In her book “A Literature of Their
Own” Elaine Showalter writes on English women writers. She says that we can see patterns and phases
in the evolution of a female tradition.
Showalter has divided the period of evolution into three stages. They are:
1. the Feminine,
2. the Feminist, and,
3. the Female stages.
1) The first phase, the feminine phase
dates from about 1840-1880. During that
period women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the
male culture. The distinguishing sign of
this period is the male pseudonym. This trend
was introduced in England in the 1840’s.
It became a national characteristic of English women writers. During this
phase the feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique, because of the
inferiority complex experienced by female writers.
2) The feminist phase lasted about 38
years; from 1882 to 1920. The New Women
movement gained strength—women won the right to vote. Women writers began to use literature to dramatize
the ordeals of wrong womanhood.
3) The latest phase or the third phase
is called the female phase ongoing since 1920.
Here we find women rejecting both imitation and protest. Showalter considers that both are signs of dependency.
Women show more independent attitudes. They
realize the place of female experience in the process of art and
literature. She considers that there is
what she calls autonomous art that can come from women because their
experiences are typical and individualistic.
Women began to concentrate on the forms and techniques of art and
literature. The representatives of the
female phase such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf even began to think
of male and female sentences. They wrote
about masculine journalism and feminine fiction. They redefined and sexualized external and
internal experience.