Towards Feministic Poetics

Elaine Showalter

Introduction

Elaine Showalter is one of America’s literary scholars and a pioneer in the feminist

studies of nineteenth century female authors. Showalter is concerned by stereotypes of

feminism that see feminist critics as being ‘obsessed with phallus’ and ‘obsessed with

destroying male critics’. Showalter wonders if such stereotypes emerge from the fact that

feminism lacks a fully articulated theory. According to Showalter the academic demand for

theory can only be heard as a threat to the feminist need for authenticity and the visitor

looking for a formula that he or she take away without personal encounter is not welcome.

Hence Showalter wants to uotline a Poetics of Feminist Criticism.

Feminist Critique

Feminist critique focuses on women as a reader who is consuming the male-produced

literature. It is a way of criticizing in which a female reader changes the apprehension of the

given text, awakening it to the significance of sexual codes. The historically grounded inquiry

of the critique probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. They are concerned

about the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omission of and misconceptions

about women in criticism and the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience.

Feminist critiques are essentially political and polemical. It is metaphorically similar to Old

Testament seeking ‘the grace of imagination’ and looking for the errors of the past.

Gynocritic

Showalter provides an exemplary critique of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of

Casterbridge to demonstrate that one of the problems of feminist critique is that it is ‘male-
oriented’ which means even when criticizing patriarchy, the focus is towards male. As an

alternative Showalter presents gynocritics as a way to construct a female framework for the

analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female

experience rather than to adapt to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritic is concerned

with woman as writer, the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and

structures of women. They eschew the inevitability of the male models and theories and seeks

a purely female model. She claims that women writers have their own tradition.

Three Phases

Showalter says that women’s writing in the past was overlooked and undervalued by

the male critics. She has reconstructed the past of literary history of women and classifies

women’s writing into three phases that establishes the continuity of the female tradition from

decade to decade.

Feminine Phase

Showalter sees the first phase taking place from 1840 to 1880. She declares that this

phase is characterized by women in an effort to equal the intellectual of the male culture. It

exerted an irregular pressure on the narrative, affecting tone, diction, structure and

characterization. The women writers internalized the dominant male aesthetic standards. The

distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym as women were not allowed to write.

Bronte Sisters, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell are some of the women writers who

belong to this phase.

Feminist Phase

The Feminist Phase follows from 1880 to 1920in which women are historically

enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use literature to

demonstrate the ordeals of wronged womanhood. The women writers of this phase like

Elizabeth Robins, Francis Trallope and others protested against the male canons and values.

It is a period of separatist utopia. They developed a sense of personal injustice and wrote

biased of male. This phase is characterized by the visions of perfect, female-led societies of

the future.

Female Phase

Showalter posits the third phase, the Female phase, which began in 1920. In this

phase women rejected both imitation and protest which are two forms of dependency. The

female experience became the source of an autonomous art. They differentiate female and

male writing in terms of language. They extend the feminist analysis of culture to the forms

and techniques of literature. The effort to identify and analyse the female experience leads

them to this phase of self discovery.

Feminist writers

Mary Wollstonecraft: She has strongly raised her voice against the patriarchal

domination over females. She firmly holds her belief that mind does not know sex and

answers the attacked charged by male writers.

Virginia Woolf: She is profound 20th C feminist. She illustrates the history of

women’s literary writing in patriarchal society where they had no room for their own. They

were regular victim of men’s anger, misunderstanding and hostility.

Simon de Beauvoir: Beauvoir has destabilized the deep-rooted patriarchal

construction of myths to human manifest in the works of literature and society.

Gilbert and Gubar: They had influenced the advancement of both the study of female

writers and the feminist literary theory.

 Julia Kristeva: She talks about two stages, ‘semiotic and symbolic’. She divides

‘semiotic and symbolic’ from each other and says that all significations are composed out of

these two elements.

Kingston: Kingston recognizes the importance of experience in the very fact of her

writing. She recognized her aunt’s desperation as a woman impregnated out of wedlock and

recounted the repressed messages of women in history

Conclusion

Showalter’s contribution to feminist criticism and women’s studies has helped

influence the canon of British and American literature. It brought the new visibility and

legitimacy to often forgotten and under-appreciated female authors. Showalter’s works were

prised for their broad, interdisciplinary approach to literary, cultural and social trends. She

has been highly regarded for calling attention to complex issues surrounding gender and

sexual politics. She insisted the need for “completeness” in discussing women author’s work.

Through “Towards Feminist Poetics” Showalter served an introduction which needs to

considered as a major contribution to reconstruct the social, political and cultural experience

of women.
 Feminist Criticism

Introduction

The present feminist literary criticism is the product of the ‘women’s

movement of 1960s. It was not the start of criticism but the renewal of an old tradition of

thought and action already possessing its classic books which had diagnosed the problems of

women’s inequality and proposed solutions. This movement was literary from the start as it

realized the significance of the images of women promulgated by literature. It made the

women to question their authority and coherence. The movement has been crucially

concerned with books and literature.

Feminist criticism

During 1980s the feminist criticism became more eclectic and began to draw upon the

findings and approaches of other kinds of criticism like Marxism, structuralism, linguistics

and so on. It switched its focus from attacking male versions of the world to exploring the

nature of the female world and outlook. The lost suppressed records of the female

experiences are reconstructed. The attention was to construct a new canon of women’s

writing by rewriting the history of the novel and of poetry in such a way that neglected

women writers were given new prominence.

Phases of women writing

The concern with ‘conditioning’ and ‘socialization’ underpins a crucial set of

distinction between the terms ‘feminist’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’. Showalter detects the

feminine phase from 1840 -1880 in which women writers imitated the dominant male

models. The feminist phase from which covers the duration from 1880 to 1920 radical and

separatist positions are maintained. In the final phase mainly considered the female writing
and female experience which began from 1920. She described change in 1970s as a shift of

attention from ‘androtext’ to ‘gynotext’. She coined the term ‘gynocritics’. The subjects of

gynocriticism are the history, styles, themes, geners, structures of writing, psychodynamics of

female creativity and the evolution of laws of a female literary tradition.

The role of theory

The feminist criticism has concerned disagreements about the amount and type of

theory that should feature in it. Hence three versions are classified based on the several

distinct features.

1.) Anglo-American

The Anglo Americans maintain major interest in traditional critical concepts like

theme, motif and characterization. The literature was treated as a series of representation of

women’s lives and experience which can be measured and evaluated against reality. The

close reading and explication of individual literary texts are the major concerns of feminist

criticism. The American critic Elaine Showalter is the major representative of this approach.

2.) French Feminism

The French Feminists adopted and adapted the post-structuralist and psychoanalytic

criticism as the basis. French theorists deal with concerns of language, representation and

psychology and travel through detailed treatment of major philosophical issues before

coming to literary text itself. They posited the existence of an ecriture feminine associated

with the feminine and facilitating a different framework for women’s writing.

3.) English Feminist Criticism

This criticism tend to be ‘socialist feminist’ in orientation, aligned with cultural

materialism or Marxism. The Marxist Feminist Literature Collective is an important group

indicating the strong political and theoretical interests of this kind of feminist criticism.

Literature Teaching Politics Collective is another important group and a series of conferences

and an associated journal. The important figures associated with these groups are Julia

Swindells, Cora Kaplan and Catherine Belsey.

Nature of Language

The female writers are seemed to be suffering the handicap to use a medium of

writing which is essentially male instrument fashioned for male purposes. Virginia Woolf

suggested that languages use is gendered and women had ‘no common sentence ready for her

use’. But Jane Austen devised a perfectly natural language of her own. This thesis that the

language is ‘masculine’ is developed by Dale Spender. She argues that language is not a

neutral medium and patriarchy finds the exact expression.

Female oriented language:

The characteristics of women’s sentence are the clauses linked in looser sequence

rather then carefully and patterned as in men. The French theorists posited the existence of

ecriture feminine associated with the feminine and facilitating the free play of meanings

within loosened grammatical structure. The heightened prose works of Helene Cixous, a

French women writer, demonstrated and explained it in her essay ‘The Laugh of Medusa’.

The use of such language is seen as a kind of perennial freedom-fighter in an anarchic realm

of perpetual opposition. This kind of writing is uniquely the product of female physiology.

Two aspects of language

The notion of the ecriture feminine is expressed in the writing of Julia Kristeva. She

uses the terms symbolic and semiotic to designate two different aspects of language. These
are not two kinds of languages but aspects of language.The symbolic aspect is associated

with authority, order, repression and control. It maintains the fiction that the self is fixed and

unified. This aspect of language is stressed by the structuralists. The semiotic aspect is

characterized by displacement, slippage, condensation which increases the available range of

possibilities. This aspect is entailed in the post-structuralist view of language.

Psychoanalysis

The distinction made by Millett between sex and gender is that sex is a matter of

biology whereas gender is a construct which is acquired rather than natural. Simon de

Beauvoir invokes this distinction when she writes ‘One is not born woman; rather, one

becomes women. Millett condemns Freud as the source of the patriarchal attitude against

which feminists must fight. Freud was defended by Juliet Mitchell in her work

‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism’. Freud does not present the feminine as something simply

given and natural. He shows the process of its being produced, constructed and formed by

early experiences and adjustments. Jane Gallop switches from the Freudian and Lacanian

variety. The grounds which are implicit in Freud is explicit in Lacan’s system. All Lacan way

of writing seems to emboby the ‘feminine’ or ‘semiotic’ aspect of language, rather than

‘masculine’ or ‘symbolic’.

Conclusion

The women’s movement is crucially concerned with books and literature so that

influence can be made on everyday conduct and attitudes. Mary Wollstonecraft discussed

male writers like Milton, Pope and Rosseau in ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’.

Virginia Woolf portrayed the unequal treatment of women in ‘A Room of One’s Own’. The

male contributors of feminist writing are John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Engels.