00313--ELAINE SHOWALTER and her works

ELAINE SHOWALTER

SHOWALTER

1.A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing 2.The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 3.The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, Theory 4.Speaking of Gender 5.Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de siècle 6.Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing 7.Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage 8.Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents

00181—What does Elaine Showalter mean by the current impasses in Feminist criticism?

According to Elaine, the present impasses in feminist criticism are not a problem of finding definitions or theories.  The impasse comes from women’s own divided consciousness; the split in each of us.  We are both the daughter of the male tradition of our teachers, our professors, our dissertations, advicers and our publishers.  It is a tradition which asks women to be rational, marginal and grateful.  At the same time they are sisters in a new women’s movement which engenders another kind of awareness and commitments.

To the present comments from some critics that Feminism is in wilderness, Showalter has clear answer.  She says Feminist criticism is in good company because all criticism is in wilderness now.  She admits that Feminist criticism lacks a systematic and unified theoretical basis.

00166—Feminine, Feminist and Female stages

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.   

00134--Describe the three national variants in Feminist Literary criticism as presented by Showalter.

            In the 1980's women's writing asserted itself as the central project of feminist literary study through hundreds of essays and research papers.  In the 1970s, French Feminist theories had certain differences of opinion with the American feminist movements and theories.  Differences were mainly regarding the method of study.  But now, they are solved.  The new French feminism have much in common with radical American feminist theories.  The concept of ecriture feminine, is a significant theoretical formulation in French feminist criticism today.  Showalter comments "ecriture feminine is a hope for the future". 

            The three major national variants in feminist criticism Showalter talks about are:

a)         English Feminist Criticism which is essentially Marxist.  In the analysis of women issues, it stresses oppression.

b)        French Feminist Criticism.  This is essentially Psychoanalytic.  In its methods of reading and theory, French Feminist Criticism stress Repression. 

c)         American Feminist criticism.  This school is essentially Textual.  In the analysis of women's issues American Feminist Criticism stresses Expression.

            With all there differences, the three variants have still become gynocrtic.  Theories of women's writing presently make use of four models of difference.  The are:  Biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural.  Each model represents a school of gynocentric feminist criticism.  Each has its own favourite texts, styles and methods.

00132--Explain the term Gynocrtics.

            There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism.  The first mode is concerned with women as reader and this is termed Feminist critique.  The second mode is concerned with women as writer and hence called Gynocrtics.

            The term is introduced by Elaine Showalter in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics" published in 1979 and later elaborated in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness", 1981.  Gynocritics focuses on images, themes, plots, and genres, on individual authors and patterns of influence among women, in an effort to identify what is specifically characteristic of women's writing and to construct "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature".  Associated primarily with Anglo American feminist criticism of the late 1970s, gynocrtics seeks to recover the unknown, and to re-read the known, writing by women in order to 'map the territory' of a female literary tradition.

            Showalter called Gynocritics the "second phase" of feminist criticism, because it succeeded and built upon an earlier phase of "feminist critique", which has focused on women as the writers of male texts.

00131--Explain Concept of Feminist Critique.

            There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism.  The first mode is concerned with women as a reader, and this is termed Feminist Critique.  The second mode is concerned with women as writer and hence called Gyno-critics.

            Feminist critique is a historically grounded enquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literature.  It is political and polemical and has affiliations to Marxism.  The subjects of study are mainly the image of women in literature, omissions and misconceptions of them.  According to Elaine Showalter, Feminist Critique is an interpretation of texts from a feminist perspective to expose diche's, stereotypes, and negative images of women.  Generally focusing on male literary and theoretical  texts, it also calls attention to the gaps in a literary history that has largely excluded writing by women.  This approach dominated feminist criticism when it first emerged in the 1970s and is strongly linked to the decades political agendas; Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), for example ties the mistreatment of women in fiction by Henry Miller and others to the oppression of women in a patriarchal society.  As early as 1975, Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson associated such readings with the "righteous, angry" first stages of feminist criticism.  Showalter would go on to suggest that by continuing to emphasize writing by men, the strategy of feminist criticism remained dependent "on existing models" of interpretation.  It did, however, lay the foundation for what she identified as the second, "gynocritical" phase of feminist criticism, focusing on women as writers with values, methods, and traditions of their own.  It has also led to more fully elaborated theories of women as readers, and continues to be an important tool in exposing the operation of sexism in culture and society.

00130--Why does Showalter say that feminist criticism is the Wilderness now?

Audio Books

            The term wilderness literally means 'a large areas of land that has never been developed or used for growing crops because it is difficult to live there'.  In history, Wilderness is the woodland region, south of the Rapidan River.  It was the scene of a Civil War between the armies of Grant and Lee in 
May, 1864.  It was Carolyin Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson, who observed that Feminist Criticism is in the Wilderness now.  The reason is that it has branched out into diverse groups and attitudes, and they cannot reach a monolithic perspective.  Originally it was Mathew Arnold who predicted that literary critics might perish in the wilderness before they reach the promised land.  To the present comment from some critics that Feminist criticism is the wilderness is clearly answered by Showalter.  She says that feminist criticism is in good company because at present, all criticism is in the wilderness.

Audio Books

            Feminist criticism too lacks a systematic and unified theoretical basis.  Different thinkers interpret and explain it differently.  Black critics protest the silence of feminist criticism about black and third world women writers.  They demand a Black feminist aesthetic.  Marxist feminists want to focus on class along with gender.  Literary historians want to uncover the lost tradition.  Post structuralists want to synthesise a new critical mode that is both textual and feminist.  Psycho analytic critics prefer to talk about women's relationship to language and signification.

00129--How does Elaine Showalter explain the absence of a systematic Feminist theory?

Showlter

            Elaine Showalter views the absence of systematic Feminist theory as something quite natural and positive.  In a culture which is dominated by patriarchy, such situation is not unexpected.  One major obstacle was this: for many feminists, the observations and view points they put forward were really "an expressive and dynamic enterprise" of theirs.  It was rather a part of their being and not just a mechanic academic out pouring.  These women were unwilling to limit or bound there expressions within the constraints of a theory.  Naturally they resisted such moves.  Hence these feminists wished to escape from the leading schools of critical thought dominated by male centered theories and theorists.  The cases of Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and Marxism were similar.

            All these debates were at the alto of masculine discourse.  Another thing is that scientific criticism (Structuralist, Post-structuralist or Deconstructionist) tried to become objective while Feminist criticism stressed the authority of subjective experience.  These feminists preferred to agree with Virginia Woolf.  It is "unpleasant to be locked out.... it is worse perhaps to be locked in".  In other words, it is unpleasant to have no systematic theory....it is worse to be locked in the chambers of masculine theories.