Dr.

Protibha Mukherjee Sahukar

Assistant Professor and Principal
Department of English
Durga Mahavidyalaya, Raipur (C.G.)
Semester IV
Elaine Showalter’s
Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981)
14/08/23
 Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981)

Elaine Showalter is one of the founders of contemporary feminist

criticism.

born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 21, 1941.

The works of Elaine Showalter along with Sandra Gilbert, and Susan

Gubar, stand as modern classics of contemporary feminist criticism.

 Major Works

A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing

(1977);
The Female Malady: Women,; Madness, and English Culture , 1830-1980 (1985);
The New Feminist Criticism: Essays an Women, Literature, and Theory (1985).
Inventing Herself. 2001
"Towards a Feminist Poetics," 1979.
"Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry 8. University of Chicago:
Winter, 1981.
 Two Essays

Towards a Feminist Feminist Criticism in the

Poetics - 1979 wilderness - 1981

Feminist Critical Feminist Criticism for

Practice theoretical Consensus
 Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness

"But if, in the 1980s feminist literary critics are still wandering in
wilderness, we are in good company for, as Geoffrey Hartman tells us,
all criticism is in the wilderness”

“Yet between feminist ideology and the liberal ideal of dis-

interestedness lies the wilderness of theory, which we too must make
our home”
In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter embarks
on another classification, the construction of the female
tradition.

“each generation of women writers has found itself, in a

sense, without a history, forced to rediscover the past anew,
forging again and again the consciousness of their sex".
 Three Phases
Feminine 1840-80 Female 1920-2020

Feminist 1880-1920
 The Feminine Phase (1840–1880)

This Stage involved "imitation of the prevailing modes of

the dominant tradition" and "internalization of its
standards.”

“women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual

achievements of the male culture, and internalized its
assumptions about female nature”

it was characterized by “women writing in an effort to equal

the intellectual achievements of the male culture…
 The Feminist Phase… from 1880 to 1920

The “feminist” phase was characterized by protest of and rebellion against

those previously unquestioned value

This phase was characterised by “Amazon Utopias,”

This was a phase of conscious rebellion.

 The Female Phase……1920…

Began the "phase of self-discovery, a turning inwards freed from

some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity.”

Self-discovery-literature of their own

Showalter says, “women reject both imitation and protest—two

forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as
the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of
culture to the forms and techniques of literature”
 Modes of Feminist Criticism

Women as Reader Women as Writer

Feminist Critique Gynocritics

“In a splendidly witty dialogue of 1975, Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson
identified two poles of feminist literary criticism.

The first of these modes, righteous, angry, and admonitory, they compared
to the Old Testament, "looking for the sins and errors of the past."

The second mode, disinterested and seeking "the grace of imagination," they compared to the New
Testament.
 Woman as Reader - Feminist critique

The first mode -The Old Testament

righteous, angry, and admonitory

looking for the sins and errors of the past

“The first mode is ideological;it is concerned with the feminist as reader,and it offers feminist readings of texts which consider the

images and stereotypes of women in literature”

“….feminist reading or the feminist critique,is in essence a mode of interpretation, one of many which any complex text will

accommodate and permit”.

"images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and

misconceptions about women in criticism, and women-assign in semiotic
systems."
 Woman as Writers-Gynocritic

The second mode-New Testament

Disinterested

The grace of imagination

“history, styles, themes, genres, and structures 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”

 Modes of Feminist
Criticism

Biological Linguistic Psychoanalytic Cultural

 Four Models

Biological:Women’s Writing and Woman’s Body

Linguistics:Women’s Writing and Women’s Language

Psychoanalytic: Women’s Writing and Woman’s Psyche

Cultural: Women’s Writing and Women’s Culture

 Women’s Writing and Woman’s Body

“Organic or biological criticism is the most extreme statement of gender difference, of a text
indelibly marked by the body: anatomy is textuality”

“More body, hence more writing”

-Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa

“Victorian physicians believed that women's physiological functions diverted about twenty
percent of their creative energy from brain activity”

“Victorian anthropologists believed that the frontal lobes of the male brain were heavier and
more developed than female lobes and thus that women were inferior in intelligence”
 Women’s Writing and Women’s Language

“Linguistic and textual theories of women's writing ask whether men and women use
language differently;

There is some ethnographic evidence that in certain cultures women have evolved a private
form of communication out of their need to resist the silence imposed upon them in public
life”.

“But such ritualized and unintelligible female "languages" are scarcely cause for rejoicing;
indeed, it was because witches were suspected of esoteric knowledge and possessed speech
that they were burned”.
“The appropriate task for feminist criticism, I believe, is to
concentrate on women's access to language, on the available
lexical range from which words can be selected, on the
ideological and cultural determinants of expression”

“The problem is not that language is insufficient to express

women's consciousness but that women have been denied the full
resources of language and have been forced into silence,
euphemism, or circumlocution”.
 Women’s Writing and Woman’s Psyche

Psychoanalytically oriented feminist criticism locates the

difference of women's writing in the author's psyche and in the
relation of gender to the creative process.

It incorporates the biological and linguistic models of gender

difference in a theory of the female psyche or self, shaped by the
body, by the development of language, and by sex-role
socialization.
 Women’s Writing and Women’s Culture

“A theory based on a model of women's culture can provide, I believe, a

more complete and satisfying way to talk about the specificity and
difference of women's writing than theories based in biology, linguistics, or
psychoanalysis”

“A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences

between women as writers: class, race, nationality, and history are literary
determinants as significant as gender….women’s culture forms a collective
experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women
writers to each other over time and space”
 Separate Spheres

Victorian Model

Men Women
 Overlapping Spheres

Ardeners’ Model

Women Men

X Y

Wild Zone
 y o u
a n k
T h