Men in Feminism (RLE Feminist Theory) by Alice Jardine Paul Smith

Author:Alice Jardine, Paul Smith [Alice Jardine, Paul Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415754217
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

A Criticism of One's Own

Denis Donoghue

I have been reading a good deal of feminist criticism and scholarship. Not all of it—I am sure to have missed many books and essays I should have read. But I have made an attempt to see what has been happening in feminist criticism since 1970, when Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, the book usually taken as having started the feminist field by provoking sentiments and passions in its favor, was published. The main problem I have encountered is not the multiplicity of books and essays in the field. That is merely a quantitative matter, endemic in every area of scholarship: Who can keep up with anything these days? The difficulty, rather, is to determine what the present context of feeling is.

The annual report for 1984 of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association, for instance—but is it an “instance,” and of what?—includes Annette Kolodny's claim that “in the wake of all the new information about the literary production of women, Blacks, Native Americans, ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians; and with new ways of analyzing popular fiction, non-canonical genres and working-class writings, all prior literary histories are rendered partial, inadequate, and obsolete.” In the same report, compiled by Donald Yannella, Professor Marianne De Koven evidently holds “that women have the same claim as men to having ‘invented’ modernism in America,” and cites as evidence three fictions by women: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1891), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), and Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (1903–6). She also claims that there is “an official version of modernism,” as in Hugh Kenner's A Homemade World, which defines it (these are De Koven's words, not Kenner's) as “a revolted flight, by means of the ‘fabulously artificed,’ Dedalian wings of male technology, from the primary horror of female (pro)creativity.” I'm not sure whether these sentiments, which seem wild to me, accurately indicate the context of feminist criticism or some bizarre hyperbole; a real fury in the words, or willed turbulence worked up for the occasion.

But there are some tangible episodes, one of which is especially significant. On April 28, 1985, the novelist Gail Godwin reviewed the new Norton Anthology of Literature by Women for the New York Times Book Review. Her account of the book was quietly severe. She disapproved of the editors’ “stated desire to document and connect female literary experience rather than present a showcase of the most distinguished writing by women in English from Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century to the present day.” The Norton Anthology, she maintained, forced “the individual female talent to lie on the Procrustean fain ting-couch of a ‘diseased’ tradition.”

Godwin's review angered several well-known feminist critics, including Elaine Showalter, Alicia Ostriker, Carolyn Heilbrun, Nina Auerbach, Myra Jehlen, Nancy K. Miller, and Catharine R. Stimpson. They accused her of “denying the existence of a female literary tradition” (Ostriker). In her reply, Godwin went a step further than her review: she “mourned the authors who were slighted in the

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