The Complete Idiot's Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism by Steven J. Venturino PhD

Author:Steven J. Venturino, PhD [Venturino, Steven J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615643271
Publisher: DK Publishing
Published: 2013-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Evolving Phases

Elaine Showalter described three developmental phases in women’s writing since the nineteenth century. These phases aren’t marked by strict boundaries, since much of what is described for any one phase can occur at any other time. Yet, as Showalter described them, these phases have become (despite strong disagreements over details) enormously helpful for beginning to think not only about women’s literature emerging from patriarchy, but about any art form developing in the context of a dominant social force (as we’ll see in the discussion of postcolonial literature in Chapter 21).

The first phase, or “feminine phase,” Showalter argued, occurred between 1840 and 1880. During this period, women wrote with an eye to matching men’s achievements. Works written in this phase show women internalizing male assumptions about female culture. Male pseudonyms were a symptom of this: Mary Ann Evans wrote as George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë published as Currer Bell, and the French novelist Aurore Dupin Dudevant became George Sand. As Virginia Woolf wrote regarding the same period, a woman writer at the time “was admitting that she was ‘only a woman,’ or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man.’”

During the “feminist phase,” from 1880 to 1920, according to Showalter, “women are historically enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood.” That is, women writers directly confronted the negative effects of patriarchy. Consider the works of Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton, North and South, Cranford) involving factory and home life, as well as class struggle. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper”) and Kate Chopin (The Awakening) also belong to this phase.

In the third, “female phase” beginning in the 1920s and continuing through the century, “women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience.” Writers in this period, such as Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse) and Dorothy Richardson (Pointed Roofs) sought to create worlds in which a woman’s identity, however linked to other characters, can be seen as autonomous and reflective of actual female experience.

Another important development of feminist literary scholarship involving all three phases has been the recovery of literature written by women but traditionally ignored by critics, school reading lists, and ordinary readers. The author and critic Alice Walker, for example (see Chapter 14), brought Zora Neale Hurston’s valuable work back to the public’s attention after years of neglect.

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