Feminist Literary Criticism

Mary Eagleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317900047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Looks at the work of a range of critics, including Elaine Showalter, Kate Millett, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the French feminists. The critical approaches encompass Marxist feminism and contemporary critical theory as well as other forms of discourse. It also provides an overview of the developments in feminist literary theory, and covers all the major debates within literary feminism, including "male feminism".

1 Elaine Showalter and Toril Moi

ELAINE SHOWALTER A Literature of Their Own*

Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontè to Lessing (1977) traces a history of women’s writing through three phases – the ‘feminine’ from 1840–80, the ‘feminist’ from 1880–1920 and the ‘female’ from 1920 onwards. The two extracts included here are from the female phase, from Showalter’s chapter on Woolf, entitled ‘Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny’. The chapter title is suggestive. Showalter finds Woolf’s concern with an androgynous ideal escapist, a way of avoiding confrontation with her family, her critics and readers, her social class. Similarly, Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own’ has certain creative and protective possibilities, but is more often viewed by Showalter as a sign of Woolf’s retreat from a necessary interaction with the material world and with her own psychosexual dilemmas. The section of the chapter excluded focuses on Woolf’s sexual and psychiatric history, relating her mental crises to biological factors – the onset of menstruation, her childlessness, the menopause – and to her relationship with her husband, Leonard. The link is not one of crude biologism – women because of their biological make-up are periodically unstable and hysterical – but one that points to the excessive and irreconcilable pressures that Woolf felt at such moments of crisis. Fuelled by a feminism that believes in a forthright declaration of one’s needs as a woman, Showalter contends that androgyny, private space, aestheticism are inadequate answers to the problems of sexual politics. (See Introduction, pp. 7–11).

It needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled apart by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her own health and sanity to a certainty.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

If I were a woman I’d blow someone’s brains out.

THE VOYAGE OUT

In recent years it has become important to feminist critics to emphasize Virginia Woolf’s strength and gaiety and to see her as the apotheosis of a new literary sensibility – not feminine, but androgynous. Caroline Heilbrun has described the members of the Bloomsbury Group as the first examples of the androgynous way of life; she demands that we recognize: that they were all marvelously capable of love, that lust in their world was a joyful emotion, that jealousy and domination were remarkably sparse in their lives.¹ Within this milieu, we are to understand, Virginia Woolf was free to develop both sides of her nature, both male and female, and to create the appropriate kind of novel for the expression of her androgynous vision.

The concept of true androgyny – full balance and command of an emotional range that includes male and female elements – is attractive, although I suspect that like all Utopian ideals androgyny lacks zest and energy. But whatever the abstract merits of androgyny, the world that Virginia Woolf inhabited was the last place in which a woman could fully express both femaleness and maleness, nurturance and aggression. For all her immense gift, Virginia Woolf was as thwarted and pulled asunder as the women she describes in A Room of One’s Own. Androgyny was the myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and ambition. Woolf inherited a female tradition a century old; no woman writer has ever been more in touch with – even obsessed by – this tradition that she; yet by the end of her life she had gone back full circle, back to the melancholy, guilt-ridden, suicidal women – Lady Winchelsea and the Duchess of Newcastle – whom she had studied and pitied. And beyond the tragedy of her personal life is the betrayal of her literary genius, her adoption of a female aesthetic that ultimately proved inadequate to her purposes and stifling to her development.

In Virginia Woolf’s version of female aestheticism and androgyny, sexual identity is polarized and all the disturbing, dark, and powerful aspects of femaleness are projected onto maleness. Woolf deals with her most intimate experience through biographical essays on other women writers, including Jane Carlyle, Geraldine Jewsbury, Charlotte Brontè, and George Eliot. In her fiction, but supremely in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf is the architect of female space, a space that is both sanctuary and prison. Through their windows, her women observe a more violent masculine world in which their own anger, rebellion, and sexuality can be articulated at a safe remove. Yet these narrative strategies, as in the novels of her predecessors Schreiner and Richardson, are ultimately unsuccessful. It is a man, of course, who speaks the line from The Voyage Out quoted above. The ambiguity of violence in Woolf’s fiction is instructive; the vague target, the someone whom the sensitive woman is likely to destroy, is inevitably the woman herself. When we think about the joy, the generosity, and the absence of jealousy and domination attributed to Bloomsbury, we should also remember the victims of this emotional Utopia: Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Virginia Woolf. They are the failures of androgyny, their suicides are one of Bloomsbury’s representative art forms.

For the past fifty years, Virginia Woolf has dominated the imaginative territory of the English woman novelist, just as George Eliot dominated it the century before. The woman writer is urged to be as ‘Woolfian’ as possible, according to Joyce Carol Oates² – that is, to be subjective, and yet to transcend her femaleness, to write exquisitely about inner space and leave the big messy brawling novels to men. A similar idealization and mystification of Woolf’s life style is extending her sphere of historical influence to personal relationships. I think it is important to demystify the legend of Virginia Woolf. To borrow her own murderous imagery, a woman writer must kill the Angel in the House, that phantom of female perfection who stands in the way of freedom. For Charlotte Brontè and George Eliot, the Angel was Jane Austen. For the feminist novelists, it was George Eliot. For the mid-twentieth-century novelists, the Angel is Woolf herself.

The most famous of Woolf’s statements about androgyny is A Room of One’s Own. A. J. Moody is in the minority when he objects that ‘the title has enjoyed a fame rather beyond the intrinsic merits of the work’ (Woolf’s most conspicuous antagonists, the Leavises, found Room too flimsy to warrant their close attention).³ What is most striking about the book texturally and structurally is its strenuous charm, its playfulness, its conversational surface. There is nothing here to suggest the humorless polemics of Votes for Women or The Egoist. The techniques of Room are like those of Woolf’s fiction, particularly Orlando, which she was writing at the same time: repetition, exaggeration, parody, whimsy, and multiple viewpoint. On the other hand, despite its illusions of spontaneity and intimacy, A Room of One’s Own is an extremely impersonal and defensive book.

Impersonality may seem like the wrong word for a book in which a narrative T appears in every third sentence. But a closer look reveals that the T is a persona, whom the author calls ‘Mary Beton’ and that her views are carefully distanced and depersonalized, just as the pronoun ‘one’ in the title depersonalizes, and even de-sexes the subject. The whole book is cast in arch allegorical terms from the start: ‘I need not say that what I am about to describe, Oxbridge, is an invention; so is Fernham; T is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being/In fact the characters and places are all disguised or delicately parodied versions of Woolf’s own experience. ‘Fernham’ is Newnham College, Cambridge, where she had given the lectures that were the genesis of the book. Woolf’s cousin Katherine Stephen was Vice-Principal of Newnham; she is the ‘Mary Seton’ who explains to Mary Beton why the women’s colleges are so poor. Her mother, ‘Mrs Seton’, has had thirteen children (actually Mrs Stephen had seven). The narrator, Mary Beton, lives in a London house by the river. Before 1918 she made her living in the jobs open to untrained middle-class women: amateur society journalism, clerical work, and teaching. Then she inherited 500 pounds a year from an aunt, also named Mary Beton, who had fallen off a horse in Bombay. Woolf had inherited 2,500 pounds from her aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen, whose life was much less romantic.⁴ The last Mary, Mary Carmichael, author of Life’s Adventure, is probably also a parody or a composite figure.

The entire book is teasing, sly, elusive in this way; Woolf plays with her audience, refusing to be entirely serious, denying any earnest or subversive intention. As M. C. Bradbrook has written, ‘The camouflage in A Room of Ones Own...prevents Mrs Woolf from committing the indelicacy of putting a case or the possibility of her being accused of waving any kind of banner. The arguments are clearly serious and personal and yet they are dramatized and surrounded with all sorts of disguises to avoid an appearance of argument.’⁵ In the opening chapters, this defensiveness leads to a rather unpleasantly Stracheyesque kind of innuendo, as if the Cambridge setting had recalled the style of the Apostles. An example is the appearance of a Manx cat in the Oxbridge luncheon scene. Mary Beton is suddenly convulsed with laughter at the sight of ‘that abrupt and truncated animal…. I had to explain my laughter by pointing at the Manx cat, who did look a little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in the middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident?.. .It is strange what a difference a tail makes – you know the sort of things one says as a lunch party breaks up and people are finding their coats and hats.’⁶ This certainly sounds like a feline swipe at Cantabrigian impotence.

In chapter 3, however, the narrative finally moves beyond this kind of gamesmanship and focuses on the question of women and fiction. Woolf insists that a woman must have an independent income and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, and that the mind of the artist should be androgynous. Apart from the specific question of income, to which Marxists object, these ideas are very nearly as civilized and unabrasive as the style, and it is easy to get caught up in the seductive flow. Who could possibly object to the idea of androgyny? Even clinical psychology confirms that ‘the really creative individual combines “masculine” and “feminine” qualities’⁷; indeed, since masculine and feminine personality qualities are stereotypes to begin with, it is virtually a tautology to say that creative people are not limited to one set. Woolf’s selection of Shakespeare to exemplify the androgynous artist also provokes little disagreement, especially since we know so little about Shakespeare’s life; although there is no obvious connection between her other examples – Keats, Sterne, Cowper, Lamb, and Coleridge – one could probably discover some similarities, perhaps in their attitudes toward fantasy and madness.

Woolf, however, does not supply the connections; nor does she encourage the reader to pursue them very strenuously If one can see A Room of One’s Ozvn as a document in the literary history of female aestheticism, and remain detached from its narrative strategies, the concepts of androgyny and the private room are neither as liberating nor as obvious as they first appear. They have a darker side that is the sphere of the exile and the eunuch.

Virginia Woolf was extremely sensitive to the ways in which female experience had made women weak, but she was much less sensitive to the ways in which it had made them strong. Filling in the outlines of her 1918 review, she wrote finely about the problems in the lives of several of her predecessors: their domestic responsibilities, their narrowness of range, and their frustration and anger. ‘We feel the influence of fear in it’, she wrote of Charlotte Brontè’s portrait of Rochester, ‘just as we constantly feel an acidity which is the result of oppression, a buried suffering smouldering beneath her passion, a rancour which contracts those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain’.⁸ All of these passionate responses she deplored because she thought that they distorted the artist’s integrity. She describes with compassion and scornful illustration how women writers were disadvantaged and harassed – an important and fully realized discovery. But in wishing to make women independent of all that dailiness and bitterness, so that they might ‘escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality’,⁹ she was advocating a strategic retreat, and not a victory; a denial of feeling, and not a mastery of it.

We can see this withdrawal most plainly in the theory of androgyny presented in the last chapter of the book, which is the psychological and theoretical extension of the material reform implied in the private room. Woolf brings in the discussion of androgyny in a characteristically low-keyed way, as if it were an afterthought; but it is central to her thinking not only in this book but also in her novels. The androgynous vision, in Woolf’s terms, is a response to the dilemma of a woman writer embarrassed and alarmed by feelings too hot to handle without risking real rejection by her family, her audience, and her class. A room of one’s own is the first step toward her solution; more than an off...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Elaine Showalter and Toril Moi
• 2 Peggy Kamuf and Nancy K. Miller
• 3 Julia Kristeva and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• 4 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément
• 5 Kate Millett and Cora Kaplan
• 6 Mary Jacobus and Stephen Heath
• Glossary of Terms
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index