Making a Difference

Feminist Literary Criticism

Gayle Green, Coppélia Kahn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000158700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Feminist scholarship employs gender as a fundamental organizing category of human experience, holding two related premises: men and women have different perceptions or experiences in the same contexts, the male perspective having been dominant in fields of knowledge; and that gender is not a natural fact but a social construct, a subject to study in any humanistic discipline. This challenging collection of essays by prominent feminist literary critics offers a comprehensive introduction to modes of critical practice being used to trace the construction of gender in literature.
The collection provides an invaluable overview of current femionist critical thinking. Its essays address a wide range of topics: the rerlevance of gender scholarship in the social sciences to literary criticism; the tradition of women's literature and its relation to the canon; the politics of language; French theories of the feminine; psychoanalysis and feminism; feminist criticism of writing by lesbians and black women; the relationship between female subjectivity, class, and sexuality; feminist readings of the canon.

1

Feminist scholarship and the social construction of woman

GAYLE GREENE and COPPÉLIA KAHN

Literary criticism, like history and the social sciences, has traditionally asked questions that exclude women’s accomplishments. Feminist scholarship undertakes the dual task of deconstructing predominantly male cultural paradigms and reconstructing a female perspective and experience in an effort to change the tradition that has silenced and marginalized us. This chapter describes these efforts in anthropology (Part II), history (III) and literature (IV). In investigating the purposes cultural paradigms serve, feminist scholars expose the collusion between ideology and cultural practices; but we need to be aware of the ideological implications of our own assumptions and make sure that we are not recuperating the ideology of the systems we repudiate. In literary criticism, as in the social sciences, the inclusion of women raises questions that reshape it – challenging traditional notions of what constitutes evidence and excellence, redefining both the subjects and the methods of study, we enrich and enlarge the discipline.

Feminist literary criticism is one branch of interdisciplinary enquiry which takes gender as a fundamental organizing category of experience. This enquiry holds two related premisses about gender. One is that the inequality of the sexes is neither a biological given nor a divine mandate, but a cultural construct, and therefore a proper subject of study for any humanistic discipline. The second is that a male perspective, assumed to be ‘universal’, has dominated fields of knowledge, shaping their paradigms and methods. Feminist scholarship, then, has two concerns: it revises concepts previously thought universal but now seen as originating in particular cultures and serving particular purposes; and it restores a female perspective by extending knowledge about women’s experience and contributions to culture. Feminist scholarship received impetus from the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, but it participates in the more general dethroning of authority begun by Freud, Marx and Saussure–a redefinition of ideas of human nature and reality which has called into question traditional concerns of literary criticism, including established canons and ways of reading.

A feminist perspective leads to a critique of our sex–gender system – ‘that set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human social intervention’ (Rubin 1975, p. 165; Fox-Genovese 1982, pp. 14–15). That men have penises and women do not, that women bear children and men do not, are biological facts which have no determinate meaning in themselves but are invested with various symbolic meanings by different cultures. Feminists do, however, find themselves confronting one universal – that, whatever power or status may be accorded to women in a given culture, they are still, in comparison to men, devalued as ‘the second sex’. Feminist scholars study diverse social constructions of femaleness and maleness in order to understand the universal phenomenon of male dominance. That ‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman … it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature’ is the thesis of Simone Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1952, p. 301), the pioneering and most comprehensive study of the ideology of woman; and it is a central assumption of feminist scholarship, which undertakes to ‘deconstruct’ the social construction of gender and the cultural paradigms that support it. Feminist scholarship both originates and participates in the larger efforts of feminism to liberate women from the structures that have marginalized them; and as such it seeks not only to reinterpret, but to change the world.

The social construction of gender takes place through the workings of ideology. Ideology is that system of beliefs and assumptions – unconscious, unexamined, invisible – which represents ‘the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (Althusser 1971, p. 162); but it is also a system of practices that informs every aspect of daily life – the clothes we wear, the machines we invent, the pictures we paint, the words we use. Though it originates in particular cultural conditions, it authorizes its beliefs and practices as ‘universal’ and ‘natural’, presenting ‘woman’ not as a cultural construct but as eternally and everywhere the same. Thus that women, who happen to bear children, should be more responsible for rearing them than the men who father those children is presented as ‘the way things naturally are’, though this social arrangement has been challenged by feminist scholars from several standpoints (Dinnerstein 1976; Chodorow 1978; Rich 1977). Ideology masks contradictions, offers partial truths in the interests of a false coherence, thereby obscuring the actual conditions of our existence and making people act in ways that may actually contradict their material interests – as, for example, when wives refuse to strike for equal pay in the belief that their wages only provide extra income for the family while their husbands are the true breadwinners.

The oppression of woman is both a material reality, originating in material conditions, and a psychological phenomenon, a function of the way women and men perceive one another and themselves. But it is generally true that gender is constructed in patriarchy to serve the interests of male supremacy. Radical feminists argue that the construction of gender is grounded in male attempts to control female sexuality (Barrett 1980, p. 45; Firestone 1970, p. 11), an objective that accounts for the ‘madonna/whore dichotomy’: the

twin images of woman as, on the one hand, the sexual property of men and, on the other, the chaste mothers of their children … [are] the means whereby men … ensure both the sanctity and inheritance of their families and their extra-familial sexual pleasure.

(Barrett 1980, p. 45)

This objective also helps explain the dichotomization of masculine and feminine in terms of such polarities as ‘culture and nature’, ‘truth and duplicity’, ‘reason and passion’, ‘day and night’ – the term associated with the female always requiring control by the superior male. Thus the meaning of gender in partriarchal ideology is ‘not simply “difference”, but … division, oppression, inequality, interiorized inferiority for women’ (Barrett 1980, pp. 112–13).

The ideology of gender is inscribed in discourse – in our ways of talking and writing – and it is ‘produced and reproduced in cultural practice’ (Barrett 1980, p. 99). An example from Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1972) shows how such production occurs in a process that invisibly cements the imaginary to the actual. Barthes examines a group photograph from the French women’s magazine Elle which depicts seventy women novelists, captioned thus: ‘Jacqueline Lenoir (two daughters, one novel); Marina Grey, one son, one novel; Nicole Dutreil, two sons, four novels’, etc. He remarks that, while Elle singled these women out because they actually do ‘have access, like men, to the superior status of creation’, the effect of the caption is to reinforce the ideology in which women are inscribed – to remind us all that ‘Women are on the earth to give children to men; let them write as much as they like, let them decorate their condition, but above all, let them not depart from it’ (Barthes 1981, p. 50). Further noting the total absence of men from the picture, the caption and the magazine as a whole, Barthes writes:

where then is man in this family picture? Nowhere and everywhere, like the sky, the horizon, an authority which at once determines and limits a condition.… Man is never inside, femininity is pure, free, powerful; but man is everywhere around, he presses on all sides, he makes everything exist… the feminine world of Elle, a world without men, but entirely constituted by the gaze of man, is very exactly that of the gynaeceum.

(Barthes 1981, p. 51)

In their creation of fictions, writers call upon the same signifying codes that pervade social interactions, re-presenting in fiction the rituals and symbols that make up social practice. Literature itself is a ‘discursive practice’ (Michele Foucault’s term; Eagleton 1983, p. 205) whose conventions encode social conventions and are ideologically complicit.¹ Moreover, since each invocation of a code is also its reinforcement or reinscription, literature does more than transmit ideology: it actually creates it – it is ‘a mediating, moulding force in society’ (Hawkes 1977 P. 56) that structures our sense of the world. To invoke the conventional narrative resolutions of marriage or death, for example, as most nineteenth-century novelists did, was to sanction them, make them prescriptive as well as descriptive, to perpetuate them as the working myths of the culture.

Feminist literary critics attend to the collusion between literature and ideology, focusing on the ways ideology is inscribed within literary forms, styles, conventions, genres and the institutions of literary production. Like feminist scholars in other areas, they are – in Barthes’s term – myth decipherers.

I

We turn to a short story by Isak Dinesen to show how a feminist mode of reading is at the same time, and inevitably, a reading of culture. ‘The Blank Page’ is told by an old woman who learned the art of storytelling from her grandmother, who learned it, in turn, from her grandmother. This art has been passed down with the admonition ‘Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak’ (Dinesen 1975, p. 100). The story concerns a convent whose nuns are renowned for growing, spinning and weaving the finest flax in Portugal. For centuries, they have enjoyed the privilege of supplying linen bridal sheets for the princesses of the royal house – sheets which, blood-spotted, are hung on the balcony of the palace the morning after the wedding as the Chamberlain or High Steward proclaims, ‘Virginem earn tenemus’ (‘We declare her to have been a virgin’) (pp. 102–3). The sisters’ privilege extends even further, for they also maintain a gallery lined with gilt frames, ‘each of them adorned with a coroneted plate of pure gold, on which is engraved the name of a princess’, each frame displaying a square cut from a royal wedding sheet which bears the ‘faded markings’ of the wedding night (p. 103). In their later years, the princesses make ‘sacred and secretly gay’ pilgrimages to the convent to ponder the stories told by the sheets (p. 103); and the old woman recounts:

in the midst of the long row there hangs a canvas which differs from the others. The frame of it is as fine and as heavy as any, and as proudly as any carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this one plate no name is inscribed, and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to corner, a blank page.

(p. 104)

This tale, like the linen of Convento Velho, is woven from the social fabric of western European patriarchy. It can be unravelled only by a reader who understands that patriarchy, its social practices, psychological dynamics and symbol-making, and its power to mould women and men as social beings. With the image of the sheets, Dinesen evokes an ideology built on male control, through the institution of marriage, of female sexuality and reproductive power. The nuns preserve their virginity and the princesses surrender theirs, but the ideology informing both practices holds female sexuality to be dangerous and powerful, requiring men to exercise strict control over it. In a custom observed widely throughout Europe well into the nineteenth century, the sheets are meant to validate the virginity of daughters who are passed on by fathers to husbands, to ensure the legitimacy of the heirs they will bear and to attest to the honour of both fathers and husbands. It is this honour that the various structures of male dominance – property, the law, social status, political authority – exist to protect.

The arresting analogies Dinesen draws between bloodstained sheet and printed page, between female body and male authority, make the story a critique.of culture. And the contrast between the story told by the spotted bridal sheets and that which speaks in the silence of ‘the blank page’ may be seen as a metaphor for the two major foci of feminist scholarship: deconstructing dominant male patterns of thought and social practice; and reconstructing female experience previously hidden or overlooked. Thus a feminist interpretation of literature involves decoding many of the same systems of signification with which social scientists are concerned.

II

Though anthropology gathers much of its data from so-called ‘primitive cultures’ rather than from Europe in the periods during which literature flourished, it addresses some of the same questions that concern feminist scholars in all areas – how patriarchal power arose and what makes it persist – and its debates focus ideas about gender in a way that is helpful to feminist literary critics.

Two anthropological theories...

Table of contents

• Cover
• In The Same Series
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Feminist scholarship and the social construction of woman
• 2 Varieties of feminist criticism
• 3 The politics of language: beyond the gender principle?
• 4 Inscribing femininity: French theories of the feminine
• 5 Mind mother: psychoanalysis and feminism
• 6 Pandora’s box: subjectivity, class and sexuality in socialist feminist criticism
• 7 What has never been: an overview of lesbian feminist criticism
• 8 Black women writers: taking a critical perspective
• 9 Notorious signs, feminist criticism and literary tradition
• Index