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What Difference? The Theory and Practice of Feminist Criticism By Joyce Quiring Erickson, Warner Pacific Col lege

The purpose of this essay is not to review feminist criticism over the past dozen years from its latest revival in the women's movement of the late 1960s to its present almost-respectable status in the literary critical establishment, but to consider some key issues that have engaged its practitioners and theorists.1 Once these issues have been raised, I hope to show briefly that the difficulties and rewards of such a critical approach bear some resemblance to those attached to "Christian criticism."

From the outset it is important to note a distinction between practice and theory in feminist criticism; that is, a distinction between the examination of literary works from a feminist perspective which results in a feminist interpretation of the work based on those biases, on the one hand, and the search for a critical theory whose assumptions about the work qua literature are exclusively feminist on the other. Another way to characterize this search is to see it as an attempt to determine what other critical theories are complementary to the practice of feminist criticism. Though it may not appear so to "outsiders," feminist criticism is not monolithic; debate within the community of feminist literary scholars is lively and reflects sharply divergent opinions about purpose and practice. Yet despite those differences, as Annette Kolodny says, the shared assumptions of feminist critics encourage a "communal frame of mind."2

What assumptions are shared? Stated briefly and generally, it can be said that "feminist critics look at how literature comprehends, transmits, and shapes female experience and is, in turn, shaped by i t ."3 But the enterprise is not neutral in its assumptions about the social and intellectual context from which literature or female experience arises:

Though there are internal disagreements within most perspectives, nevertheless just as all Freudians believe in the unconscious, in infantile sexuality, in neurotic behavior as a form of purpose behavior; so all feminists, I argue, would agree that women are not automatically or necessarily inferior to men, that role models for females and males in the current Western societies are inadequate, that equal rights for women are necessary, that it is unclear what by nature either men or women are, that it is a matter for empirical investigation to ascertain what differences follow from the obvious psysiological ones, that in these empirical

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investigations the hypotheses one employs are themselves open to question, revision, or replacement.4

In addition to these shared assumptions, most feminist critics also assume the use of cer ta in key t e rms ; the d i s t inc t ion be tween f ema le /ma le and masculine/feminine; the former is a biological gender distinction, the latter a cultural distinction, highly variable from culture to culture and even within cultures, concepts or expectations separable from biological determinants.5

(This distinction is not always rigidly adhered to in common usage even among feminists.) To distinguish between this set of terms does not mean, as we shall see, that how one determines difference between women and men and what one makes of the difference is a settled issue.

Another concept almost universally accepted as a given is Simone de Beauvoir's notion of women as other, an assertion that males and male experience have been understood to constitute the human norm. De Beauvoir's analysis shows that the relationship between male and female in the human continuum is not reciprocal; women can be categorized as "not male" but males have never been categorized as "not female. ' ' Of course, all human beings have the capacity to make others of human beings who are not part of the group they consider definitive, but no distinction has been so pervasive in human experience as the distinction between men as the norm and women as the other, nor has it been the case that the asymmetry has been universal as it is with males and females.

Thus it is that some feminists see the oppression of women as the model for all other oppressions—caste, class, race—which perceive the less powerful as other. It is not surprising, then, that one writer analyzes the progress of feminist criticism by comparing it to the stages of emergence of colonial literature.6

Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of women as other appeared in The Second Sex, a book that is essential reading for anyone who wishes to trace the history of feminist criticism, though this work is not literary criticism per se.1 It is Virginia Woolf 's A Room of One's Own which serves as the earliest and, in many ways still the best introductory work delineating the issues and difficulties that confront women who purpose to become full participants in the human enterprise of reading, writing, and criticizing literature. Based on a series of lectures in 1928, the book's opening paragraph confronts the possibilities for understanding the meaning of the topic, women and fiction, given her for the lectures. The possible meanings she implies for the topic still reflect some contemporary approaches:

The words. . .might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney, . Jane Austen, . .the Brontes, . .Miss Mitford, . .George Eliot, . .Mrs. Gaskell. . . . The title women and fiction might mean. . .women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together. . . .8

Yet, as she considered these complexities, she says, she was always brought to a

WHAT DIFFERENCE?

"minor point" preliminary to these unresolved questions about the nature of women or the nature of fiction—that unless a woman has a room of her own, unless she is independent financially and emotionally, she cannot become a full participant in this enterprise. The process of thought and reasoning that led Woolf to this conclusion makes up the greater part of the essay.

But it is the manner as much as the matter of Woolf s essay that is seen as significant in another important piece of feminist critical exploration, Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision."9 Rich is struck by the "sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness in the tone ," for what this tone portrays, Rich thinks, is a woman who subdues her passion because she is "actually conscious. . .of being overheard by men" (p. 92). Such concern for object ivi ty and respec tab i l i ty , Rich c o n t e n d s , w h e t h e r consc ious or unconscious, is a hindrance for women writers. What will energize women's writing is the abandonment of an objective stance and a deep surrender by women to their own consciousness and experience.

Woolf s perception for women who would write is quite different from Rich's call for surrender to the knowledge and understanding of oneself as a woman. At the end of her lecture, Woolf argues passionately for the middle of the writer, man or woman, as androgynous:

It is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must like wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace (p. 108).

Woolf s plea for an androgynous mind is elaborated on and demonstrated in ano the r significant work , Carolyn H e i l b r u n ' s Toward a Recognition of Androgyny.11 Defining androgyny as ' 'a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly defined" (p. x), Heilbrun surveys western literature and finds "a hidden river of androgyny." Her point is that the best human impulses tend toward the recognition of the essential humanness of both male and female, and the qualities of character and action that characterize the best of human life and culture are to be found in men and women (cf. the chapter titled "The Woman as Hero") . Although she does not deny the limitations that have been imposed on women and is thoroughly committed to their being lifted, and although she sees feminist criticism as essential to that process, Heilbrun has consistently argued in other writings that the point of feminist criticism is to reach the place

CHRISTIANITY & LITERATURE

where critics are "free to range ourselves on the spectrum of human action for reasons other than that of gender. . . ; it will be a place where literary perceptions will avail past the necessity of social action."12

But whether this is a possible, or even a desirable, destination is not acceded to by all feminist critics.13 Why not? Because, as many critics besides Rich say, women have not been able to write as mere human beings; the act of writing itself has meant they were defining themselves as more than the object of male desire, adoration, or calumny as they have appeared in most literature. The act of writing defines them as subjects; by definition it is a revolutionary act and hence must, of necessity, be somehow inscribed in the text. It is the self-consciousness of that act that Rich sees in Woolf's tone of effort and tentativeness.

Such self-consciousness may, in fact, be inscribed even more deeply than in a surface manifestation such as tone, Myra Jehlen suggests:

Women (and perhaps some men not of the universal kind) must deal with their situation as a precondition for writing about it. They have to confront the assumptions that render them a kind of fiction in themselves in that they are defined by others, as components of the language and thought of others. . . . The autonomous individuality of a woman's story or poem is framed by engagement, the engagement of its denial of dependent [on the male tradition or on others' definition of oneself]. We might think of the form this necessary denial takes. . . as analogous to genre, in being an issue, not of content, but of the structural formulation of the work's relationship to the inherently formally patriarchal language which is the only language we have.14

This implies another reason for postponing the marriage of male and female consciousness in an androgynous mind. In fact, such a marriage may be impossible until female experience and certain so-called traditional feminine values are incorporated into our cultural or literary consciousness as necessary human values:

Much feminist criticism is. . .corective criticism designed to redress the imbalance in current literary curricula, . . .to retrieve the extensive body of women's literature and art that has been neglected in the past—not only to retrieve it but to integrate it into the canon. If, in this process of integration, we establish that there is a woman's culture, so much the better for the purposes of our politics—to make the world a place in which woman is no longer other.15

Until reciprocity between masculine and feminine ways of being and knowing is assumed as the human way of being and knowing, these feminists insist, the exploration of women's experience and consciousness must be of the highest priority. In fact, without such highlighting of women 's experience, the reciprocity will not occur.

An awareness of a special consciousness in women and of disabilities which they have faced is not a substitute for but a prologue to literary study, not only as a sotto voce accompaniment to biography, but as soil and context for the works

WHAT DIFFERENCE?

themselves. Art has a life of its own, and an awareness of injustices toward women is not going to make a bad book better; yet it is criticism that evaluates and preserves that life, and criticism which is sexually, as opposed to intellectually, discriminating, will hide and withhold a significant portion of the life of a book. Elements in women's writing which have been unappreciated or denigrated by male critics may appear in a different light once the prejudices of these critics have been named as such.16

As this quotation implies, the task of feminist criticism is not only to highlight women's consciousness and experience but also to uncover ways in which that experience has been misunderstood or denigrated in the writings of men or masked and trivialized in the writings of women. The burst of critical activity early in the last decade which exposed stereotypical treatments of women exemplifies this kind of critical activity, but that is perhaps the most obvious and also, once learned, the most perfunctory kind of feminist reading. A more thorough critique of literature "wants to decode and demystify all the disguised questions and answers that have always shadowed the connections between textuality and sexuality, genre and gender, psychosexual identity and cultural authority."17

Elaine Showalter distinguishes between two modes of feminist criticism, one mode "concerned with the feminist as reader, . . .in essence a mode of interpretation, one of many which any complex text will accomodate and permit."18 But focusing solely on the feminist as reader means "the feminist critique can only compete with alternative readings, all of which have the built- in obsolescence of Buicks, cast away as newer readings take their place" (p. 182).

That is why Showalter argues for a second mode, " the study of women as writers; . . .its subjects are the history, styles, themes, genres, and structure of writing by women; the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective female career; and the evolution and laws of a female literary tradition" (pp. 184-85). This shift from "an androcentric to gynocentric feminist criticism" has produced a spate of book-length studies, not to mention numerous essays and papers.19

The ascendance of a gynocentric criticism does not assure a unity of approach to the list of subjects in Showalter's second mode or to agreement on the crux of the difference in women's writing. The ways in which the difference can be articulated are physical/biological—the difference of women's bodies (an approach taken by French feminists who are influenced by Lacan); linguistic— the difference of women's language (another interest of French feminists who argue for a parler femme); psychological—the difference of women's perceptions of the self and of the creative act; cultural—the difference of women's experience as part of a female culture.

Although Showalter finds each of the approaches has yielded fruitful insights, she believes the last difference is the most defensible and most promising as a ground for articulating differences. Using Edwin Ardener's model of a muted

CHRISTIANITY & LITERATURE

and dominant group, she argues that women and men share particular experiences, but each has areas of experience that are shared only with members of the same gender. It is this area of unshared experience, or the aspects of a woman's text that reflect both the shared and unshared experiences, that may provide the distinctive difference for gynocentric criticism. "One of the great advantages of the women's culture model is that it shows how the female tradition can be a positive source of strength and solidarity as well as a negative source of powerlessness; it can generate its own experiences and symbols which are not simply the obverse of the male tradition" (p. 204).

Still, this model focuses almost necessarily on content or context and, as Ellen Messer-Davidow points out, is philosophically based in an author-centered criticism.20 She argues that most feminist criticism can be fitted into the four philosophical approaches to a work of art first delineated by Meyer Abrams (author, audience, universe work) or as responsive to the approach that sees the work as communication (structuralism, semiotics, deconstructionism). Is it possible to conceptualize the task in a way that is not so dependent?21 Yes, says Messer-Davidow, if the subject of feminist criticism is conceived not as literature but as ideas about sex (biological differences) and gender (cultural differences).22 These ideas are accessible and provable, whereas the actual differences themselves are not. Such ideas can be explored in themselves, related to the agent who uses them, examined with respect to their effects on people, and considered in their relationship with other ideas. The epistemology of such an approach recognizes not only the author, audience, universe, work, and language as a potential medium of communication but also the critic, an acknowledgement present but not explicit in certain other models. Anyone who approaches literature as a feminist, then, is necessarily concerned with issues of sex and gender.

The dependence of feminist criticism on other forms or modes of literary c r i t i c i sm, or on o the r ideologies (e .g . , Marxism, psychoanalys is) , has engendered much discussion, perhaps because it appears that feminist criticism has two aims; criticism that is "authentic both as literary criticism and as feminist praxis.''23 If carried out in isolation, each negates the other, but if feminist criticism is conceived as a "dialectical mediation" between feminism and literary criticism, the result may be a restructuring of the discipline, showing that "the literary and critical tradition has betrayed its claims to universality" at the same time that it affirms the value of the tradition: "feminist criticism is devoted to the liberation of the ideal of beauty and aesthetic pleasure from its bondage to the patriarchal logic, which usually attaches these values to the representation of women as other. . . . It is an effort to preserve what literature and criticism can and ought to be against what they have become" (p. 175).

Whether or not one finds these projections plausible, it is clear from Schweickart's comments, and from those of other feminist critics, that disinterestedness is not held up as a critical ideal. (Of course, critics other than feminists have implicitly and explicitly acknowledged the elusiveness of such an ideal in the last several decades.) But it is also clear that feminist critics do see

WHAT DIFFERENCE?

their enterprise as a "criticism of life." Is it really possible to come up with an adequate criticism of life without disinterestedness?

This perplexing issue—how to be true to the integrity of the literary work and to the extra-literary commitments that inform one's understanding and hence may affect one's reading of the work—is crucial not only for feminist critical theory and practice but also for Christian criticism.

Both feminism and Christianity posit visions of a world that is better than the present one; both can point to reasons the present is less than perfect, and both proffer remedies for the problem. If one holds such views passionately—and both assert that not to hold them so is hardly to hold them at all, they will affect every area of one's life, including one's intellectual endeavors. How is it possible, then not to judge a literary work by the standards of one's ideology? How can one avoid being guided by attitudes and beliefs that are held to be essential for understanding the self and the world? These are questions that animate critical discourse in either circle, feminist or Christian.

One predictable response to this dilemma is the assertion that the work of art is autonomous and sets its own standards for judgment. Yet even if the many arguments against this position—which have pretty well demolished the possibility of a naive formalism—are ignored, both feminism and Christianity would assert that such autonomy can only be penultimate: feminism because art is seen to be inextricably grounded in a human context that by definition involves ideas about and attitudes toward sex and gender (humans are either male or female; no neutral identity is possible), Christianity because even art must be judged in the light of eternity.

However one formulates a response to this theoretical dilemma, in practice the approaches of feminist and Christian critics bear some similarity, taking several forms: e.g., discussions about how a particular writer's Christianity or sex/gender attitudes shape a particular work; an examination of forms or periods in the light of the non-literary commitment (e.g., Nathan Scott's The Broken Center); recovery of works considered marginal to the canon because their ideological values have obscured their literary value to the supposedly objective (e.g., Donald Davie's reconsideration of the hymns of Isaac Watts). Another related issue of practical criticism arises in the study of that western literature written in the Christian era when no alternative world view is posited. What is the relationship between belief and literary practice; for example, is the choice of particular idioms or symbols deliberate or conventional? Similarly, what particular choices are guided by consciousness of one's gender identity or adoption of a conventional stance? What aspect of the context is inextricable?

Though the answers to these questions are varied, it is clear that people who ask and attempt to answer such questions care deeply about the products of human creation, even though their ultimate allegiance compels them to look beyond and outside literature and art for answers. Such care is, in fact, an implicit expression of their concern for the future of human life, just as their ideological or religious commitments are explicit expressions of this concern.

Whether implicitly or explicitly expressed, this caring for literature and this

CHRISTIANITY & LITERATURE

concern for human life are the reasons it is important to raise such questions in the classroom as well as in the arenas of scholarly debate. Insofar as the insights of feminist critics are showing us ways we have made human subjects into objects or showing us we have accepted definitions of self that exonerate us from the effort of growing into full personhood; insofar as the insights of feminist critics have alerted us to the human tendency to make others of those who are different, especially of those who have less access to power than we, then feminist critics are helping us to understand and carry out our task carefully as Christians.

And even if feminist critics were to have accomplished only a set of alternate readings in competi t ion with other readings (although I believe their accomplishment is greater and still to be fully realized), these alternate readings can remind us of the powerful effects readers have on texts, and conversely of the powerful effect texts have on readers, not the least of whom are our students.24 Jehlen makes a similar point in her comparison of descriptions by Henry Nash Smith and Ann Baym of the same sentimental novel:

Smith reports that Wide Wide World is the tale of 'an orphan exposed to poverty and psychological hardships who finally attains economic security and high social status through marriage.' Baym reads the same novel as 'the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world.' The second account stresses the role of the girl herself in defining her situation, so that the crux of her story becomes her passage from passivity to active engagement. On the contrary, with an eye to her environment and its use to her, Smith posits her as passive throughout, 'exposed' at first, in the end married. Clearly this is not a matter of right or wrong readings but of a politics of vision.25

No one who reads criticism or who teaches students needs to be told that drastically different readings of a text exist. But perhaps we do need be reminded that readings have the power to hurt and to help. In fact, for both feminist and Christian critics the high value accorded literature and art is linked to the conviction that they have the power to affect human life, a power that extends into the future, for some even as "far" as eternity. Dare we use that power carelessly?

To whom much is given, from them much is required.

1 Readers who are interested in such reviews are referred to the following, listed chronologically: Annis Pratt, "The New Feminist Criticism," College English, 32 (May, 1971), 872-889; Elaine Showalter, "Literary Criticism," Signs, 1 (Winter, 1975), 435- 460; Annette Kolodny, "Literary Criticism," Signs, 2 (Winter, 1976), 404-421; Cheri Register, "Literary Criticism," Signs, 6 (Winter, 1980), 268-282.

W H A T DIFFERENCE?

2 Annette Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary Crit icism'," ^ 3

Critical Inquiry, 2 (Autumn, 1975), 91 3 Register, ρ 269 4 Annette Barnes, "Female Criticism A Prologue," in Arlyn Diamond and Lee R

Edwards, eds , The Authority of Experience Essays m Feminist Criticism (Amherst University

of Massachusetts Press, 1977), ρ 9 5 This distinction is pointed out in Mary McDermott Shideler's introduction to

Dorothy Sayer's Are Women Human? (Grand Rapids Lerdmans, 1971), ρ 12 6 Register, pp 281 282 7 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans , H M Parshley (New York Alfred A

Knopf, Ine , 1953) 8 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York Harcourt, Brace & World

[Harbinger], 1929), ρ 3 9 Adrienne Rich's Poetry, ed Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York

Norton, 1975), pp 90 98 1 0 Cf Marilyn R Farwell, "Adrienne Rich and an Organic Feminist Criticism,"

College English, 39 (October, 1977), 199 203 11 Carolyn G Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York Harper & Row,

1973) 12 Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Simpson, "Theories of Feminist Criticism A

Dialogue," in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed Josephine Donovan (Lexington The

University Press of Kentucky, 1975), ρ 72 1 3 One writer, who claims to have long been a convinced feminist, argues that

attempts to define differences in women's literature are foolish, certainly women have

been stereotyped, but women are not special types " W o m e n ' s l i terature" is in the same

category as "Jewish l i t e r a t u r e , " argues Minda Rae Amiran, " W h a t W o m e n ' s

Literature," College English, 39 (February, 1978), 653 661 1 4 Myra Jehlen, "Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism," Signs, 6

(Summer, 1981), 582 1 5 Josephine Donovan, "Feminism and Aesthetics," Critical Inquiry, 4 (Spring, 1977),

606 1 6 Lynn Sukenick, " O n Women and Fiction," in Diamond and Edwards, ρ 44 1 7 Sandra M Gilbert, " W h a t Do Feminist Critics Want 9 , or, a Postcard from the

Volcano," ADF Bulletin (Winter, 1980), ρ 19 1 8 Flame Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry, 8

(Winter, 1981), 182 This issue of Critical Inquiry has been issued as a separate volume,

Writing and Sexual Difference ed Elizabeth Abel (Chicago University of Chicago Press,

1982) 1 9 See, for example (listed in chronological order), Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female

Imagination (New York Avon Books, 1975), Ellen Moers, Literary Women The Great

Writers (Garden City, NY Anchor Books, 1977), Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their

Own British Women \oveIists from Bronte to Lessmg (Princeton, NJ Princeton University

Press, 1977), Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women An Idea m Fiction Cambridge)

Harvard University Press, 1978), Nina Baym, Women's Fiction A Guide to Novels by and

about Women m America, 1820 1870 (Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1978, Sandra

Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman m the Attic The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth

Century Literary Imagination (New Haven Yale University Press, 1979), Margaret

Homans, Women Writters and Poetic Identity (Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press,

1980)

C H R I S T I A N I T Y & L I T E R A T U R E

20 Ellen Messer-Davidow, "The Philosophical Bases of Feminist and Traditional Literary Criticism," paper read at special session, Feminist Criticism: Theories and Directions, MLA Convention, Los Angeles, California, December 28, 1982.

21 Cf. other formulations of the dependence: "A criticism which exclusively locates the generat ion of meaning at the level of author (biographical cri t icism, text (formalism), or society conceived as a monolithic causal agent ('vulgar' Marxism and many sociologies of literature) will not expose the ideologically-determined process of sexual oppression which must involve both the literary text andits reading cul ture" — Stuart Cunningham, "Some Problems of Feminist Literary Criticism," Journal of Women's Studies m Literature, 1 (Spring, 1979), p. 170.

"The emphasis in each country falls somewhat differently: English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression"—Showalter, "Criticism in the Wilderness," p. 186.

22 See also Judith A. Spector, "Gender Studies: New Directions for Feminist Criticism, College English, 43 (April, 1981), 374-378.

23 Patricinio Schweickart, "Comments on Jehlen's 'Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism'," Signs, 8 (Autumn, 1982), 175.

24 For a discussion of feminist criticism as a kind of reader-oriented criticism, see Sandra M. Gilbert, "Life Studies, or, Speech after Long Silence: Feminist Critics Today," College English, 40 (April, 1979), 849-863.

25 Jehlen, p. 590. The quotation from Smith is found in "The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story," Critical Inquiry, 1 (September, 1974), 49; from Baym, Woman's Fiction, p. 19.

H ARD H AT Poetry is a subtle art,

And he did not have a subtle touch

Rough hands calloused o\er a rough soul

And while the delicate young students

Contemplated the fallen tree,

His job was to reach for the axe

Yet 1 caught him one morning—

When the sun laughed

And the big hand of the wind tousled the leaves—

Watching a bird build a nest,

When he thought the other men weren't looking

Wil l iam David Spencer

^ s

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