ASSIGNMENT VI

Name
Javeria M. Talha
College Roll no. Presented to:
E-18-04 Dr. S. Singh
MA I Semester II
 Elaine Showalter - Towards a Feminist Poetics

About the Author

Elaine Showalter, (born Jan. 21, 1941, Boston,
Mass., U.S.), American literary critic and teacher,
and founder of gynocritics, a school of feminist
criticism concerned with “woman as writer…with
the history, themes, genres, and structures of
literature by women.”

Showalter studied English at Bryn Mawr College

(B.A., 1962), Brandeis University (M.A., 1964), and the University of California,
Davis (Ph.D., 1970). She joined the faculty of Douglass College, the women’s
division of Rutgers University, in 1969, where she developed women’s studies
courses and began editing and contributing articles to books and periodicals about
women’s literature. She later taught at Rutgers and Princeton University, neither
of which hired women when she began her teaching career; she retired from
Princeton as professor emeritus in 2003. Showalter also spent time as a freelance
journalist and media commentator.

Showalter developed her doctoral thesis into her first book, A Literature of Their
Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977), a pioneering study
in which she created a critical framework for analyzing literature by women. Her
next book, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–
1980 (1985), was a historical examination of women and the practice of psychiatry.
She also wrote Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1990);
Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (1991);
Hystories: Historical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997), a controversial
exploration of the history of mass hysteria; Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist
Intellectual Heritage (2001), which follows the evolution of the feminist
intellectual from the 18th to the 21st century;
One of America's foremost academic literary scholars, Showalter is renowned for
her pioneering feminist studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century female
authors and her provocative cultural analysis of women's oppression in the history
of psychiatry. In her influential book A Literature of Their Own: British Women
Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977), Showalter advanced a new form of
feminist literary theory under the term “gynocriticism,” offering an alternative
framework for the interpretation of women's literary history.

Showalter forged the branch of feminist criticism known as “hystory,” an attempt

to reinterpret and redefine the pejorative notion of women's hysteria as embodied
in literary and social history. Showalter's contributions to feminist criticism and
women's studies have helped influence the canon of British and American
literature, bringing new visibility and legitimacy to often forgotten or
under-appreciated female authors.

Major Works
Among the founding scholars of feminist literary criticism and women's studies in
America, Showalter broke new ground in the 1970s by creating a progressive
literary theory known as “gynocriticism.” Unlike traditional literary criticism,
gynocriticism focused on the “history, themes, genres, and structures of literature
by women,” seeking to create a method of analyzing literature written by women
and to develop models of interpretation based on female experience, rather than
adapting male interpretive theories and models. Putting her theory into practice,
Showalter edited the anthology Women's Liberation and Literature, consisting of
excerpts from works considered essential to feminist literary study, such as Mary
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Henrik Ibsen's A
Doll's House.

In A Literature of Their Own, a revision and elaboration of her doctoral

dissertation, Showalter rebukes the unfair critical standards applied to the work of
English women writers in the nineteenth century and contends that, as a result,
female artists paid a terrible price for their creative work in terms of guilt,
self-loathing, and frustrated effort. Showalter divides the evolution of women's
writing into three phases—“feminine,” from 1840 to the death of George Eliot in
1880; “feminist,” from 1880 to 1920, the date of female suffrage in America; and
“female,” from 1920 to the present. Between 1975 and 1981, Showalter published
three essays in academic journals that, taken together with A Literature of Their
Own, form the foundation of her literary critical outlook and have become major
tenets of American feminist literary criticism.

The first, “Literary Criticism” (1975), published in the journal Signs, discusses
two approaches to feminist criticism—feminist critique, which examines the
anti-female biases of traditional readings and literary canons; and feminist
re-evaluation of women writers considered to be minor figures, as they represent
the idea of a historical female subculture. Showalter's next seminal essay, “Toward
a Feminist Poetics,” was originally published in Mary Jacobus's anthology Women
Writing and Writing about Women (1979). She further maintained that women's
writing constitutes a “double-voiced discourse that always embodies the social,
literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant.”

Summary of Towards a Feminist Poetics

Showalter’s feminist criticism is a clearly articulated feminist literary theory.
Showalter has proposed a separate and independent model of feminist literary
theory by rejecting the inevitability of male models and theories and by recalling
the history of women’s writing to the present. In her essay she talks about the
following issues: Woman as reader , Woman as writer , The problems of Feminist
Critique, Program of Gynocritics, and Feminine, Feminist and Female Stages.

She divides her female model in to two types:

1) Feminist critique exposing woman as a reader

2) Gynocritics presenting women as a writer.

She is more inclined to gynocritics in order to develop a literature of their own.

The feminist critique as a sort of feminist criticism envisions the women as the
readers of those male produced texts. The feminists thus, try to trace out the
images and stereotype of the women exposed in the male texts. This is also called
traditional feminist criticism where women are the consumers of the production in
literary writing.

On the contrary gynocritics is such a phase of feminist criticism in which “women

becomes writer with women as the producer of textual meaning, with the history,
themes, genres and structures of literature by women”. This is in true sense the
female model of writing being independent of male values and norms. It reflects
the position and importance of women’s writing in the literary history.

In this way, gynocritics eschews (deliberately avoid) the inevitability of male

models and theories and seeks a purely female model. She takes her departure
from the assumption by saying that women are different in terms of nature, race,
culture and nation. Thus they can not be universally studied. She claims that like
the male writers, female writers too have their own tradition. She says that
women’s writing in the past was overlooked and undervalued by male critics. To
make the literature of women different and special, there is a need of the
reconstruction of its past and rediscovery of the scores of women writers. As a
result, she has reconstructed the past of literary history of women by dividing the
three stages of woman writers:

1) The Feminine Phase (1840 to 1880):- The women writers such as the
Bronte sisters, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, belong to this phase, which
covers the period of 1840 to 1880. The writers followed male’s norms
internalizing the dominant male aesthetic standards. They identified themselves
with the male culture as women were not allowed to write. Some of them even
wrote in male pseudonyms. Their works dealt with social and domestic
background. They however exhibited a kind of sense of guilt in their writing. They
accepted certain limitation in their writings.
2) The Feminist Phase(1880to 1920):- This phase covers the duration of
1880 to 1920 including the writing like Elizabethan Robins, Francis Trallope and
others. The women writers of this phase protested against the male canons and
values. It is the period of separatist utopia. They rejected any text that stereotyped
the women. They developed a personal sense of injustice and wrote biases of
male.

3) The Female Phase (1920 to present):- The writers such as Rebecca West,
Katherine Mansfield, and Dorothy Richardson of the period between 1920 to the
present day came under this phase. The writers of this phase avoid both the
imitation of the feminine writers and the protest of the feminist writers and the
protest of the feminist writers. They purely develop the idea of female writing and
female experience. They differentiate female writing and male writing in terms of
language. Their effort to identify and analyze the female experience leads them to
this phase of self discovery.

Women, in general, began to be more aware about forms and techniques of art and
literature. Thus, Showalter’s attempt is note worthy in a sense that she wants to
free women from the male dominated literary tradition. For this, she rejects the
heliocentric language and calls for the women’s access to language so that the
women can develop a cultural model of their own writing to express and interpret
women’s experiences distinctly and authentically.