Isles, and in other parts of the English-
speiling world, this is not necessarily the case; but in England, the
shift from 'mummy' to 'mum' marks a process of maturation, a
growing away from childish things and words which begins around the
 Julia Kristeva : Rewr i ting the Subjec t I 45

time that a child goes to school. In Scotland and Ireland, however,

'mummy' does not have the same implications and can be used by
people of any age.
 6 ' Mirror, Mirror • • • ' .•
Luce lrigaray and
Reflections of and on the
Feminine

Luce Trigaray vvas born in 1930 in Belgium, though she is now a

French national. As Margaret Whitford has noted, however, she
strongly resists the tendency of criticism to focus on biography,
fearing the kinds of cul feminam critiques that operate by' neutralizing
a woman thinker whose work is radically chalJenging (by reducing
her] to her biography' (Whitford 1991, 1-2). Her work is in the fields of
philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis, and she is also a regular
contributor to Communist newspapers, especially in Italy. Although
she rarely writes specifically about literary texts, she does have impor-
tant things to say to feminist literary theory- those realms of oppres-
sion, repression and expression identified by Showalter as the foci of
feminist thinking.
Her earliest book, Le Langage des dements (I 973, The Language of
the Demented), was an investigation into the linguistic collapse
suffered by patients with senile dementia. Her focus was on the kinds
of subjectivity that can exist for those whose language ceases to be a
transparently expressive medium. She concluded that the dementia
sufferer was disabled from speaking for himself, and was forced to
repeat pre-existing language structures: the de1nented figure was
denied a place from which to speak by the process of his disease, and
ended by 'being spoken' by a language over which he had no control,
which did not reflect any conscious intention, and which therefore
undermined the very notion of subjectivity itself. It was a psycholin-
guistic study, heavily inflected by the training in Lacanian psycho-
analysis that Irigaray had undertaken from the mid-1960s onwards.
That interest in the subject as a speaking and spoken being is

146
 Luce lrigaray: Reflections I 4 7

certainly derived from Lacan's view that subjectivity occurs in and

through language. On the face of it, this does not look like a feminist
intervention. But, as Tori! Moi has argued, 'this passive, imitative or
mimetic relationship to the structures of language [in sufferers from
dementia] is strikingly similar to the ways in [Link] ... women relate to
phallocratic discourse' (Moi 1985, 127). The book in which Irigaray
began to speak of the place of wo1nen in relation to the patriaJchal
languages of philosophy and psychoanalysis was Speculum of the
Other Woman, published fust in 1974, which was also lrigaray's
doctoral thesis. Although this book, too, was heavily indebted to
Lacan, Irigaray's main focus in Speculum was on the 'mastering'
discourse of philosophy.
There was a personal cost to this second text. Imn1ediately it was
published, Jrigaray was expelled from the Ecole freudjennne at
Vincennes, a research institution then under the directorship of
Jacques Lacan himself, and was sacked from her University post
there. Lacan was notorious for disapproving of theoretical deviations
from his own point of view. Presumably, he recognised the implicit
attack on his own position that Speculum represented. In fact,
though, Lacan is not named in the book, which is a wide-ranging
meditation on the writings of Freud and the Western philosophical
tradition, from Plato onwards. Its structure, though, belies the very
idea of linear history; it begins with Freud and ends with Plato, and it
sets out to undo mono logical traditions of theory and philosophy that
suggest that there is only one way to think or be. Indeed, its very
method as well as its anti-chronological ordering attacks the position
of monologi<:. As Jane Gallop writes:

[The] encounter between lrigaray's feminist critique and Freud's final

text on woman is an important training ground for a new kind of
battle, a feminine seduction/disarming/unsettling of the positions of
phallocratic ideology. Irigaray's tactic is a kind of reading: close
reading which separates the text into fragments of varying size,
quotes it, and then comments with various questions and associa-
tions. She never sums up the meaning of Freud's text, nor binds all
her commentaries, questions, associations into a unified representa-
tion, a coherent interpretation. Her commentaries are full of loose
ends and unanswered questions. As a result, the reader does not
easily lose sight of the incoherency and inconsistency of the text.
(Gallop 1982, 56)
 1 48 (Psycho)Analyses

In other words, lrigaray's critique in no way establishes itself as a

master-narrative, a paraphrase that masters (mistresses?) the found -
ing texts of psychoanalysis, whether by Freud or by Lacan. Instead,
she mimics the psychoanalytic session in her writing: her written rela-
tionship with Freud (and later with Plato) is a dialogue of questions
and occasionaJ answers, in which neither she nor Freud has the last
word. Indeed, it might well be this sense of the dialogic in psycho-
analysis that attracts Irigaray to it; while she very often criticises the
content of Freud's writings, she has successfully appropriated his
forn1 as the context in which her critique can take place.
So, although lrigaray was very distressed by her exile frorn the
psychoanalytic community (she herself called it a 'quarantine'
[Whitford 1991, 5). implying that the psychoanalytic academy saw her
as infecting agent), she continues to use the insights of psychoanalytic
theory even as she also provides a radical critique of its ' blind spots'. 1
But as Margaret vVhitford has noted, her most recent work demon-
strates a concern with having an effect on society, with changing
social norms and values. Her attitudes, however, are not straightfor-
wardly materialist, even when she discusses material conditions. As
she writes in the Preface to the collection of essays, Sexes and
Genealogies.

Today it is all too clear that there is no equality of wealth, and claims
of equal rights to culture have blown up in our faces. All those who
advocate equality need to come to tenns with the fact that their
claims produce a greater and greater split between the so-called
equal units ... Any woman who is seeking equality (with whom? with
what?) needs to give this problem serious consideration. It is under-
standable that women should wish for equal pay, equal career oppor-
tunities. But what is their real goal? ... salaries and social recognition
have to be negotiated on the basis of identity - not equa1ity. Without
women there is no society. Women have to proclaiin this message
loud and clear and den1and a justice that fits their identity instead of
some temporary rights befitting justice for men. To achieve this goal,
women must learn how they relate both to gender and to kinship.
(Irigaray 1993, vi)

In other [Link], the liberal ferninist claim to equal rights within [Link]-
ing social structures is not the answer. When women seek an abstract
equality ('with what?', 'with whom?' are both the pertinent and
 Luce l rigaray: Reflections I49

impertinent questions that lrigaray asks of liberal feminism), they risk

becoming pseudo-n1en, and merely insert themselves into a sociaJ
structure that has always already proven disabling, competitive and
inequitable. Equal rights feminisn1 is not the answer, says Irigaray.
The answers (the plural is important) lie rather in identity.
Identity is, however, a complex thing. In Charlotte Bronte's Villette,
Ginevra Fanshawe asks the 'heroine', Lucy Snowe: 'Who are you Miss
Snowe?'

'You used to call yourself a ntrrse1y-governess; when you first crune

here you really had the care of the children in this house; I have seen
you cany little Georgette in your arms like a bonne - few governesses
would have condescended so far - and now Madame Beck treats you
with more courtesy than she treats the Parisienne, St. Pierre; and that
proud chit, my cousin, n1akes you her bosom friend!'
'Wonderful!' I agreed, n1uch amused at her mystification. 'Who am
r indeed? Perhaps a personage in disguise. Pity I don't look the char-
acter.' (Bronte 1979, 392)

It is a jokey response to what is, in the context, an impertinent ques-

tion. But it raises the difficulties of knowing identity with which
Irigaray is concerned. Ginevra, as it is in her character to do, tries to
define Lucy in terms of her social and econo1nic position, but finds
that her ostensible occupations as nursery-governess or bonne
(nursemaid) do not coincide with the social respect that she has
earned fro1n her employer, Mme Beck, or with the friendship Lucy has
established with the aristocratic figure of Polly Home. Lucy's state-
ment that she is a 'personage in disguise' aJigns her with the fictional-
ity of the literary text; but she is not so immediately readable, and
does not 'look the part'. Her identity is withheld, kept back so that it is
not available to scrutiny, not there to be seen.
ln thinking about identity, lrigaray's writings suggest that who
women are is similarly illegible or invisible, unrepresentable and
unspeakable. For her, identity draws together the disparate discourses
of explanation to be found in psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy,
politics, history (including the family history of genealogy) and the
body. Who we are depends on the complicated intersections of all
these differenl kinds of explanatory narratives. And since all these
discourses are 'man-made', a feminist politics of identity and repre-
sentation needs to make use of, and to modify, all ofthen1. 2
 I 50 (Psycho)Analyses

Looking again: images of femininity, Irigaray and psychoanalysis

Nothing separates female experience fron1 male experience more

sharply and more early in life, than the compulsion to visualise the
self.
Ellen Moers, Literary Women

There is an interesting contrast between the behaviour of the sexes.

In the analogous situation, when a little boy first catches sight of a
girl's genital region, he begins by showing irresolution and lack of
interest; he sees nothing or disavows what he has seen ... It is not
until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold on
him, that the observation becomes important to him: if he then recol-
lects or repeats it, it arouses a terrible storm of emotion in him and
forces him to believe in the reality of the threat he has hitherto
laughed at. This combination of circumstances leads to two reac-
tions, which rnay become fixed and will in that case, whether sepa-
rately or together or in conjunction with other factors, permanently
detennine the boy's relations to w01nen: horror of the mutilated crea-
ture or triu1nphant contempt for her ...
A little girl behaves differently. She makes her judgement and her
decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is witl1out it
and wants to have it.
Sigmund Freud, 'So1ne Psychical Consequences of the
Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes'

In Lacan's mirror stage the infant is fixed, constrained in a represen-

tation which the infant believes to be tl1e Other's, the n1other's image
of her [or him?]. The representation freezes the nameless flow ... Yet
without representation there is only infantile passivity, powerless-
ness, anxiety. The only way to move is to exercise power and criticize
it, not let it gel into a rigid representation.
Jane Gallop, Feminis,n and Psychoanalysis:
The Daughter's Seduction

In the scene Freud describes where the boy-child sees the girl -child's
genitals, the emphasis is on his 'seeing', with all the en1phasis that
implies on distance, perspective, objectivity and mastery. For Freud
seeing eventualJy becomes believing. For the boy-child, what he first
sees is unthreatening absence in the girl; later he sees a significant
and dangerous lack in her that appears to threaten his own 1nasculine
 Luce l rigaray: Reflections I S I

identity with castration. What he sees and the way he sees it deter-
mine his subsequent response to the idea of femininity: it is either
monstrous or contemptible because it is different from what he sees
in his own body, one of the sites of his own subjectivity. In this scene
the boy-child has alternative responses: indifference, horror, triumph.
The girl-child has only one response: desire for the apparently
missing penis. Freud cannot imagine other ways of responding to the
sight of the male genitals that might include laughter, horror, disgust,
curiosity - and, importantly, indifference to the boy's possession. His
writing of this scene, that is, is cons r·. 1cted from a space of masculine
privilege that asswnes that sexed [Link] is necessarily male.
For Irigaray, this is one of the blind spots of psychoanalysis, which
begins by inscribing inequality in sexuate identity. The blind spot
derives fro1n Freud's failure to imagine a female desire that is not
penis-oriented, not directed at this one object of absolute sexual
potency. In This Sex Which is Not One (1977), her critique is in part
directed against the monological construction of sexuality as inher-
ently masculine. She argues that 'Fe1nale sexuality has always been
conceptualised on the basis of masculine parameters'; Freud has
'nothing to say' about woman and her pleasure because her sex is an
absence, a nothing-to-be-seen (Irigaray 1985a, 23). This is a failing in
Freudian analysis, but it is also an understandable failing that does
not undo the importance of psychoanalysis. Freud was a man of his
time, influenced not only by the n1ores of the late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries, but also by the entire philosophy of
Western Europe, which was also a significant part of his training. In
Irigaray's terms, what Freud describes is in no sense a naturally
occurring develop1nent of sexuality and gendered identity in men and
women, but the result of a whole history of philosophy that was struc-
hued on sinillar asswnptions. If 'Woman ... is only a more or less
obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies' in the sexual
imaginary of the present, this is because of the effects of her disap-
pearance from subjective identity that are, in turn, the consequence
of her disappearance from social, civic, econon1ic, philosophical and
religious importance.

As Freud admits, the beginnings of the sexual life of a girl child are so
'obscure', so 'faded with time', that one would have to dig down very
deep indeed to discover beneath the traces of this civilization, this
history, the vestiges of a more archaic civilization that might give
 I 52 (Psycho)Analyses

some clue to women's sexuality. That extremely ancient civilisation

would undoubtedly have a different alphabet, a different language.
(25)

In that different language, female sexuality might be representable,

nlight be allowed a linguistic and thence a social existence - might
become presence rather than absence.
For lrigaray, it is the emphasis on seeing and believing - and
on telling what one has seen - that is responsible for disappearance of
fen1ale sexuality, for the elision of differences in sexualities, and for
the inscription of that monological sexual identity that depends
entirely on the possession of the penis. She argues that women are
less likely than men to be aroused by seeing an erotic image; and that
they are also less likely to be turned off by seeing too:

the predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination of fom1, is

particularly foreign to fe1nale eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more
from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominant
scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is
to be the beautiful object of contemplation. While her body finds
itself thus eroticized, and called to a double movement of exhibition
and of chaste retreat in order to stimulate the drives of the [male]
'subject', her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see. A
defect in this systematics of representation and desire. A 'hole' in its
scoptophilic lens. It is already evident in Greek statuary that this
nothing-to-see has to be excluded, rejected, from such a seen€ of
representation. Won1an's genitals are simply absent, masked, sewn
back up inside their 'crack'. (25-6)

For Western culture, says Irigaray, seeing is the place of privilege.

What you can't see - or what you can't see easily - can't be there: 'So
woman does not have a sex organ?' (28). And if she has no sex
organ, how can she have, express, write or live a sexuality of her own?
The problem, says Irigaray, is not with woman, but with the systems
of representation which focus on sight, and which render women as
the objects of other people's (111en's) appraising and appropriative
gazes.
In this critique of seeing, Jrigaray also criticises and 1nodifies
Lacan's construction of the mirror phase in the infant. In his seminar
'Le Stade du miroir' (usually translated as 'The Mirror Stage'), Lacan
had argued that one of the formative moments of a child's develop-
 Luce lrigaray: Reflections 153

ment is when he (sic) catches sight of himself in a mirror. Seeing his

own reflected image allows the child to hypothesise his own identity,
and to view that identity as coherent and stable, as particular, individ-
ual and at one with itself. Lacan, however, had read the fow1ding
works of structuralism by Ferdinand de Saussure; when he suggests
that the image the cruld sees is not himself, but rather an image of
himself, and that therefore the child's recognition of hilnself is in fact
a misrecognition, Lacan was appealing to the Saussurean concepts of
signifier and signified, which are the connected, but not the self-iden-
tical, constituents of words. For Lacan, this misrecognition is a kind of
necessary fiction, for as Gallop puts it, 'without representation there is
only infantile passivity, powerlessness, anxiety'. Possessing a single,
coherent image, even if the image is a kind of lie, is a necessary stage
in the formation of subjectivity.
For Irigaray, it is necessary to rewrite this paradigm of one-ness and
coherence. She concentrates on the idea that the mirror image is a
signifier, and is therefore part of a system of representation as
opposed to an unmediated reality. It is the syste1n of representation
based on sight, not reality itself, that replicates sameness, that insists
on the identification of image and self as the same. She argues that all
the major representations of Western thought, based as they are on
the seeing male 1/ eye, have constructed a logic of the same wruch she
calls 'hommosexual'. There is a pun here in French, as in English,
deriving from the etymology of two words that sound the same:
'homo', Greek for same, and 'homo', Latin for man. In the logic of the
same, male identity is sexed identity, and sexuality is therefore always
the same thing, always one thing: a masculine thing. The feminist
task, Irigaray argues, is to break up this logic, to pose alternative
systems of representation than those based on the 'seeing-believing'
model, and to find new languages in which women can render them-
selves speakable, representable and, importantly, in which women's
sexuality can be understood not as one thing, the lacking Other of
male sexuality, but as many positive presences.
This is the force of the two titles of her best-known works, Speculum
of the Other Woman and This Sex which is not One. A speculum is a
concave mirror, like the internal surface of a spoon. The image it
reflects in its surface is therefore upside-down. The speculum, as
opposed to the flat mirrored surface in which the Lacanian child
presumably constructs his self-image, radically demonstrates that
image and self, signifier and signified, are not the same, are not as
 154 (Psycho)Analyses

one. In addition, the speculum is the kind of mirror used to examine

the cavities of the body: in particular, dentists use specular mirrors to
examine teeth; and gynaecologists use speculums to examine the
vagina during internal examinations on female patients. The specu-
lum is absolutely not, then, a nlirror that frames visual experience
with distance and perspective. It is, as it were, an intimate mirror; a
mirror that helps one to see, but which also touches the objects it
examines, denying the alleged n1astery of distance. A physicist might
call it a distorting mirror: but for lrigaray, its importance is precisely
that it illustrates the extent to which the tlat 'realist' mirror of patriar-
chal syste1ns of representation is also a distorting mirror, refusing to
reflect female sexuality on a woman's own terms. Irigaray sees that
realist mirror as a frozen mirror, a mirror that fixes images into one
version and that enforces distance: 'the mirror is a frozen - and
polemical - weapon to keep us apart.... The rnirror, and indeed the
gaze, are frequently used as tools that ward off touching and hold
back fluidity, even the liquid embrace of the gaze' (lrigaray 1993a, 65).
She proposes the speculum as an alternative mirror of intimate
embrace with many meanings.
This Sex which is not One, like the 'homo-ho1no' of 'hommosexual-
ity', is a pun. Puns, of course, disrupt the logic of the same, since they
depend on two or 1nore possible meanings for the 'same' words.
lrigaray's title draws on the subversive potential of punning: it means
both ·this sex which is not a sex' - si nee woman has no sexuality of her
own; and 'this sex which is not single, unified, coherent, this <;ex
which is not one sex'. Her aim in Speculum and This Sex is to rewrite
the term 'sexuality' so that it means not one thing, but many: so that
'hommosexuality' can become multisexualities. In order to do this,
Irigaray returns to the female body as the site of feminine sexualities
that are multiple, since her pleasures are not focused on one organ
like the male penis, but on lots different erogenous zones. First, her
genitalia are already doubled: 'Woman "touches herself" all the time,
and 1noreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are
formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, ,,vithin herself, she is
already two ... that caress each other' (Irigaray 1985a, 24). More than
that, in fact: 'woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds
pleasure almost anywhere' (28). Erotic zones, that is, need not be
limited to the genital area - a limitation that serves male fantasy
rather than fe1nale pleasure. All parts of the a woman's body can
partake of her sexuality, so long as she has found a system of repre-
 Luce lrigaray : Ref l ect1on1 ISS

sentation that permits the aniculation of her multiple pJca<iurcs. ·r he

body and the languages in which it is understood a rc inl crrc;l,Jtcd in
lrigaray's thought. Women have to learn a new <,pccch in order to
develop a sexuate identity of their own, since sexuatc identity, like all
modes of subjectivity, depends on the use of language.

Speech is never neuter/neutral

It is perhaps in her writing about speech and language use that

lrigarats \\7litings are most approachable from the point of view of
literary theory. 1n this context, again, she both mares use of and
modifies Lacanian psychoanalysis. From Lacan ~he takes the in'light
that subjectivity is linguistically constructed: to become the 'i1Jbject of
a sentence or a verb is the prerequisite of identity the c,pcakcr
becomes whats/he says or ,vhat s/he can imagine $aying. 'fhc rela
tionship behveen identity and language is foundational. Jmplicitly,
though, Jrigaray's writings are also a critique of Lacan 'c, crnphl!Hi<. ,,n
the Symbolic order, on the languages of mastery, power, objectivity
of, in the end, masculinity. As T've already suggested, the very '>tru<-
ture of Speculum ofthe Other Woman undermines [Link] Symb(Jlic order
through a kind of creative disorder. And individual c"<,ay'> further
mimic that disruption in their refusals of totalising narratives ,Jr
complete allS\~ers to their many rhetorical qut.-stions. What lrigaray
proposes, both in her practice and in her contenL, is the need t<J
develop alternative linguistic systems, alternative modes r,f rcprcM:n -
tation; she seeks to rewrite the Symbolic order in c,uch a way that
it ,vould allov., \.\'omen a space to speaf<' from, and which w,,uld
ajso permit \VOmen to hear their O\VO speech as valuable. She
calls this women's speech •parler-femme', a phrase that mean,;
'speaking \.voman', 'speaking about woman' and 'woman speaking to
women'.
Like Helene [Link]'s ecriture feminine l!>ee above and Chapter 7>,
par/er-femme refuses [Link] logic of the 'self-same' di'>U,urscs of mas<-1J
line power, and is thus connected to the multiplicity of feminine ~xu
ality. Parler-femme refuses to taJJr 'straight refu!>e~ the; lirnitaJions of
coherence and stability that are to be found in the JteaJht phalJo<.:ratic
modes of ,vriting that make up the Symbolic order. Jt is a rnctonyrnic
language practice rather than a metaphoric ont: that ,s, it depi:ndc, on
connections made by contiguity, \'fllich are often 'i1Jogical . rather
 1S6 (Psycho)Analyses

than on connections made on the basis of similarity or sameness,

which are supposed to be understood as making logical sense.
Women's words, writes lrigaray:

are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of

reason, inaudible, for whoever listens with ready-1nade grids, with a
fully elaborated code in hand. For in what she says too, at least when
she dares, woman is constantly touching herself. She steps ever so
slightly aside from herself with a munnur, an exclamation, a whisper,
a sentence left unfinished .... When she retUins, it is to set off again
fron1 elsewhere. [...) One would have to listen wiili anoilier ear, as if
hearing an 'other meaning' always in the process of weaving itself. of
embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order
not to become fixed, congealed in them. (29, emphasis and first ellipsis
in original)

Parler-femme is a language between women that requires syn1pa-

thetic female auditors who listen with 'another ear'. This other ear
discerns the subtexts and alternative patterns in women's speech. It is
necessary, Irigaray argues, because without it, 'if we go on speaking
the same language together, we're going to reproduce the saine
history' (205). But not speaking is not an option. Silence is death,
since subjectivity requires language. At the end of This Sex which is
not One, then, Irigaray, writes:

Speak, all ilie same. It's our good fortune that your language is,1't
formed of a single tl1Jead, a single strand or pattern. It comes from
everywhere at once. You touch me all over at ilie same time. In all
senses. Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time? To seduce,
to satisfy, to fill one of my 'holes'? ... We are not lacks, voids, awaiting
sustenance, plenitude, fulfilment from ilie oilier. By our lips we are
women: this does not mean iliat we are focused on consuming,
consummation, fulfilment. (209-10)

She draws here on the structuralist linguistics that also influenced

Lacan. Language itself is 1nultiple. The Symbolic order is not the only
route by which the speaker can make herself understood. Speech
comes fro1n the body: you have to take breath to speak, move the
tongue and the teeth, use also perhaps the languages of gesture.3 The
whole body is in play, and the woman's body can become the subject
of language, can satisfy herself, and can satisfactorily represent
 Luce lriga r ay: Ref l ections 157

herself, so long as she is not written out of the equation as a subject of

speech.
All of which sounds like a very Utopian project. But Irigaray's inter-
est in psycholinguistics also leads her to make very practical analyses
of the power of language. particularly in master-narratives like
science, history and philosophy. The title of her 1985 book Parler n'est
jamais neutre translates as both 'Speech is never neuter' and 'Speech
is never neutral'. The point is that privileged language is gendered as
masculine even when it claims to be neutral/neuter/natural. In her
essay 'The Three Genders', 4 Irigaray pursues the implications of non-
neutrality in speech. She argues that the languages of privilege - espe-
cially science in this context - appears to aspire to a kind of neutrality:
'man today is committed to keeping himself out of language, no
longer saying I or you or we'. That is, the language of science seeks to
appear as impartial, neutral, objective rather than subjective. The
point of disguising subjectivity in science is that words are surren-
dered 'to some agent that is supposedly more worthy to articulate our
truth' (Irigaray 1993, 170). Neutered {impersonal) discourse is appar-
ently a matter of nature. Phrases such as 'it is raining, it is snowing'
take place in a neutered voice. Irigaray suggests that the attempt by
powerful discourses to appropriate the neutered position is in fact an
attempt to claim for man-made discourses the power of nature. The
sexed being who says 'I' is displaced by an apparently extra-human
unsexed power that says 'it is so', and this is a powerful tool because
there is a sense in which saying that something is so appears to 'make
it so'. The responsibility of the critic, lrigaray argues, is to 'analyse
very rigorously the forms that authorise ... content' (172), the ways in
which certain kmds of speech make meaning more powerfully than
other kinds.
What Irigaray notes about the power of the neuter voice is that it
has, in fact, been appropriated by masculinity, so that even appar-
ently neutral phrases are really masculine in everyday grammar:

in French, the masculine gender always carries the day syntactically:

a crowd of a thousand persons, nine-hundred and ninety-nine
women and one man will be referred to as a masculine plural; a
couple composed of a man and a woman will be referred to as a
masculine plural; a woman telling the story of her love affair with a
man will have to use the supposedly neutral masculine plural form in
her agree1nent of past participles when she says 'we fell in love' (nous
 15 8 (Psycho)Ana l yses

nous sommes aimes), etc. In other places the neuter is expressed by

the same pronoun as the 1nasculine: il tonne ('it is thundering') and it
faut ('it is necessary'), not elle tonne or elle faut. These laws of syntax
in French reveal the power wielded by one sex over another. (173)

It's for these kinds of reason that Jrigaray sees a parter-femme as

necessary to break down the surface neutrality and 'hommosexuality'
of powerful discourses. If subjectivity depends on language, it is a
function of the ability to say 'I'. Powerful discourses, in their mascu-
line appropriation of the neuter/neutral/natural, leave no space for
femininity, no words in which her subjectivity can be powerfully
expressed, can be expressed as having power. Irigaray's writing here
constitutes a powerful rebuke to people like me. As a university
lecturer, r spend a lot of my life crossing out phrases like 'I think', 'I
believe' from student's essays, because I know that the apparently
objective statement that so1nething 'is so', is far more powerful than
any statement that depends on my own thought or belief. Parler-
femme helps to construct an impertinent feminine 'I' that pokes
wholes in the 'I-less' subjectivity of neutered language.

Politics and French feminism

It is a very common criticism of the kinds of writing produced by

Irigaray, as by Kristeva, indeed of what is now called 'Fren.-;h
Feminism', that they ignore political, materialist and historicist
concerns. A glance at Marks and de Courtivron's collection New
French Feminisms (1981), or at Tori! Moi's French Feminist Thought
(1987) shows that this is a rather skewed view of feminist movements
in francophone traditions. Amongst the essays on psychoanalysis and
philosophy, there are Marxist, materialist and liberal feminist tradi-
tions alive and well in France represented by this coUections, tradi-
tions that coexist with the more obviously theoretical reflections of
Irigaray and Kristeva. For both writers, n onetheless, formal 'party'
politics have been part of their training and experience. As I suggested
in writing of Kristeva, her early life in Bulgaria was profoundly influ-
enced by the political thinking of a Communist regime. And Irigaray
continues to work in dialogue with Italian Communists. For both
writers, though, there are limitations to what political u nderstanding
can do to analyse and alter the position of women. The social and the
 Luce lrigaray: Reflections 159

economic are not adequate explanations for won1en's interpellation

into syste1ns that radically disadvantage them. Moreover, the view
that t heory is not political is also problematic. Irigaray's appropria-
tion s and rewritings of Freud and Lacan demonstrate the political
power that psychoanalysis has claimed for itself - the power to
pronounce on pathology and normality. Her rewritings are therefore
political interventions in discow·se of mastery that unsettle the
master-narratives. Implicitly, she argues that we cannot change the
world without changing the way that we look at the world.
Her work, though, does not deal with historical specificities.
Because the master-narratives against which Irigaray pits herself set
themselves up as universal and eternal, her responses are similarly
slippery customers that posit alternative possible truths. She writes in
grand gestures not in terms of locally-determined, historical specific
differences. Her essay 'Women on the Market', collected in This Sex,
does engage with the politics of women's positions in societies
around the world; but it draws large general, not small particular,
conclusions. The essay begins with the insight from Claude Levi-
Strauss's structuralist anthropology that all cultures appear to be
based on the exchange of women. Women are exchanged, says Levi-
Strauss, because they are scarce, though tl1is 'scarcity' is not an
absolute value, as Irigaray points out birth rates of male and female
children are roughly equal. The scarcity comes about because of a
'deep polygamous tendency' among men which renders wornen
scarce because there are never quite enough of them to satisfy 1nen's
multiple desires. Levi-Strauss was recording what he believed he had
observed. Irigaray looks differently at the issue, wondering to herself
whether women might have polygamous desires, whether it is possi-
_ble to imagine a society in which men's bodies were objects of
exchange between women, whether male bodies are as desirable to
women as women's bodies appear to be to men.
These are, again, impertinent questions; and lrigaray does not quite
answer them. She suggests instead that under the patriarchal organi-
sation of society, it is not possible to imagine women as promiscuous,
polygamous figures with polymorphous desires for many different
men. It is not just psychoanalysis or psycholinguistics that can explain
the unrepresentability of female desire. There are material reasons
that have psychic effects for women, and which construct their subor-
dinate position in patriarchal cultures:
 160 (Psycho)Analyses

all the systems of exchange that organize patriarchal cultures and all
the n1odalities of productive work that are recognized, valued and
rewarded in these societies, are men's business. The production of
women, signs, and commodities is always referred back to men
(when a man buys a girl, he 'pays' the father or the brother, not the
1nother ... ), and they always pass from one man to another, fro1n one
group of men to another. The work force is thus always assumed to
be masculine, and 'products' are objects to used, objects of transac-
tion among men alone. (Irigaray 1985a, 171)

Women are commodities, she s uggests. In an analysis that owes much

to her readings in Karl Marx, they have a use value (that is, they labour
in both senses of that word: they go into labour and they do work) and
they have an exchange value as objects that pass between men. In the
context of the other essays of This Sex, Irigaray's argwnents suggests
that female commodification in social structures intersects with visu-
alisation of their psychic and physical 'lack' in psychoanalytic struc-
tures. She proposes no formal political programme to combat these
structures. Instead, her argument appears to be that women must
make an identity for themselves which will enable them to re-imagine
their social and psychic positions. The process of identifying them-
selves anew is the prerequisite of social change.
It is, perhaps, a chicken-and-egg argument. If social structures
conspire to deny fen1ale subjectivity, how can such a subjectivity
come into existence without changing the social structures? But, on
the other hand, unless the impertinent questions are asked, how can
women even know the tenns of their own oppression and repression?
And how can they express themselves unless they know they need to
learn to do so?

Reading with Irigaray: three Go thic reflections 5

In Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, the young English lawyer,

Jonathan Harker begins to discover the absolute strangeness of the
Transylvanian count when he finds that Dracula has no reflection in a
1nirror:

l had hung n1y shaving-glass by the window, and was just beginning
to shave. Suddenly T felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the
 Luce lrig aray: Reflections I 6 I

Count's voice saying to me, 'Good morning.' I started, for it amazed

n1e that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered
the whole room behind me.... Having answered the Count's saluta-
tion, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This
time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could
see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the
mirror! (Stoker 1984, 37)

Dracula, realising what Harker has seen - or rather, not seen - takes
the mirror and throws it out of the window, pronouncing it a
'wretched thing ... a foul bauble of man's vanity', leaving the lawyer
feeling very annoyed, 'for I do not see how I am to shave' without it
(38).
Dracula's lack of a reflection in the novel stands as a sign of his
supernatural status. It alerts Harker to his strangeness and his danger.
More significantly, though, it is also a powerful disruption of the
world-view that Harker inhabits. The n1irror is traditionally a
metaphor for Realism, those conventions and systems of representa-
tion that are supposed to reproduce the world as it really is in art and
literature. The realist world is a specular world: seeing is believing,
what is not seen cannot be there, hence the uncanny effect of
Dracula's unmarked entrance into Harker's room. Despite his appar-
ent corporeal solidity, he looks like a trick of the light. Now although
Dracula is gendered as masculine, his position in the text, and in rela-
tion to the views of its narrators who are nothing if not realists,
signalled by their professional and social status (two doctors, a
lawyer, an aristocrat, a teacher and an American man of adventure), is
feminised. He is an Eastern European, not a Westerner inhabiting the
traditions of Western rationalist thought. As Judith Halberstram has
· noted, he has the racialised characteristics of the Wandering Jew, who
is, like woman, a dispossessed figure in western patriarchal Christian
cultures (Halberstram in Ledger and McCracken 1995, 248-9). He has,
Dr Van Helsing says, a 'child-brain' not a '1nan-brain', a common
vie\ov of the difference between men and women. And in hls grotesque
assault on Mina Harker (an attack that no 'real man' would have
mounted, since it goes against all the rules of gentle-manliness to
attack a woman at all), he makes her drink blood from his breast in a
perversely monstrous maternal gesture.
Like a woman, Dracula is a figure who evades the representation of
the patriarchal glass, and yet who refuses not to exist. At the end of
 I62 (Psycho)Analyses

the novel, he is defeated, beheaded and staked - and there is nothing

particularly subversive about that ending. On the other hand, the
manner of his defeat has required a paradigm shift in the world-views
of the heroes of masculine rationality, whose belief systems are over-
turned by Dracula's very existence. As Dr Van Helsing comments to
Dr Seward:

you reason well, and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You
do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside
your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are
things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some
people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and
new which must not be contemplate [sic] by ,nen's eyes, because they
know - or think they know - some things that other men have told
then1. Ah, il is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and
if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. (Stoker 1984,
229, n1y ernphasis)

In other words, what Irigaray might call a 'ready-made grid ... a fully
elaborated code' (Irigaray 1985a, 29) for comprehension constructed
by science cannot account for everything. The scientists and lawyers
of Dracula have to learn to see things anew, and to put aside their
codes of knowledge and ethics. They do not defeat Dracula by apply-
ing the systems they explicitly acknowledge; rather they defeat him by
superstition (garlic, crosses, stakes and the communion host), by
forgery (of Lucy Westernra's death certificate), by bribery (of eastern
port officials): in short, they defeat him by believing in him - a belief
that goes against everything they stand for. Their science cannot help
them, as evidenced by their application of the new science of blood
transfusions, that do not save Lucy's life. Dracula may be 1nale; but he
is also 'feminine'. His powerful femininity produces fissures in the
facade of patriarchal knowledge.
In a different kind of Gothic mirror, the speaker of Mary Elizabeth
Coleridge's 'The Other Side of the Mirror' (1908) is indeed reflected;
but the image that she sees is monstrous: 'The vision of a woman,
wild /With more than womanly despaiJ'.

Her hair stood back on either side

A face bereft of loveliness.
It had no envy now to hide
 Luce lrigaray: Reflections 16 3

What once no man on earth could guess.

It formed the thorny aureole
Of hard unsanctified distress.

Her lips were open - not a sound

Carne through the parted lines of red.
Whate'er it was, the hideous wound
In silence and in secret bled.
No sigh relieved her speechless woe,
She had no voice to speak her dread.

And in her lurid eyes there shone

The dying flame of Ufe's desire,
Made mad because its hope was gone,
And kindled at the leaping fire
Of jealousy, and fierce revenge,
And strength that could not change nor tire ...
Colelidge, 'The Other Side of the Mirror' 1908, 8- 9

The horror of the image is in the whispered recognition that "'I am

she!"' When Gilbert and Gubar read this poem in The Madwoman in
the Attic, they saw it as a 1netaphor for female creativity, which,
though bounded by social and psychological limitations, is still able to
express 'an invincible sense of [the speaker's) own autonomy, her
own interiority' (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 16).6 They argue that the
female imagination 'has perceived itself, as it were, through a glass
darkly: until quite recently the wornan writer has had (if only uncon-
sciously) to. define herself as a mysterious creature who resides
behind the angel or monster ... image' of conventional femininity. The
_speaker is 'an enraged prisoner' (15) of the patriarchal glass.
That is an important and interesting commentary. But a reading
inflected through Irigaray's ideas about mirroring might have other
things to say. For one thing, any identification of the 1nirror's image
with the reflecting self is a misrecognition, a misidentification. The
monstrous ghost in the glass is not the self, just as the 'aspects glad
and gay/That erst were found reflected' in the glass were not the self
either. Neither image has anything very much to do with a 'real'
fen1ale identity. As Irigaray writes in her essay 'Divine Women':

Female beauty is always considered a garrnent ultimately designed to

attract the other into the self.... We look at ourselves in the mirror to
164 (Psycho)Analyses

please [Link], rarely to interrogate the state of our body or our

spirit, rarely for ourselves and in search of our own becoming. The
mirror al1nost always serves to reduce us to a puxe exteriority ... The
mirror signifies the constitution of a fabricated (female) other that l
shall put forward as an instrument of seduction in my place. (lrigaray
1993, 65)

The speaker of Coleridge's poem speaks of the silence of the reflected

monstrous image. She can see its despair figured in its bleeding lips
and thorny halo of hair, but the image is inarticulate. The lips in
particular are a figure of the pain of femininity- the lips of the mouth
denied speech, the lips of the genitals denied existence as sexuality.
But those red lips and that wild hair could easily be rewritten as the
fetishised female body parts that are supposed to attract male desire:
lips, hair and eyes are the staple points of emphasis in male-authored
love poetry and in pornographic images. The silence of those red lips
is eloquent despite its wordJessness. Irigaray argues that there is no
language in which women can speak their own desires, their own
sexuate identities. In patriarchal libidinal economies, women are
objects of sexual desire, not desiring subjects. Coleridge's speaker,
then, might be said to misrecognise the image in the mirror as one of
terror, rather than one of desire because she is forced by phallocracy
to represent that desire in relation to male models that insistently
construct female desire as monstrous.
It is nonetheless important that Coleridge has spoken in her poem.
She rnay be speaking a language shot through by the Symbolic order;
but her parter-femme, because it speaks to women who might listen
\!\Tith 'other ears', as well as about women, and because it is spoken by
a woman, it resists the freezing monologic of the patriarchal mirror.
Because language 'isn't formed of a single thread, a single strand or
pattern', it is a creative writing of female identity that can be read
creatively to help us re-imagine fernaJe identities of our own. Gilbert
and Gubar offered one kind of reading; Irigaray's ideas give us
another strand.
One last, and very famous example, is the reflection that Jane
Eyre sees in the Red Room episode of her narrative. Jane is impris-
oned in the Red Room, in a child's version of a Gothic confinement,
follo\i\l'ing her violent outburst against John Reed's treatment of her.
She is unstrung, nervous, and upset in the aftermath of these events,
all of which are 'realist' explanations for her subsequent apparently
 Luce lrigaray: Reflections I 6S

non-realist experiences. Left alone 1n the room, she observes the

1nirror:

I had to cross before the looking-glass; my fascinated glance involun-

tarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in
that visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there
gazing at 1ne, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and
glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of
a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half
imp, Bessie's evening stories represented as coming out lone, ferny
dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers.
(Bronte 1996, 21-2)

Indeed, a few pages later, the reader encounters one of Bessie's (the
nursemaid's) songs, telling of the hard life of the poor orphan
child who haunts the deserted byways of the 1noors (29-30). What
Jane sees in the mirror is, presumably, herself; but unlike Coleridge's
speaker, she does not whisper 'I am she'. Instead, the reflection
appears as quite alien, as supernatural even - a spirit, a phantom, a
fairy, an imp - figures who are not at home in houses like Gateshead,
indeed who are not at home anywhere. (And of course, when Freud
defined the Uncanny, in his essay 'The Unheimlich', it was in relation
to the word's etymology - unheimlich means unhomely, not at
home.7)
The child, however, is not frightened by the image in the 1nirror.
She understands its strangeness but is not afraid of it. She remains
instead preo_c cupied with the causes of her incarceration, and with a
meditation on her place in Mrs Reed's house. The phantom in the
mirror, in other words, does not provoke irrational superstition, but
·rational analysis of her situation, and slightly less rational ideas about
how she is to escape from that situation. She wonders why she could
never please at Gateshead: 'I dared commit no fauJt: I strove to fulfil
every duty; and I was termed naughty and tireson1e, sullen and sneak-
ing, from morning to noon, and from noon to night.' All she can make
of these facts is that they are:

'Unjust! - unjust!' said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus

into precocious though transitory power; and Resolve, equally
wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape
from insupportable oppression - as running away; or, if that could
166 (Psycho)Analyses

not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting 1nyself die.
(22)

That childlike and unfulfilled resolve leads to a meditation on Jane's

dead uncle, in whose room she is now incarcerated with an aching
and bloodied head, and an overwrought frame of mind. As the room
grows darker and the afternoon fades to evening, she thinks about
how he would have treated her had he been alive, and wishes that he
would rise from his grave to punish her aunt and her cousins. That
image, no sooner conjured, seems to be fulfilled by a light shining and
moving along the wall of the room. In Jane's already emotional state,
she screams; but Mrs Reed refuses to free her from the Red Room, and
Jane faints from terror.
What interests me here is the juxtaposition of a Gothic image - the
ghost in the mirror - with Jane's first serious attempt to analyse her
ovvn situation. The mirror image whom Jane does not identify explic-
itly as herself, but which must be her signifier, provides the spur to
reason and resolve: the illogical image provides the conditions for an
alternative logical diagnosis of Jane's position. She is not 'really'
'naughty, tiresome, sullen and sneaking', as the powers-that-be
would have it. Her deliberate misrecognition of the image that is
in1posed on her from outside is the spur to power. At ten years of age,
the power does not last very long and ends in a fainting fit and utter
defeat. But the beginning of this power of logical analysis stems from
the illogical phantom of the Red Room mirror, that allows Jane to see
with other eyes, to hear the criticisn1s of her 'with other ears'. It is a
small moment, but it is foundational in Jane's development into a
grown woman 1Nith a sexuate, desiring identity of her own.

Notes

l. One of the chapters in Speculum of the Other Woman is entitled 'The

Blindspot of an Old Dream of Symmetry'. it refers to Freud's 1933 essay
on 'Femininity', and Irigaray shows in her chapter how Freud remained
captivated by a pseudo-symmetrical theory of male and fen1ale sexual-
ity, despite the obvious asymmetries between them.
2. It could obviously be argued that bodies are not 'n1an-made' . But the
ways that bodies are represented and understood clearly are man-
 Luce lrigaray : Reflections 167

made, and it is representation, and the ways in which we inhabit repre-

sentation, that are at stake jn lrigaray's theoretical interventions.
3. One of the essays in the collection Sexes and Genealogies,
'Psychoanalysis and Gesture', is particularly concerned with reading
the gestures of the psychoanalytic session, with the patient objectified
on the couch before the mastering subjectivity of the seated analyst.
See Luce Trigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 89-104.
4. 'Genders' in this title translates the word 'Genres'. The word 'genre' in
French has a number of meanings. It can mean type or kind, it can
mean genre of literary text; and it can mean gender. Biology, sociology
and literature are all compressed into the possible, multiple references
for this signifier.
5. I think l should repeat here my warning for my readings through a
Kristevan Jens. These readings are not intended as the last word; they
are just possible ways of thinking abouL how Irigaray's writings n1ight
be applied to literary texts.
6. I should, perhaps, note here, that I would not have c01ne across
Coleridge's poem had it not been for Gilbert and Gubar's discussion of
it in The Madwoman in the Attic.
7. See Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' in The Penguin Freud Library, Volume
15, Art and Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, 335-76.
7 Cixous: Laughing at
the Oppositions

In English-speaking countries, Helene Cixous is primarily known as a

theorist of language and literature, and one whose works focus in
particular on the sexual differences inherent in language. This is an
especially pressing issue for a writer/speaker in the French language,
since French is heavily gender-inflected, and any adjective attached
to a speaking subject immediately alerts the reader/hearer to the
issue of gender. Her project is Utopian: her writing seeks what she
calls an ecriture feminine (feminine/female writing), a writing that
could adequately represent female/feminine positions in relation to
culture. 1 There has been a concentration on her interest in the body
and writing, which she sees as linked because of the gender inflec-
tions of French, and this has led in turn to much criticism of her work
because it sometimes appears to be dangerously essentialist, 1nixing
up culture (language) and nature (bodies).
The accusation of essentialism arises in part because of the
vagaries of the French language, a fact that enacts one of Cixous's
most central points: she suggests that language thinks us, and
that a revolution in language practice is a first stage in a revolution
in subjectivity. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the writings of
James Joyce, a writer who \-vas particularly concerned by the idea
that language is at once the medium of thought, and a li1nitation
on thought - one can only think in language, and yet one cannot
think what one has no vocabulary for. One of the problems of the
French language for conceptualising feminisms is the difficulty in
distinguishing between female and feminine. There is a French
word femelle, which is similar in derivation to 'fe1nale'. But it is a
word that cannot properly be used to describe a human female,
being used exclusively to describe the female of animal species.
Thus the word feminin has to do double service for female and
feminine, making it difficult sometin1es to distinguish whether

168
 Cixous: laughing at the Oppositions 1 69

Cixous's usage is one derived from biology or one derived from accul-
turation.
This linguistic fact is important in Cixous's work, though it does
cause problems for readers of her writing in translation. Her ·writing
suggests (rather than states) that the ambiguities of language are both
a trap and a potential space of liberation since ambiguity can produce
fissures and disjunctions in a totalising version of the world. Since
totalisation has tended to suppress women in general, finding the
holes in the arguments can be part of the process of breaking open
the structures (in language and elsewhere) which oppress them.
Her fundamental arguments are based on the premise that the
Enlightenment tradition of Western philosophy, with its emphasis on
gendered binary oppositions, has profoundly influenced the ways in
which knowledge can circulate in the world, and by extension, has
limited the possible meanings of woman who is particularly disadvan-
taged by the closed system of binary logic. She suggests that any
system of binary logic constructed by our society is always a hierar-
chical ·opposition - one term is more privileged, accorded more
status, more power, and more desirability than the other, is defined at
the expense of the other in an economy of the word which then has
real effects. In addition, the less favoured term is always feminine and
Other - so that the feminine is always conceived of as a negative
proposition. Patriarchy shores up its own position of power by devel-
oping a whole series of characteristics which it labels 'feminine' -
characteristics such as sweetness, subservience, irrationality - and it
then elides any distinction between these culturally derived charac-
teristics and ·the female body. Patriarchy argues that if you are born a
woman, if you have a female body, you will necessarily and naturally
.exhibit these characteristics. Not to exhibit them (in case anyone
would dare), is to risk being labelled monstrous, unnatural, anti-
social, deviant, mad. Her attack on patriarchy, then, is that it is patri-
archy itself that is essentialist and biologist; it bestows feminine
virtues on all the female bodies that it is prepared to tolerate.
In themselves, these argu1nents are not new. Even an early feminist
such as Mary Wo!Jstonecraft went this far in analysing the social
structures of patriarchal oppression. But materialist feminists, while
they might accept the analysis, are concerned that Cixous appears to
propose no activist agenda to go with it. That is, she tells us about the
nature of the problem, but not what we should do politically to
combat it. Her relationship to the feminist [Link] is a complex
170 (Psycho)Analyses

one. Cixous did participate in the women's liberation debates in the

1970s, but she is not a card-carrying member of any party. Her
reasons are that she is wary of aligning herself with what she sees as
masculist political procedures. Hers is not a liberal feminism, based
on the bourgeois woman's will to material or political equality with
bourgeois man. She would prefer a more radical shift in power rela-
tions in culture as a whole, as part of her own ideal revolution. In
other words, she fears merely replicating the system as it currently
exists if she engages in fighting it only with its own weapons and on its
own terms. She does not want a mere reversal of the site of privilege
within binary logic. And rather than activist politics, she emphasises
writing itself as the site of the revolutionary expression which will
eventually overthrow both women's material oppression and their
psychic repression.
Her procedure, therefore, is to n1ount a profound critique of the
principle of the binary oppositions that structure Western thought. In
'Sorties', her contribution to the work which has found her widest
English audience, The Newly-Born Woman, co-authored with
Catherine Clement, and published in French in 1974, she argues that
violence and death are at the heart of patriarchal thought. Under the
heading 'Where is she?', she provides the by now infamous list of
binary oppositions:

Where is she?

Activity/ Passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/ Nature
Day/Night

Father/Mother
Head/Heart
l ntelligible/ Sensitive
Logos/Pathos ...
(Cixous 1986, 63, ellipsis in original)

All tl1ese oppositions, she argues, are structured on the underlying

opposition of 'Man/Woman'. Because these oppositions take place in
language, and because language forms what it is possible for us to
think, these relative positions of 1nastery and subordination are
 Cixous: Laughing at the Oppositions 171

inescapable in language and thought as they are currently consti-

tuted. In this schema, woman is defined by passivity, and rendered
non-existent as a subject, since subjects (in grammar as in life) are
participators in action: 'Either the woman is passive or she doesn't
exist. What is left is unthinkable, unthought or (64). Cixous reads the
oppositions as violent and death-dealing because for one of the terms
to inhabit meaning and presence, it must destroy the other term into
meaninglessness and absence. Binary thought is a war zone in which
a struggle for mastery is ceaselessly played out. For this reason, Cixous
does not propose a simple equality within the existing system. Indeed,
it is her contention that such an equality is irnpossible in the existing
system, which is why she is not an activist, since contemporary poli-
tics is so implicated in the system of oppression. Instead, she
proposes that we must rewrite the system in such a way that the
conflict between two terms could be replaced by something else.
The argument takes place both as a theory and as a practice of
writing. It is dramatised, that is, in the forn1s in which Cixous chooses
to write, as well as in her content. Her writing enacts a resistance to a
closed system of duaUty, through a mode of writing which is rhetori-
cal, excessive and poetic rather than logical, ordered and prosaic.
Although she does not cite Lacan, owing a more self-evident alle-
giance to the works of Jacques Derrida, her writing establishes a space
between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, analysing the rules, and
disrupting them through overflowing linguistic practice. In this prac-
tice, then, meaning comes not from the closed relationship of two,
but from an endless stream of differentiations: not one, not two, but
many, an idea which derives from, and partly rewrites in the terms of
gender, Derrida's concept of differance. In French, differance puns on
.two meanings; difference and deferral. Derrida argues that all
meaning takes place within the realm of differance-, words mean in
terms of their differences to other words, rather than having mean-
ings fixed within them, and therefore meaning is always deferred, put
off, never present (see Wolfreys 1998a, for more infonnation). The
binary relationship that appears to affirm the presence and rneaning
collapses, not into meaninglessness, but into a different and deferred
set of possibilities that is not foreclosed (already decided and fixed). It
is this practice that Cixous calls 'ecriture feminine'.
Like Derrida's word 'deconstruction', ecriture feminine 'is not a
method and cannot be transformed into one' (Derrida, ed. Kamuf
1991, 273). The whole problem of the limitations imposed by defini-
 I72 (Psycho)Analyses

tion is precisely what the terms seek to evade, since definition oper-
ates by the same exclusions as binary thought in general - if man is
defined by what woman is not, then feminine writing would be the
negative position in relation to masculine writing. So, writes Cixous:

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an

impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theo-
rized, enclosed, encoded - which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocen-
tric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those
subordinated to philosophico-theoreticaJ do1nination. It will be
conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by
peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate. (Cixous in
Marks and de Courtivron 1981 , 253)

In 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (fron1 which the above extract is taken),
as well as in 'Sorties' and almost all her critical writing, Cixous uses a
language which simply does not read like traditional essay-language.
She refuses the stance of impersonality or objectivity associated with
academic writing. She eschews linearly logical formations. Her
language is poetic, making use of a logic of conflation and juxtaposi-
tion in which the reader is invited to make her O\,vn connections. This
is a politicised writing, because it is a radical attempt to subvert the
prevailing order in writing, the order which has insidiously presented
itself as natural writing. Its rhetoric appeals to the logic of the voice,
where a direct and urgent tone can be as persuasive as argument. It is
an erotic, fluid language, built up around puns, poetic images, and
ellipses (fill in the gaps for yourself). It has none of the conventional
reserve or poise of objectivity of academic writing. The reader is
supposed to be involved completely, in body as well as in 1nind, not
merely in parts as has been the case with a masculine mode of writing
which admits only the mouth and the phallus (sex in the head, mealy-
mouthed academic-speak, in which sexuality is limited to genital
function in the service of masculinity, not of female/feminine over-
flowing excessive desire) (251).
The relationship between writing and the body is appealed to in
many different ways through Cixous's texts. The most obvious place is
in the autobiographical stance she takes up and the perfom1ance of
an autobiographical critique of both literature and philosophy.
Experience, says Cixous, is what has taught her to want to think in a
 Cixous: Laughing at the Oppositions 173

non-linear and non-binary way. She was born, as she sees it, by
historical accident in Algeria. This does not quite make her an
Algerian though. Rather she was an Algerian French girl (Cixous 1986,
70) whose multiple national, racial and gendered identities (her
ancestors Christians and Jews, who came from Spain, Morocco,
Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany; and as a woman she can
claim none of these identities for herself (71)) placed her as a person
in between oppositions. As a French national, she was taught official
French history: 'The routine, "otu ancestors, the Gauls" was pulled on
me' (71). But as a French Algerian, she sees also the other side of the
coin, the master-slave relationship on which the French occupation
of Algeria was predicated. The accident of where a body happens to
have been born, perhaps especially a Jewish body, especially in the
twentieth century, makes a lot of difference in how that body views
the world. From a different subject position (whether the difference is
constituted in tenns of gender, race, nationhood, class), one sees a
different world, or rather, Cixous suggests, one sees multiply different
worlds·proliferating beyond the capacity of Western thought to order
them.
Meaning, then, is carried in and through the body. The body of the
text is related to the bodies of its writers and readers, who choose
their reading and theil" writing routes through the texts on the basis of
where and how their bodies mean. And although bodies are biological
entities, Cixous is much more interested in their cultural meanings
than in the apparently simple facts of sex or race. Thus, for her, femi-
ninity is not a matter of sex; rather it describes a position in relation to
culture which is not dependent on biology, though she concedes that
women are more likely to occupy this position than men are in society
_as it is currently constituted. Both women and men are capable of
feminine writing, it's just that wornen are more likely than men to
want to engage in it, because they have less invested in the discursive
status quo. Cixous concedes that it might have been better to choose
other words than masculine and feminine, but 'because we are born
into language, and I cannot do otherwise than find myself before
words ... there is nothing to be done except to shake them like apple
trees, all the time' (Cixous 1994, 133). Elsewhere she writes, 'Great
care must be taken in working on feminine writing not to get u-apped
by names: to be signed by a woman doesn't necessarily make a piece
of writing feminine. It could quite well be masculine writing, and
conversely, the fact that a piece of writing is by a man does not in
 174 (Psycho)Analyses

itself exclude its femininity' ('Castration or Decapitation', quoted in

Moi 1985, 108). [Link], therefore, is not the only determinant of
femininity or masculinity: it's a question of attitude, of cultural posi-
tioning.
The route for collapsing the structure of binary opposition in
gender in Cixous's argument is the route of bisexuality. In both
'Sorties' and 'The Laugh of the Medusa', she argues that the classic
conception of bisexuality is a concept of the neuter, neither one sex
nor the other, a kind of nothingness. 1l has been defined in this way,
she suggests, because n1en fear bisexuality. In part their fear arises
from its possible suggestion of castration - the male body becomes
neuter only when it is mutilated. More importantly, perhaps, they also
fear the loss power and mastery to which binary thought entitles
the1n. Opposing this neutered, unsexed, unsexy bisexuality, Cixous
argues for what she calls 'an other bisexuality', a variable and ever-
changing sexuality that consists of 'non-exclusion either of the differ-
ence, or of one sex'. This other bisexuality works rather by 'the
multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts
of my body, and the other body, indeed this other bisexuality doesn't
annul differences, but stirs them up, pursues them, increases them'
(Cixous in Marks and de Courtivron 1981, 254). She goes on to argue
that in the present state of history and culture, women's writing is
more likely than men's to be bisexual and/or feminine because
women have a different material, psychic and social stake in that
culture. Men seek to repress their fear of fen1ininity by oppressing real
women, and they have a vested interest in keeping the status quo.
Occasionally, some exceptional men might break through the culture
of monosexualisrn and achieve that 'other bisexuality'. Her point is
not that men cannot be feminine or bisexual, but that they will gener-
ally choose not to be, because it would require a sacrifice of their
maste1y.
Is this a political analysis? It depends, of course, on one's definition
of the political. Marxist/Socialist feminisms might object to the ideal-
ism and impracticality of a political agenda based on language
without action. Cixous's response to this kind of criticis1n is to seek a
rewriting of the terms of politics and activism. She is resolutely not
interested in dismantling old structures merely to clear space for new
(and probably similar) structures to be re-erected. Rather, she wants
to call the very notion of structure into question, wherever it resides.
In writing, this means committing linguistic outrages on systematic
 Clxous: Laughing at the Oppositions 17 5

beliefs and logical grammatical forms. It means using this language

terrorism to attack the mythic structures of subordination, amongst
which she counts psychoanalysis. Her critique of Freud is based on
her sense that his system is woman-hating and wo1nan-fearing, and
that the system has real effects. Her activism takes place in words that
undo structures. In 'The Laugh of the Medusa', she suggests that the
anarchic activities of sex, laughter and writing can undo the edifices
of patriarchy. In an explicit reference to Freud, who said that woman
was 'the dark continent' of psychology, she says that 'The Dark
Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable. - It is still to be explored
only because we've been made to believe that it was too dark to be
explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what inter-
ests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack' (255). She
describes the figure of woman as a figure trapped between the myths
of the monstrous Medusa and non-being of the Abyss which is the
logical conclusion of a femininity defined by Lack. This placement of
the feminine is stupid enough, unrealistic enough 'to set half the
world laughing, except that it's still going on ... regenerating the old
patterns, anchored in the dogma of castration'.
What is the way out of this impasse? Cixous suggests laughter. Her
call is: 'Let the priests tremble, we're going to show then1 our sexts!'
This call is based on a fundamental objection to the Freudian version
of femininity which defines it as negative hole, or Lack. Men both fear
and desire this lack: fear it because it suggests their own mutilation,
desire it because it is the locus of their sexual fulfilment. Seeing the
face of the Medusa or seeing a woman's genitals petrifies men, turns
them to stone in terror, or turns them into stone by giving them a
hard-on as their symptom of desire. Feminine writing plays around
_with the oppositions of desire and terror, hence the ptu1 on 'sexts', a
conflation of (women's cultural) texts and (women's biological) sex.
What is signalled here is something that seldom happens: the woman
writer as flasher. For a woman to show her genitals is so1newhere
between offensively outrageous and farcically funny, an act of aggres-
sion, but also something to snigger at in which laughter disperses the
fears that keep current structures in place.
The borders of the body, as J have already suggested (see above,
Chapter 5), are the location of obscenity, of what remains off the
scene, what is w1representable. Laughing and flashing are actions in
which those corporeal borders are transgressed. Laughter, like desire,
is involuntary. It opens up the body to external scrutiny and the
 176 (Psycho)Analyses

closed system (of the body, of the world) is attacked, which is why the
body's borders should not be represented to patriarchal eyes. [Link]'s
laughing Medusa, and her play on sex and text are monstrous, the
very things that the Enlightenment tradition posits as outside the
limit. She, however, is suggesting an alternative economy of meaning
in which the monstrous might be rewritten as also liberating, hilari-
ous, pleasurable and erotic. Her procedure, as Derrida has
commented, is 'to make language speak, down to the most familiar
idiom, the place where it seems crawling with secrets which give way
to thought. She knows how to make it say what it keeps in reserve,
which, in the process also makes it come out of its reserve' (Derrida
1994, vii). Reserve here means the structures of patriarchy which
impose reserve (good manners) and constraint on the subjects who
live under its rule. The erotic flow of the language of the body mounts
an attack on, poses a critique of, both the reserve of language and the
reservations about the body. A flash of the genitals as it were sheds a
least 1nomentary light on the paradox of the 'dark continent'
constructed out of Enlightenment, and supposedly enlightened,
thought.
The point here is that thjs is a generous movement, a movement
based on the gift. Along with her other descriptions of the binary
masculine/feminine, Cixous argues that 1nasculinity aJigns itself with
the realm of property and ownership, whilst femininity resides in the
realm of the gift. In French the word propriete accumulates clustered
meanings: property that is owned, that which is one's own, approp:-i-
ate (proper) behaviour, clean and tidy. This etyn1ological link between
concepts of property and propriety dramatises a relationship between
economics and psychology/behaviour. One's properties (characteris-
tics) are what one is; they form the sense of self by exclusion and
accumulation. What is not one's own is what one is not, what one is is
,.vhat one owns. Where property rnatters, [Link] argues, there must be
proper ordering, structures of knowledge that keep property in its
proper place.
This view of the world cannot conceive of generosity. It gives only to
receive more, in an economy of exchange (another word might be
intercourse) that depends on the rigidity of the structure. But in the
realm of the gift, woman is open to difference, and is willing to be
traversed by the other. This realm is characterised by a generosity that
flows out from the self, from the body even, rather than imposing
limits on a rigidly defined set of bodily margins which must not be
 Cixous: Laugh i ng at t h e Oppositions I 77

transgressed because this th reatens the fundamental binary opposi-

tions of self/ not-self, male/fem ale:

To love, to watch-think-seek the other in the other, to despecularize,

to unhoard. Does this seem difficult? It's not impossible, and th is is
what nourishes life - a love that has no commerce with the apprehen-
sive desire that provides against lack, and stultifies the strange: a love
that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies. (Cixous in Marks and de
Courtivron 1981, 264)

The source of this generosity is woman, who doesn't order what she
gives, count it out, profit from it. Her gifts destabilise 'all the old
concepts of management', and displace the necessity for presence to
be defined against absence, property to be defined against lack
Her metaphor for writing comes, therefore, from the maternal
body: the feminine text is written in white ink (251), mother's milk, a
gift given from the body to the body (before the process of differentia-
tion [Link] mother and child has been initiated), without hope or
expectation of return. It is a writing that does not depend on hierar-
chy, mastery or power. A Utopian project, perhaps, especially if the
revolution is supposed to occur only through language. But it does
offer new ways of thinking ourselves out of structures of oppression,
and into new possibilities for expression: and some day that might
make a difference.

Reading wi~h Cixous

The difficulty in dealing with Cixous's ideas has to do with the extent
·to which they depend as much on their formulation as on their
formulae. The extent to which discursive mastery is irnportant in
Western culture is clearly signalled by the fact that the student who
writes her essay in her own version of ecriture feminine might well
find that her grades drop. And my discussion of Cixous has not taken
place in the kind of writing she recommends. Indeed, in describing
her work, I am almost certainly doing violence to it, so caught up am I
in the system of language and thought she evokes and attacks. The
p retence that sh e works as a theorist whose ideas can be picked up at
will and applied to whatever one chooses, without her readers modi-
fying their own discursive praxes probably will not do. It is important
 178 (Psycho)Analyses

to recall that [Link] is a writer of fiction as well as of criticism and

theory, and that her mixing up of genres (fiction written in the mode
of academic essay, a critique of Freud couched as a play, essays
written in poetic prose) is an issue of politics as well as of style. It
makes her hard to 'use' if we want to 'use' her honestly, and probably
a certain da1nage is inevitable.
The temptation with Cixous's writings is to take the easiest concept
- that of the hierarchised, gendered construction of binary opposition
- and see it as a totalising concept that can explain everything, in a
kind of 'vulgar [Link]'. So, for example, a poem like D. H.
Lawrence's 'Bei Hennef could simply be read as replicating the struc-
ture she describes. The poem is a honeymoon piece, written to and
for Frieda Lawrence, during their trip to Gennany soon after their
marriage. The poem opens with a description of 'almost bliss', placed
in the context of a twili t river, with the world and its interruptions
'shut up a nd gone to sleep'. The peace of the scene allows the speaker
to know the nature of his love for his wife, which, at this moment feels
complete. He expresses this perfection or con1pletion in a series of
images of what he sees as complementarity:

You are the call and I am the answer,

You are the wish, and J the fulfiJn1ent,
You are the night, and I the day.
\Nhat else? It is perfect enough.
lt is perfectly complete,
You and I,
What 1nore -?

Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!

Lawrence, 'Bei Hennef, 1977, 203

Armed with [Link]'s notion of gendered opposition, we can see the

structure of gender at play in the oppositions, call/ answer, wish/fuJfil-
ment, night/day, and we can see also that the second tenn of each
opposition answers the lack of the first (feminised) tenn. The ques-
tion 'what else?', with its answer 'it is perfect enough' closes do\i\rn the
possibility of alternative formulations: there is nothing else, and what
is there is perfect. The perfection and completion named by
Lawrence's speaker seek to articulate a system without disjunction,
with no gaps in which to insert a difference of equality. The last line,
 Cixous: Laughing at the Oppositions 179

however, undermines the structure of the perfect. The couple contin-

ues to suffer despite perfection precisely because it is based on the
unwilled subordination of one term to the other. Perhaps for the
reader of Cixous, the suffering is not strange at all, but the obvious
consequence of the implied lack of the first term.
All of which is interesting in its way, but it tends to risk making the
reading of the poe1n into a mechanical procedure which ignores the
specific structure of the poem as well as making Cixous's opening
remarks in one essay into the be-all and end-all of her critique. A
theoretical reading indebted to Cixous must pay 1nore careful atten-
tion. For example, the phrase 'perfect enough' is surely oxymoronic,
since perfection, by definition takes no qualifiers. That's one of the
places in which the structure ,vhich seems at first to be impenetrable
breaks down. A second place might be in the word 'suffer'. Its most
obvious meaning is that of 'undergoing pain'. It also means to endure,
meaning 'to put up with, tolerate', but also 'to last'. It contains within
it other possibilities, the ghosts of other words, including 'sustain', the
meaning of its Latin root word sujferre-, and it is also the word that
defines passion (which signals suffering as well as anger and desire).
The strangeness the poem identifies may actually have to do \-vith the
ways in which words, for all their apparently structuring functions, do
not actually fix meaning at all. And this is compounded by the context
of the poem as a whole whose title 'Bei Hennef' means poste restante
or temporary address in the town of Hennef am Rhein. The structure
of call/answer, wish/[Link] etc. is not necessarily, in this context,
the catch -all that it first appears. It is a temporary frame , something
that holds good just for this moment and in this place. In other words,
the gaps in the structure can be found. For the theoretical reader, it is
never enough just to notice that the structure exists by passively
applying a pre-existing model. She must also be an active reader,
searching for a p lurality and contradiction, even when the discourse
seems closed.

Similarly, it is difficult to exemplify ecriture feminine without fixing it

into defining limitations. What follows in the following brief reading
of Angela Carter's novel Nights at the Circus first published in 1984,
therefore, should be taken merely as examples of what such a writing
might look like, rather than a final definition of what it always is. Ecrit-
ure feminine is about disrupting oppressive structures of signification
 180 (Psycho)Analyses

from the macro level of, say, genre, to readings and writings of a given
text's content, right down to the micro-level of the sentence. What I
propose here therefore is to think through the lens of the idea of ecrit-
ure feminine, rather than try to impose a Cixousian reading on
Carter's text.
The first thing that becomes apparent in reading the novel is that
this is a textual world in which reality and fantasy are inseparable. In
part, this is a function of the novel's setting in the world of popular
entertaintnent, the music-halls and circuses of the end of the nine-
teenth century, spaces in which illusion plays a significant part, and
yet spaces which are aJso inhabited by 'real' people. The central figure
of the novel, Fevvers, dramatises the paralysis of binary thought in the
face of anything that questions its logic. She is a real woman, with reaJ
wings, a biologicaJ impossibility who is also a logical absurdity. 'Is she
fact or fiction?' asks her own publicity material, playing on the binary
logic of either/or - but the answer to the question is 'yes': she is both.
Fevvers's very existence, albeit in a fictional text, thro,vs into doubt a
number of apparently certain facts of epistemology and ontology. Her
appearance, as a larger than life woman, \-vith life-like wings, undoes
any theory that implies that one can w1problen1atically believe what
one sees. Common sense and its related discourse of Realism tell us
that Fevvers is impossible, a point made in the novel by the journalist
Walser who uses both his common sense and his knowledge of
biology to make the point that she cannot exist: 'what about her belly
button? Hasn't she just this minute told n1e she was hatched from an
egg, not gestated in utero? The oviparous species are not, by defini-
tion, nourished by the placenta; therefore they feel no need of the
umbilical cord ... and therefore don't bear the scar of its loss. Why
isn't the whole of London asking: does Fevvers have a belly button?'
(Carter 1984, 17-18). The question, a realist's question, is posed but
not answered: and this is a function of the novel's genre, which might
be termed that of Magic Realism.
The term itself is a paradox. Realism is precisely that mode of
writing that eschews magic. It is the writing that represents the status
quo, and as such, it has increasingly been read as a conservative and
reactionary mode (Belsey 1980, 67-84). Not only does it attempt to
reproduce the world as it is currently constituted as natural, it also
produces a version of the reader who is constituted, like the realist
character, as stable, coherent, knowable: to go against such a mode of
representation is to use form in a political way, by writing alternatives.
 Cixous: Laugh ing at the Oppositions 181

The addition of magic to reality unsettles reality. Thfa is especially

powerful in the novel in its effects on Walser, a supremely realist char-
acter who is drawn into the web of Fewers's narrative as weU as her
world, and loses his stable sense of self in the process. He is reduced
through the process of the novel to a n1an who wears make-up as part
of his disguise as a clown, rendering his gender status uncertain; he
dresses as a chicken in the Russian circus, losing his species identity
too; and for part of the novel, he wanders the Siberian waste land,
having lost his memory, shouting 'cockle-doodle-dooski' (a rough
approximation of a Russian chicken's language), signalling his loss of
language itself, as weU as his tenuous grip on his own humanity. In
the battle between magic and reality in the context of the novel,
neither wins. Both are necessary for survival, though there is always
some sacrifice of each in its relation \.\rith the other. This genre of
magic realis1n makes the hierarchical organisation of discourses
impossible. Fevvers's chaotic autobiographical oral narrative, with
which the novel opens, has more authority than Walser's impassive,
objective journalism, even ifwe cannot believe a word she says.
In its representation of male and female, moreover, the novel
continues its subversive process, since it undercuts what Cixous saw
as the gendered hierarchical binaries that organise thought. As
Margaret Atwood has argued, using a Cixousian model derived from
Blake's poem 'The Tyger', \.\rith its (gendered) opposition of tiger and
lamb:

Jt is Carter's contention that a certain amount of rigerishness may be

necessqry if women are to achieve an independent as opposed to a
dependent existence; if they are to avoid - at the extreme end of
passivity - becoming meat. ... although society may slant things so
that women appear to be better candidates for rneathood than men
and 1nen better candidates for meat-eating, the nature of men is not
fixed by Carter as inevitably predatory with females as their 'natural'
prey. Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and
in the srune individual at different tin1es. (Atwood in Sage 1994,
121-2)

Now the novel clearly shows 'lrunbhood', and what happens to the
passive is very disturbing. The role of woman as dead meat is taken to
its logical conclusion in Madame Schreck's Museum of Horrors in the
figure of Sleeping Beauty, who sleeps for a living and is gawped at by
 I82 (Psycho)Ana l yses

voyeuristic punters. Her sleeping is her livelihood, but it will also be

the death of her. But the novel also shows that 'tigerishness' is not the
preserve of masculinity. Fevvers, for example, is physically voracious:
she eats like a horse, drinks like a fish- is greedy for all ldnds of physi-
cal experience. Even so, she has nearly become a human sacrifice on a
number of occasions. And Walser's pose as very manly man, the war
correspondent and man of action, a tiger if ever we saw one, is belied
by his treatment of the poor girl, Mignon, whom he chooses not to
exploit. Mignon herself, a classic victim, becomes a happy person in
the arms of the Abyssinian princess who keeps tigers. The brutal
Strong Man even finds his gentle side. Oppositions inhabit the same
bodies, whatever their gender, and nowhere is this more the case than
with Fevvers herself.
Fevvers represents both a stifling femininity (corsets, dyed hair and
feathers, overwhelming perfume and make-up laid on with a trovvel),
and its Liberation. She inhabits the divide between culture and nature.
In material terms she is very successful; she is the mistress of her own
destiny; she makes her own contracts with her employers and is
clearly a powerful player in the apparently masculine world of capital-
istic commerce. She holds her place there by the maintenance of a
powerful illusion of femininity which must appear natural, but which
is, in fact, entirely faked. Her body, even in corsets, does not conform
to the supposed standards of feminin e delicacy: she takes after her
father the swan in the shoulder parts, for example; her voice is like
dust-bin lids, never 'gentle, soft and low'; she is well over six feet t:tll
('she was a big girl'), and her height is emphasised by big hair. She
also claims to be a virgin (though the claim is open to some doubt),
not for reasons of morality, but explicitly for reasons of commerce -
the mystery makes her more marketable. Her status as a comn1odity
breaks down some of the negative assumptions that might go with
that label. For after all, Fevvers made herself, and controls the tenns
under which she is bought and sold. She is always contradictory: at
once a high culture Valkyrie and a low culture 'bird in a gilded cage';
at once woman and symbol, subject and object. She inhabits the
oppositions and undoes ilieir logic. The contradiction of magic
realism is played out in the representation of her contradictory
physique - woman and bird.
Alongside genre and representation as aspects of a possible ecriture
feminine, Carter's writing style in the novel partakes of excess. She
n1akes reference to every area of cultural life, from the highest to the
 Cixous : Laughing at the Oppositions 183

lowest, and mixes them up to such an extent that it is virtually in1pos-

sible to reinscribe the hierarchy that the words high and low rnost
usually represent. The writing itself subverts order, and defuses its
categorisations into anarchic laughter. In Cixous's ·writing laughter
functions as both mockery and sheer pleasure. Fevvers's laughter,
with which Nights at the Circus ends, is a silnilarly subversive force
which undermines the force of binary thought. As Cixous recom-
mends, Fevvers laughs at the oppositions:

The spiralling tornado of Fevvers' laughter began to twist and

shudder across the entire globe, as if a spontaneous response to the
giant comedy that endlessly unfolded beneath it, until everything that
lived and breathed, everywhere, was laughing. (Carter 1984, 295)

Notes

1. In ~ recent interview with Helene Cixous in the collection Rootprints,

Mireille Calle-Gruber notes that English-speaking criticism has tended
to assume that Cixous is primarily a critic, and that this blindness to
other aspects of Cixous's writing (her plays and novels, for example) is a
kind of 'amputation' of her work, a [Link] and a reification of an
oeuvre which is 'plural; overflowing; which incessantly questions what
it draws' (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, London: Routledge, 1997, 5). This is
a tin1ely warning, but unfortunately it is an amputation that this book
will tend to replicate since its own subject is fen1inist theory. Moreover,
much of Cixous' creative work in fiction and drama remains to be trans-
lated.
Part Ill

Differences
8 Differences of View and
Viewing the Differences:
Challenging Female
Traditions

Ain' t I a woman?

Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism is the title of bell

hooks'~ 1981 exploration of the position of Black women in relation to
feminist thinking. The title comes from a speech delivered in 1852 at
an Ohio women's rights convention by Sojourner Truth. Sojourner
Truth was a Black-American woman, born into slavery in 1797, who
campaigned actively for Abolition, and for the rights of Black women.
The speech was a powerfu l rebuke not only to white men who sought
to deny women (Black and white) the vote, but also to white feminist
suffrage campaigners who failed to see the Black won1an as a woman
like themselves. Sojourner Truth said, in response to a 1nale delegate
who had argued that women could not have equal rights because they
could not participate equally in manual labour being physically
weaker:

Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages,
and lifted ober ditches, and to have de best places ... and ain't I a
woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! ... 1 have plowed and planted,
and gathered into barns, and no man could head me - and ain't I a
woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I
could get it) and bear de lash as well - and ain't I a woman? T have
bon1e five children and seen 'em mos aJJ sold into slavery, and when J
cried out with my n1other's grief, none but Jesus hear - and ain't I a
woman? (Sojourner Truth, quoted in hooks 1982, 160)

The rebuke was necessary because for most of her audience, the defi-

187
 188 Differences

nition of ·a \,voman' was derived from a white middle-class perspec-

tive on feminine propriety. A Black woman who could work as hard as
a man, and who could eat like a man, who could be punished like a
man, 1night not have seemed much like a woman in those terms. But
the evidence of Truth's life is undeniable: she is a woman, and she
displays her body to prove it; she has borne five children, and has
wept for them just as any white n1other might. She claims the right to
be defined as a woman, though she does not match all the criteria of
fe1nininily (of the upper-class white privileges of attenuated appetite,
and the incapacity for physical work) that framed upper-class white
won1en of the tilne. As hooks comments, 'Unlike most white women's
rights advocates, Sojourner Truth could refer to her own personal life
experience as evidence of women's ability to function as a parent; to
be the work equal of man; to undergo persecution, physical abuse,
rape torture; and to not only survive but emerge triu1nphant' (160).
When hooks took Truth's battle cry as her title, 130 years later, she
signalled the extent to which the Black woman ren1ained an absence
fron1 woman-centred thinking. The Civil Rights movement that had
emerged in the 1960s to overturn the colour bar, and to lobby for
equal-rights legislation for Black and white first in the United States,
then in Britain, had done little for Black women. Fo r hooks, Black
wo1nen were silenced by the oppressive assumptions of white women
and white men, and also very powerfully by the sexism of Black men.
The women's liberation movements of the early 1970s seemed to say
nothing to Black women, because they operated within discourses
that separated sex from race and from class, and vvere established by
white women for whon1 race was invisible as a structure of sexist
oppression. Sojourner Truth's speech n1ight have been electrifying in
1852: but even in the late 1970s, Black women still needed to claim the
womanhood that she had 111ade her clarion call. In a later speech,
delivered in 1867 to the first annual meeting of the American Equal
Rights Association, Truth had said: 'I arn above eighty years old; it is
about time for me to be going. 1 have been forty years a slave and forty
years free, and would be here forty years 1nore to have equal rights for
all' (Trutl1 in Lauter 1998, 2052). Subsequent histo1y has shown her
prediction to be wildly optimistic, in particular in relation to the
struggle for equality of Black women both in white-dominated
Western societies and in Black societies.
The emphasis in this book so far has been on the modes of feminist
criticism that have become most widely accepted in the British and
 Challenging Female Traditions 1 89

American academies. Quite apart fro1n the socio-economic grouping

that such an emphasis implies (on women who are already suffi-
ciently economically and socially privileged to form part of the
academy) such a focus also disguises the differences between women
inside the academy: Black feminist criticism has scarcely had its say;
lesbian-feminist criticism has not yet been [Link] extremely
aware of the ways in which the structure of Literary Feminisms poten-
tially reproduces the exclusions of which working-class, Black and
lesbian women complain when they are confronted by a feminist crit-
icism and theory that claitns to speak as, to and for all women, in
utopian projects like parter-femme and ecriture feminine, and yet
which cannot imagine speaking for or to them, and which does not
hear their voices. As Elizabeth V. Spelman has argued in her impor-
tant book Inessential [Link]: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist
Thought (first published in 1988), unthinking exclusion is the single
most significant problem in the kinds of feminist theories that have
become, as it were, the 'respectable', academic face of feminism. In
fact, far from being respectable, exclusion is the scandal of feminist
theory. Spelman castigates feminist thinkers such as Simone de
Beauvoir and Nancy Chodorow (in particular her book The
Reproduction of Mothering, 1978) for forgetting that their views about
'woman' mean only a certain kind of woman in a particular society:

If gender identity were isolatable from class and race identity, if

sexism were isolatable from classism and racism, we could talk about
relations between 1nen and women and never have to worry about
whether their race or class were the same or different. ... If gender
were isolatable from other forn1s identity, if sexism were isolatable
from other kinds of oppression, then what would be true about the
relation between any man and woman would be true about the rela-
tion between any other 1nan and any other woman. (Spelman 1990,
81)

But catch-all explanations about man/woman relations (or about

woman/woman relations) are not true. The totalising gestures of
feminisn1 - those times when feminist thought seeks to speak for all
women, and to create a sisterly solidarity between aU women -
disguise differences between women that actually matter a great deal.
These differences have historicalJy been one of the 1najor blind
spots of academic fen1inism, and various explanations have been put
 190 Differences

fo1ward for the failure to view the differences between women. For
Barbara S1nith, the reason for the excision of Black lesbian voices
fro111 the authorised version of feminist theory is simply the racism
that comes when white critics (female and male) know no Black
women, professionally and personally, a [Link] that renders
them unable to i1nagine and value a Black woman's identity, and
unable even to imagine a lesbian identity that is other than white.
White feminist critics, she suggests, take their own situation as the
paradigm of wo1nen's position. They interrogate neither their white-
ness nor their (hetero)sexuality as political institutions that cushion
them against the \vorst effects of racist and sexist violence. They fear
the surrender of their heterosexual and white privileges. Nor do they
value Black won1en's writing as 'literary' since they are blind to the
social/economic circumstances that condition a Black woman's
choices of image, metaphor and plot (Smith in Showalter 1986,
168- 185). For bell hooks, the reasons have to do with the silencing of
Black women's voices by the sexism and racism of whites (whether
this is registered either as overt hostility, or whether it is registered as
indifference), and by the sexism of Black men. As Sn1ith argues else-
where, in an address to a Women's Studies conference, racis1n is an
issue that feminism has to confront because of what feminism is
supposed to mean: 'Feminism is the political theory and practice that
struggles to free all women: women of color, working-class women,
poor women, disabled women, lesbians, old women - as well as
white, economically privileged, heterosexual women. Anything less
than this vision of total freedom is not feminis1n, but merely feminist
self-aggrandisement' (Smith in Hull et al. 1982, 49). Her speech and
her writings else\.vhere constitute an important rebuke to a white
Western feminisn1 that never examines its own criteria properly, and
which proceeds on the basis that the problems of the white woman
are the problems of all women.
The origins of Black feminist literary criticism, as they are estab-
lished in Smith's 1977 path-breaking essay, 'Towards a Black Feminist
Criticism', are always far more politically grounded than the liberal
womanist1 origins of white feminist critiques. EIJen Moers and
Patricia Mayer Spacks, after all, both refused even to use the word
'feminist' in describing their own projects, as we have already seen.
Moreover, theirs is writing that does not even see the differences
between women of different races and classes and sexual choices, let
alone make those differences the object of their view. They establish a
 Challenging Female Tradit ions I 9 I

view of wotnen which is collective - women's experiences are essen-

tially the same across time, space, economic and materiaJ circum-
stance. Well - they would say that, wouldn't they? Their examples
make precisely that point, since they are drawn from privileged white
circles, and are chosen because of pre-existing standards of literary
vaJue, standards that their works leave unquestioned.
Black fe1ninist criticism therefore has had to restage many of the
battles of white feminist criticism within the terms of both feminist
and anti-racist activism. Only, where the white woman fought mostly
against white patriarchal privilege, the Black woman had to fight on
many fronts: against white patriarchy, against white women's racisn1,
and against the sexism of Black men. It had to begin by establishing
that Black women actually have histories and experiences that are
specific to them, which it did by starting the process of uncovering the
words of Black women about their own experiences, and by criticising
histories of Black people that assumed that Black experience was
maJe. Erlene Stetson's essay, 'Studying Slavery: Some Literary and
Pedagogical Considerations on the Black FemaJe Slave', describes a
college course she began to teach in the late 1970s. The fundamentaJ
problem of such a course is that the written materials in which
won1en's experiences are expressed in their own words are 'hidden or
submerged': they exist in the forms of 'narratives, letters, diaries, and
unpublished documents, court transcripts, and sometimes bills of
saJe' (Stetson in Hull et al. 1982, 61). To read and interpret these docu-
ments, they first have to be found. There is no ready-made Great
Tradition of Black slave-women's writings that is already published
and easily available. Once the materiaJs had been found, the class
Stetson taught had to begin to establish a methodology for reading
. them. Stetson began with what might be calJed the 'authorised'
version of slave history, studying contemporary and then Lwentieth-
century histories of slavery in the United States. This study estab-
lished the racism of many of the so-called 'objective' histories of
slavery; but it aJso established that the lives of slave-women had not
been objects of study at all - the slave-woman's narrative was a
lacuna, an absence at the centre of the story. Stetson aJso noted how
difficult her students found it to read against the grains of these
authoritative studies: how they were blinded by the wealth of statis-
tics and the apparently objective voices in which so many of the
studies were written.
She sought to help her students to unpick the supposed logic of
 192 Differences

histories of slavery through the appeal to Black slave-women's own

narratives of their own experiences. The monologic of traditional
history was modified by the polylogicality of hearing the different
voices, the different genres and versions of slave experience from a
Black woman's point of view. Stetson argues that Black feminist
perspectives have to develop alternative reading strategies because:

Black women's slave narratives contained some problems unique to

themselves. For one thing, there is the question of genre: what are the
most useful ways to study female slave narratives? Is there a generic
way of describing them as literary-historical documents? Should slave
narratives be studies as fiction (literary document), as history (anti-
slavery documents), as autobiography (the slaves' own story)? ... the
Black female slave narratives were the n1ost exciting, perhaps
because they seemed closer to literature than to history. (68)

The class eventually decided that genre was a limiting category - that
the slave narratives of Black women were history, literature and auto-
biography aU at once. To privilege one signifiying discourse over
another was to belie the force of the narratives. And in making this
decision, Stetson and her students were creatively disrupting the
boundaries between the narrative modes, showing that autobio-
graphical writing can have both the force of historical evidence and
the potency of literary value: they authorised personal experience as
valid in both history and literature. Reading these neglected texts was
a re-vision of that powerful matrix that makes meanings in a binary
mode: as either one thing or another. These readings and rereadings,
that is, ,.vere subversive in the very fact that they took Black women's
voices seriously as emanating from people who had valuable, impor-
tant things to say, and who were themselves valuable and important.
Their narratives were open to analyses that showed how oppression
and expression had to be read together, just as sexis1n and racism
should also be read together.
Stetson's critique and analysis of the apparently objective voice of
'history' is also a significant part of the development of Black feminist
criticism, which does not want to disguise itself as writing by white
men in order to get its point across. As Luce Irigaray argues, speech is
never neuter. The adoption of an objectivist discourse that excises the
speaking 'I' fron1 the critical text plays white men at their own game.
The game is a game that Black women have been trained to lose
 Challenging Female Traditions 19 3

through poor education and social deprivation. More importantly, it

is a game whose rules Black feminist criticism disputes. After all, that
objective voice that said 'there shall be only one version of truth' is
precisely the voice that excluded them in the first place. And white
women's mimicry of the objectivist stance is not much help either.
Stetson's article is at least implicitly autobiographical, making her
own experience of teaching the focus of her argu ment. Other Black
feminist interventions, notably Alice \,Valker's In Search of Our
Mothers' Gardens (1983), perfo1m the writing of theory as a creative,
as well as a critical, performance, writing dialogues, imaginary
conversations, and including apparently non-acade1nic materials
(cooking, sewing, folklo re) as the structures of the argument. As Gloria
T. Hull puts it, describing her approach to the works of the Black
woman poet Alice Dunbar-Nelson:

It goes without saying that I approached her as an important writer

and her work as genuine literature. Probably as an (over?)reaction to
the condescending, witty but etnpty, British urbanity of tone which is
the hallmark of traditional white male literary scholarship (and which
l dislike intensely), I usually discuss Dunbar-Nelson with level high
seriousness - and always with caring. Related to this are my slowly-
evolving efforrs at being so far unfettered by conventional style as to
write creatively, even poetically, if that is the way the feeling flows ...
the question of audience is key. (Hull in Hull et al 1982, 194)

The title of Hull's essay is 'Researching Alice Dunbar-Nelson: a

personal and literary perspective'. The point she makes is that the
personal and the literary (and the literary-critical) can be found
together. She is tiying to find a voice that suits the material, and a
· voice that suits the politics of interpreting that material. There is more
than one audience, and there are more ways than one of writing Black
feminist criticism to address the different audiences.
Given that Black women have been - and continue to be - the most
disprivileged groups within both white and Black societies, the devel-
opment of a feminjst literary theory may not seem to be their most
pressing need. Where people are hungry, one assumes, they do not
need to analyse their hunger and its causes: they want to be fed. But
as Barbara Smith persuasively argues, political theories are a vehicle
for raising the consciousness of oppressed groups; knowing the terms
of one's oppression is the prerequisite for changing it. Moreover,
194 Differences

because literature is itself one of the terms of privilege, claiming the

status of literariness for Black won1en's texts is a highly charged politi-
cal act that helps to claim value for the Black women's Lives that Black
women's writing most usually represents. In Black feminist criticism,
aesthetics and politics are inseparable terms. Barbara Smith, Alice
Walker or bell hooks would never distance themselves from the
explicit feminist politics of a woman-centred approach, as Moers and
Spacks, as Showalter and Gilbert and Gubar, did.
Once a tradition of Black women's writing has been established,
then Black feminist criticism sought to read it differently and to
rewrite the meaning of literary value so that Black women writers
were shown to have it. Instead of being viewed as merely a minority
interest group, Black fe1ninist cLiticism focused its attention on the
content of Black women's writing, on its (mediated) reflections of
experience, but also on the forms, images, metaphors and plots that
this writing expressed. This emphasis involves viewing Black women's
writing in the context of Black women's writing, rather than measur-
ing it against some apparently universal standard, or reading it as a
mere adjw1ct to the writing of Black men or of white women. Having a
tradition of their own and fostering a familiarity of that tradition,
would, argues Barbara Smith, allow Black feminist critics to see that
'thematically, stylistically, aesthetically, and conceptually, Black
women writers manifest comn1on approaches to the act of creating
literature as a direct result of the political, social, and economic expe-
rience they have been obliged to share'. In the works of Zora Neale
Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, for
example, one would find repeated references to the domestic skills of
Black women, but also to their powerful folk 1nemories, their use of
herbal medicines, their relationships with magic, their knowledge of
midwifery, their cooperation with each other, their potent female
friendships and love. One would also find a 'specifically Black female
language' to express their experiences, and an en1phasis on oral tradi-
tions which are brought into the realn1 of the literary. In the nurturing
readings of a Black female literary tradition, these forms and themes
can be celebrated rather than criticised (Smith in Showalter 1986,
174). In turn, Black female languages find their way into the
discourses of criticism.
One theme that such a criticism might examine is that of the trope
of 1naternity. Motherhood is, of course, a function that is universally
female. Moreover, in most societies, the care of pre-school and/ or
 Challenging Female Tradit i ons I95

pre-adolescent children, whether male or female, is socially

constructed as the role of women. For many early white feminist
theorists, maternity was one of the major problems that feminism had
to address, since maternity and economic independence were
constructed as incompatible. In Simone de Beauvoir's meditation on
motherhood, conception is usually the result of failed contraception,
pregnancy is a time of morbid pathologies, birth is traumatic, and the
child itself is abandoned to the care of a neurotic woman who has so
many social and psychic frustrations that 'one is frightened at the
thought that defenceless infants are abandoned to her care' (de
Beauvoir 1997, 529). And fo r Shulamith Firestone, individual mother-
hood would ideally be replaced by artificial wo1nbs and centralised
child-are, to alleviate women from the pain and disgust of pregnancy
and social deprivations involved in prolonged child-rearing (Firestone
1972).
Black feminist criticism exposes the ways in which such views are
the product of white feminism and privileged experience, and do not
accurately map Black female expetiences at all. For Black women, so
often placed in situations of serious economic need, there has very
often been no choice between work and childbearing. Indeed, in slave
times the two kinds of labour went together, with female slaves often
being forced to bear children from systematised rape by Black slaves
and/or white slave-owners. Where explicit systems of slavery are not
the issue, as in certain Third World countries, work and children are
not oppositions, and they are seldom matters of choice. It is only in
the sphere of the privileged woman, usually a white woman, that
childbirth and work are separated; the disgust expressed by de
Beauvoir and Firestone depend on a particular narrow version of
. what is meant by femininity. As Alice Walker quietly comments in one
essay, ('One Child of One's Own' [19781): 'Our Mother thought,
cradling her baby with one hand, while grading student papers with
the other (she found teaching extremely compatible with childcare)'
(Walker in Hull et al. 1982, 39). The comment might almost pass
without notice, in its muted parenthesis. But presumably the point is
that university teaching, a privileged kind of labour after all, makes
caring for children much easier than working in low-paid, low-status
jobs, with awkward hours and no autonomy over conditions of work.
Similarly, the Nigerian-born novelist Buchi Emecheta dedicates her
novel Second-Class Citizen (1974) 'To my dear children, Florence,
Sylvester, Jake, Christy and Alice, without whose sweet background
196 Differences

noises this book would not have been written'. The dedication gives
the lie to the commonly held view that creativity and mothering do
not mix, a view perpetuated by Elaine Showalter in A Literature of
their Own, who noted that the majority of the vvomen writers she
discussed were childless. E1necheta's book shows Adah, her protago-
nist, vvriting around the needs of her family; she sees no personal
conflict between childbearing and training and work, except the
conflict imposed on her by her white employers in Nigeria and then in
London. These are very small examples, but they do suggest that there
are different views of female experience. Sojourner Truth appealed to
her maternity as tl1e sign of her womanhood. It was a different appeal
from one that might have been made by upper-class white women in
her time: but the differences should not imply inequalities.
The phrase Black feminism is itself, of course, a term that disguises
differences within Black communities, and across varieties of
geographical locations. The experiences of Black women in the US or
Britain may have much in common with the experiences of women in
Africa, tl1e Middle East or Asia; but an element of shared experience is
not the same thing as saying that all women are treated in the same
way, perceive themselves in the same way, or that one can easily
extrapolate fron1 that shared experience a theoretical model that
applies to aU Black women. Black and white represents precisely the
kind of binary opposition that seeks to totalise experience, and that
feminist theories have so urgently tried to dismantle. Blackness and
whiteness are much more co1nplicated relations than a binary oppo-
sition implies. Where, in that oppostion, are the women who inherit
Chinese or Indian ethnicities, or are Puerto Rican, Latina or Chicana?
Where are the women who inhabit multiple combinations of identity
in relation to race, class, culture, nationality, religion and sexuality? As
Black (and sometimes white) feminisms have developed, they have
increasingly tried to ensure that con1plex identities are not erased in
the process of seeking to make large statements about the position of
all \.YO men in the world.
What fe111inisms have to negotiate is the relationships between
structures of systematic oppressions and individualised, localised
experiences of them. Global capitalism is a system that has to be
analysed; but how I experience it, living in relative privilege in the
West, is different from the ways in which a low-paid Korean worker in
Silicon Valley, California experiences it; and both of our experiences
are different again from middle-class women in Egypt and from
 Challenging Female Traditions I91

peasant workers in India. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty eloquently

demonstrates, phrases like Black women, women of colour, Third-
World women, have a tendency to disguise important differences. In
her essay 'Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Ojscourses', she analyses the ways in which generally well-meaning
Western feminists belie their own good intentions in their critical
practices. Their analyses, she suggests, take place within what
Tnigaray would call ready-made grids derived from pre-existing
Western models.
These analyses find what they seek, rather than what is there, and
tend to reproduce Third-World women as a uniformly oppressed
category, rather than seeking their subjectivities and valuing their
own culturally specific strategies of survival and resistance:

What is proble1natical about [the] use of 'women' as a group, as a

stable category of analysis, is that it assumes ahistorical, universal
unity between women based on a generalized notion of their subor-
dination. Instead of analytically demonstrating the production of
women as socioeconomic political groups within particular local
contexts, this analytical move limits the female subject to gender
identity, completely bypassing social class and ethnic identities ...
women are thus constituted as a coherent group, sexual difference
becomes coterminous with femal.e subordination, and power is auto-
matically read in binary terms: people who have it (read: men), and
people who do not (read: wo1nen) ... Such simplistic formulations are
historicaJJy reductive; they are also ineffectual in designing strategies
to combat oppressions. All they do is reinforce binary divisions
between men and women. (Mohanty 1991, 64)

. If the phrase ' the personal is political' is more than a convenient

slogan, it means that there is an obligation on us to understand that
the systems of oppression do not impinge on us all equally, and to
recognise the specificity of different women's experiences, and the
validity of their own views about them. Seeing the world in terms of
Black and white disguises all those other colours in the spectra of
women's lives.
These complexities are at the heart of edited collections of critical
and autobiographical writings by US feminists of colour such as
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. The first of these, This Bridge
Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, originally
198 Differences

published in 1981, opens up discursive spaces for some of the women

\<Vho are rendered invisible by terms like Black and white. 'I-Jere are
women of every shade of color', writes Moraga:

We were born into colored homes. We grew up inside the inherent

contradictions in the color spectrum right inside those ho1nes: the
lighter sister, the mixed-blood cousin, being the darkest one in the
family. It doesn't take many years to realize the privileges, or lack
thereof, attached to a particular shade of skin or texture of hair. It is
this experience that moves light-skinned or ·passable' Thirld World
women to put ourselves on the line for our darker sisters. We are all
family. Fron1 those families we were on the one had encouraged to
leave, to climb up white. And with the other hand, the reins were held
tight on us, our parents understanding the danger that bordered our
homes. We learned to live with these contradictions. This is the root
of our radicalism. (Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983, 5)

The word · passable' refers to the idea of women of colour 'passing for
white' because of the race disprivilege of Blackness. The very idea of
'passing' radically dismantles the binary opposition of Black and
white: one cannot always tell race/ethnicity merely by looking. But
'passing' also depends on a version of the world in which
Blackness/ colour cannot be conceived as positive identities. The
collection of poems, letters, autobiographical essays and fragments,
and interviews that makes up This Bridge Called My Back both drama-
tises the reasons why it is sometimes safer to 'pass', and challenges
the idea of needing to 'pass' by fostering strong, attractive images of
women of colour. The book is written by Black American women, by
Latinas and Chicanas, by Native American women, by Asian A1nerican
and Chinese American women. This proliferation belies the silnplicity
of Black and white. Moreover, these identities are not exactly precise
or secure. Rosario Morales writes of being US American, but also of
being Cuban, Puerto Rican, Jewish and Catholic, and of speaking each
of the possible languages that go with each of those identities (Moraga
and Anzaldua 1983, 14-15). For Gloria Anzald(1a, the inheritance is
German and Spanish and Mexican Indian as well as US American. No
single identity holds up: identity is multiplied and fragmented. But
that does not mean that these identities have no valid existence, nor
that it is permissible to render them invisible. Specificity must never
be disguised by generalisation.
 Cha l lenging female Traditions 19 9

The writings of women of colour and of Third-World women are

very various. They do not propose a totalising theoretical model, nor a
unified critical practice. They do, however, demand that white
Western feminists take the real conditions of their oppression and
repression seriously, and they express the grounds of their own pains
and pleasures in strikingly creative ways. White women, it becomes
clear, in reading the \NTitings of Spivak, Mohanty, Moraga and
Anzaldua, are part of the problem for women of colour. White women
seldom see their own race as an issue at all, since they live with the
privileges of whiteness that blind them to the systemic oppressions of
race. Feminisms must wear coats of many colours. The different
colours can speak to each other, but that requires that white feminists
in particular learn to hear the real differences that colours make, and
in the words of Gloria Anzaldua, 'acknowledge that they (are) agents
of oppression', and stop seeking 'reassurance, acceptance and valida-
tion from mujeres-de-color (women of colour] ' (Anzaldua 1990, xx).
Women of colour have their own battles to fight; it would be better if
they didn't have to fight them with \IVhite feminists.

Ghosts, traces and sexual 'Others': lesbian feminist theories

It is neither an accident nor a mistake that lesbian feminist theory

appears here in the immediate context of Black feminist theory. For
all kinds of reasons these two fonns of thinking have much in
common, not least the emphasis that Barbara Smith placed on the
Black lesbian woman in 'Toward a Black Feminist Criticisrn' in her
. reading of Toni Morrison's novel Sula (1974). Smith describes hearing
a definition of lesbian textuality at a conference in 1976:

Bertha Harris suggested that if in a woman writer's work a sentence

refuses to do whal it is supposed to do, if there are strong images of
wOJnen and if there is a refusal to be linear, the result is innately
lesbian literature. As usual, I immediately wanted to see if these ideas
rnight be applied to Black women writers that I know and quickly
realised that many of their works were, in Harris's sense, lesbian. Not
because women are 'lovers', but because they are the central figures,
are positively portrayed and have pivotal relationships with one
another. The form and language of these works are also nothing like
200 Differences

what white patriarchal culture requires or expects. (Smith in

Showalter 1986, 175)

For Smith, this way of thinking offered a new of way of approaching

Black women's writing. The term 'lesbian' in literature did not
need to mean a particuJar sexual object choice; it couJd mean
experimental forms in sentences and plots. The text had to be
woman-centred, but it did not have be filled with the kinds of
woman-woman love scenes that are a staple of male-authored and
male-consumed pornography. She was attracted to this mode partic-
ularly because it helped to relieve Black feminist criticism from any
kind of male dependency. Because Black women suffer the double
oppression of white sexism and racism and Black male sexism, posi-
tive images of female friendship break the mould and enable a Black
feminist discourse that is autonomous from most of its sources of
oppression. 2
This very positive view of the lesbian in literature is not of course
how the word 'lesbian' is always used. It is often hurled as a term of
abuse in my experience in British playgrounds and pubs: it can be a
frightening word, filled with the threat of violence. In other words, it is
a contested word. As Joseph Bristow suggests in his book Sexuality,
the word 'lesbian' began to emerge in the early twentieth century to
describe women whose primary sexual object-choices were other
women (Bristow 1997, 50-1). It emerged in the context of the pseudo-
science of sexology, and it was viewed as a 1nore or less pathological
condition, ·which could either be treated and nonnalised, or which
was 'incurable' and would ruin the 'sufferer's' life. ln this kind of
context which has been more or less apparent for most of the twenti-
eth century, it has often been very hard for a won1an-identified
woman to clain1 a lesbian identity as her own, and to clain1 such an
identity positively. As Adrienne Rich argued in her important essay
'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence' (1980) 'lesbian
experience is perceived on a scale ranging fron1 deviant to abhorrent
or simply rendered invisible' through the biases of compulsory
heterosexuality (Rich 1987, 26). It provokes either hostility or disbelief.
Why, then, would anyone want to clairn it?
Because any word used to so aggressively clearly expresses power.
What Rich calls 'compulsory heterosexuality' seeks to disarm the
subversive potential of lesbian existence. Heterosexuality and patri-
archy are both threatened by women who love women. What Luce
 Cha l lenging Female Traditions 201

Irigaray called 'hommosexuality', the masculine logic of the same, is

undone if women turn away from a sexuality that depends on the
male: 'men fear ... that women could be indifferent to them alto-
gether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional - therefore
economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being
left on the periphery of the matrix' (43). Hence, argues Rich, the enor-
n1ous forces that are deployed to keep women heterosexually compli-
ant in patriarchal cultures. Her list of patriarchal strategies against
women is massive, but it includes social and economic deprivations,
sexual subordination, denial of female sexuality (through everything
from clitoridectomy to the death sentence for heterosexual adultery
or lesbian relationships), rape, control of women's labour, control of
their children, erasure of women fro1n history and cultural achieve-
ment, inadequate education and objectification. Women confront a
'pervasive cluster of forces, ranging from physical brutality to control
of consciousness'. The energy that goes into this repression 'suggests
that an enormous potential counterforce is having to be restrained'
(39). On the whole, it is likely that women who identify themselves as
heterosexual believe either that their heterosexuality is 'natural' (they
were born that way) or that it was freely chosen. In other words,
heterosexuality, like whiteness, takes itself as the norm and the ideal:
as such it does not need to theorise itself. It those who are Others -
those who are not white, not straight, who have to do the thinking in
the first place.
As Rich argues, this will not do. Just as Smith castigated white femi-
nism for its inherent racism based on ignorance, hostility and failure
to interrogate whiteness as an identity, Rich wants to castigate
straight feminism for its heterosexist assumptions:

The assumption that 'most women are innately heterosexual' stands

as a theoretical and political stumbling block for feminism. It remains
a tenable assumption partly because lesbian existence has been
written out of history or catalogued under disease, partly because it
has been treated as exceptional rather than intrinsic, partly because
to acknowledge that for women heterosexuality many not be a 'pref-
erence' at all bul something that has had to be imposed, managed,
organized, propagandized, and maintained by force is an immense
step to take if you consider yourself freely and 'innately' heterosexual.
Yet the failure to exa1nine heterosexuality as an institution is like
failing to adntit that the economic system called capitalism or the
202 Differences

caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including

both physical violence and false consciousness. (50-1)

Implicitly, Rich suggests that if we allow 'lesbian' to continue to be

used as a tern1 of insult, and if we refuse to see it as a positive choice,
we help to perpetuate the heterosexism that underpins patriarchy.
Feminism has to have lesbianism at its heart, and in its heart. It
wouldn't be much of a feminist revolution if it left out women who
love women.
Rich therefore identifies two ways of thinking about the lesbian in
feminist theory. She uses the terms lesbian existence and lesbian
continuum to evade the 'clinical and limiting ring' of the word
lesbianism, a term imposed by sexology and psychoanalysis to
describe a sickness, a word that regulates a constrictive normality on
fen1ininity:

Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of

lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that exis-
tence. I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range -
through each woman's life and throughout history - of woman-iden-
tified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or
consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman.
(51)

These two ways of using the word lesbian are not oppositions, erect-
ing a firm fence between heterosexual and lesbian wo1nen. Rather,
they are to be understood as allowing both women who love women
and all other women access to their woman-to-woman e>..l)erience in
contexts where the word 'lesbian' is not being used as an insult or a
diagnosis. Lesbian existence is part of the lesbian continuun1; but the
lesbian continuum also consists of mother-daughter relationships,
sisterly relationships, women's groups of many different kinds, female
friendships and female love affairs. Rich asks us to consider the possi-
bility that all won1en, from the suckling female child, to the Lnother
who gives her milk, to the wo1nen who share professional commit-
ments and workspaces, to the won1an who dies in old age nursed by
other women, all exist on a lesbian continuum which they 1nove in
and out of at different times (54). The lesbian is not just a sexualised
being. She partakes of all areas of female life; and all women could
fruitfully rethink their relationships with other women as a resistance
 Challenging Female Traditions 203

to their sexualisation by patriarchal culture. Texts that celebrate

female relationships, whether sexual or not, are part of the contin-
uum, and can be read as attempts to re-articulate relationships
between love and po\over.
The first explicitly lesbian-feminist critiques, however, did not
quite behave in this way. Like all kinds of feminist criticism, they
began by finding images, and then moved on to describing a tradi-
tion. A case in point is the 'founding' text of lesbian critique, Jane
Rule's Lesbian Images (1975). The book is an 'images of women'
critique with a lesbian gynocritical basis. It takes lesbian writers such
as Gertrude Stein and Ivy Compton-Burnett and reads their images in
an analysis that is a lesbian-inflected version of liberal humanist criti-
cism. In itself, that was of course a radical attack on the unspoken
assumptions of humanism - humanisn1 had no place for the lesbian,
after all. Rule did, however, implicitly and explicitly, go further than
that. Her introduction, for example, is an autobiographical explo-
ration of her own 'coming-out' story - she uses her own experience to
validate the claim that lesbian criticism is necessary. Moreover, she
also undertakes historical surveys of sexual practices and mores in
Ancient Greece and Rome, and in the Middle East, thereby establish-
ing that the normative heterosexuality of the present is neither
universal nor trans-historical. She shows the ways in which the
powerful discourses of the law, religion and medicine conspire to
construct the heterosexual world as 'natural'; and argues that the
figure of the lesbian is the most significant victim of these discourses,
since they conspire to erase her existence entirely. In her readings of
individual writers, she traces a history of different kinds of lesbian
image. This is, as it were, history as necessary fiction, by Rule's own
-admission. It is fiction because the structure of a narrative history
tends to in1ply progress and teleology, features that may not be 'really
there'; it is necessary because how else are lesbian readers and writers
to rediscover themselves? The writing of this history exemplifies what
Adrienne Rich called 're-vision' - 'the act of looking back, of seeing
with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.'
Re-vision is 'an act of survival' for all women, and perhaps especially
for lesbian women (Rich 1993, 177).
As Bonnie Zimmerman has noted, if Jane Rule's Lesbian Images was
a founding text for a tradition of lesbian- feminist criticism, it was not
exactly an overnight success. lt took another five years for a second
book-length study of women-identified women in literature
204 Differences

(Zimmennan in Showalter 1986). This book was Lillian Faderman's

Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between
Women from the Renaissance to the Present (1981). It is notable that
the word 'lesbian' does not appear in the title of this work, presum-
ably precisely because of the hostility that the word often generates.
Nonetheless, in her Introduction, Faderman argues for an inclusive
definition of lesbian existence, one which does not require a prurient
interest in women's sexual activities and which does not insist on
evidence of woman-to-woman genital activity for the word lesbian to
be invoked. Faderman argues that the focus on sex acts is a twentieth-
century preoccupation. Women in previous centuries were 'encour-
aged to force any sexual drive they might have to remain latent', with
the consequence that passionate romantic attachments between
women might have had no explicitly sexual content:

in many other centuries, romantic love and sexual i1npulse were

often considered unrelated . ... But the lack of oven sexual expression
in these romantic friendships could not discount lhe seriousness or
the intensity of women's passions toward each other- or the fact that
if by 'lesbian' we mean an all-consuming emotional relationship in
which two women are devoted to each other above anyone else, these
ubiquitous sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-
centu1y ro1nanlic friendships were 'lesbian' . (Fadennan 1985, 19)

Faderman charts the social tolerance that romantic friendships

between women enjoyed before the twentieth century; and remarks
with pain that such friendships were increasingly policed in the light
of the development of the discourse of sexology, which defined
lesbianism as 'a medical problem'. Faderman, that is, uncovered a
lesbian history that was resolutely not a history of progress. The twen-
tieth century created tl1e lesbian as an outlaw figure who had inter-
nalised the view of her sexuality as disease, and consequently suffered
from it rather than celebrating it as earlier generations had been able
to do. Only comparatively recently has lesbianism become a relatively
more acceptable choice for women. For Faderman, although there are
significant differences between lesbian choices in the late twentieth
century and the choices of earHer women, it is important to register
the continuity of lesbian experience, to affirm that it has existed and
that it continues to exist: 'had the romantic friends of other eras lived
today, many of them would have been lesbian-feminists; and had the
 Challenging Female Tradit i ons 205

lesbian-feminists of our day lived in other eras, most of them would

have been romantic friends' (20)
What follows this introduction is a massive excavation of female
friendships across five centuries, using the evidence of their letters
and diaries as well as of their literary texts to uncover the patterns of
female feelings. What she notes from this discussion is the fact that
for very few women was it possible to invest all their emotional energy
in romantic friendships. Their passions for other women largely took
place in the contexts of heterosexual marriages and maternal duties.
The distrust of romantic friendship arose not only with the patholo-
gised discourse of sexology, but with the rise of the increasingly inde-
pendent woman who did not n1arry or have children - the so-called
Boston marriage of late-nineteenth-century America, and the rela-
tionships of the New Women in both Britain and the United States.
The overt independence of these women was a direct threat to male
heterosexual privilege; patriarchy closed in over the lesbian. lt created
a vision of her as n1annish, unfeminine, unattractive - the invert
figure ·of the man trapped in a woman's body that is explored in
Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. It is this image that
is so often invoked when the word lesbian is used as an insult. Only in
the very recent past, Faderman argues, has it been possible to rescue
the word from its hostile, aggressive usages. Its rewriting as a positive
term describing woman-identified experience, including sexual expe-
rience, becomes possible only in the wake of the sexual revolution of
the 1960s and of the women's liberation move1nents. (Even then, the
progress has not been, as it were, in a straight line: there has been
hostility to- lesbian women in the women's movements, too.)
Faderman ends her book ,,vith the hope that lesbian-feminist won1en
. will be able one day to live as they choose, without the pain of exclu-
sion, and without feeling that separatism is the only political choice if
all women are to become free.
Faderman's work is monumental and important. But like the estab-
lishment of other feminist traditions of writing, it has some significant
limitations as a literary-theoretical account of lesbian writing. It tends
to concentrate on content; and although Faderman examines the
covertness of female affections - the coding that disguises desires
deemed unpalatable by norn1ative heterosexisn1 - the focus is neces-
sarily on the content of the texts as a reliable indication of the experi-
ences of the writers. Uncovering a tradition is about seeing
similarities of image, plot and language that validate the claim that
206 Differences

lesbian existence has always existed. It is also necessarily a biographi-

cal approach since the experience of lesbian existence and identity is
what one has to try to find.
More recently, then, lesbian feminist criticism has begun to seek
out lesbian textualities as dramatising lesbian experience, rather than
representing it. Indeed, where sex was not quite the issue for
Faderman (at least in looking back at earlier centuries), the expression
of the specificity of lesbian sexual desire has become highly signifi-
cant for lesbian theory. Teny Castle's recent book, The Apparitional
Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (1993), argues
that the lesbian has tended to be a ghoslly figure who is seldom prop-
erly seen. Castle says that her project is 'to bring the lesbian back into
focus ... in all her worldliness, comedy and humanity' (Castle 1993, 2).
The words 'worldliness' and 'humanity' are very important here for
the politics of Castle's project. Worldliness is a term she bonows from
Edward Said; it means 'that humane and expansive faculty of mind
which allows one to see things "in a global setting" - as part and
parcel of a larger world of "formal articulations''' (15). Lesbians have
to be understood in their multiple relations to themselves as sexed
beings, and to other definitions of sexed identity. She is in profound
disagreement with modes of lesbian and queer theory that ovve alle-
giance to post-structuralist formations of identity as provisional and
even irrelevant.3 She is unwilling to pronounce the death of lesbian
identity not least because the obituaries would reconstitute the
lesbian as a ghost effect. One of the effects of lesbian ghosting is Ll1e
denial of the sexual experiences of lesbian women, the loss of the
lesbian body in discussions about and representations of sexuality.
The ghostliness of the lesbian seems to affect the [Link] in which
lesbian writing might be defined. Castle hypothesises a number of
possible ways of glossing the term 'lesbian fiction '. She rejects a defin-
ition that insists on the depiction of sex between women, not least
because this has been a popular trope in the writings of many men,
and in particular is a repeated figure in male-authored and male-
consumed pornography. The fonnula that 'a lesbian novel is a novel
written by a lesbian' does not quite work either: there are women
writers who were lesbians whose fiction eschews lesbian identity. 'A
novel written by a woman depicting sexual relations bet\>veen women'
is another formulation: but it relies 'too heavily on the opacities of
biography and eras, and lacks a certain psychic and political speci-
ficity' (67). The problem, suggests Castle, is that lesbian writing is
 Chal l enging Female T raditions 207

under-theorised as a category. And it needs a theory that will liberate

it from invisibility, will put the bodies back as sexuate bodies, because
only by elaborating theories of lesbian existence and self-expression
can lesbian women hope to gain the freedom to walk the streets arm
in arm without the threat of violence. As with all kinds of feminist
theory, then, there is a comrnitinent to seeing and making the
connections between the theoretical realm and the real - life as it is
Lived by real lesbian women.
In order to work out what a lesbian fiction might look like, Castle
turns to the 1nodel produced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her 1985
book Between Men: English Literature and Male .Romosocial Desire.
Sedgwick's book argues that what appear to be heterosexual relation-
ships between men and women in literature (the marriage and
cou11ship plots that are so central to fiction), are often, in fact,
male-male homosocial relationships. A man's 1narriage to a woman
can be read as cementing his relationship with the wo111an's brother,
father or friend. Sedgwick elaborates this idea in the figure of the
triangle: two men and one woman - the woman is the com1non term
between the men. When Castle examines Between Men, she is
distressed that there is apparently no place for the woman-identified
woman in Sedgwick's analysis. Indeed, Sedgwick more or less aban-
dons the lesbian as a desiring subject. Sedgwick in fact unwittingly
shows up the limitations of Rich's lesbian continuum, as Castle points
out: 'Lesbians, defined here, with telling vagueness, only as "wo1nen
who Jove women", are really no different, Sedgwick seems to imply,
from "women promoting the interests of other women"'. Castle is
alarmed that the specificity of lesbian existence is 'lost to view' in the
unthinking appropriation of the lesbian continuum rnodel (Castle
.1993, 71).
She turns instead to a model for lesbian fiction that rewrites the
erotic male-male-female triangle at the heart of Between Men. She
sho"vs that this triangle is only secw·e so long as the female term has
no female bonds of her own - so long, that is, as the woman in the
triangle has no other female relationships. As this is unlikely, in life as
in literature, the stability of the homosocial triangle is immediately
threatened by the incursion of a fourth female term, which makes it
possible to imagine an alternative triangular structure
female-female-male - a new erotic triangle in which female desire is
paramount and the male term drops out of the equation as a func-
tioning desiring subject. Such a model would be radically subversive
208 Differences

of the 1nale plots that patriarchy enforces on women. Castle argues

that this model couJd be read as a model for a definition of lesbian
fiction that is not biographical but textual. It is not a model that can
be found in nineteenth-century or earlier texts since the ideological
constraints of the marriage plot were much stronger then. But it can
be found in a rereading of Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel Sumrner
Will Show (1936), a novel set in the mid-nineteenth-century context
of the European revolutions of 1848, which rewrites 'Victorian fiction
itself (Castle 1993, 80).
In examining this 'under read' text Castle undertakes a very tradi-
tional act of feminist recuperation. She takes a number of pages to
summarise the novel's plot so that the unknown novel can become
'known' to the reader. She concentrates in particuJar on the develop-
ing relationship between the heroine, Sophia, and her husband's
mistress, Minna, a relationship in which 'the male homosocial trian-
gle reaches its point of maximum destabilisation', to the point of
collapse. The novel replaces the male homosocial triangle with a
female triangle in which women's erotic desires for each other are
central, thus displacing the patriarchal plot. It does this in the context
of a pastiche of Victorian novel-writing: a novel that appears to
conform to the conventions of Realism in fact produces the traces of a
'counterplot' in the 'authorised' version. Castle argues from Warner's
novel that a definition of lesbian fiction can be found in the textual
performances of writing, and need not be excavated from unreliable
biographical evidence. In this reading, lesbian fiction: 'resists any
simple recuperation as "realistic". Even as it gestures back at a
supposedly familiar world of human experience, it almost invariably
stylises and estranges it - by presenting it parodisticaUy, euphuisti-
cally, or in some other rhetorically heightened, distorted, fragmented
or phantasmagoric way' (90). These effects come precisely from the
effects that accrue because lesbian fiction refers insistently to the
conventions of canonical texts with the purpose of unsettling them:

by plotting against ... the 'plot of male homosociality', the archetypal

lesbian fiction decanonizes, so to speak, the canonical structures of
desire itself. Insofar as it documents a world in which men are
'between w01nen' rather than vice versa, it is an insult to the conven-
tional geometries of fictional eros. It dismantles the real, as it were, in
a search for the not-yet-real, something unpredicted and unpre-
dictable. It is an assault on the banal ... As a consequence, it often
 Challenging Female Traditions 2 09

looks odd, fantastical, implausible, 'not there' - utopian in aspiration

if not design. lt is, in a word, imaginative. This is why, perhaps, like
lesbian desire itself, it is still difficult for us to acknowledge - even
when (Queen Victoria notwithstanding) 4 it is so palpably, so plainly,
there. (90- 1)

Realism is the place where male homosocial bonds are validated.

Lesbian fiction has to resist the plots that render the lesbian invisible,
as Realism must tend to do. In its stylisation, parody, mockery and
counterplotting, Castle argues, lesbian fiction has a political voice
because it unsettles the idea that Realism provides a version of the
real that holds true for everyone. This is a criticism that makes lesbian
women visible to a culture that does not want to see them; close
textual attention is combined with political commitment - aesthetics
and politics are the necessarily juxtaposed in theorising the presence
of the many lesbian 'others' in the face of the critical/creative/politi-
cal indifference ('hommosexuality', the logic of the same) that erases
them.

Queering the patch: Marjorie Garber, Judith Butler and the slip-
page of identity

When you meet a hurnan being, the first distinction you make is
'1nale or female?' and you are accustomed to make the distinction
with wlhesitating certainty.
Sigmund Freud, 'Femininity'

One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

What do I mean by masquerade? In particular, what Freud calls

'femininity'. The belief, for example, that it is necessary to become a
woman, a 'normal' one at that, whereas a man is a man from the
outset. He has only to effect his being-a-man, whereas a woman has
to become a normal woman, that is has to enter into the masquerade
offemininity.
Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One

All the theories and ideas that we have dealt with so far have been
thoroughly bound up in the idea of an identity that can be known.
210 Differences

Even where the emphasis has been on the multiply-possible ways

of being a woman - a whjte woman, a Black woman, a straight
woman, a lesbian woman, a working woman, an upper-class
woman, and many, many more - the claim is stiU that we know what a
woman is, what women are. And we claim further that women in all
their many differences have some experiences in common. In other
words, femaleness shares features across historical, geographical,
economic and psychic boundaries. It is a kind of common-sense posi-
tion: we all know what a woman is, what a man is, and we are 'accus-
ton1ed' says Freud, to be able to tell the clifference 'with unhesitating
certainty'. But if de Beauvoir was right, and being a woman is not
'essence' but a learned configuration of gender, precisely how do we
know? If gender identity is socially constructed, presumably we
cannot tell just by looking. Gender can be a kind of clothing, a
disguise - what Irigaray calls a masquerade, a performance, in which
appearance masks 'reality' and one cannot tell clearly precisely what
one has seen.
Recently, then, the assumptions of common identity between
women have been shaken up by the interventions of a number of
critics whose work is inflected by the discourses of new lesbian and
gay-male critiques that are often designated by the term 'queer
theory'. For example, the literary critic and social historian Marjorie
Garber's book Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cullural Anxiety
(1992) explores the ways in which 'clothing constructs (and decon-
structs) gender' (Garber 1992, 3). The fact that biology (male ::>r
female?) and gender (masculine or fe1ninine?) are articulations of a
binary opposition troubles Garber because such thinking enforces an
'either/or' version of the world. Binary thinking, as Cixous argues, is
always hjerarchised with one term privileged over the other. It is an
attempt to fix things - to fix everything from political systen1s to the
proper way to be a woman; and it tries to suggest that the fixed posi-
tion is natural, eternal and immutable. For Garber, transvestism
(wearing the clothes of one sex when one is, 'in fact', the 'other' sex)
introduces a destabilising third term into the system of binary opposi-
tion, a term that produces a crisis in such thought: 'Three puts into
question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge'
(11). The effects ofthls are felt strongly in the area of gendered iden-
tity, but they go beyond that too: the third term is 'the disruptive
element that intervenes (and produces) not just a category crisis of
male and female, but the crisis of category itself' (17). In a remarkably
 Challenging Female T raditions 2 I I

detailed and interesting series of examples, including eve1ything from

the Shakespearean stage to Elvis impersonators, Garber exposes the
ways in which clothes have been seen as the markers of identity. But
because clothes are provisional - you take them off as well as put
them on, you wear different clothes for different occasions - the iden-
tity they mark, including the gender of that identity, is also provi-
sional. The implications of this insight are very far-reaching and
disturbing for traditional formations of feminist theory that are
founded on knowing what a woman or a man is and claiming
common cause on the basis of such knowledge. What can fe1ninist
theory do if it can no longer be sure of the grounds on which it
speaks?
Vested Interests and Garber's later book, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and
the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1995), 111ay be disturbing in what they
imply about identity (gender identity and sexuate identity) as unsta-
ble, but they are very readable accounts of why simplistic views of
who we are can be both seductive and inadequate. More disquiet has
been voiced (by, for example, Terry Castle 1993 and Nicole Ward-
Jouve 1998) over the works of Judith Butler, whose style is very differ-
ent, and who draws out the implications of her views with 111uch 1nore
vigour. Butler's arguments are strongly influenced by postmodernist
and post-structuralist theories of identity. For her, gendered identity
is far more than a matter of clothes, tl1ough clothes play their part.
Her arguments begin from ilie wish to disrupt ilie binary opposition
of sex and gender - the opposition that is at the heart of feminist
theory, and which is often rewritten as nature and culture. The
proble1n of this binary opposition, Butler suggests, is that it privileges
nature over culture, assumes that sex is the immutable, gender the
mutable; gender is therefore to be understood as a copy - rnore or less
'accurate' - of ilie 'original' sex/nature. Nature, however, is not
'natural'. It is constructed through discursive practices. And if nature
is not 'natural', then sex is not 'natural' either: sex is also a discursive
formation, taking place in language, not simply existing in real bodies.
Bodies do not intrinsically have sexes; sexes like genders are imposed
upon them in language and culture because of the perceived neces-
sity in language and culture to taxonomise - to put everything into
categories.
You will notice here that I am not quoting Butler's own words. Her
arguments are very densely written, as she herself admits (Butler
1993, 99), and are consequently difficult to extract in short quotation.
212 D i fferences

Nonetheless, a brief extract exemplifies her theoretical position, and

dramatises her 'difficulty':

The insistence on coherent identity as a point of departure presumes

that what a 'subject' is is already known, already fixed, and that that
ready-made subject n1ight enter the world to renegotiate its place.
But if that very subject produces its coherence at the cost of its own
complexity, the crossings of identifications of which it is itself
composed, then that subject forecloses the kinds of conteslatory
connections that might de1nocratize the field of its own operation.
(115).

Butler is here reading the idea of selfhood through the lens of

Lacanian psychoanalysis which suggests that the self exists only in
and through language, and is therefore provisional. Her writing takes
this position absolutely seriously to posit that there is no identity that
can be known as a stable coherent entity. Indeed, any such identity
would be dangerously limited because 'already known, already ftxed'.
Moreover, stability comes at the cost of complexity. An identity that
can be wholly known is a very simple thing. ln order to change the
world, the subject needs its co1nplexity, even if the subject
him/herself cannot fully comprehend it. If one agrees to be fixed in an
identity, one agrees to the conditions in which that identity was
formed.
Butler's paiticular points of interest are in the marginalised figures
of gay n1en and lesbian won1en. But her discourse is not only talking
to or about these groups. What she says about identity as performa-
tive and provisional has knock-on effects for everyone, and perhaps
especially for theoretical discourses that rely on identity, such as
fe1ninist criticism, Black-feminist criticism, lesbian-fenunist criticism.
What price any feminjsn1 that cannot tell what a woman is? What of a
Black criticism that cannot describe blackness, or of a lesbian criti-
cisn1 that doesn't quite know what lesbians are? Nicole Ward-Jouve's
impassioned defence of a more humanist version of identity against
Butler's deconstructive critique dra1natises how unsetthng these ideas
are. Ward-Jouve wiites, in the wake of Butler's first book, Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

The very tern1 'Wo1nan ', which had been a rallying call [for women's
liberation movements] like 'workers of all countries unite' in the old
 Challenging Female Traditions 2 I 3

Internationale, came under attack: the job to do, it now seemed, was
to un1noor women from that body that had always been the pretext
for their suppression. The body had to be mastered, shown to be
changeable, malleable (...] Identity had to be tactical, forever rein-
vented, a mask to put on, and cast off. Guerilla tactics became the
order of the day (... ] alliances with other oppressed groups, theoreti-
cal wizardry, deconstruction, imaginary geometries, transvestism,
transsexuality, endless transformations of your body, your image ...
[...) You had to be nimble. Question, and question again. You had to
'position yourself before you talked. Swiftly slot into opposition.
(Ward-Jouve 1998, 7, ellipses in square brackets 1nine)

The highly charged rhetoric here in a sense says it all. For Ward-Jouve
there is a fundamentaJ dishonesty in parading perfonnance, and it
appears to her as a dangerous thing to try entirely to suppress binary
opposition as a tool for thinking. Collapsing the hard -fought distinc-
tions between sex and gender risks collapsing the possibility of
meaning, and of meaningful action, altogether. 'Without the much
denounced so-called binaries,' she writes, 'maJe and female, mascu-
line and feminine - there would be nothing: no generation (the root is
the same as for gender). No meaning' (10).
The debates about Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter
(1993) rumble on. The last word has not been had. But these debates
do register the ,.vays in which gender remains a usefully contested
term. Feminist literary theories, of whatever kind, have not finished
yet, just as feminisms in the 'real world' have yet more things to do.
Butler's work has at least the profoundly useful function of making us
continue to question our own assumptions, and to keep differences -
between women and even within individual women - in view.

Notes

l. 'Liberal womanist' is of course a rewriting of the term 'liberal human-

ist', used to describe traditional, untheorised, male-authored criticism.
Moers and Spacks tried to put white women into the definiton of
'human'; they forgot - to put it at its kindest - to try to include Black
women too.
2. I say 'most', not 'all' because although female friendship supports Black
women in a nurturing environment in this view, what is missing from
the equation is the economic oppression caused by capitalist econon1-
214 Differences

ics. Black women may help each other, but they don't quite escape the
networks of oppression even in their positive relationships.
3. In particular, she is concerned with the effects of discourses of 'provi-
sional identity', such as those articulated by Judith Butler in her two
recent books, Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies the Matter (1993). For
n1ore information, see below.
4. The reference to Queen Victoria refers to a possibly apocryphal story
that the Queen was so incapable of imagining female-female desire
that she refused to sanction legislation that would outlaw it. 'The Queen
Victoria principle of lesbian non-existence' is a recurring figure in
Castle's text, used to demonstrate the ongoing invisibility of the lesbian
as a person, and of lesbian desire as a possible object choice.
Part IV

Readings
9 Reading the Boys ' Own
Stor i es: The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , The
Picture of Dor i an Gray and
Heart of Darkness

I inscribe this book of adventure to my son, Arthur John Rider

Haggard, in the hope that in days to come he, and many other boys
whom I shall never know, may in the acts and thoughts of Allan
Quatermain and his companions, as herein recorded, find something
to help him and them to reach to what, with Sir Henry Curtis, I hold
to be the highest rank whereto we can attain - the state and dignity of
English gentlemen.
H. Rider Haggard, dedication to Allan Quatermain

My father is Lord Bracknell. You have never heard of papa, I suppose?

... Outside the family circle, papa, I am glad to say, is entirely
unknown. l think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me
the proper sphere for the man. And, certainly once a man begins to
neglect his domestic duties, he becomes painfully effeminate, does
he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.
Gwendolen Fairfax to Cecily Cardew, in Oscar Wilde,
The Importance of Being Earnest

On the face of it, it would be difficult to imagine three texts, short of

overtly pornographic writing, which are Jess attractive to feminist
theorists than Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886), Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) and Conrad's
Heart of Darkness (1900). These fictions, all produced during the last
fifteen years of the nineteenth century, give little obvious purchase to
feminist readings. As Stephen Heath has written, quoting Henry

2 I7
2 I 8 Readings

James's contemporary response to Stevenson's novella, the episode in

which Hyde tramples a little girl on the street 'is one of the very few
fe1nale references in a s tory that does ... "without the aid of the
ladies'" (Heath in Pykett 1996, 65). Heath goes on to note that women
are absolutely peripheral in The Strange Case, consisting only of
servant girls and women in the streets of London (women who might
also be thought of women of the streets of London):

the brevity of their appearance goes along with the lowness of their
class which itself in turn runs into their marginalisation in the given
middle-class male story-world. Ja1nes was more than right: there are
indeed no ladies, no wo1nen who could enter the story, play a part.
The fe1nale is shut out, a thing of the streets whjch then take on their
remaJeness. (66)

The world of The Strange Case is a world of cosy interiors, but they are
distinctively not the domestic sphere of respectable femininity. These
are the interiors of bachelordo1n, of male friendships and clubbish-
ness fron1 \>vhich women are excluded.
Much the sa1ne can be said of Wilde's Dorian Gray. The novel does
have significant female figures: the actress, Sibyl Vane, who is the
occasion of Dorian's first act of cruelty, Lord Henry's wife, the inci-
dental duchesses and aristocrats who populate the drawing rooms
which are his mise-en-scene, and the street girl who, like Sibyl, calls
him Prince Charming, and alerts Sibyl's brother to his real identity
(Wilde 1985, 225). But in terms of the action of the story, even the
most significant of these female figures, Sibyl, is less important than
the moral sto1y being told about the male protagonist's decline and
fall. And again, the world is one of interiors, but they are domestic
spaces inhabited by men rather than by ,,vomen. Indeed, the intimacy
of the bachelors' rooms leaves no significant space for female figures
to occupy, registered in Lord Henry Wotton's cynicism about his own
1narriage:

the one charm of marriage is that it rnakes a life of deception

absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is,
and my wife never knows what I an1 doing. When we meet - we do
n1eet occasionally, when we dine out together or go down to the
Duke's - we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most
serious faces. My ""rife is very good at it - much better, in fact, than I
 Reading the Boys' Own Sto ries 219

am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But
when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish
she would; but she merely laughs at me. (26)

Lord Henry's own wife is merely incidentaJ in his life, and is aJso
merely incidentaJ to the novel's action.
Similarly, Heart of Darkness has only incidental female characters.
There is Marlow's aunt, who gets him the job on the Congo steamer;
there are the two enigmatic female figures in the ante-room of the
shipping office, who knit in black wool, and whom Marlow sees as
'uncanny and fateful' (Conrad 1983, 37); and there are the two women
associated with Kurtz, his Intended back in Europe for whom and to
whom Marlow lies, and his magnificent African n1istress, who terrifies
Marlow. Again, however, these figures are scarcely centraJ. Their
appearances are brief and symbolic rather than sustained and active
within the plot. Moreover, although Conrad's novella belongs in part
to the genre of maJe adventure fiction, it is recounted in a safe space
that approximates domesticity: on board a ship named the Nellie, told
by a man to a group of fellow men. It discourses on horror, and brings
that horror 'home', to London, to the banks of the Thames, rendering
home unhomely, or in Freud's terms, 'uncanny'. 1
Apart from their historicaJ proximity of production and publication
in the fin de siecle, these three texts are united by their acute focus on
the agonised male figure, whom they each present in a gothic world
where all the usuaJ certainties - the certainties associated with ReaJist
modes of presentation and common-sense views of the world - have
all been somehow undermined. They are stories about masculinity,
and particularly about masculinity in crisis. Why, then, would a femi-
nist theorist wish to read them at all? And what can a feminist theorist
say about them which is useful to the politicaJ and cultural projects of
feminisms?

Reading the stereotypes

From what I've already said, it should be clear that an 'images of

women' approach to these texts would be difficult to maintain
precisely because that kind of textual critique depends on a sustained
representation of femaJe characters, whereas the images we have in
these texts are isolated and epherneral. In con1parison, say, to other
220 Readings

contemporary late-nineteenth century fictions by men, to Thomas

Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) or Jude the Obscure (1895), or
to George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893), all of which make the
'problem' of fe1nininity into a centraJ plank of their plots and themes,
there appears to be very little to say. These fictions largely eschew the
female. They are perhaps misogynist texts, signalJed by the exclusion
of the female, but once one has said so much, it could mean that
feminist literary theories have very little else to say to these fictions. It
would, however, be an impoverished theory that admitted defeat so
easily. There is a feminist critique to be made about these texts on the
grounds of their representation; and there is much to say about how
the texts present won1en and 1nen, and why they do so. Thus, Heath's
insight that Stevenson's Strange Case contains no women who
'count', no ladies, no social, economic or cultural equals to the
middle-class white men in the tale, is not just an admission of female
exclusion from the male story world. It also tells us son1ething about
the constitution of maleness, of masculinity, in a particular culture at
a specific historical period, as that constitution is what the story
represents.
The critique of stereotypical representations has to take place
within a context. Whilst stereotypes present then1selves as unchang-
ing, as constants no matter what the history and the geography, the
class and the culture, to take thern at face value, as it were, is to render
them untouchable truths; it [Link] them and places them beyond the
reach of a critique that demands change as part of its political agenda.
Stereotypes, feminist theories suggest, have to be placed in order to be
understood. They operate inside contexts, not outside them. To read
the stereotypes in Conrad, Stevenson and Wilde requires a historicist
intervention and contextual reconstructions.
The late nineteenth century, Elaine Showalter has argued, borrow-
ing the phrase with which she titles her book from George Gissing,
was a period of 'sexual anarchy' (Showalter 1991, 3), a period in which
gender definitions were acutely threatened by a variety of social
changes. Simple demographics was one n1ajor cause of gender confu-
sion. The returns from the 1861 British census provided evidence that
there were far larger numbers of women than men living in the British
Isles. This fact produced enormous cultural anxieties in mid- to late
Victorian Britain. As Mary Poovey (1989) and Lynda Nead (1988) have
both demonstrated, the 1860s were also the high point of the ideology
of the separate spheres for n1en and women which had been develop-
 Reading the Boys' Own Stories 221

ing since the mid-eighteenth century: the phrase describes the belief
that n1en were active, economically independent, competitive, striv-
ing creatures whilst women were passive, dependent, nurturing and
weak. If such were the 'natures' of male and female, it made social
sense to organise human life to reflect the capacities of each sex. As
Tennyson put it, possibly ironically, in The Princess (1847):

Man for the field and woman for the hearth:

Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and won1an to obey;
All else confusion.

The separate spheres of man and woman, then, were respectively the
worlds of competitive work and domesticity; as an ideology it defined
men as active, women as passive, men as workers outside the domes-
tic sphere, women as confined (for their own protection and for the
comfort of men) inside it. The binary oppositions structured all social
thinking about the relationships between the sexes: without them, 'all
else confusion' .
But, if there were significantly more women than 01en, then it was
clear that not all women could marry and take meir places in the safe
domestic sphere to act as wives and mothers. 2 Economic necessity
dictated that many women from the middle orders had to work for a
living, despite the fact that their education had _not fitted tl1em for
work, and that mey risked me loss of social status as middle-class
women (as 'ladies', as Henry James might have put it) if mey left me
safety of the domestic sphere. On the back of these demographic and
economic facts, therefore, there had been a wave of serious agitation
for women's rights: for better education, for the opening up of t11e
universities and tl1en the professions (legal and medical in particular)
to women, and for the vote. ln tandem witl1 these explicit political
demands, mere was a general feeling that (middle-class) women were
becoming ,nore socially assertive, 1nore independent, less passive and
domesticated. As an 'Angry Old Buffer' put it in Punch in 1895 (27
April):3

When Adam delved and Eve span

No one need ask which was the man.
Bicycling, footballing, scarce human,
222 Readings

All wonder now, 'Which is the woman?'

But a new fear my bosom vexes;
Tomorrow there may be no sexes!
Unless as end to all the pother,
Each one in fact becomes the other.

The message of the skit is clear. Uppity women are a direct cause of
effeminate men, and androgyny is to be feared, not welcomed, since it
undoes the binary opposition of gender that structured all contempo-
rary thought. The crisis of late nineteenth-century masculinity is,
then, a crisis caused by a shift in gender relations in general. The
disruption of the binary opposition, of the separate spheres,
rebounded on men as well as on women. If femininity was not what it
was supposed to be, then masculinity was troubled as well. The
pervasiveness of the separate spheres ideology is signalled in both the
epigraphs to this chapter. Rider Haggard, dedicating his book to his
son and to his son's school-friends, appeals to the values of masculin-
ity, and wills their continuity- English gentlemanliness is the 'highest
rank' for anyone to aspire to: his adventure stories articulate the
testing of those values in the romantic space of imperial territory, a
space which is resolutely male and undomestic. Gwendolen Fairfax,
on the other hand, in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest,
upends those selfsame assumptions. Domesticity is the male sphere
and male effen1inacy is dangerously seductive, views which overturn
the normative values of masculinity and femininity for respectable
Victorians. The ideology of separate spheres can be at once appealed
to and parodied: confusion indeed.
This is not the only context in which Conrad, Stevenson and Wilde
can be read, but it is perhaps the most significant context for a femi-
nist appraisal of their texts which chart in their different ways the
dismantling of long-cherished versions of gender relations, and a
desperate attempt to reassert the values of masculinity. Showalter
defines texts such as Conrad's and Stevenson's as 'male quest
ron1ances' - romantic quests for the elusive qualities of masculinity
(Showalter 1991, 81), an interesting take on the genre of romance
quests, whose usual object is the passive lady love of the active male
protagonist. She argues that the removal of women from the plots of
these texts is also a strategy for removing then1 from the readership of
the texts: like Haggard's novels, they are addressed to 'all the big and
little boys' who read them. And the homo-erotic tale of Dorian Gray
 Reading the Boys ' Own Stories 223

exists within this frame as well since the all-male worlds of the gentle-
man's club (The Strange Case) and the ship (Heart of Darkness) shade
very easily from homosocial to homosexual nuance. 4
Despite the repression of female characters, therefore, these texts
have interesting perspectives to offer to fe1ninist thinking. New
answers to the question: what does it mean to be a wo1nan? require a
reappraisal of what it might mean to be a man. The analysis and re-
evaluation of one half of any binary opposition has repercussions for
the other half. The three fictions deal with those effects in different
ways and reach different but related conclusions.

Case-Notes: Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde

Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything
to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from
the opposition activity/passivity fro1n the power relation between a
fantasisized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the
consequential phantasm of woman as a 'dark continent' to penetrate
and 'pacify' ... Conquering her, they've made haste to depart fro1n her
borders, to get out of sight, out of body. The way man has of getting
out of himself ... deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory.
(Cixous in Marks and de Courtivron 1981, 247, n}

What exactly is the matter with Henry Jekyll? What makes him search
out the seamy side of his own nature through the process of quasi-
scientific e.x periment, and through the masculine discourse and prac-
tice of science? Because The Strange Case is a gothic text, the answers
it proposes to these questions are not clear cut, and are not scientific.
Rather they are symptoms which have to be read back to pathological
causes: but the route of cause and effect is a winding path, not a
straight one. One of the definitions of the gothic genre is that it
disrupts the common-sense discourses of Realism where explana-
tions are readily forthcoming and explanation dissolves mystery. In
Freud's terms, the familiar comes back in an unfamiliar guise which is
the source of fear. The mystery 1nust remain in so1ne sense intact in a
gothic text: the symptoms are multiply-caused and invite multiple
diagnoses. One possible feminist diagnosis of Henry Jekyll's particular
pathology goes as foUo,ivs.
At the end of the text, we read Jekyll's 'full statement of the case',
 224 Readings

·which is both a scientific text describing what happened (a scientific

case study), and a confession which eschews the objectivist stance of
science and places itself in the personal, subjective voice of the man
in extremis. The dual nature of Jekyll's narrative is a dramatisation of
the duality he describes in his own personality: he is at once a scien-
tist and a hedonist; a man of honour and a rake; a moral man and an
amoral monster. That these oppositions inhabit the same body is the
root of the problem. As Jekyll himself describes it in his statement:

I was born in the year 18- to a large fortune, endowed besides with
excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of
the wise and good among my fellow men, and thus, as might have
been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distin-
guished future. And indeed, the worst of my faults was a certain
impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of
many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious
desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave
countenance before the public. Hence it caine about that 1 concealed
my pleasures; and that when I reached the years of reflection, and
began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in
the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life.
(Stevenson 1979, 81)

Much earlier in the century a certain Jane Austen had noted, probably
ironically, but also appealing to cliche, that: 'It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,
must be in want of a wife' (Austen 1972, 51). On the face of it, Henry
JekyU was just such a man: he had fortune, good looks, a disposition
to hard work and will to be respected by his peers. An ideal man, and
an eligible bachelor indeed, especially if his worst fault was to pretend
to be more serious than he actually felt like being. The pleasures of
which he partook, and yet disguised, appear to have been fairly
innocuous - 'many a man would have even blazoned such irregulari-
ties as I was guilty of (Stevenson 1979, 81). Jekyll, however, preferred
to pretend. And although he led a double life even before he discov-
ered the potion that produced his alter ego, Edward Hyde, he denies
that he was a hypocrite: 'both sides of me were in dead earnest' (81).
And despite his evident eligibility, he never marries. Indeed, the story
contains no hint of any woman who could represent an eligible spin-
ster for such a man.
The source of his trouble is traced in his own narrative to an idio-
 Reading the Boys' Own Stories 225

syncrasy of his own personality. He liked to look on himself as a fine

upstanding figure; he Liked to have the approval of his friends: but he
also 'learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream' (82) on
the idea of self-indulgence, establishing a binaiy opposition between
the prosaic world of everyday objectivity and the daydream world,
almost a narcotic world, of subjective pleasure. On the one hand,
then, he played the part of the picture of English gentlemanliness with
all its implications of self-denial and self-restraint; 5 on the other, he
played the unrestrained man, untouched by the fetters of civilisation.
His is a story of 'going native', argues David Punter: and, 'it is
precisely Jekyll's "high views" which produce morbidity in his alter
ego' (Punter 1980, 241). Knowing how he should look and behave,
knowing the rules of civilisation, produces a kind of ' reverse' knowl-
edge of what breaking the rules might mean, a capacity to imagine the
transgression of social values. What Jekyll suffers, therefore, is the
split between nature and culture, inherent in aJl human beings, yet
most usually figured in the female of the human species, for she most
usually is understood as being both closer to nature, and the bearer of
cultural significance. He recognises that his 'proper' n1asculinily is
merely a perfonnance. He likes the adulation it brings when he
pretends to be working at the 'furtl1erance of knowledge or the relief
of sorrow and suffering' (81); but he also enjoys those 'other' plea-
sures. He thinks that he is unusual, but he also extrapolates from his
own experience to make a universal claim: 'man is not truly one, but
truly two', and may indeed be multiple rather than merely double
(Stevenson 1979, 82). His discovery is disturbing to his fellow profes-
sional men, the doctor (Lanyon} and the lawyer (Utterson} both
because it threatens their own sense of upstanding masculinity, and
because it contaminates masculinity with the threat of the feminine
other withjn the supposedly indivisible male self - the word 'individ-
ual', valued in Victorian discourses, literaJly means that which is undi-
vided.
When the lawyer Utterson breaks into Jekyll's private rooms and
flnds the body of Hyde, he is shocked by a number of other circum-
stances in the closet. One is a pious work that has been annotated,
apparently by Jekyll, with dreadful blasphemies. But more significant
is the mirror he finds in the rooms:

the searchers came to the cheval-glass, into whose depth they looked
with an involuntary horror. But it was so turned as to show them
226 Readings

nothing but the rosy glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a
hundred repetitions along the glazed front of the presses, and their
own pale and fearful countenances stooping to look in.
'This glass has seen some strange things, sir,' whispered Poole.
'And surely none stranger than itself,' echoed the lawyer, in the
sa1ne tone. 'For what did Jekyll' - he caught himself up at the word
with a start, and then conquering the weakness: 'what could Jekyll
want \•vith it?' he said. (71)

Mirrors have many meanings. They represent the scientific view of

the world, the objective image or representation on which science
might pride itself. In this guise, they are the metaphor of Realism.
What is seen in the mirror is \,vhat is 'really' there. And yet: mirrors
might also act as a metony1n of femininity, frames in which both
culture and nature are inscribed. What one sees in a mirror is what is
'really' there, but it is also the space in which one sees the process of
the creation of oneself, the mask or persona of social performance.
Traditionally, it is won1en who gaze obsessively at their own images.
When a man does so, he partakes of the commodification and objecti-
fication of femininity. When Narcissus fell in love with his own image,
it destroyed hiln; when Jekyll obsessively observes his external
appearance, he is also destroyed. Utterson and Jekyll's butler, Poole,
are the1nselves unmanned by tl1eir reflections. They look into the
mirror with 'involuntary horror', and see themselves as pale ghosts of
themselves in the uncanny atmosphere of Jekyll's room. Jekyll's
effeminate self-consciousness is potentially catchjng, since all men
have the seeds of his disease.
The consciousness that his gentlemanly identity is a performance
rather than an irtherent essence produces Jekyll's horror which then
extends to his circle of friends. For if he n1erely performs manliness
rather than inhabiting its essence, then so do they. The absence of
women from the text signals that one need seek no further than one's
own (male) self for the disturbing 'other', tl1e difference within the
same. Indeed the absence of wo1nen who 'count' within the confines
of tl1e story world emphasises an uncomfortable duality in all the men
with whom Jekyll associates. And without that 'other' against which to
define a stable masculine identity, that identity is co1npromised,
because it cannot know its own borders, the defining limitations
which guarantee its existence. In this case, a world without wo1nen is
also a world in which 'real' men do not exist.
 Reading the Boys' Own Stories 227

As pretty as a picture? Wilde's Dorian Gray

'My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex.

They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women
represent the tri umph of matter over mind, just as men represent the
triumph of mind over n1orals.'
Lord Henry Wotton to Dorian Gray

When Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in 1890, in Lippincott's

Magazine, it received some very hostile reviews. The anonymous
reviewer in the Scot's Observer slated the novel in the following terms:

Why go grubbing in muck heaps? ... Mr. Oscar Wilde has again been
WTiting stuff that were better unwritten; and while The Picture of
Dorian Gray ... is ingenious, interesting, full of cleverness, and plainly
the work of a man of letters, it is false art - for its interest is medico-
legal; it is false to human nature - for its hero is a devil; it is false to
,morality - for it is not made sufficiently clear that the WTiter does not
prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health
and sanity. The story - which deals with n1atters only fitted for the
Criminal Investigation DepartJnent or a hearing in camera - is
discreditable alike to author and editor. Mr. Wilde has brains, and art,
and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and
perverted telegraph boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some
other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public
morals. (Beckson 1970, 75)

What the reviewer was identifying in the novel, made evident in his
reference to 'outlawed noblernen and perverted telegraph boys' is a
version of masculinity which radically unsettled all the sacred
Victorian beliefs about what it meant to be a man. The reference is to
the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, when a number of prominent
figures (including Queen Victoria's second son, Prince Albert Victor)
were implicated in illegal homosexual practices following a police raid
on a male brothel in Cleveland Street. The telegraph boys were laid
on, as it were, as part of the entertainment. In its aftermath, several
aristocratic men had tled to the Continent to avoid prosecution and
scandal. The reviewer was picking up on hints in Basil's moralising
speech to Dorian that the 'nature' of his crimes was that of' unnatural
vice' - of homosexuality. 6 If this is indeed the issue (but see note 4),
no wonder women are so spectacularly excluded from the text.
228 Rea d ings

The source of Dorian Gray's ability to unsettle its readers derives

perhaps from its rewriting of the categories of masculine and femi-
nine, a rewriting that takes place in the figure of Dorian himself, but
which also implicates his upper-class circle of friends . Basil Hallward,
the artist, Henry Wotton, the dandy, and Dorian himself are all men
who refuse the masculinity inscribed by writers like H. Rider Haggard,
G. A. Henty, Robert Louis Stevenson (in his guise as a writer of adven-
ture stories), Rudyard Kipling or Andrew Lang. 7 In Dorian Gray, the
men belong to the leisure class. They have no work outside the home.
Even Basil, who works as an artist, has his studio 'at home'. There is
no necessity for them to work; and they do not choose to work as an
assertion of their manhood. Instead, they do nothing; conversation
and parties, drink and good food, music and theatre are their occupa-
tions: as Lady Brandon says when she introduces Dorian to Basil:
'Charming boy ... Quite forget what he does - afraid he - doesn't do
anything - oh yes, plays the piano - or is it the violin, dear Mr Gray'
(Wilde 1985, 30). Whether it is piano or violin, neither would count as
a proper occupation for a man; indeed, both might be thought of as
the fe1ninine accomplishments of upper-class women. As such, then,
the three men are scandalous to a hegemonic bourgeois version of
masculinity \,vhich is supposed to be active, hard-working, indepen-
dent. Indeed, in the novel as a whole, precisely those men who
conform to the bourgeois standard are those who are ridiculed by
Lord Henry's languid cynicism. To a greater or lesser extent, Basil,
Henry and Dorian are feminised men. They are passive, idle and often
bored. Basil, is marginally uncomfortable with all this, since he has
retained his conscience; but Henry enjoys his position and he teaches
Dorian to enjoy it too.
The single most significant thing about Dorian is his appearance.
He is a beautiful young man and his face is both his fortune and his
downfall. It endo\,vs hi1n with an effeminacy that makes him an object
to others, and which thus renders his own subjectivity and self-
consciousness painful. We first meet him in the object of the portrait
of which he is also the subject. He has been painted as the fulfilment
of Basil's artistic dreams, and the portrait is so successful that all three
men begin to confuse the object with the subject - the picture with
the man. As Dorian tells Basil, 'I am in love with it ... It is part of
myself, to which Basil replies: 'Well, as soon as you are dry, you shall
be varnished, and framed, and sent home. Then you can do \ivhat you
like with yourself (51). The effect of the picture - or rather, of the
 Reading the Boys' Own Stories 229

series of pictures that Basil has painted of hi1n - is that Dorian is

commodified, in much the same way as a woman of his class and
beauty might also have been commodified in the art of the period.
The first appearance of the picture emphasises its status as an object
with monetary as well as aesthetic value. When Lord Henry first sees
it, be advises Basil to send it to the Grosvenor Gallery \,Vhich
specialised in avant-garde art, as opposed to the Royal Academy, the
exhibition that was the contemporary index of mass taste (24). The
painting is thus registered as a commodity \,vith a specialised market,
which would have value only for the cognoscenti (amongst whom
Lord Henry, of course, includes himselt). The buyers are male, and the
objects they buy or exchange amongst themselves, most usually
pictures of women, function in the feminine mode. When Dorian is
confused with his painted image, this is also a sign of the confusion of
normative gender roles.
The other pictures that Basil has painted of Dorian idealise his
image, displacing it in the safe space of mythology. Basil has repre-
sented Dorian as Paris, as Adonis, as Adrian and as Narcissus: 8 'And it
had all been what art should be, unconscious, ideal and remote'
(144- 5). In idealising the image, Basil had displaced the desire that his
representations articulated. The danger of the image arises when it is
placed in contemporary clothes and in a contemporary setting.
Without the clothing of 'long ago and far away', the explicitness of the
male beauty in the painting becomes 'idolatry' (145) - a profane and
perverse worship of the male image by the male viewer. And the
profanity of Basil's worship of Dorian's image is replicated in Lord
Henry's, when we discover from his wife that he has seventeen or
eighteen photographs of him in his rooms (69-70). In this concentra-
tion on the image, image is placed way above substance in a reversaJ
of contemporary values, in which depth was supposed to matter more
than surface, sincerity more than style.9
Moreover, it is not only in the fact of Dorian's multiplying image
that he is feminised. It is also in the substance of the image, in the
ways in which the other two men, and the narrative as a whole, see
him. The effect that Basil seeks in his painting is that of a feminine
arousal. What he wants to capture is: 'the half-parted lips, and the
bright look in the eyes' (43), precisely the image of the sexually recep-
tive female in the commodity representations of both cosmetic adver-
tising and pornography, in which parted lips and shining eyes are the
essence of feminine appeal. 10 At the beginning of the novel, further-
230 Readings

more, Dorian acts and is treated like a virginal young girl. For
example, when he first sees Henry, he blushes; and Henry warns
Dorian not to sit out in the sun for too long: 'You must not allow your-
self to become sunburnt. It would be unbecoming', he says (45). The
painting itself, like the mirror in The Strange Case, is a sign of Dorian's
self-consciousness of his own beauty, and the temporality of his exis-
tence. Basil and Henry are not alone as idolators in the text. Dorian
learns to worship his own image, to be conscious of the effects he has
on people through the combination of seeing the picture and of
listening to Henry's tempting words. His fascination with his face, his
concentration on external appearance, replicates the concerns of
upper-class femininity.
In these circumstances, it is no wonder that the woman he falls in
love with is an actress, a woman whose commodity status is obvious
for all to see, and whose implication in appearances and surfaces is
the halln1ark of her trade. Indeed, Sibyl is so much a commodity that
the old Jew who ovvns the East End theatre where she performs has
effectively bought her for fifty pounds. The word 'theatre', like the
word 'theory' derives from the Greek for seeing. What Dorian sees in
Sibyl Vane is a multiplication of performed images taken from the
'long ago and far away' world of Shakespeare, and he falls in love ,,vith
the proliferation of images that she represents, as well as with her
ability to transcend the sordid reality of the surroundings in which her
performances take place:

'One night she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is ln1ogen. I have
seen her die in the gloom of an Italian to1nb. I have watched her
wandering through the forest of Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in
hose and doublet and dainty cap. She has been mad, and come into
the presence of a guilty king, and given him rue to wear, and bitter
herbs to taste of. She has been innocent, and the black hands of jeal-
ousy have crushed her reed-like throat. I have seen her in every age
and in every costun1e. Ordinary won1en never appeal to one's imagi-
nation. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfig-
ures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their
bonnets ... They have their stereotyped smile and their fashionable
manner. They are quite obvious. But an actress! How different an
actress is!' (76)

Dorian's description here dramatises his infatuation with Sibyl as a

 Readi n g the Boys' Own Stories 23 I

series of images which require nothing from him but seeing and
admiration. His paratactic rapture, which makes no logical connec-
tion between the images, articulates a fascination that words are
scarcely adequate to represent. His words disguise the cheap theatre
which is 'like a third-rate wedding cake' (74), maintaining the ilJusion
of Sibyl's transcendence. She acts in the dramas, and he observes her
in a mirror image of Henry and Basil's appropriation of his figure and
face in their various representations of it. But although his relation-
ship with Sibyl might potentially reinscribe him in the usual position
of the powerful gazing male subject who gazes at the passive female
subject, in fact, their relationship is all about image - his as well as
hers. When Sibyl sees Dorian, she sees [Link] as a theatrical figure - as
Prince Charming, the rescuing hero of stage faity-tale, not as he is.
'She regarded me merely as a person in a play,' Dorian tells Hen1y.
'She knows nothing of life' (79). Just as Basil and Henry interpret
Dorian's face, so too does Sibyl; and the fact that Dorian and Sibyl's
fantasmatic interpretations of each other are mutual does not make
them any the less fatal.
Sibyl and Dorian are both works of art. Sibyl, as Rosalind, dressed as
a boy, has the 'delicate grace' of a 'Tanagara figurine' (103); Dorian
dreams of placing her on 'a pedestal of gold' and seeing 'the world
worship the woman who is mine' (105). But the works of art from
which they derive their form are tragedies. Whilst Dorian admires
Sibyl in Shakespeare's comedies, he is more fascinated by the roles in
which she dies, when she plays Ophelia, Desdemona and, most
importantly, Juliet. Juliet is the first role in which he sees her, and it is
the last role she plays before her death; indeed, one might even say
that she plays Juliet to the death, since, like the Shakespearean
heroine, she poisons herself once Dorian has announced to her that
his love for her is dead. Dorian, schooled by Henry, insists on seeing
her death as a passage 'into the sphere of art' (139), as a 'strange lu1id
fragment from some Jacobean tragedy' (133), which fixes her meaning
in a remote aesthetic sphere. This attitude enables him to discern
beauty in her death without having to examine its morality. Dorian's
tragedy is that his own work of art, the painting that he hides irI the
attic, the space given over to mistakes and madness, is not similarly
fixed. With his moral degradation, the image ceases to be ideal . It is an
object over which he can exercise no masculine control, except to
keep it hidden in his closet, as Henry Jekyll hides his mirror.
The text intends no moral message, no femirlist content. But in
232 Readings

following up the hint of 'sexual anarchy' implied by the effeminacy of

the three male characters who are the centre of the plot, the reader is
permitted to see more in Dorian's image than Wilde meant to put
there. Wilde himself licenses us to excavate his texts for our own
meanings: in the Preface he writes, 'lt is the spectator, and not life,
that art really mirrors' (22). And at this time, this spectator sees
unease with contemporary (1890s) sexual relations. The novel, that is,
charts how men as well as women were trapped by gendered and
classed codes of sexuality and behaviour. If it is fatal for Dorian to be
treated as if he were a woman, as if he were both subject and object in
culture, then it shouldn't surprise us that it is fatal for Sibyl too. The
only difference is that Dorian - a powerful, rich, upper-class man - in
terms of contemporary codes of behaviour, has more power and
ought to exercise it for moral good. His story, however, shows that
1naking the human subject - whether male or female - into an object,
exposes him/her to a dangerous split. For Dorian and for Sibyl, who
inhabit the slash line between the binary opposition of
subject/ object, this split is entirely destructive. The feminist reader,
then, can extrapolate from this particular example to a general point:
a femininity which means objectification is dangerous.

Civilisation and its discontents: Heart ofDarkness

In its technique and plot, Conrad's Heart of Darkness dramatises the

spirit of the masculine romance - it is a novel told by and to men, and
it is a narrative about the limitations of 'the highest rank whereto we
can attain - the state and dignity of English gentlemen.' The setting
establishes an internal audience which represents the flower of
English middle-class manhood. Marlow, the veteran sailor of imperial
voyages tells his tale to a Director of Companies, a Lawyer (' the best of
old fellows' [Conrad 1983, 28-91), and an Accountant, as well as to the
unnamed narrator of the frame story. It is a tale about men, for men,
told to men by a man whose own status as a proper man is not in
question. It radically excludes women from its setting in the all-male
space of the ship on the Tharnes, a space which is continuous with the
Clubland of Stevenson's novella and the quasi-bachelor world of
Wilde's Dorian Gray. But instead of shoring up the meaning of
masculinity as its apparent genre of masculine romance would tend
to do, Heart of Darkness questions it on its own grounds, in a critique
 Reading the Boys ' Own Stories 233

of manliness that is perhaps even more radical than Wilde's homo-

erotic fantasy. Henry Jekyll is a man apart; similarly, Dorian, Henry
and Basil live on the margins of hegemonic manliness. Marlow and
his audience, however, are the very source and exemplars of defini-
tions of proper masculinity. Marlow's narrative is by far the greatest
threat to such definitions, since it is a narrative which has bought into
the dream of the English gentleman and yet which nonetheless
exposes the dream as a nightmare of horror.
What Marlow articulates is the fear that the project of active, adven-
turing masculinity has no basis in reality. The world of the empire
which Dorian and Jekyll's domestic lives eschew is the world in which
Marlow has come to self-consciousness - and it is a very different self-
consciousness from that which haunts the other men. He has discov-
ered, from grim experience as an explorer and professional sailor,
that:

The conquest of the earth, which mostly n1eans tile taking it away
from those who have a different complexion, or slightly flatter noses
than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
What redeen1s it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a senti-
mental pretence, but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea -
something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice
to ... (3 1-2, ellipsis in original)

Precisely what the 'idea' is, however, Marlow is unable to say,

signalled by his failure to define it, and his trailing off into a silence
marked textually by an ellipsis. Indeed, the idea looks very much like a
pagan god, worshipped, as Dorian's image is worshipped, perhaps,
.out of a blind faith without reason. The nature of the 'idea' has to be
reconstructed out of Marlow's disconnected story. When it is recon-
structed, it is not a pretty thing.
Presumably, the basis of the idea is that of civilisation. The rhetoric
of empire was a rhetoric which spoke of civilising the savage, of bring-
ing the benefits of progress to the poor benighted native. It was based
on the assumption that so-called civilisation was actually a good
thing, and that the indigenous peoples of colonised countries had
nothing equivalent to the profound values of Western European
culture. The rhetoric disguised 'the robbery with violence, [the] aggra-
vated murder on a grand scale' (31) which was the method used to
achieve the economic goals which were the 'real' idea behind imperi-
234 Readings

alism. What Marlow discovers is the absolute disjunction between

cash and ideals, between the facts on the ground and the idealistic
justification of them. It forces him to calJ into question not only what
actualJy happened in late nineteenth-century Africa, but also the basis
of the society in Western Europe which Licensed such excess. In a
world supposedly structured by binary oppositions - primitive/
civilised; Afiica/Europe; nature/technology; darkness/enlightenment;
black/white; female/male; economic necessity/ideals; ignorance/
knowledge - Marlow is forced to confront the fact that the binaries
structure only thinking, not the reality thought is supposed to repre-
sent. There is a leakage across the slash lines that supposedly divide
the oppositions which confuses and destabilises the neat taxonomies
by which Western philosophy has structured the world and its mean-
ings.
The metaphor for this is the metaphor of the river which flows into
the sea - just as all rivers flow into the sea. Geography- the maps over
which the young boy Marlow once was used to pore with such excite-
ment - represents, as an order of knowledge, an ordering of knowl-
edge. A map is a document which organises the natural world into
boundaries, naming places as a 111ode of controlling them. Africa is no
longer a blank space, says Marlow, but has 'got filled ... with rivers and
lakes and names' {33). But geography on the ground, as it were, is a
very different thing. It is far more confusing, less ordered than the
maps W'Ould have us believe. Borders on the ground are not clear.
Water borders are even less discernible, a fact signalled by the novel's
setting, with Marlow speaking in a ship at anchor in the Thames, a
river that connects geographically and economicalJy with all the other
waterways of the world. As Marlow says of the Thames, 'this also ...
has been one of the dark places of the earth' (29), just as Africa was
described by contemporary commentators as the Dark Continent.
The novel's last sentence, with its connection of the dark Thames to
the dark Congo River shows us what is at stake in the novel: 'The
offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-
way leading to the uttennost ends of the earth flowed sombre under
an overcast sky- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense dark-
ness' (121). If the Thames flows into the Congo, and vice versa, what
principle of structure guarantees a Western, European, civil ised,
masculine identity against contamination or invasion by the Oriental
or African, primitive and savage identities that are 'out there - some-
where' .1 1
 Reading t h e Boys ' Own Stories 235

It is not, however, merely the confrontation with an alternative

culture which produces Marlow's disquiet. In this economy of opposi-
tion and otherness, there is one site of otherness within the same,
which also destabilises the cosy space of self and other. That site is the
space of femininity, of women in culture. The paradox of the novel is
that women are contradictions; they inhabit both sides of any binary
opposition, and they thereby dramatise the instability of the order
which depends on those binaries. At the outset of the novel, we are
introduced briefly to Marlow's aunt, who he sets to service in getting
him a job on a boat. Her influence in this matter is indirect: she gets
the desired result through her acquaintance amongst the wives of
powerful men. Marlow is rather disturbed to discover that he has
been 'represented to the wife of the high dignitary, and goodness
knows to how many more people besides, as an exceptional and
gifted creature ... Something like an emissa1y of light, sornething like a
lower sort of apostle' (38-9). But the small facts of feminine influence,
and of female (mis)representation, at least signal the economic
importance of women even when they are apparently most excluded
from the realms of the cash nexus.
Despite her influence, though, the unnamed aunt has no sense of
the reality of the company's work, and especially the fact that it is run
for profit and with tre1nendous brutality. She has bought into the
rhetoric of empire, but the words are divorced from the reality that
Marlow suspects, and then comes to know in his journey to the centre
of Africa. In his musing about his aunt, he comments to his listeners:

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a
world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and
never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up
it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Son1e confounded fact
we 1nen have been living contentedly with since the day of creation
would start up and knock the whole thing over. (39)

Later, speaking of Kurtz's Intended in an amplification of this point,

Marlow says: 'They - the women I mean - are out of it - should be out
of it. We must help the1n to stay in that beautiful world of their own
lest ours gets \lvorse' (84). Women,12 that is, live with the ideal, not the
real. And the edifice of their ideal is very fragile indeed - signalled by
the fragility of the Intended, a china doll of a won1an who would be
shattered by the truth. But the fact is that men are equally out of
236 Readings

touch with the real and with the truth. It is only an 'idea', another kind
of ideal, that has redeemed the 'conquest of the earth' from mere
brute savagery. As Marlow learns, the idea is not enough to save indi-
vidual imperial workers from the true implications of their work:
hence Kurtz is moved to the savage sentiment, 'Exterminate all the
brutes', scrawled on his writings about enlightenment and civilisation
and to the savage decor of severed human heads with which he
defaces his African dwelling and through which he inscribes his own
degeneration. Women, in their safe domesticity, hold true to the idea;
men, faced with reality, discover that the idea they worship is a graven
image, a false god.
The narrative of Marlow's meeting with Kurtz's Intended shows the
extent to which the ideal is rotten to the core. Marlow is a conspicu-
ously manly, and perhaps even gentle-manly figure. He subscribes to
the hegemonic ideal of masculinity- the ideal of playing the game, of
giving one's word, of speaking the truth, of being chivalrous. He
believes in 'truth' as a positive moral value, and speaks of his disgust
at lies: 'You know l hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am
s traighter than the rest of us, but sin1ply because it appals me. There
is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies ... It makes me miser-
able and sick, like biting something rotten would do' (57). Yet, for all
that, he lies to the Intended, rewriting Kurtz's last words as her name,
not 'the horror, the horror'. He cannot tell what Kurtz had really said
fo r fear chat it would actually destroy civilisation - the fragile facade
behind which china-doll, middle-class women live with their ideals
ridiculously intact. Marlow's lie is born of chivalry. But it demon-
strates the inte1nal contradictions in his version of proper masculin-
ity: lies are bad, taste of mortality; but lies are necessary to protect
enfeebled femininity. One of the sources of the darkness, then, is that
civilisation is based on lies, not the ideals that are claimed for it; civili-
sation is therefore tainted by mortality and imn1orality.
If the Intended is the ideal - the attenuated womanhood that civili-
sation licenses - then Kurtz's African mistress is ... what, precisely? In
one sense, she is, of course, the absolute Other: tl1e racial, gendered,
geographic and savage Other to Marlow's white, male, European
civilised self, the self that represents the norm to himself and the
novel's internal audience. As Marlow's descriptions of her imply, her
otherness makes him fear her. He describes her as 'the wild and
gorgeous apparition of a woman', a phrase which speaks both of her
attractiveness and her otherness, as an almost ghostly spectacle:
 Read i ng the Boys' Own Stories 237

She ,valked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed

cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of
barbarous ornan1ents. She carried her head high: her hair was done
in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knees, brass
wire gauntlets to ilie elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innu-
merable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre iliings, charms,
gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and tre1nbled at
every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks
upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and n1agnificent;
iliere was someiliing ominous and stately in her deliberate progress.
And in ilie hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful
land, the [Link] wilderness, the colossal body of tl1e fecund and
mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as thought it had been
looking at ilie [Link] of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.
(100-1)

At the very end of her approach, she makes a startling gesture, raising
her [Link] above her head, 'as though in an uncontrollable desire to
touch the sky' (101). She never speaks, but her gesture is somehow
eloquent and frightening. It has meaning, but the Western observers
are not equipped to interpret it.
Everything about her is radically other to what Marlow expects of
femininity. The Mistress has an air of dignity and command - there's
no feminine cringing, no lowering of the eyes in the gestures expected
of Western womanly modesty. Her adornments emphasise power -
hair like a helmet, jewellery like armour, ostentatious wealth. For the
Western observers the whole picture is threatening, to the extent that
Marlow reports the response of the Russian sailor who "'would have
tried to shoot her"' had she come any closer. Had he done so, his
· response would have been an 'un-manning' since proper men, within
their codes of masculinity, never offer violence to women. The facade
of civilisation is undermined by her presence and her silent - but
somehow articulate - gesture.
The native woman never speaks except in this single gesture.
Kurtz's Intended, however, speaks all the time. The mise-en-scene of
Marlow's meeting with the Intended could not be more different from
the African landscape of his encounter with the Mistress. Where the
latter takes her setting from wild nature, the former is staged in a
house that articulates all the values of civilisation. Marlow waits for
the Intended in a 'lofty drawing-room with three long windows from
238 Readings

floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and be-draped columns.
The bent gilt legs and back of the furniture shone in indistinct curves.
The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A
grand piano stood massively in a corner; with dark gleams on the flat
surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus' (117). This staging
speaks the language of civilisation and of the domestic space of femi-
ninity within that civilisation - windows like Greek columns, the
tekhne of complex furniture, the monumental whiteness of marble,
the piano which signals culture. But as Marlow has already observed
of the Belgian city, it is like a whited sepulchre (35); the civilised
Western world is a tomb with the mere veneer of civilisation which
disguises but does not dispel the corruption underneath. Thus the
piano, whilst it is a marker of culture, is also a tomb - it has the
'flavour of mortality' about it, as Marlow says that lies always do. The
Intended, then, lives in a lie, and is presented with a lie 'to Jive with'
(121). The failure of civilised language to represent reality is mirrored
in this setting, as well as in the words that Marlow and the Intended
exchange. Her language has no substance; that is what the context of
Marlow's narrative as a whole demonstrates: as her sorrow bursts out,
she says to Marlow:

'Forgive me. I - I - have mourned so long in silence - in silence ... You

were with him - to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody to
understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear
.. .' (120- 1, ellipses in 01iginal)

She speaks hesitantly, with many gaps and ellipses, many unfinished
thoughts. This is supposed to be the language of articulate western
civilisation. It is, in fact, a language that disguises rather than
expresses, much as the Kristevan semiotic is supposed to do (see
above, Chapter 5). There is meaning in the gaps, but it is not easy to
read.
There is a sense, then, in which the encounter with proper feminin-
ity is n1ore radically disturbing to Marlow's sense of civilised
masculinity than the meeting with the so-called primitive woman of
Africa. Both the Intended and the Mistress demonstrate the contami-
nation of categorical certainties. But the Intended brings that contam-
ination home - literally as well as figuratively. The Symbolic order of
the West is shown as a n1ere fiction, dependent on the semiotic
murn1urings of one bereaved woman and on 'the holy terror of
 Reading the Boys' Own Sto r i es 239

scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums' (85). The novel shows that it
is only fear and lies that make order; what price the great idea of civili-
sation then?

About these readings

There are lots of other things that could be said about these texts; any
approach represents a limitation on the text as well as an elucidation
of it. The value of such readings, of taking 'the boys' own stories' and
reading them against the grain, is that they are texts brimming with
contradictions. So that whilst they may appear to present and perpet-
uate very attenuated and partial versions of women (and, indeed, of
men), a certain kind of reading allows us to interrogate the fissures,
the logical gaps, the holes, the inconsistencies, in the structures which
are based on women's marginalisation in male-dominated cultures. It
is certainly my view that feminist literary theories cannot ignore texts
such as these. Whilst we may prefer the gynocritical route, any theory
of literature has to be prepared to approach any mode of writing.
These readings are about looking for the holes. A text (a word that
derives from the Latin £[Link], meaning to weave) has holes as well as
threads in its structure. Without them, it is nothing. Traditional
1nodes of reading often insist on reading the threads to the exclusion
of all else. Feminist readers just adopt different places to stand in rela-
tion to texts, and different points of focus within them.

Notes

1. Freud's essay, 'The Uncanny' establishes that unsettling effects are

caused when something that is familiar or known becon1es momentar-
ily unknowable; he argues that it is especially when the homely space of
ho1ne becomes unknowable that the uncanny is n1ost powerful. This is
in part a Linguistic argument, derived from d1e etyn1ology of the
Gern1an word 'unheimlich' which literally means unhomely, and is
usually translated as 'uncanny'. See Sigmund Freud, 'The "Uncanny"'
[1919). in The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 14, Art and Literature
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 335-76.
2. Of course, these ideals of femininity and masculinity were heavily influ-
enced by social class. Working-class women were almost always also
240 Readings

workers outside the domestic sphere as well as within it, and had been
from time immemorial. The Woman Question ('What shall we do with
our old maids?' as Frances Power Cobbe put it in 1861) was felt very
acutely because it brought middle-class women into the equation of
paid work. The articulate middle classes who wrote in and read the
newspapers of the mid and late century were writing about their own
sisters and daughters, and feared for their futures in a way that they had
never bothered with when the women concerned can1e from the lower
orders.
3. As Sally Ledger has noted, this 'poem' appeared in Punch just as Wilde's
second trial for gross indecency - the legal term for ho1nosexual
offences - was beginning at the Old Bailey. There was a tendency to
read masculine women as a cause of effeminacy in men (and vice
versa), and Punch was particularly vitriolic in its attacks on New
Women (who demanded various forms of equality with men) and what
it saw as effeminate and decadent men. See Sally Ledger, 'The New
Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism' in Sally Ledger and Scott
McCracken (eds) Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995, 25-6. For a more sustained discus-
sion of the New Woman, see Sally Ledger, The New Wo,nan: Fiction and
Feminism at the Fin de Siecle, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997.
4. Indeed, Showalter argues that Stevenson's Strange Case can be 'most
persuasively read as a fable of fin-de-siecle homosexual panic, the
discovery and resistance of the homosexual self (Showalter Sexual
Anarchy, London: Bloomsbury, 1991, 107). The tenn homosocial was
coined by Eve Sedgwick in her book Between Men: English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985). She argues that even heterosexual relationships in literature are
signs of attraction between men, and that the guy who wins the gal
most usually does so in order to become closer to the gal's male rela-
tions or protectors. Homosociality (male-male friendship) exists on a
continuum with homosexuality (1nale-male sexual relationships). The
heterosexuality of marriage often exists as a cloak for homosocial/
sexual desire.
5. For further information on the 'cult' of the English gentleman, see Mark
Girouard, The Return co Gamelot: Chival,y and the English Gentleman
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981); James Eli
Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Iiliaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); Richard Dellamora,
Atfasculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel
Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
 Reading the Boys ' Own Stories 24 1

6. Dorian's 'crimes' are actually wider than the label 'homosexuality'

implies. He has also corrupted women, including Lord Henry's own
sister, Gwendolen, who is now beyond the social pale to the extent that
no respectable woman would receive her, and even her children are no
longer allowed to live with her (Wilde 1985, 185). Basil also accuses
him of financial irregularities, and of sensual debauchery in brothels
and opium dens. To reduce his 'crimes' to homosexuality is to reduce
the impact of his corruption. Alan Sinfield's The Wilde Century argues
this case very fully, insisting that pinning Dorian down as a homosex-
ual is a misreading of a text that carefully evades such easy identifica-
tion of Dorian's 'vice'. For Sinfield, Dorian's effeminacy is not a simple
equivalent for his sexuality. Our identification of the effeminate male
with the decadent homosexual is a 'reading back', a retrospective posi-
tion which arises from our knowledge of Wilde's eventual fate, when
he was prosecuted and i1nprisoned for homosexual offences in 1895.
See Sinfield, The Wilde Century, London and New York: Casell, 1994,
98- 105.
7. These were all late nineteenth-century writers of adventure stories that
were specifically addressed to male audiences. Elaine Showalter iden-
tifies their chosen genre as 'masculine romance'. See Showalter,
Sexual Anarchy (London: Bloomsbury, 1991) for more information.
8. All these figures, Paris, Adonis, Adrian and Narcissus, are tropes of
same-sex (male-male} desire, which perhaps belies $infield's insis-
tence that the reader cannot identify a specifically homo-erotic theme
in the novel.
9. For a development of this argument about masculinity and values, see
Jonathan Dollimore's Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to
Foucault(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1991, 3-18).
10. For a graphic demonstration of this, see Griselda Pollock's photo-
essay, 'Signs of Femininity' in Vision and Difference: Femininity,
Feminism and the Histories ofArt (London: Routledge, 1988), 115-19.
11. The reference is to the opening titles of the popular television series
The X Files. My point is simply that Western cultures still seek to shore
up their own identities by reference to a dangerous and insidious
'Other'. It's just that today, we call our 'others' aliens, technologies, or
conspiracy theories. The point is that by making the1n look 'bad ', we
guarantee our own sense of ourselves as 'good' .
12. Again, we are speaking of middle- and upper-class white women here:
the women who 'count' in the narratives of 1niddle- and upper-class
white men.
 I 0 Reading the Writing on
the Wall : Charlotte
Perkins Gilman's 'The
Yellow Wall-pape r ,

A few years ago, Mr. Howells asked leave to include this story in a
collection he was arranging ... I was more than willing, but assured
him that it was no more 'literature' than my other stuff, being defi-
nitely written 'with a purpose.' In my judgement it is a pretty poor
thing to write, to talk without a purpose.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Much - perhaps too much - has been written about Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's 1892 story, 'The Yellow Wall-paper'. Since it resurfaced as a
feminist text in the feminist context of a single volume edition
published by the Fen1inist Press of New York in 1973, it has become a
paradigmatic text of feminist criticism and for feminist theory. There
are many reasons for its importance. Its republication in 1973 exem-
plified the feminist scholarship, the recuperation and rereading of a
fe1nale literary tradition, that Elaine Showalter had described in her
1979 essay, 'Towards a Feminist Poetics', when she suggested that
'the manuscript and archival sources' for a gynocritical tradition were
'both abundant and untouched' (in Showalter 1986, 132), and that it
was the task of feminist criticism to uncover them. It has attracted
feminist critics because it draws on the autobiographical experiences
of the author, because those experiences speak to our stereotyped
ideas of Victorian femininity and because it has an easily recovered
historicist basis. ft has therefore been a 'useful' text for historical and
contextual literary studies of the 1naterial conditions of women's lives.
It enabled critics to establish literary-historical methodologies which
went against the grain of practical criticism's insistence on the text

24 2
 Reading the Writing on the Wal l 243

itself, and rnade contexts (a woman's experience, a woman writer's

experience, the discourses of medicine and proper femininity) a legit-
imate part of the reading experience in the academy. Moreover, it is a
very short, short story, its brevity being one of its virtues for the
purposes of student readings where length is a notorious inhibitor of
conunentary.
The earliest readers of the story, however, had not read it this way at
all. As Gilman herself narrates in her autobiography, The Living of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), she at first struggled to find a
publisher for it, despite the recommendations of William Dean
Howells (1837-1920, American journalist, critic, editor and novelist).
The first editor to whom she sent it rejected it with the comment that
it had disturbed hi1n so much that he 'could not forgive myself if I
made others as miserable as l have made myself by publishing it
(Gilinan 1990, 119). And when it was published, a letter appeared in a
rival magazine that deplored it as 'Perilous Stuff, written in a 'some-
what sensational style', holding the reader in '1norbid fascination'.
The letter-writer wondered if such texts were really fit to be printed
(121). As Annette Kolodny suggests, 1890s' readers, though well-
versed in the American Gothic tradition inaugurated by Edgar Allan
Poe, could not connect Gilman's story to the Gothic because its narra-
tor/protagonist is a white middle-class wife and mother who belongs
in the tame space of domestic fiction, not the monstrous domain of
the horror story. Their disgust arose from the story's transgression of
the limits of proper femininity, and it was dismissed as an unreadable
story that should not have been written (Kolodny in Golden 1992,
153- 5).
The story arose from Gilman's experience of what we would proba-
-bly now describe as post-natal depression, following the birth of her
daughter in the late 1880s. Her mental suffering was devastating,
particularly as it became clear that her mental health improved as
soon as she was away from her husband and child, and that it imrne-
diately deteriorated on her return. Her depression, that is, was a func-
tion of the conditions of proper femininity, the domesticity of
wifedom and motherhood. Her 1nadness was caused by the very
aspects of her life that were supposed to codify her as a proper
woman. Following a break away in California with friends, Gilman
returned to her husband and daughter feeling much better, but
'within a month I was as low as before leaving ... This was a worse
horror than before, for now I saw the stark fact - that I was well while
244 Readings

away and sick while at ho1ne' (Gilman 1990, 95, ellipsis in original). In
order to try to recover from her mental discomfort, she submitted
herself to the treatment of Silas Weir Mitchell, the leading 'nerve'
specialist. Mitchell's treat1nent was that of the 'rest cure', and is
described in his medical treatise, Fat and Blood: And How to Make
Them (1877).
Mitchell differentiated between n1ental disorders in 1nale and
female patients. He suggested that male patients (always white,
always middle class and wealthy in his expensive practice), had come
to sickness through overwork, and needed rest. His middle-class
female patients, on the other hand, had generally become ill from the
pursuit of too active a social life, too many visits and parties. There
were alternative cases \'\There female patients were suffering from the
stress of the long-tenn nursing of a sick relative, but mostly the
women were sick from too much frivolous pleasure. This did not,
however, mean iliat Mitchell believed in ·work' as a cure for women
as 'rest' was a cure for men. Rest was ilie answer to nervous condi-
tions in boili sexes, despite their different pailiologies. His treatment
consisted of isolating his patients from their families in his sanato-
rium. He then insisted iliat they go to bed for periods between six
weeks and two months. During iliis time they were fed a bland diet of
fattening food (sickness was indicated by pallor and thinness - hence
ilie need to manufacture 'fat and blood'), and iliey were allowed to do
noiliing for iliemselves:

At fust ... I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or

read. The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth. In
some instances, I have not permitted the patient to turn over without
aid ... because sometin1es the moral influence of absolute repose is of
use. In such cases 1 arrange to have the bowels and water passed
while lying down, and the patient is lifted onto a lounge at bedtime
and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed. In
all cases of weakness, treated by rest, I insist on the patient being fed
by the nurse, and, when well enough to sit up in bed, I insist that the
meats shall be cut up, so as to n1ake it easier for the patient to feed
herself. (Weir Mitchell in Golden 1992, 49)

In other words, ilie patient was returned to a state of infantile depen-

dency, wiili ilie result, according to ilie doctor, that, having been
obliged to lie still for a month or n1ore, 'rest becon1es ... a railier bitter
 Reading the Writing o n the Wall 245

medicine, and they are glad enough to accept the order to rise and go
about' when the doctor so orders (48) . The infantilisation of the
female patient (notice Mitchell's use of the femin ine pronoun) is
retold in the story, in which the narrator is isolated from her family
and friends in an ancestral mansion, confined there to a room like a
nursery, allowed no company, no stimulus, no reading, no writing
and not even the supremely feminine activity of sewing. Every aspect
of her existence is controlled, just as the existence of the helpless
infant is controlled by the adults around it. 1
This is precisely the treatment that Gilman received. 'I was put to
bed and kept there. I was fed, bathed, rubbed, and responded with the
vigorous body of twenty-six,' she wrote in her autobiography. After a
month she felt better, and was sent home with Mitchell's advice
ringing in her ears:

'Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the
tin1e.... Lie down an hour after each 1neal. Have but two hours' intel-
lectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you
live.' I went home, followed those directions, and came perilously
near to losing 1ny mind. (Gilman 1990, 96)

Mitchell's prescription, that is, is a medicalised version of the cultural

judge1nent that 'women can't paint, women can't write' that so hurts
Lily Briscoe in Woolfs To the Lighthouse (Woolf 1992, 94). It gives the
authority of science to the cultural judgements about women's intel-
lectual capacities. Intellectual activity is diagnosed by patriarchal
discourses as harmful to the female 1nind and body. Gil1nan's story
presents a continuu1n of medical discourse that shades into literary
. writing. It is also a continuation of the infantilisation of the treatment
proper in which every aspect associated with adulthood from physical
autonomy to self-expression was denied to the patient, which might
also be read as a metaphor for the infantilised position of women in
general.
Gilman insists that her breakdown and its treatment left her perrna-
nently incapacitated, especially for systematic intellectual work. After
a month or two at home, her distress returned, and eventually she and
her husband agreed to divorce, and she took up a career as a public
speaker and writer on feminist issues. The breakthrough to 1nental
health came only when she decided to disobey doctor's orders, having
recognised that it was precisely her domestic life that was making her
 246 Readings

sick in the first place. The story of 'The Yellow Wall-paper' is a

response to insanity and its treatment, written, says Gilman with a
purpose (Gilman 1990, 119). When she had completed the story, she
sent it to Mitchell, and though he never acknowledged it, she later
heard that he had modified his treatment of nervous ailments in his
female patients (20). For her this was success. Her purpose had been
fulfilled. Her refusal of the category of 'literariness' for her writing,
however, is one of the things that contemporary feminist criticism
challenges in its insistence that the aesthetic is also a political cate-
gory. Politics and poetics are not so easily separated.
The quasi-autobiographical content and the historical context have
laid the story open most obviously to materialist feminist criticism.
The story and the autobiography, the individual's fiction and her
history, alongside the evidence of Mitchell's own writings on the treat-
ment of neurasthenia, are read as a metaphor for the collective experi-
ence of women in general, and of women writers in particular. For
Gilbert and Gubar, for exan1ple1 with their interest in the material and
cultural obstacles placed in the •..vay of the nineteenth-century wo1nan
writer, and their insistence on seeing women's writing as multiple
instances of covert and overt protest against these conditions,
Gilman's story 'seems to tell the story that all literary women would
tell if they could speak their "speechless woe"' (Gilbert and Gubar
1979, 89). Like Jane Eyre, it is the sto1y of a n,adwoman in the attic, a
tale of the dis-ease as well as the disease at the heart of the family
home. It is a disease that renders that home unhomely - Freud's word
is uncanny - and the story of this disease is told through the conven-
tions of Gothic fiction, with an unreliable narrator, incipient insanity
and the reader's uncertainty about the status of what she reads. Under
patriarchy, madwomen is what all women are, or risk becoming since
their being is so radically 'other' to the dominant discourses that
organise social and psychological life. In this context, the period of the
'sexual anarchy' (Showalter 1991) of the late nineteenth centu1y1 the
social dissatisfaction of women with their limited horizons was read
as a pathological disease; the smallest claims of feminism for female
autonomy became the feminine condition of hysteria.
There are, however, problems with this view, not least the class and
race blindness that sees Gilman's narrator's plight as the plight of all
women, and her story as the story. There is a contextual specificity to
this woman's distress which depends on her class position; it is
absolutely a privileged white woman's problem. And this is one of the
 Reading the Writing on the Wall 247

dangers of the insistent reading and rereading of 'The Yellow Wall-

paper', and its establishment as the paradigmatic feminist text. Whilst
materialist privilege dearly does not do away with psychic pain, we
should be very wary of any assumption that lack of material privilege
and the existence of physical pain does away with psychological diffi-
culties. Hunger, torture and exhaustion all take a mental toll as well as
having physical effects. Giln1an herself wrote that she would prefer
any kind of physical pain, including childbirth, to the mental distress
she suffered during her breakdown (Gilman 1990, 91), and it's difficult
to doubt her sincerity, but it is a 1netaphysical comparison. The artic-
ulacy of the story's protest should not blind the reader to those other
women whose woe is rather more 'speechless', since they have
neither the materials to write it down (education, pen and paper), nor
an audience prepared to listen.
Materialist contexts and the content of the text, however, are not the
only aspects of 'The Yellow Wall-paper' that have been considered
during its insistent reappearance as the text about which to write. Just
as feminist criticism in general has moved away from purely material-
ist concerns, and towards psychoanalytic and post-structuralist
concerns with language, the criticism of the story has changed as well.
For it is, of course, primarily a story about a woman who writes - a
woman writer - a woman who is also going mad. That fact, along with
its insistent references to and rewritings of the conventions of gothic
fiction placed alongside the theme of writing in its content, has tended
to make it a fruitful text for readings through the various lenses of
psychoanalytic feminisms. In her autobiography, Gilman con1ments:
'In those days a new disease had dawned on the medical horizon. It
was called "nervous prostration". No one knew n1uch about it, and
. there were many who openly scoffed, saying it was only a new name
for Laziness. To be recognisably ill, one must be confined to one's bed,
and preferably in pain' (90). She is writing of the late 1880s, and
nervous prostration or neurasthenia can quite legid1nately be seen as
the forerunners of the Freudian diseases of neurosis and hysteria in
which physical symptoms were traced to unconscious mental causes,
as opposed to having an organic pathology rooted in the body.
As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English argued as early as 1973,
the psychoanaJytic intervention in 1nedical discourse is also a histori-
cal moment. Psychoanalysis is often criticised for ahistoricity, but that
does not mean that it has no history of its own. Whilst, on the one
hand, Freud's separation of mental disease from physical causes
 248 Readings

represented a break with the past and the insistence that hysteria
arose from the anatomy of the womb, on the other, his theories still
made biological anatomy into social destiny: 'the female personality
was still inherently defective, this time due to the absence of a penis,
rather than the presence of the domineering uterus' (Ehrenreich and
English in Golden 1992, 109). They read hysteria as a protest against
confining social roles; but they also see it as a kind of dead end, firstly
because it was an individualised protest which brought about no
political changes, since hysterics do not unite to fight their common
enemies, and second, because it confirmed patriarchal prejudices
that judged women as 'irrational, unpredictable and diseased' (107).
And, moreover, as Paula Treichler has suggested, laying the (fe1nale)
body open to the discourses of medical diagnosis which are associ-
ated with masculinity permits the male doctor immense power over
the existential rights of the female patient: once a diagnosis is
pronounced, it 'not only names reality, but also has considerable
power over what that reality is now to be' (Treichler in Golden 1992,
196). Thus, whilst the story expresses an absolute social dissatisfac-
tion and articulates the mental pain that is its result, it also empha-
sises the trap or fe1nininity from which there is no escape. The
narrator is either repressed out of existence, or she expresses an
insane self, which is in turn 'read back' onto her body and its symp-
toms: whatever choice she makes, she will eventually be silenced.
Psychoanalysis can be a materialist discourse, connecting social
oppression and repression with mental aberration, which is, I think,
its ideal position. In addition, one of the sources of the importance of
psychoanalysis for feminist literary theory is that it pays close atten-
tion to the textuality of the text. A reading that recovers what Giln1an
saw as the story's purpose - a political protest against medical
discourse - without recuperating its poetics, its literary qualities
(which Gilman suggested it did not have), is missing something that
even the author missed. Psychoanalysis looks at manner as well as
content, how as well as what, poetics as well as politics.

The story tells of the steady mental decline of a unnamed female

narrator. It opens with the narrator's feeling that there is sometlling
'queer' (uncanny, unfamiliar, unhomely) about the colonial mansion
that she and her husband, along with her sister-in-law and narrator's
small baby, have rented for the sum1ner. The house has been taken
 Reading the Writing on the Wa l l 249

for her benefit, though there are several logical inconsistencies here.
On the one hand, husband John, 'does not believe that I am sick'
(Gilman, 1990, 3). Yet despite his disbelief, he has 'diagnosed' her
'condition' as 'temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical
tendency' (4) and prescribed 'phospates or phosphites ... and tonics,
and air, and exercise, and journeys' and has forbidden his wife to
work (which appears to mean, 'to write') until she is well again. John
is clearly a supreme realist, an absolute believer in rationality. He will
not stomach his wife's feeling that there is something 'queer' about
the house, and laughs at her when she talks of anything 'not to be felt
and seen and put down in figures' (3) . He refuses to see her as sick,
and yet his every action proclaims that he does not see her as well.
What space can his wife have for an identity between these binary
oppositions of health and disease?
The space the story offers her is a room at the top of the house - a
room of her own since she is often alone in it, but also a kind of
prisor:i. The room was once used as a nursery, with bars at the
windows, presumably to stop the children from falling out, though
other readings of the bars, apart from this 'common-sense' realistic
reading, are also possible. The furniture doesn't match. The bed is
nailed to the floor. Except for one thing, it is a pleasant roo1n, big and
airy and filled with sunshine. Unfortunately, the walls are covered
with a disgusting yellow wallpaper, torn off in patches; it is a
sulphurous colour, and has an unfathomable pattern. As the tenancy
of the colonial mansion continues, the narrator becomes increasingly
obsessed by the paper; at first angered and repulsed by its ugliness,
she eventually begins to see a female figure trapped behind the bars
of the paper. With no other stimulus, it takes over her entire existence
and she becomes determined to make sense of the pattern, and then
to 'free' the woman she has 'seen' (or perhaps hallucinated) trapped
behind its bars. She studies the wallpaper, and then begins to tear it
from the walls. The story ends with her creeping around the walls,
having removed all the paper. When her husband observes her state,
he faints; but the narrator continues to creep, and creeps over his
prostrated form at every rotation.

Plot summaries never tell enough of a text's effects which is why the
manner of the telling is as important as the story itself. How we read
the story depends on how we read the wallpaper. Jeffrey Berman, for
 250 Readings

example, sees the wallpaper as 'projection screen or Rorschach test of

the narrator's growing fright'. Its inconsistent pattern represents the
inconsistencies of her own life, her need for security and love oppos-
ing her will towards independence, her contradictory impulses
towards conventional feminine duty and unconventional feminist
protest (Berman in Golden 1992, 232). This is an interesting insight,
but it is more complicated than Berman's content-based psycho-
analysis presents it as being, since the inconsistencies of the narra-
tor's life are not symptoms of an idiosyncratic pathology: it's not just
her problem, but goes wider than that. One can see also the gaps and
fissures, the holes in the argument, as it were, of the discourses that
oppress her. Hence my emphasis above on John's insistence that she
is not sick, but that she nonetheless needs treatment. When the voice
of reason is so illogical, no wonder the narrator has problems. The
concentration on the female figure of the text and on her pathology
and problems displaces the need to read the male other of the text,
and authorises his version of reality as a seamless whole that is not
open to criticism. Children are told not to 'answer back' meaning that
they must resist being impertinent and insolent to the adult version of
the world. But telling a child not to answer back is usually the
response of an adult whose arguments or reasoning are a bit shaky.
The story shows a woman being treated like a child. One way of
reading the story, then, is to see it as a 'reading back' and a 'writing
back', an insolent, improper version, which shakes up a particular
version of the real, just as, eventually, the narrator's imaginary double
shakes the pattern of the wallpaper (Gilman 1990, 11). Part of its
subversive effect co1nes from the manner of the writing, which should
not be simply ignored in favour of the stoiy's content.
When one sees 'The Yellow Wall-paper' on the page, one becomes
i1nmediately aware of the staccato effect of the prose. The paragraphs
are very short, often consisting of no more than one short sentence.
The style is paratactic - that is, connection is made by juxtaposition
(placing of ideas in space) rather than by the logic of grammatical
subordination. Disconnected ideas are placed side by side as if they
have a connection: the connection is spatial, rather than logiccJ, as in
the sentence: 'John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that' (3).
This sentence is written in the context of two pieces of information,
first the narrator's feeling that the house might be haunted, and
second, the 'practical' nature of her husband. That simple sentence is,
however, very loaded. Its three parts, John's laughter, the narrator's
 Reading the Writing on the Wall 2S I

'of course', and her generalised expectation that John will continue to
laugh at her, beg a lot of questions. Why is it 'of course' that a
husband laughs at his wife? Why is it expected? It seems stylistically
very simple, like a child's narrative, but appearances are deceptive. If
there is a power relationship implicit in the way that John reads his
wife, there's an answering back insolence in her writing of him in
which the tone is very uncertain. Do all husbands laugh at their wives,
or just this one? What are we being asked to accept as 'of course'?
The parataxis of the style is an act of political, personal and
aesthetic resistance to the totalising narratives of cause and effect
(nanated in long sentences, long paragraphs, and, indeed, long
novels as well as in the discourses of science and medicine) that
usua11y go by the name of Realism. This is the discourse through
which John, who believes in fact, the narrator's brother, who agrees
with hiin, and Silas Weir Mitchell define the world. Medical diagnosis
is precisely a realist discourse: a cause produces a symptom (effect); a
diagn<?sis is a reading of that effect; a prescription (which is a kind of
writing that comes from the reading) supposedly effects a cure. The
story is over, and there are no loose ends. Or, at least, that is the vvay
that the story is supposed to go, as Weir Mitchell's Fat and Blood
suggests.
Only this isn't really the whole story no n1atter how totalising
Realism attempts to be. Like the pattern iI1 the paper, this story is
multiple rather than singular. It does not sin1ply say that the narra-
tor's version of the world is right, and that John's is wrong. The parat-
actic style, engagingly and disarmingly simple as it is, undoes the
distance of perspective required by ReaJist discourses to make their
allegedly objective judgements. It undoes the pretence of objective
· interpretation. Its performance of naivety and innocence is also
therefore a performance of cunning - its textual gestures collapse the
structures by which we are used to judge. The style draws the reader
into complicity with the narrator, requesting our sympathy and iden-
tification with the poor, put-upon writer whose story we are reading.
We get too close and suspend our judgement. The reader's conven-
tional position of dispassionate interpretation is interfered with. Mary
Jacobus argues that we must never forget the creepiness of the story,
the way it makes skins crawl (Jacobus 1986, 234-5): the uncanny effect
is played out on the reader - the reader of either sex. If we identify
with the narrator, we identify with madness. ffwe identify with John's
realist perspective, we identify with the forces of a highly unattractive
252 Readings

oppression. There is no solid ground here. The inconsistencies of the

text undermine any reading position.
So, for example, the voices of authority (the brother and husband
who are both doctors) are represented in the narrator's text. The
brother and the husband say 'the same thing' (Gilman 1990, 4), tell
the same story, read the same symptoms and come up with the same
diagnosis and treatment. But because their narratives are displaced
fron1 the centre of the narrative, retold from a different perspective,
their certainties are undermined. The narrator comments:

Personally, I disagree with their ideas.

Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excite1nent and
change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
r did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a
good deal - having to be so sly about it, or else 1neet with heavy oppo-
sition.
l son1etimes fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and
1nore society and stimulus - but John says the very worst thing I can
do is think about n1y condition, and I confess it always makes me feel
bad.
So I will let it alone and talk about the house. (4)

The structures and juxtapositions of sentences here are very tightly put
together. Seemingly random ideas do, in fact, have a very close logic.
The assertions the narrator makes of her disagreements, for example,
do double service. They are at once insistently self-expressive: this is
what I think; and they are also idiosyncratic - personal opinion is set
in opposition to the expert voices of the doctors. Who is to say which
discourse is right? Moreover, she expresses what she thinks only to the
'dead paper' on which she writes, not to the men whose pronounce-
ments her writings at once challenge ('I disagree') and endorse ('it does
exhaust n1e'). Her writing about her 'condition' is unfinished. She has
no language to imagine an alternative because John's reported author-
itative voice interrupts her sentence, and sets her off on another track
- she will 'talk about the house' instead. Since the house is the only
thing that she has to talk about, the house becomes tl1e site of her
'condition', as well as its en1blem. It is a beautiful place, with a 'deli-
cious garden'; but it is also uncared for, derelict and damaged. Which
might just be a description of the narrator herself - trapped by a
 Reading the Writing on the Wal l 253

domesticity she does not desire, which, indeed, repulses her, she too
becomes derelict and damaged, uncared for despite all the care that is
being taken, because it is the ·w rong kind of care.
Increasingly, therefore, because the text w1settles the totalising and
naturalising narratives of Realisrn, it has been read with a post-struc-
turalist bent; the wallpaper becomes the projection of a female/
feminine writing effect. Treichler sees the wallpaper as '\,v omen's
discourse' (Treichler in Golden 1992, 195). More recently, Julian
Wolfreys has read it as exe1nplifying the Cixousian notion of ecriture
feminine, a writing of excess and defiance, which resists the closures
of definition and telos (Wolfreys 1997, 83). It destabilises any sense
that rneaning might be 'there' just to be grasped, which in turn desta-
bilises the reading positions that we 'outside' the text might adopt.

I placed the word 'outside' in inverted commas to signal the provision-

ality of the reading positions that 'The Yellow Wall-paper' dramatises.
Jacques Derrida has written that there is nothing outside the text, no
outside text - there is no position outside textuality, no metalanguage
in which interpretation is concretised and authorised, nothing outside
the languages which we inscribe and by which we are inscribed.
Although she uses language differently from the linguistic structures of
her husband, for example, the narrator of the story remains implicated
in the same language, unable to escape from its hold on her - the ways
in which it inscribes her, describes her, prescribes for her and
proscribes her: these are all words to do with writing, deriving from the
Latin verb scripere, to write. In Lacanian terms, one might say,
language speaks h er even as she speaks language. Treichler's insight
that the wallpaper is 'women's discourse', or Wolfreys's sense that it is
a mode of ecriture feminine, both speak of an entrapment in a
language that the narrator has not made or chosen, yet to which she
must appeal in order to express anything at all.
The wallpaper, then, is an emblem of many things. Attached to the
walls of the house, it is a marker of the kind of domestic space the
house is: this is a house that is not quite a home, a domestic space
that has been neglected and untenanted, not a home-from-home,
rather an unhomely or uncanny space, though we have only the
narrator's word for it. It has been rented for three months, so that
there is no point in John undertaking repairs or redecoration, for they
will not be there long enough. Before their tenancy, 'the place has
254 Readings

been empty for years' (Gilman 1990, 4), following legal troubles
amongst the heirs. The logical explanation of its emptiness does not,
however, quite exorcise its ghostliness: the narrator remains deter-
n1ined to express her feeling that 'there is something strange about
the house', something 'queer', a ghostliness and a haunted quaLity
that seems to her the 'height of romantic felicity' despite her
husband's insistence on draughts as the sole explanation of its
strangeness, and his exhortations to self-control and away from fancy.
The Gothic and the realist narrative compete.
The wallpaper signifies the neglect of the house. Even before the
narrator arrives, someone - she surmises that it was the children, the
previous tenants of the attic - has already started to pull the paper
from the walls. The narrator is not surprised because the paper is so
very bad:

One of those sprawling, flamboyant patte1ns committing every artis-

tic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced
enough constantly to irritate and provoke study, and when you follow
the lame uncertain curves for a Little distance they suddenly cornmit
suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in
unheard-of contradictions. (5)

The point about patterns is their regularity. A pattern is supposed to

be a repeating structure which has its own coherence, and which
might even be thought of as restful so long as it retains its equilia-
rium. But this wallpaper, although the different lengths repeat, has no
other source of repetition. If it is a pattern, it is idiosyncratic. The
paper has no balance. And in the absence of other stimuli, the narra-
tor begins to study it, and to see things in it. She feels the pattern has a
vicious influence, and that there is a suppressed violence in it that
disturbs her, as she sees 'a broken neck and two bulbous eyes' staring
at her hundreds of times in the room, an image of strangulation or
stifling which invites us to read it as the metaphor of the narrator's
own condition. Even the regularity which, at first, she sought in the
pattern has become a source of potential horror, since the reiteration
of the pattern, reproduced throughout the room becomes, with
constant study, endless and uncanny:

l get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlasting-

ness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd
 Reading the Writing on the Wall 255

unblinking eyes are everywhere .... I never saw so much expression in

an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression
they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment
and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than n1ost children
could find in a toy-store. (7)

The reference to childhood here is important because the room is a

nursery, and the patient has been deprived of her position as an adult
in charge of her ovvn destiny. The childlike games of imagination that
she plays hark back to an age of innocence, but also speak of regres-
sion and loss of adult identity. Moreover, where for a child endowing
inanimate objects with human powers is a harmless gan1e, for an
adult it is a less innocent pursuit. Jt is a dangerous lapse into fancy, a
refusal of the real. Thus, eventually, the wallpaper obtrudes itself into
every thought. The narrator might be thinking about the countryside
and the wallpaper enters her mind. She sees different things in differ-
ent lights so that the idea of seeing and knowing (or seeing and believ-
ing) is· belied by her narrative. The meaning of the wallpaper is not
just a single meaning, and it is not just 'there' to be grasped. It is full
of spectral traces - but there's nothing you can put your finger on,
even in language - nothing you see and feel and put down in figures
(3). In daylight, for example, a second sub-pattern become
discernible, a subtext for the main pattern. This subtext is only visible
at certain times of day, when 'the sun is just so': seeing is no guaran-
tor of knowledge here. Then the narrator can see 'a strange, provok-
ing, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that silly
and conspicuous front design ' (8). As Wolfreys suggests, a formless
figure is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms (Wolfreys 1997,
· 79-80), much like the Kristevan chora. Furthermore, none of the
adjectives, none of the description as a whole gives a concrete depic-
tion of what the narrator sees. If the wallpaper is dangerously sugges-
tive to her, her descriptions are suggestive too, rather than obvious.
Suggestive of what? Excess, perhaps. It breaks artistic laws (Gilman
1990, 9) and commits every artistic sin. It operates by no design princi-
ple of which the narrator has ever heard. Rather it is monstrous,
because it is overflo,[Link] and excessive: it has 'bloated curves and
flourishes' and it 'waddles' rather than progressing regularly (accord-
ing to the rules of design - regularity is a term derived from the Latin
word for 'rules'). The diagonal patter is an 'optic horror, like a lot of
wallowing seaweeds in full chase' (9). Suggestive images indeed, but
256 Readings

still no obvious answer as to what they suggest. A vulgar Freudian

answer might suggest the terror of the female body, and in particular
what Cixous sees as the last taboo, the pregnant female body. Those
bloated curves, that waddling movement, the entrapping motion of the
wallowing seaweed which is at once like entrails (the obscenity of the
body when il transgresses its own limits) and the head of the Medusa.
Conventionally, according to the laws of design, the paper is highly
improper. According to the laws of representation, there are some
things that should never be represented. And after all, the narrator has
just given birth to a baby that she cannot bear to be \ivith, so parturition
and the limits (of the body, of representation, the limits imposed by
motherhood on ambition and independence) are probably on her
mind. The wallpaper speaks of a physical body it represents as
grotesque, of artistic representation and its laws, and of sociological
context: female nature, feminine culture, sociological observation of a
mind going mad. For Gilman and her readers, it is indeed an ugly story.
Reading the wallpaper is a question of multiplying perspectives,
and none of the perspectives is valorised over the others. Like the
paper, the text proliferates possible meanings, rather than settling on
one version. The hidden activity of the paper - its subtexts - come to
mirror the subterfuges and evasions of the narrator, who increasingly
withdraws even from the limited human contact of her husband and
sister-in-law, refusing to discuss the paper with them as the story goes
on. This leaves her free to see all its possibilities, 'the things in that
wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will' (I 1). What
she sees is a 'dim shape' that gets clearer with passing time: the clarity
is presumably illusory, since what she sees is 'like a wo1nan stooping
down and creeping about behind that pattern' - the image gives the
narrator the creeps, makes her feel 'creepy' in a terrifying verbal
prefiguring of the story's final actions, but there is no escape from it
since her husband will not take her away. What the narrator seeks is
mastery over the paper (12), since she has mastery nowhere else in
her life. But the attempt to take control of the paper, to comprehend
it, results in violence: 'You think you have mastered it, but just as you
get well under way in fo!Jo\.ving, it turns a back-somersault and there
you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon
you. It is like a bad dream' (12). The organic images of seaweed and
toadstools in florid arabesques (12) are seen by daylight: by night,
they solidify into bars, and the sub-pattern resolves itself into a
woman behind the bars. The creeping figure of the woman (or some-
 Reading the Writing on the Wall 257

times, many women) is trying to escape the paper, but cannot

because of the florid bars of the top pattern, which 'strangles them off
and turns then1 upside down, and makes their eyes white!' (15). This
horrifying image is placed in the context of John's increasing concern
for his wife, as if her n1adness is becoming more discernible. But by
now it is clear that the narrator associates his solicitude with the
entrapment of the woman in the paper - his fear of madness traps her
- and she has become overtly afraid of hin1, wishing he would leave
her alone, and that she could spend the night alone. With the loss of
realist perspective the narrator becomes the creeping woman she has
'seen'.
v\Then the opportunity arises, she locks herself into the room - an
act of assertion that iJnplies that she is choosing her own status as
prisoner - and peels the paper off the walls. By now, she is quite n1ad:
she believes herself to be the figure in the wallpaper, fears being put
back behind the bars, and tears the paper down to prevent herself
from being trapped again. Like Bertha Mason before her, she consid-
ers burning the house to effect her escape fro111 the wallpaper's perva-
sive influence; and she thinks for a moment of jumping through the
window, both of which are Bertha's actions. Her behaviour is that of
the caged animal, a relentless, repeated, pathological motion of
creeping around the room. The claim she has made for autonomous
selfhood has finally robbed her of any semblance of a sane identity;
she is no longer a wife and mother: indeed, she has even lost her
humanity. When John comes home and sees her state, as well as ilie
state of ilie room which is a sign of her state, he faints. She crawls over
him, in an endless repetition.

The story resists ilie closure of defining what will happen next. The
final image of the creeping woman is creepy precisely because it
refuses us a resolution of the proble1ns the text has raised - social,
economic, biological, cultural, psychic problems: none is resolved. All
that has happened is tl1at the self-styled voice of reason has collapsed
in a dead faint in ilie face of creeping unreason. One syste111 has
toppled. But nothing has been erected in its place. There is a blank
space for new writing, new patterns on the wall, a space that Gilman
has left empty.
Critics have read the narrator's last 1noments as a scene of tempo-
rary triumph over patriarchy. I'm not sure that the story invites any
258 Readings

kind of even qualified optimism for our particular protagonist. The

problems it enacts are presented as the diagnosis of a disease: the lack
of closure implies that there is no prescription, no cure, as yet. There
are hints as to what a cure might be: a more varied life, more stimulus,
more work for the narrator, and for women like her - though not
necessarily for all women. But this is not finally a therapeutic text. D.
H. Lawrence spoke of shedding sickness in books, of writing away
pain and distress. A feminist text, however, is not necessarily one that
makes its readers feel better. For Gilman, the feminism of this text was
bound up with its purpose: for her, it was meant to be a transitive text,
a story that acted on the world, that made a difference. Inasmuch as
Mitchell hinted that reading it had modified his clinical practice -
changed his discourse, altered the stories he told - it was a success in
Gilman's tern1s. For contemporary readers, that fact remains impor-
tant. But the story itself leaves us with an image of pain, not of recov-
ery. And if this is the paradigmatic story of feminist literary theory, the
story that all women might tell, the theory, like the narrator, remains
trapped in a very grim world. Perhaps it is time to imagine, to write,
and to read, some of the other possible stories in the blank space of
the bare wall. ... That is, after all, what Gilman's text itself invites us to
do in its radical refusals of 1nonolithic points of view, and its prolifera-
tion of alternative meanings and possible interpretations. We've had
the diagnosis that women are sick because they are oppressed and
repressed, and because they lack the means of self-expression. But
that is not the end, the sole aim, of fenunist theories. There are more
spaces to conquer than attic rooms.

Notes

1. A version of Weir Mitchell's rest cure was the treatment received by

Virginia Woolf during her periodic bouts of mental distress. She hated
the treatment, and satirised the doctors who provided it in her 1924
novel Mrs Dalloway. As Elaine Showalter has noted (in The Female
Malady, London: Virago, 1987), the effects of the treatn1ent were to
infantilise the patient into a state of co1nplete dependency; infantilisa-
tion and feminisation go together, which is what helps to constitute
insanity as the 'the female malady'.
Afterword : The Mark on
the Wall Marking
Differences , Marking Time

... it is impossible to say 'this is comic', or 'that is tragic', nor are we

certain, since short stories, we have been taught, should be brief and
conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should be
called a short story at aJJ.
VLrginia Woolf, 'Modern Fiction'

Virginia Woolfs short story 'The Mark on the Wall' (1917) is perhaps
nol really a short story at all, or rather, it is a story that rethinks the
meaning of the short-story form, and meditates on the question of
genre, amongst other things. It is not a traditional short story in that it
has no external incidents to speak of - no 'story'. As E. M. Forster puts
it in Aspects of the Novel (1927), a story is 'a narrative of events
arranged in their time sequence'; the story is the 'something' that
happens. In contrast, plot refers to the narrative of events where the
emphasis 'falls on causality', on the relations between the events; plot
need not be chronologically organised. When story elements are para-
_mount, the reader asks, 'what next?' When plot is more significant,
she asks, 'why?' (Forster 1993, 55). For the early theorists of what a
short story is, writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and Randall Stevenson,
the obligation of the short story is that it tell about incidents, and that
the shape of the incidents must lead to an inexorable conclusion:
the question 'what next?' Leads to an identifiable conclusion. As Poe
puts it:

Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be
elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the
pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view d1at we can
give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by

259
260 Afterword

making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the
development of the intention. (Poe in May 1994, 67)

And further, the conventions of the short story imply that the denoue-
ment must also be a t\.vist in the tale, an unexpected conclusion to the
events that have been elaborated.
In these terms Woolfs story does not behave itself properly. It is all
plot, one 1night say, and no story; its force is in the manner of the
telling rather than in the substance of the narrative. The narrator,
some time ago - probably in January, she's not quite sure - had
noticed a mark on the wall in her sitting room. She did not know what
the mark was, where it had come from, what it might 1nean; but it did
provoke a chain of associative thinking about the nature of conscious-
ness, and a whole range of rando1n memories and images, all of which
are indicative of the narrator's own attitudes to various things. The
story meanders for three or four pages, revisiting those associations
until the chain of thought is interrupted by the other occupant of the
room who tells the narrator that he is going to buy a paper. Before he
goes, he announces that the n1ark on the wall is, in fact, a snail. And
the stream of consciousness comes to an abrupt but inconclusive end.
That the male figure is going to buy a paper, and that he fixes and
defines the marks on the wall into the realm of fact, thereby causing
the story to break off is important: the incursion of facts on the medi-
tation (the newspaper which will report facts, the fact that the mark is
a snail) stems the flow. The fact that the mark on the wall that has
provoked this whole narrative sequence is a snail might of course be a
kind of twist in the tale, aligning the story with the traditions of short-
story writing - it is an unexpected explanation; but the real kink
comes from the fact that the whole 'story' takes place in the narrator's
mind. lts events are mental not physical. Moreover, these mental
events take place at several removes. The narrator does not recount
what she is thinking ' now'; she is recalling what she was thinking
'then', in January, when she first saw the mark on the wall. The tense
of the narrative, the apparent immediacy of the thoughts that appear
in the narrator's mind, however, conspire to disguise that distance
fron1 the reader. We have no perspective that permits us to make reli-
able, objective judgements.
When Forster 'read' this tale in Aspects of the Novel, he quoted a
long passage from it in the immediate context of a passage from
Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-centu1y novel, Tristram Shandy
 Marking Differences, Marking T i me 261

(1759-67), a novel remarkable for its inconsequentiality, its refusal of

narrative lines of cause and effect. The passage from 'The Mark on the
Wall' that Forster chose suggests that Woolfs story has similar
features:

But for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by
a nail after all; its too big, too round, for that. l might get up, but if I
got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for
certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it
happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of
thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control
of our possessions we have - what an accidental affair this living is
after all our civilization - let me just count over a few of the things lost
in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious
of losses - what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble - three pale
blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird-cages,
the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal scuttle, the
bagatelle board, the hand organ - all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and
emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring
affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back,
that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one
wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to be being
blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other
end without a single hairpin in one's hair. (Woolf 1993b, 54)

ln fact, Forster omitted the references to the Tube and the hairpins
with ellipses, perhaps feeling that the quotation was quite long
enough already, perhaps deliberately stopping before the specifically
intimate feminine reference to lady's coiffure - mind and millinery, as
·George Eliot has already shown us, are not supposed to go together.
What he concludes from this passage is that Woolf, like Sterne, was a
fantasist, by which he appears to mean that Woolf took a very small
object as the basis of her meditation. She fluttered from it, and then
settled on it again. She combined 'a humorous appreciation of the
muddle of life with a keen sense of its beauty'; and her tone is 'a rather
deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all and sundry that
[she does] not know where [she is] going' (Forster 1993, 35). The
fantasist, in other ,,vords, writes not in order to make sense of things,
but in order to register their confusion. The very word 'fantasist' tends
to imply a vaguely negative judgement: the fantasist plays fast and
loose with the rules of representation, and unsettles the reader's
262 Afterword

expectations. As Forster comments at the end of his brief re1narks on

Woolfs story: 'life is such a muddle, oh dear, the will is so weak, the
sensations fidgety ... philosophy ... God ... oh dear, look at the mark ...
listen to the door - existence ... is really too ... what were we saying?'
(35-6, ellipses .in original). He does not say what he thinks, but his
mimicry in bis own criticism (criticism, after all, being a discourse
which is supposed to 'make sense of things') demonstrates that he
finds these strange juxtapositions unsatisfactory.
Now this is not only not what a short story is supposed to be, or to
be about, but it is also not what artistic production has traditionally
been supposed to be. The organisation of Woolfs fiction here is in
fact more like a creative dis-organisation. Unlikely things are more or
less randontly juxtaposed. The 1nark on the wall - in itself a very small
thing whatever its cause, and also a random thing, apparently uncon-
trolled by the narrator's conscious intention - is made the spur to
meditations on everything from the impossibility of human knowl-
edge to the loss of three canisters of book-binding tools. There is no
order to the list of things one can think about. Indeed, lists, as Patricia
Waugh has noted, extol the 'principle of substitution instead of
contextuality' (Waugh 1984, 144). They are thus dis-ordering, unstruc-
tured structures because they imply that any one thing in the list is as
important or insignificant as any other: in this case, the ignorance of
hutnanity, a Queen Anne coal scuttle and a bunch of hairpins have a
kind of equality in their randomised invocation. And this dis-ordering
can be seen as a feminist intervention in the taxonomies of masculine
kno,,vledge. As Laura Marcus puts it: "'The Mark on the Wall" explores
the difference between the "masculine" point of view - fact-bound,
hierarchical, constraining - and a free-associative thinking which
revels in the multiple imaginings opened up by freedo1n from the
desire to find out what things "really" are' (Marcus 1997, 19). This is a
writing with no sense of proportion or precedence.
The narrator's juxtapositions of trivial and important things are
explicitly a ctitique of another kind of listing, that claims the impor-
tance of order: 'the masculine point of view which governs our lives,
which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of
Precedency' (Woolf 1993b, 57). Whitaker's Almanack, an armual
publication, contains a table that establishes social precedence:
which members of the Royal Family are more ilnportant than others,
which Archbishops take precedence over the others, which kinds of
peer come first. Woolfs story implies that this is a false ordering that
 Marking Differences. Marking Time 263

has no real meaning. Disorder in fiction may, in fact, make more

sense because life itself is disordered and disproportionate. As she put
it in one of her most famous essays, ' Modern Fiction' (1919):

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The

mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they
shape the1nselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came here, not
there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could
write what he chose, not what he must, if he could work upon his
own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe, and perhaps not
a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.
(Woolf 1993d, 8)

Life, [Link] Woolf, is not symmetrical and enlightening. Life is hazy; it

does not make sense. The task of the ,,vriter is therefore to express life's
peculiarities, not to express the mere conventions of Realism which
are not, in the end, at all real, and which make sense only at the
expense of falsification and exclusion. Where the proliferation of
meanings in the writing on the wall was terrifying evidence of incipi -
ent insanity for the narrator of Gilman's 'The Yellow Wall-paper', for
Woolf it is the condition of human life. It is terrifying only when one is
hemmed in by discourses that insist that there is only one meaning,
one way of_seeing. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf suggested that the
woman writer's problem was that she had 'altered her values in defer-
ence to the opinions of others' (Woolf 1993a, 67). Gilman's narrator
tells her story of resistance to the professional opinions of others as
painful and difficult because of her deference to their opinions. The
'others' are men who wield real power, and they do have the power to
drive you mad. But Woolf tries to rewrite that monolithic version of
reality. Her writer in this case is a man - the generic figure of the writer
in Woolfs writing almost always is. But he is a man who is a slave to
convention, to the necessity imposed on writing that it must tell a
particular kind of story, that it must be packed with incident (love
interest and catastrophe), and with detail (a button sewn on, or not).
What Woolrs works dramatise is a rewriting of the patriaJchal plots
which trap male writers as well as women - though her concern is
264 Afterword

more for women. She refuses the categorisation that says 'this is an
important book ... because it deals \>vith war. This is an insignificant
book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room'
(67). Litera1y value- human value - is not to be fow1d in either 'this' or
'that', male or female. There is not one version, there are many. As a
whole, Woolfs works constitute an important example for all kinds of
feminist theories. For all that Woolf herself was a privileged upper-
class white woman, living at a very specific historical period, \,vho often
articulated W1comfortably prejudiced views, she continues to have
much to say to all of us. Her own life, for all its privilege, ended with a
suicide by drowning - a dramatic yet also cliched gesture (the fallen
woman in nineteenth-century literature always drowned herself) that
remains as a painful reminder that even privileged femininity, even the
femininity that has a private income and a room of its own, can be a
frighteningly narrow space. A Room of One's Own is a foundational text
for feminist literary theories. It discusses the material difficulties of the
woman writer and the psychic and literary consequences of social
subordination; it begins a process of uncovering a female tradition of
writing; it challenges the assumption that 'women can't paint, women
can't write' (Woolf 1992, 94) , and creates an imaginative, fictional,
personal criticism in which questions of value can be re-evaluated, a
criticism that undoes the alleged neutrality of the objective voice. Her
focus on multiplicity and dis-ordering has much in common with the
insights of French feminisms into language and its power: the pulse of
the semiotic on the Symbolic order; the parter-femme of speaking as a
woman to other women; the resistance to the logic of the same; her
will to make an ecriture feminine out of her own resources. The mark
on the wall is impoverished when it is revealed to be only a snail. While
it is an unkno\>vn quantity, while its 1neaning is unfixed, it has much
more to offer, and is a figure that reveals the necessity of differences
which both feed the imagination and validate real lives.

Where now? How now?

TU be a post-feminist in post-patriarchy' .
T-shirt slogan

Rachel Bowlby begins her book Feminist Destinations and Further

Essays on Virginia Woolf(l997 ) by wondering about 'the possible ends
 Marking Differences, Marking Time 265

or destinations implied in speaking of "feminist" writing and criti-

cism.' 'Where is feminism, or feminist theory going, and what would
constitute its "arrival"?, the end of the "movement"?' (Bowlby 1997,
3). It is, of course, an unanswerable question, not least because, as I
hope I have shown, feminist theory doesn't al,-vays begin from the
same departure-gate, and takes very different routes for its multiple
destinations. One kind of answer might be that there is a sense in
which 'feminist literary theory' at least, has already 'made it', inas-
1nuch as it is already an indispensable part of the study of literature in
universities in Britain and the United States. Courses on women's
writing proliferate; and alongside specifically gynocritical approaches,
it is increasingly unacceptable to teach a Literary canon that contains
only two and half wo1nen writers. Where women writers can't be
included, on Shakespeare courses for example, there's lots of feminist
material out there that reads Shakespeare differently, 're-visions' his
oeuvre from a woman's point of view. So, the battle's won. We can all
go hof!le·
Only ... every year in my teaching career to date, I have spoken to
groups of female students about women's ,-vriting and feminist
theory, and I've asked my students a version of the 'McCarthy ques-
tion': are you now, or have you ever been, a feminist? 1 say 'McCarthy
question' because the answers l have usually received have generally
been negative - often vehemently so. My students all believe in the
rights that liberal feminism achieved for them. The very fact that they
are in university classes at all is testament to that. They believe in
equal rights, equal pay for equal work, in universal suffrage, in racial
equality, in 'the equality of the lesbian woman, in equality of opportu-
nity regardless of gender, race, sexuality or disability. And they enrol
· on women's writing courses, and enthusiastically learn the lessons
that feminist literary theories seek to teach them - at least in the rela-
tively safe space of academic life. But they aren't feminists.
They aren't feminists for two reasons. The first is that they are opti-
mistic, and believe that the world is already a better place, and that
they will be able to do anything within it. The second reason however
undercuts that optimism. They are afraid to be labelled as 'feminists'
since they perceive it as a term hurled with hostile purposes, a term
that makes them ugly and angry, that rewrites them into those old
stereotypes of the shrew and the witch. They conform to new defini-
tions of what nice girls are, and do not see that they are conforming.
Femininity might be a wider space than once it was for First-World
266 Afterword

women - but it's nowhere near 'as wide as the sky' (Atkinson 1996,
374). Even for Western women, there is still work to be done in
consciousness-raising and techniques of resistance.
And in the rest of the world, the problems are often more acute and
1nore urgent. We cannot stop being feminists in the West just because
we've got equal rights legislation when the women of so many other
countries lack even basic rights. I cannot claim that feminist literary
theories will directly change the real conditions of women's lives. But
I can claim that that ought to be the aim; and if feminism has a 'desti-
nation', an end-point, it is a destination that will be reached by
making the links between our historical oppressions and the current
oppressions of those other women. The battle isn't over, and won't be
over until my students don't even need to call themselves feminists
because all women are freed from terror and pain, and liberated into
the selves that they want to be. Utopian? Yes, because future Utopias
should be better places for all people to live in than the dystopias of
the here and now, and of the there and then, and of the there and
now.
For now, then, Woolfs indeterminate mark on the wall, the
unknown mark, not the mark resolved into a snail, is a figure that
holds out the possibility of seeing things differently. Feminist literary
theory is not one body of knowledge that speaks only to or about a
particular set of female bodies. It is a creative multiplicity that has
many other sides. Some of the things that it sees are highly improper;
many are disturbing; a few are funny and happy. As the snail moves
on, it presumably leaves a trail, the physical evidence of its journey.
But where the snail ends up is not predetermined, already foreclosed
by forceful logic. The theories, like the snail, do not need a fixed desti-
nation to have meaning; and both can make a difference if ,,ve are
prepared to see things differently.
 Annotated Bibliography

The texts selected here are largely texts that get only the briefest of
mentions in the rest of the book, or that are not mentioned at aU.
They are, nonetheless, important contributions to the fields of femi-
nist literary theories and are helpful places to begin you own adven-
tures in theoretical thjnking. I have chosen examples from 1nany
different approaches, from the post-structuralist to the liberal
humanist/womanist. Many of these texts are 'diliicult' to read. Don't
let that put you off. Read slowly and use what you can. Feminisms are
not totalisng - none of the texts here gives the whole answer. That
being the case, you can try to make the most of them, an activity
which will not be the same as making everything of them.

Armstrong, Isobel ed. New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on

Theories and Texts. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
A collection of essays by a number of important theorists, including
Rachel Bowlby, Laura Marcus, Jane Moore and Lynda Nead. The
usefulness of this collection resides in the fact that most of the essays
are 'reailing·s ' of texts, reailings inflected through well-argued theoret-
ical positions. It provides helpful examples of 'how to do' feminist
· reailings.

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of

the Novel. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Armstrong's concern is to historicise the reading of literary history.
She argues that previous histories of the novel, such as those by Ian
Watt, and by Gilbert and Gubar, have failed to take proper account of
gender and sexuality as formative in the construction of the novel.
Using the insights of Michel Foucault, she suggests that gender and
sexuality are not fixed qualities, but qualities that take place in and
through language and which are subject to historical variation. The

26 7
268 Annotated Bibliography

history of the novel is a writing and a creation of female desires. The

book contains interesting, approachable and historically contextu-
alised readings in the works of Jane Austen and the Brontes, readings
that are a very useful supplement and corrective to the assumptions
of Elaine Showalter (1978) and Gilbert and Gubar (1979).

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference

in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994.
A philosophical rather than a literary-theoretical text, Nom.a dic
Subjects emphasises the relationships between bodies, their material
conditions and the psychic effects of those conditions, which is a rela-
tively traditional formula forward in feminist theory. Instead of
merely anlaysing current structures of oppression and repression for
women, however, Braidotti is anxious to try to create and imagine
alternative futures. The figure of the nomad - precisely a figure who is
not fixed - is for her a way of imagining the journey towards a fe1nale
subjectivity that is fully embodied, fully subjective and which can
therefore become free.

Cixous, Helene and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and

Life-Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
A very accessible introduction to Cixous's more recent thought.
Rootprints contains interviews and meditations as well as autobio-
graphical writing, all of whlch reflect on sexual differences and
writing. The book's very form demonstrates a commit1nent to multi-
ple points of view, and it eschews the terms of so-called academic
writing to make the personal voice and experience central to any
theoretical project. It is theory as creative writing.

Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social

Change. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989.
Felski's book provides one of the very best recent exainples of an
attempt to read literary texts closely within the frameworks of theoret-
ical models. She takes very seriously the implications of French femi-
nism, yet also mounts a critique of its assumptions that language
might change the world. Through readings in a wide range of contem-
porary women's writing, she argues that realist forms are still an
 Annotated Bibliography 269

essential part of feminism's project to see the world anew; ecriture

feminine is onJy one possible strategy for women's writing, and it is
not the chosen mode of the majority of women writers who have
activist purposes. All in all, a very important book, a model of fully
theorised argument.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural

Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
This important recent book examines literature and feminism in a
global context. Friedman argues that narrative, the process of story-
telling, requires a new kind of reading, a 'feminist geopolitical liter-
acy'. The ways in which stories are made in different cultures can act
as a primary resource for the feminist critic who wants both to explore
difference and to see commonalities of experience. Friedman
suggests that systemic oppression has to be analysed in the contexts
of its individualised expressions. She reads a number of modernist
novels by Joyce, Forster, Woolf and Hurston, as well as examining
film, in order articulate the acute differences between groups, caused
by the barriers of race, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality and gender.
But, she suggests, those differences should not cripple analyses that
make common cause against structures of oppression.

Gallop, Jane. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction.

London: Macmillan, 1982.
A very witty book that examines the relationships between feminist
thought and psychoanalysis through a variety of different analyses.
For example, Gallop reads not only the texts of Jacques Lacan, but
also reads the performance situation of the seminars that generated
the texts to demonstrate his 'mastery' of the situation. There are also
useful commentaries and introductions to the work of the British
pyschoanalytic critic, Juliet Mitchell, and the works of Irigaray and
other French critics. Gallop is irreverent and funny, but also helpful
and academically serious.

Greene, Gayle and Coppelia Kahn, eds. Making a Difference: Feminist

Literary Criticism. London and New York: Methuen, 1985.
A really useful anthology, demonstrating a range of different
approaches. There are essays on language, society, class, race, gender
270 Annotated Bibliography

and sexuality, all related to feminist thinking. This was one of the early
anthologies of feminist criticism, but it remains a helpful introduction
to the main issues. The essays are all readable and approachable.

Hennessy, Rosemary. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of

Discourse. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
A major rethinking of the meaning of materialism for feminist theory.
Hennessy argues that the definition of materialism has to be broad-
ened to include not only the conditions of individual women, the
materiality of their bodies and their economic circumstances; materi-
alism must, she suggests, be understood as more than local condi-
tions. In a world where capitalism effectively ruJes, materialist
analysis has to take into account global conditions, and in particuJar,
it must focus on the very real deprivations of the Third World.
Hennessy, in other words, offers a real rebuke to feminist discourses
that hide in universities in the West, and pay no attention to the \>Vorld
beyond their own immediate context. A challenging book in every
way.

Jacobus, Mary. Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism. London:

Methuen, 1986.
Reading Woman is a collection of quite disparate essays written over a
number of years. It provides dazzling readings of a number of literary
texts, including Gilman's 'Yellow Wall-paper', Bronte's Villette and
Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. It also reads psychoanalytical texts by
Freud through the lens of literature. It was one of the first books by an
Anglo-American critic to take the idea of theory as centrally impor-
tant. The readings are difficult to approach at first, since their range of
allusion is so wide; but perseverance is definitely recommended.

Lydon, Mary. Skirting the issue: Essays in Literary Theory. Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
This is a particular favourite of mine. Lydon's book is a collection of
essays written over a nun1ber of years, so that there are cases where
she revisits the same texts and reads them differently. Her work is
feminist in approach, but it is a fe1ninism profoundly influenced by
post-structuralist thought. The essays are funny and interesting,
covering a range of (mostly French-authored) literary and artistic
 Annotated Bibliography 27 I

texts. The book exemplifies the usefulness of post-structuralism's

unsettling of assumptions for a feminist approach to literature.

Minh-ha, Trin T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Post-Coloniality and

Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1989.
A re1narkable book, written lyrically and passionately as an examina-
tion of the particular problems faced by the Third-World/post-colo-
nial woman writer. Minh-ha discusses the various ways in which sex
and race discourses conspire to erase the subjective identity of the
woman writer as both woman and writer, by labelling her to suit the
purposes of the labeller. The book presents its case through both
traditional academic argument, and through dramatic examples of
personal experience. The text is interspersed with stills from Min-ha's
own films, reclaiming and celebrating her own gendered, classed,
racialised identities through her own choice of how she is repre-
sented. Very persuasive, and well worth reading.

Moi, Tori!. Sexual/Textual Politics: Ferninist Literary Theory. London

and New: Methuen, 1985.
One of the founding feminist introductions to feminist thinking in
literature. In this book, Moi introduced a generation of readers to
Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous, and gave lucid account of the necessity
for a properly theorised feminist theory. Sexual/Textual Politics has
been criticized for assu1ning an absolute divide between Anglo-
American traditions of thought and French fe1ninisms; this is really a
function of the book's aim to introduce a less-well-known tradition to
English-speaking readers. It remains a very useful book, lucid, read-
able and approachable.

Pykett, Lyn. The Improper Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel

and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992.
Charts a literary history which is not found in the so-called Great
Tradition. Pykett concentrates on the 'won1en's' forms of fiction in
the nineteenth century - the forms written by and for women in the
1860s (the sensation novel) and the 1890s (the New Woman writing).
She reads these texts as articulations of protest against the constric-
tions of proper femininity, and argues that their exclusion from the
272 Annotated Bibliography

canon is at least partly due to 'improper' femininity. This is a book

which uncovers female traditions of writing that have been hidden
from literary history. In presenting less-weU-known texts and authors
in this academic context, Pykett argues for a broadening of the terms
of literary value.

Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 197~1985.

London: Virago, 1987.
Since the early 1970s, Rich has been a major feminist thinker, intro-
ducing new terms and new ways of approaching texts and society.
Blood, Bread and Poetry contains her important essay 'Lesbian
Existence and Compulsory Heterosexuality' as weU as a range of other
shorter essays on poetry, autobiography and education. Her writing is
very approachable, warm, one might aln1ost say; well worth reading
for insights into lesbian existence and the place of woman as v,1riter
and teacher.

Robbins, Ruth. "'Snowed Up: A Mistletoe Story": Feminist Approaches'

in Julian Wolfreys and William Baker, eds. Literary Theories: A Case
Study in Critical Performance. London: Macmillan, 1996, 103- 26.
A gentle and very short introduction to feminist theories in literature.
The main merit of this essay, though, is that it does provide an exem-
plary reading of a text from a variety of feminist perspectives. :rt's
brief, but it is to the point, even if I say so myself.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male

Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Strictly speaking, this is perhaps not quite a feminist text since its
emphasis is on male-male bonding in literature and culture. In the
analysis of these bonds, however, Sedgwick's readings of texts such as
Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Adam Bede and James
Hogg's Confessions ofa I ustfied Sinner, provide a useful point of lever-
age on the issue of female exclusions and subordinations. Sedgwick
establishes both that woman is an object who mediates between men,
and that her object-status is required to maintain the status quo. But
because women are not only objects, but also subjects, that status
quo is always potentially threatened by women's autono1ny.
Interesting to read, and not too difficult once you get started.
 Annotated Bibliography 273

Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English

Culture 1830-1980. London: Virago, [1985] 1987.
A cultural and historical approach to literary texts, which sees texts as
evidence of the social mores out of which they were produced.
Showalter demonstrates how ideas about proper femininity have
shaped the ways in which women have been defined as psychiatric
patients. She argues that madness is the female malady not because
women are madder than men, but because masculine forces in the
medical professions have the power of definition. She discusses a
wide range of sources in support of this argument, including works by
Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft and Doris Lessing.

Spencer, Jane. The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to
Jane Austen. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Establishes a literary history of different phases in women's writing
for the eighteenth century, as Showalter's Literature of their Own had
done for the nineteenth century. Spencer demonstrates the relative
freedom of subject and genre that women writers early in the century
enjoyed; but as writing became more professionalised, and as proper
femininity became increasingly narrowly defined, the woman writer
was hemmed in by social expectations. Novels of protest and of
didacticism were the two main results, though the Gothic novel and
the romance offered compensatory escape routes. Scholarly and easy
to read; indispensable for those setting out to study the eighteenth-
century wqman writer.

Spender, Dale. Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women

Writers Before Jane Austen. London and New York: Pandora, 1986.
As its title suggests, Mothers of the Novel is a rewriting of the terms of
literary history and its implicit values. Spender's text is furious with
the exclusionary literary history provided by writers like Ian Watt and
F. R. Leavis. In a massive act of feminist recuperation of women's
literary texts, she elucidates a new theory of value that allows women
writers access to their own cultural capital. Spender's indignation
makes for a very easy read.
B bl ography

Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian

Manhood. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Anzaldua, Gloria, ed. Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendas Caras.
San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990.
Armstrong, Isobel, ed. New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on
Theories and Texts. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of
the Novel. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Atkinson, Kate. Behind the Scenes at the Museum. London: Black
Swan, 1996.
Atwood, Margaret. 'Running with the Tigers'. Flesh and the Mirror:
Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. Ed. Lorna Sage. London: Virago,
1994, 117-35.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Harmondsworth: Penguin, (1813]
1972.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans I-1. M Parshley. Londcn:
Vintage, [194911997.
Beckson, Karl ed. Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. London and New
York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London and New York: Routledge,
1980.
Berman, Jeffrey. 'The Unrestful Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and
"The Yellow Wall-paper'". The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on
the The Yellow Wall-paper. Ed. Catherine Golden. New York: The
Fe1ninist Press at CUNY, 1992, 211-41.
Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia
Woolf Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.
-. 'Still crazy after all these years'. Between Feminism and Psycho-
analysis. Ed. Teresa Brennan. New York and London: Routledge,
1990, 40- 59.

274
 Bibliography 275

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. Oxford: [Link]

University Press (18621, 1987.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodirnent and Sexual Difference
in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994.
Brennan, Teresa, ed. Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London
and New York: Routledge, 1990.
Bristow, Joseph. Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1997.
Brody, Miriam. Introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman. Harmondsworth: Penguin (17921, 1992.
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Harmondsworth: Penguin, (1847], 1996.
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Index

Adams, James Eli 240n5 Bristow, Joseph 200

Althusser, Louis 68-9n2 Brody, Miriam 10
Anzaldua, Gloria 197-8, 199; This Bronte, Charlotte 40-2, 44, 53-7,
Bridge Called My Back 197-8 86,91,95,96, 149, 164-6,270;
Armstrong, Isobel 267; New Jane Eyre 40-2, 44, 53-4,
Feminist Discourses 267 164-66; Villette 53-6, 57, 149,
Armstrong, Nancy 92-3, 94, 270
267-8; Desire and Domesric Bronte, Emily 70, 71, 78, 82, 91-2,
Fiction 92-3, 267-8 96; Wuthering Heights 91-2
Arnold, Matthew 7 Burney, Fanny 78, 95
Atkinson, Kate 139-43; Behind Butler, Judith l 7n2, 117, 118n2,
the Scenes at the Musuem 211-13, 214n3; Gender
139-43 Trouble 212-13, 214n3;
Atwood, Margaret 181 Bodies That Matter 213,
Austen, Jane 71, 78, 81, 91, 95, 96, 214n3
224 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 92;
Manfred 92
Bahktin, Mikhail 119-20, 123
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 80-1, Calle-Gruber, Mireille 183n 1,
96 268; Rootprints 183nl, 268
Barthes, Roland 122 Carter, Angela 179-83; Nights at
Beauvoir, Simone de 2, 50, 51, the Circus 179-83
57-60;61,64,65,68, 70, 77,96, Castle, Terry 206-9, 211, 214114;
134-5, 136,139, 144n8, 189, The Apparitional Lesbian
195, 209, 210; The Second Sex 206-9,211,214n4
2,50,57-60,61,64, 134-5,139, Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of
209,210 Newcastle 78
Behn, Aphra 98 Chodorow, Nancy 189; The
Berman, Jeffrey 249-50 Reproduction of Mothering
Blake, William 92, 181 189
Bloom, Harold 88-9, 90, 95; The chora 130-3, 138,141,255
Anxiety of Influence 88- 9, Cixous, Helene 106,117, 118n2,
90 155, 168-83,210,223,256,268;
Bowlby, Rachel l 7nl, 264-5, 267 The Newly Born Woman
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 86-7; ('Sorties') 106, 170-1, 172,
Lady Audley's Secret 86-7 174; 'The Laugh of the
Braidotti, Rosi 17, 268; Nomadic Medusa' 172, 174- 7;
Subjects 268 Rootprints 183n 1, 268
Brennan, Theresa l 7nl Cobbe, Frances Power 240n2

285
286 Ind ex

Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth 162-4, Emecheta, Buehl 195-6

165; 'The Other Side of the Empson, William 7
Mirror' l 62-4, 165 English, Deirdre 247-8
Clement, Catherine 170 The
Newly Born Woman 170 Faderman, Lillian 204- 5, 206;
Compton-Burnett, lvy 203 Surpassing the Love ofMen
condensation 112 204-5,206
Conrad, Joseph 217, 219, 220, Felski, Rita 10, 107, l 18n2, 268;
222,223,232-9; Heartof Beyond Feminist Aesthetics
Darkness 217, 219, 223, 268
232-9 female gothic 79, 81- 3
Cookson, Catherine 99 Fielding, Henry 34
Cornillon, Susan Koppelmann 65 Firestone, Shulamith 195
Courtivron, Isabelle de 158; New Flint, Kate 102nl0; The Woman
French Feminisms 158 Reader l 02n l 0
Coward, Rosalind 99; Female Fordyce,Jarnes 31
Desire 99 Forster, E.M. 259, 260- 2; Aspects
ofthe Novel 259, 260-2
Decker, James 47nl Freud, Sigmund 64, 105, 107,
deconstruction 171 108-12, 113, 117nl, 147,148,
Defoe, Daniel 34 150- 1, 159,165, 166nl, 167n7,
Dellamora, Richard 240n5; 175, 178,209,210,219,223,
Masculine Desire 240n5 239nl,246, 247,256,270
Derrida, Jacques 17,130, 131, Friedn1an, Susan Stanford 269;
171, 176, 253 Mappings 269
Deutsch, Helene 118112 Fuss, Diana 14
Dickinson, Emily 91
differance 171 Gallop, Jane 113, 147, 150, 153;
displacement 112 Feminism and Psychoanalysis
Dollin1ore, Jonathan 24 1n9 269
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice 193 Garber, Marjorie 117, 210-11;
Duncan, Isadora 78 Vested Interests 210-J l; Vice
Versa 211
Eagleton, Terry 7, 22, 70, 74; Gaskell, Elizabeth 35, 86
Literary Theo,y: An Genet, Jean 63
Introduction 7, 70, 74 Gilbert, Sandra M. 88- 93, 94, 96,
ecriture feminine 155, 168, 171, 98, 99, 102nll, 163-4, 166n6,
177, 179--83, 189,253,264 194,246,267-8; The
Ehrenreich, Barbara 247-8 Madwoman in the Attic
Eliot, George 15, 23-4, 47-8, 71-3, 88- 93, 94, 1021111, 163-4,
75, 77,81,86,91,96, 100,251, 166116, 246; No Man's Land
270; Middlemarch 23-4, 93,95
4 7-8n2; 'Silly Novels by Lady Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 78,
Novelists' 71-3; Daniel 242- 58, 263, 270; The Yellow
Deronda 77 Wall-paper 242-58, 263, 270
Ellmann, Mary 57, 60- 2, 65, 69n4, Girouard, Mark 240n5
70, 77, 10ln2, 106,116; Gissing, George 220
Thinking About [Link] 57, Greene, Gayle 269-70; Making a
60-2, 64, 106, 116 Difference 269-70
 Ind ex 287

Gregory, John 26 159, 209; Sexes and Genealogies

Gubar, Susan 88-93, 94, 96, 98, 148, 167n3; 'Speech is never
99, 102nl 1, 163-4, 166n6, 194, neutral' 157; 'The Three
246, 267-8; The [Link] in Genders' 157-8
the Attic 88-93, 94, 102nl 1,
163-4, 166n6, 246; No Man's Jacobus, Mary 251, 270; Reading
Land 93, 95 Woman 270
gynocritics 75, 79 James, Henry 10ln9; 217-18, 221
James, William 22, 25
Haggard, H. Rider 217, 222, 228; Johnson, Samuel 78
Allan Quatermain 217, 222 Joyce,James 78,142, 144nl0, 168
Halberstram, Judith 161
Hall, Radclyffe 205; The Well of Kahn, Coppelia 269-70; Making
Loneliness 205 a Difference 269-70
Hardwick, Elizabeth 10ln4; Kaplan, Cora 38-40; Seachanges
Seduction and Betrayal 38-40
10ln4 Kipling, Rudyard 228
Hardy, Thomas 220 Klein, Melanie l 18n2
Hartmann, Heidi 38 Kolodny, Annette 243
Haslett, Moyra 47nl, 48n6 Kristeva, Julia 9, 17,117, 118n2,
Heath, Stephen 217-18, 220 119-44, 158; Revolution in
Hennessy, Rosemary 43-4, 47, Poetic Language 125-32;
270; Materialist Feminism and Desire in Language 9, 17, 121;
the Politics of Discourse 43-4, Polylogue 120; 'Motherhood
47,270 according to Giovanni Bellini'
Henty, G. A. 228 131; 'Stabat Mater' 131,
Hicks, George Elgar 56. 132-3
Hobsbawm, E. J. 22
hooks, bel 187-8, 190, 194; Ain't I Lacan,Jacques 107,112, 113-16,
a woman? 187-8, 190, 194 119, 122,127,128,131,146,
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 89 148, 152-3, 155,156,159,171,
Horney, Karen l 18n2 253,269
Howells, Willia,n Dean 242, 243 Lang, Andrew 228
Hughes, Ted 93 Lawrence, D. H. 64,70, 78, 134- 9,
Hull, Gloria T. 193 144n8, 178- 9,258; Women in
Hurston, Zora Neale 194 Love 134-9; 'Bei Hennef'
178-9
ideology 22-3,47nl Lawrence, Frieda 178
Imaginary, the 114,116, 171 Leavis, F. R. 34, 273
interpellation 53, 55, 68n2 Ledger, Sally 240n3
intertextuality 123 lesbian continuum 202, 207
Irigaray, Luce 106,117, 118n2, lesbian existence 202
146-67, 192,200-1,210,269; Le Lessing, Doris 76, 78, 10ln5, 273
langage des dements (The Levi-Strauss, Claude 159
Language of the Demented) Lovell, Terry 34- 6, 99; Consuming
146; Speculum of the Other Fiction 34- 6, 99
Woman 147, 153, 154, 155, Luhan, Mabel Dodge 78
166nl; This Sex Which is not Lydon, Mary 270-1; Skirting the
One 151, 153, 154-5, 156, Issue 270-1
 288 Ind ex

Lytton, Edward Bulwer 5-6 nomlnon du pere, le 115, 128

Mailer, Norman 63, 64, 70 Oedipus complex 108- 9, 111,114

[Link] 262,267 Oxford English Dictionary 4, 8, 10
Marks, Elaine 158; New French
Feminisms 158 parler-femme 155-6, 158, 164,
McCullough, Colleen 40; The 189,264
Thornbirds 40 Patmore, Coventry 52-3; The
Mill, John Stuart 21, 84 Angel in the House 52-3
Miller, Henry 62, 63, 64 Patriarchy 15
Millett, Kate 57, 63-4, 65, 70, 77, Payne, Michael 123, 130-1, 133
105,110,134,135,136,138; Plath, Sylvia 1, 78, 93
Sexual Politics 57, 63-4, 105, Plato 130, 147, 148
135 Poe, Edgar Allan 243, 258-60
Mills & Boon 99 Pollock, Griselda 24lnl0
Milton, John 91 Poovey, Mary 36-7, 220; Uneven
Minh-ha, Trin T. 271; Woman, Developments 36-7
Native, Other 271 Punch 221- 2,240n3
Mitchell, Jujjet 110, 269; Punter, David 225
Psychoanalysis and Feminism Pykett, Lyn 102nl0; 271- 2; The
110 Improper Feminine 102nl0,
Mitchell, Margaret 40; Cone With 271-2
the Wind 40
Mitchell, Silas Weir 244- 5, 246, queer theory 210
251, 258; Fat and Blood
244-5,251 Radcliffe, Ann 95
Moers, Ellen 75, 79-84, 85, 88, 96, Rhys, Jean 44-7; Wide Sargasso
98,150,190, 194,213nl; Sea 44-7
Literary Women 79-83, 150 Rich, Adrienne 144n6, 200-3, 207,
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 197, 272; 'Compulsory
199; 'Under Western Eyes' HeterosexuaHty and Lesbian
197 Existence 200- 3; Blood,
Moi, Toril 6, 64, 65, 69n4, 98, 122, Bread and Poetry 272
143n3, 147,158,271; Sexual/ Richardson, Dorothy 86
Textual Politics 271 Richardson, Samuel 34
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 76, Riviere, Joan 111
10ln5 Robbins, Ruth 272
Moore, George 88 Roberts, Andrew l 18n2
Moore, Jane 267 Roberts, Michele l, 2; The
Moraga, Cherrie 197-8, 199; This Visitation l, 2
Bridge Called My Back 197- 8 Rossetti, Christina 82, 91
Morales, Rosario 198 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 26, 31
Morrison, Toni 194, 199; Sula Roudiez, Leon S. 9, 121, 126,
199 143n3,144n5
Mulvey, Laura 50 Rule, Jane 203; Lesbian Images
203
Nead, Lynda 55, 66, 137, 220, 267; Ruskin, John 1
Myths of Sexuality 56, 66
New Woman Writers 88, 99 Salinger, J. D. 78
 Index 289

Sand,George 80-1, 10ln8,10ln9 Mr Hyde 217-18, 220, 223-6,

Saussure, Ferdinand de 113, 114, 230
119,153 Stoker, Bram 160-2; Dracula.
Sayers, Janet 118n2 160-2
Schreiner, Olive 88; The Story of Symbolic, the 115, 116, 128-33,
an African Farm 88 135,142,155,156,171
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 207,
240n4, 272; Between Men Tennyson, Alfred Lord 221
207,240n4,272 Todd, Janet 62-3, 98, 107, 111;
Semiotic, the 128-33, 135, 142, Feminist Literay History
238 62-3, 98; The Sign ofAngellica
Shelley, Mary 82, 91, 92; 98
Frankenstein 82, 91, 92 Treichler, Paula 248, 253
Sinfield, Alan 24 ln6 Truth, SojoUiner 187- 8, 196
Showalter, Elaine 12-14, 37-8,
74-5, 79,83-8,94,96,98,99, Unconcsious, the 111- 12, 113,
101n4, 119,146,194,222,268; 114,116
'Feminist Criticism in the
Wilderness' 12-14; 'Towards [Link] 193,194, 195;1n
a Feminist Poetics' 37- 8, Search of Our Mothers'
74-5, 242; A Literature oftheir Gardens 193, 194; 'One Child
Own 83-8, 196; The Female of One's Own' 195
Malady 258nl, 273; Sexual Walker, Margaret 194
Anarchy 220, 240n4, 24ln7 Waller, Margaret 144n4
Smith, Barbara 97-8, 190, 193, Ward-Jouve, Nicole 211, 212-13
194, 199- 200; 'Towards a Black Warner, Marina 67, 144n7
Feminist Criticism' 97- 8, Warner, Sylvia Townsend 208;
190, 199-200 Summer Will Show 208
Spacks, Patricia Meyer 69n4, Washington, Mary Helen 96;
75-9, 84, 85, 96, 98, 10ln6,190, Invented Lives 96
194, 213nl; The Female Watt, Ian 34, 267, 273
Imagination 69n4, 75-9, Waugh, Patricia 262
10ln6 Whitford, Margaret 146, 148
Spelman, Elizabeth V. 189; Wilde, Oscar 127, 217, 220, 222,
Inessential Woman 189 227-33; The Importance of
Spencer, Jane 98, 273; The Rise of BeingEarnest 127,217,222;
the Woman Novelist 98, 273 The Picture of Dorian Gray
Spender, Dale 98, 273; Mothers of 217,218-19,222,227- 33
the Novel 98, 273 Williams, Raymond 21, 22
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 42, Wolf, Naomi 67-8; The Beauty
199 Myth 67-8
Spock, Benjamin 82 Wolfreys, Julian 130, 171, 253,
Stein, Gertrude 203 255
Sterne, Laurence 260, 261 Wollstonecraft, Mary 10, 17,
Stetson, Erlene 191-3; 'Studying 26--33,39,51-3,55, 169,273;
Slavery' 191-3 A Vindication ofthe Rights of
Stevenson, Robert Louis 217-18, Woman 26--9, 31; Mary: a
220, 222, 223-6, 228, 230; The Fiction 29-33; The Wrongs of
Strange Case ofDr Jekyll and Woman 29-33
290 Inde x

Woolf, Virginia 52-3, 55, 77, 79, Fiction' 259,263; 'The Mark
84,86,94,95,96,258nl,259, on the Wall.' 259-64
263, 273; A Room ofOne's Own Wright, Elizabeth l 18n2
52-3, 77, 79,84,94; To the Wynne-Davies, Marion 98
Lighthouse 245; Mrs
Dalloway 258nl; 'Modern Zimmerman, Bonnie 203
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