american feminist criticism
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REVIEW
ESSAYS
American
Feminist
Criticism of
Contemporary
Women's
Fiction
Ellen
Cronan Rose
Works reviewed
Anderson, Linda,
ed.
Plotting Change: Contemporary
Women's Fiction.
London: Edward
Arnold,
1990.
DuPlessis,
Rachel Blau.
Writing
beyond
the
Ending:
Narrative
Strategies
of
Twentieth-Century
Women Writers.
Bloomington:
Indiana
Univer-
sity
Press,
1985.
Felski,
Rita.
Beyond
Feminist
Aesthetics: Feminist
Literature and
Social
Change. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard
University
Press,
1989.
Frye, Joanne S. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in
Contemporary Experience.
Ann
Arbor:
University
of
Michigan
Press,
1986.
Greene,
Gayle. Changing
the
Story:
Feminist Fiction
and the
Tradition.
Bloomington:
Indiana
University
Press,
1991.
Hite,
Molly.
The Other Side
of
the
Story:
Structures
and
Strategies
of
Contemporary
Feminist Narrative.
Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell
University
Press,
1989.
Robinson,
Sally. Engendering
the
Subject:
Gender and
Self-
Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction. SUNY Series in
Feminist Criticism and
Theory. Albany:
State
University
of
New York
Press,
1991.
Rubenstein,
Roberta. Boundaries
of
the
Self:
Gender, Culture,
Fiction.
Champaign: University
of Illinois
Press,
1987.
Walker,
Melissa. Down
from
the
Mountaintop:
Black Women's
Novels
in the Wake
of
the Civil
Rights
Movement,
1966-1989. New
Haven,
Conn.: Yale
University
Press,
1991.
I wish to thank Patricia A.
Cooper,
Elaine Tuttle
Hansen,
and
the
anonymous Signs
readers or helpfulcommentson an earlierdraftof thisessay,andKateTylerfor meticu-
lous,
respectful diting.
[Signs:Journal
of
Women n Cultureand
Society
1993,
vol.
18,
no.
2]
?
1993
by
The
University
of
Chicago.
All
rights
reserved.
0097-9740/93/1802-0003$01.00
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FEMINIST CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
Rose
Walker,
Nancy
A. FeministAlternatives:
rony
and
Fantasy
n the
Contem-
porary
Novel
by
Women.
Jackson:
University
Press of
Mississippi,
1990.
Wyatt,
Jean.
Reconstructing
Desire:
The
Role
of
the
Unconscious n
Women's
Reading
and
Writing.
Chapel
Hill:
University
of North
Caro-
lina
Press,
1990.
Zimmerman,
Bonnie. The
Safe
Sea
of
Women:
Lesbian
Fiction,
1969-
1989.
Boston: Beacon
Press,
1990.
The
relation
of
experience
to
discourse,
finally,
is
what is at
issue
in
the definition of
feminism.
[Teresa
de
Lauretis,
Feminist Studi-
es/Critical Studies:
Issues, Terms,
and
Contexts,
in
Feminist Stud-
ies/Critical
Studies,
ed. Teresa de
Lauretis
(Bloomington:
Indiana
University
Press, 1986),
5]
N Y A
C
CO
U
NT of
feminism's
relation to
fiction
by
contem-
porary
women
writers
is
obliged
to
consider
the relation of
experience
to discourse-how
the
discourse of
contemporary
women's iction
represents
or mediates)
xperience;
he
degree
to which
academic
critical
discourse
reflects the
assumptions
of
com-
mon
readers about the
relevance
of
this
fiction to their
lives;
how cri-
tiques by
women of color and
lesbians have raised
the
question
of
whose
experience
is
entered into
critical
discourse;
and how
criticism
of
con-
temporary
women's fiction
engages
in
and
is
affected
by
feminist
adap-
tations
of
various
theoretical
discourses. These
are
permeable
categories,
which
I
will
range
through
and
among
in
my
discussion of a
selection of
recent books
by
(with
one
exception)
American
feminist
critics on
con-
temporary
fiction
by
U.S., Canadian,
and
British
women. But
first,
a brief
and no
doubt
partial history
of how
we
got
here.
Today,
as
in
the
eighteenth
century
when Dr.
Johnson
coined the
term,
common
readers
differ from
professional
readers-college
profes-
sors,
literary
critics,
and book
reviewers-who
have
to
read
books
whether
they
want to or
not. Common
readers read to
find
reflections,
confirmations,
and
clarifications of
the
problems
they
confront
daily
as
adolescents,
lovers,
parents,
citizens.
They
read,
like
Doris
Lessing's
quintessential
common
reader,
Martha
Quest,
with
this
question
in
mind: What has this
got
to do with me?
(Martha
Quest
[1952;
reprint,
New
York:
New American
Library,
1970], 200).
It is
this
existential
curiosity
that
differentiates common
readers from
those who
read
Winter
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Rose FEMINIST
CRITICISM OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
(mostly
pulp)
fiction for
escape.
Common
readers do
not read to
es-
cape reality
but, rather,
to understand and to
cope
with it.
Janet
Sass's account of an informal
women's
reading group
she
belonged
to
in
1971
tells us
a
lot about who common readers
are
and
what
they
look
for when
they
read. Sass writes that the women in the
group
differedin
age,
class, race,
educational
background,
and
sexual identification
but were
united
in
the belief that
reading
literature was a
way
to
learning
about
ourselves and to
grow
( A
Literature
Class
of Our
Own: Women's
Studies
without
Walls,
n
FemaleStudies: Closer to the Ground-
Women's
Classes,
Criticism,
Programs-
1972,
no.
6,
ed.
Nancy
Hoffman,
Cynthia
Secor,
and
Adrian
Tinsley,
2d ed.
[Old
Westbury,
N.Y:
Feminist
Press,
1973], 79-87,
esp.
80).
Because
they
were
particularly
nterested
in
what
literature
had to
tell them
about
women's
culture and consciousness
(80),
they
selected
books
by
Lessing, George
Eliot,
Simone
de
Beauvoir,
Jane
Addams,
Maya
Angelou, Sylvia
Plath,
and
Margaret
Mead
and
were electrified to dis-
cover that discussion
of
women writers'
books,
because
they
described
experiences
common to us as
women-pregnancy,
child
care, housework,
marriage,
oss
of
virginity-brought together
our
intellect
and our
feelings;
made 'book
learning'
relevant
(81).1
In
the
early
1970s,
common
readers'
assumptions
about
the relevance
to real life
of
fictional
representations
were shared
by
a
number
of
feminist
literary
critics. Adrienne
Rich,
speaking
at the forum
The
Woman Writer
in
the Twentieth
Century sponsored
at the 1971 con-
vention
of
the Modern
Language
Association
(MLA)
by
its
newly
formed
Commission
on
the Status
of Women
in
the
Profession,
uttered
a
few
sentences
that would come to define feminist
criticism :
Re-vision-the
act of
looking
back,
of
seeing
with fresh
eyes,
of en-
tering
an old text from a new critical direction-is for women more
than a
chapter
in
cultural
history:
it
is
an act of survival....
A
radical
critiqueof literature, eministin its impulse,would take the work first
of all as a clue to how we
live,
how
we have been
living,
how
we have
been led to
imagine
ourselves,
how our
language
has
trapped
as well
as
liberated
us,
how
the
very
act
of
naming
has
been
till now a
male
prerogative,
and how we can
begin
to see and name-and therefore
live-afresh.
[Adrienne
Rich,
When We Dead Awaken:
Writing
as
Re-Vision,
in
On
Lies, Secrets,
and Silence: Selected
Prose,
1966-
1978
(New
York:
Norton, 1979), 31-49,
esp.
35]
1
For more information about Janet Sass and her group and for an extended profile of
the
contemporary
common
reader,
see
Carey Kaplan
and
Ellen
Cronan
Rose,
The Canon
and the Common Reader
(Knoxville:
University
of Tennessee
Press, 1990),
35-46.
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FEMINIST CRITICISM OF WOMEN'S FICTION
Rose
In
her
preface
to
Images
of
Women in Fiction: Feminist
Perspectives
(Bowling
Green,
Ohio:
Bowling
Green
University
Popular
Press, 1972),
the
first
published anthology
of
feminist
literary
criticism,
Susan
Kopple-
man Cornillon
addressed readers
like
herself,
who
have
looked
to
lit-
erature,
and
especially
fiction,
for
answers,
for
models,
for clues to the
universal
questions
of who
we are or
might
become
(ix).
Florence Howe
also
emphasized
the heuristic value
of
literature
in
her
1973
presidential
address to the MLA:
Literature,
in
its
most ancient
and
in
its
most
modern
forms,
illuminates
lives,
teaches us what is
possible,
how
to
hope
and
aspire (quoted
in
Margret
Andersen's Feminism as a Criterion of
the
Literary
Critic,
in
Feminist Criticism:
Essays
on
Theory, Poetry,
and
Prose,
ed.
Cheryl
L. Brown and
Karen Olson
[Metuchen,
N.J.:
Scarecrow
Press,
1978],
7).
Because ancient
literature,
written
primarily
by
men,
too often
presented
limiting
or
negative
images
of
women-if it
included
them at all-women
readers turned
with
eagerness
to
contemporary
wom-
en's
fiction,
hoping
to find
there affirmation and
inspiration.
A
number of
academic women read
novels
like
Lessing's
The Golden Notebook
(1962)
(New
York:
Bantam, 1973)
for
the same reasons common
readers did:
because
such novels resonated
to
their
experience.
Mindful of
how
crip-
pled
they
had
felt as students
by
curricula that
made
white,
male,
and
middle- and
upper-class experience
normative,
many
feminist
academics
who discovered
books like
Lessing's
wanted to
introduce them to
new
generations
of
women students. Annis
Pratt,
in her
introduction
to Con-
temporary
Literature's
special
issue
on
Lessing
(vol.
14
[1973]: 413-17),
recalled the
special pleasure many
women
academics
felt
when,
after
years
of our
attempts
to
identify
ourselves
with
Quentin
Compson,
Augie
March,
and the
Invisible
Man,
not to mention Lolita and
Franny
Glass,
we
discovered
in The Golden
Notebook
a
novel
whose
persona
was
an
intellectual,
a
political
activist,
an
artist,
as well as a
lover,
a
mother-a
woman
(413).
While feminist
literary
historians worked
to discover and
publish
lost
women
writers of
the
past,
those
of
us
who
read
primarily
contemporary
authors
struggled
to validate
popular
writers for
aca-
demic
study.2
Possibly
because most of the
few women
teaching
in
the
academy
in
the
early
1970s were white and
middle
class,
the
contemporary
women
writers who
regularly
showed
up
in
the earliest
critical
anthologies,
scholarly
journals,
course
syllabi,
and
reading
lists
were those who
wrote
about
white,
middle-class
women's
experiences.
Landmark
books
of fem-
inist
criticism
during
the 1970s featured
essays
on
Plath,
May
Sarton,
and
2
For
discussion of
the case of
Doris
Lessing
as
exemplary
of the
process
by
which
contemporary
women writers
entered the
canon,
see
Kaplan
and
Rose,
66-89.
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Rose
FEMINIST CRITICISM
OF
WOMEN'S FICTION
Alix
Kates
Shulman
(Cornillon's
1973
Images
of
Women
in
Fiction),
on
Plath and
Lessing
(Patricia
Meyer Spacks's
The Female
Imagination
[New
York:
Knopf,
1975]),
and
on
Lessing
(Sydney
Janet
Kaplan's
Feminist
Consciousness
in the Modern British Novel
[Urbana:
University
of Illi-
nois
Press, 1975]
and
Arlyn
Diamond and Lee R. Edwards's The Author-
ity
of
Experience
[Amherst:
University
of
Massachusetts
Press, 1977]).
Elaine Showalter's
A
Literature
of
Their Own
(Princeton,
N.J.:
Princeton
University
Press,
1977)
considered
fiction
by
A.
S.
Byatt
and
Margaret
Drabble,
as well as
by
Lessing,
while
the two
contemporary
writers
in
Barbara
Hill
Rigney's
Madness
and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel
(Madison:
University
of
Wisconsin
Press, 1978)
were
Lessing
and Mar-
garet
Atwood.3 The effect
on African-American women students
of
being
asked
to
identify
with
Lessing's
Anna
Wulf,
Plath's Esther
Greenwood,
or Erica
Jong's
Isadora
Wing
(Fear
of Flying
[New
York:
Holt, Rinehart,
1973])
must have been
at least as
disorienting
as it had been for white
women students
to
be
asked
to
identify
with
Shakespeare's
Hamlet or
Twain's Huck
Finn.
How
damaging
hegemonic images
of
white women
could
be
for
black
women was
powerfully
depicted
in
1970
by
Toni
Morrison
in her
The Bluest
Eye
(New
York:
Washington Square
Press).
But
most academic feminists
were not
teaching
or
writing
about
Morri-
son
in
the seventies.
In
her
1977
essay,
Toward
a
Black
Feminist Criti-
cism
(Conditions
Two
1
[October
1977]:
157-74),
Barbara Smith ex-
pressed
outrage
at
the few
pages
focused on black women in the
thousands
and thousands
of
books,
magazines,
and articles which have
been
devoted,
by
this
time,
to
the
subject
of
women's
writing
(158),
even
though
work
by
African-American
women writers was
being
published
simultaneously
with
that outburst
of feminist criticism.
Alice Walker's
The Third
Life of
Grange
Copeland
(New
York:
Harcourt)
and Toni
Cade's
The Black Woman:
An
Anthology
(New
York: New American
Library)
were
published
in
1970,
along
with
Morrison's
The
Bluest
Eye.
Between
1970
and the
appearance
of Smith's
essay
in
1977,
a number of
novels
and short
story
collections
by
black women writers had been
published:
Alice Walker's
In Love and Trouble:
Stories
of
Black
Women
3
On
the status
of women
in
the modern
languages
in the
early
1970s,
see
Florence
Howe,
Laura
Morlock,
and
Richard
Berk,
The Status of Women
in Modern
Language
Departments:
A
Report
of
the Modern
Language
Association
Commission on the Status
of Women
in the
Profession,
PMLA
86
(1971): 459-68;
Laura Morlock et
al.,
Affir-
mative
Action
for Women
in 1971:
A
Report
of the Modern
Language
Association
Commission on
the Status
of Women
in
the
Profession,
PMLA 87
(1972):
530-40;
and
Joan
Hartman et
al.,
Study
III: Women
in Modern
Language
Departments,
1972-
73:
A
Report
by
the Commission
on the Status
of Women
in
the
Profession,
PMLA 91
(1976): 124-36. For an updated survey, see Bettina J. Huber, Women in the Modern
Languages,
1970-90,
Profession
90
(1990):
58-73.
For
additional material
on the sit-
uation
of
minority
women,
see Huber's
Incorporating
Minorities
into
English
Pro-
grams:
The
Challenge
of
the
Nineties,
ADE Bulletin
21
(1990):
12-19.
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FEMINIST CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S FICTION
Rose
(New
York:
Harcourt,
1973)
and Meridian
(New
York:
Harcourt, 1976);
Mary
Helen
Washington's
Black-Eyed
Susans: Classic
Stories
by
and
about
Black
Women
(New
York:
Anchor
Doubleday,
1975);
Morrison's
Sula
(New
York:
Knopf,
1973)
and
Song
of
Solomon
(New
York:
Knopf,
1977);
and
Gayl
Jones's
Corregidora
(New
York: Random
House,
1975)
and Eva's
Man
(New
York: Random
House, 1976).
Accusing
white fem-
inist
scholars
Elaine
Showalter,
Patricia
Meyer Spacks,4
and Ellen
Moers
of
ignorance
and
inattention
if
not covert
racism,
Smith
called for
the
creation
of a
black feminist criticism
that-by taking
into account
intersections
of
race, sex,
and class-would be
capable
of
understanding
and
appreciating
the work
of
black women writers. Within a few
years
of
Smith's
article,
Deborah E. McDowell had
staked
out
New Directions
for Black
Feminist
Criticism
(Black
American Literature Forum 14
[Oc-
tober
1980]: 153-59),
and the
publication
of
several critical
anthologies
of black women's
writing
announced the birth and
demonstrated the
vigor
of black feminist
criticism.5
By
the
end of
the
1970s, white,
middle-class feminist
academics were
forced to concede
that the differences
among
women
might
be at least
as
important
to
acknowledge
and
theorize
as
the differences
between
women
and
men that had
preoccupied
not
only
feminist
literary
criticism
but feminist
scholarship
in
general.
Indeed the word
difference as-
sumed
the talismanic
significance
for the
1980s that re-vision had for
the seventies: the tone was set
by
a 1979 Barnard
conference
whose
proceedings
were
published
in
1980 as The Future
of
Difference:
The
Scholar and the
Feminist
(Hester
Eisenstein and
Alice
Jardine,
eds.
[Bos-
ton:
G.
K.
Hall]).
Not
only
were African-American women
calling
atten-
tion to the
particularities
of
their
experience,
but
also other women of
color-Hispanics,
Asian-Americans,
Native
Americans-and
lesbians of
all
races and ethnic
groups
were
beginning
to
make their voices
heard,
in
4
Spacks's
Wellesley colleague
and
office
mate
Alice Walker
( One
Child
of
One's
Own: A
Meaningful Digression
within the
Work(s),
in her In Search
of
Our Mothers'
Gardens
[New
York:
Harcourt,
1983],
371)
recalls
her
ineffectual
efforts to introduce
Spacks
to
fiction
by Gwendolyn
Brooks,
Margaret
Walker,
Toni
Morrison,
Nella
Larsen,
Paule
Marshall,
and Zora
Neale Hurston
during
the
years
Spacks
was
working
on The
Female
Imagination
(New
York:
Knopf,
1972).
5
See Roseann P.
Bell,
Bettye
J.
Parker,
and
Beverly Guy
Sheftall,
eds.,
Sturdy
Black
Bridges:
Visions
of
Black Women in Literature
(New
York:
Anchor,
1979);
Barbara
Smith,
ed.,
Home Girls:
A
Black Feminist
Anthology
(New
York: Kitchen
Table: Women
of
Color
Press,
1983);
Mary
Helen
Washington,
ed.,
Midnight
Birds:
Contemporary
Black
Women Writers
(New
York:
Doubleday,
1980);
Claudia Tate's
collection of
inter-
views
with
contemporary
black women
writers,
Black Women Writers at
Work
(New
York:
Continuum, 1983);
Barbara
Christian, ed.,
Black
Women
Novelists:
The
Develop-
ment
of
a Tradition, 1892-1976
(Westport,
Conn.:
Greenwood,
1980);
and the
articles,
bibliographies,
and
sample
course
syllabi
on black
women
writers collected
in
Gloria T.
Hull,
Patricia Bell
Scott,
and
Barbara
Smith,
eds.,
All
the
Women
Are
White,
All
the
Blacks
Are
Men,
But
Some
of
Us Are Brave
(New
York:
Feminist
Press, 1981).
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Rose FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF
WOMEN'S
FICTION
anthologies,
books, articles,
and
special
ssues
of
journals.6
With increas-
ing regularity,
white,
middle-class eminist
iterary
cholars
were includ-
ing
chapters
on women of color and
lesbians
n
their
studies
of
contem-
porary
women writers
and
inviting
contributions rom
scholars who
represented
hese constituencieswhen
they compiledessay
collections. n
two landmark
ssays
of
the
firsthalf of
the
1980s,
white
criticsdiscussed
fiction
by
both black
and
white
contemporary
women writers:
Lessing
and Morrison
n
Elizabeth
Abel's
(E)merging
dentities:
The
Dynamics
of
Female
Friendship
n
Contemporary
iction
by
Women
Signs: our-
nal
of
Women n
Culture
and
Society
6,
no.
3
[Spring
1981]: 413-35),
and
Morrison,Walker,Atwood,
Drabble,
and
Marilyn
French n
Marg-
aret Homans's 'Her
Very
Own Howl': The
Ambiguities
of
Represen-
tation
in
RecentWomen'sFiction
(Signs
9,
no. 2
[Winter
1984]:
186-
205).
Essays
about
contemporary
iction
by
womenof color and
lesbians,
often
by
women
of color or
self-identifiedesbian
scholars,
appeared
n
some
major
essay
collectionsof that
period:
ElizabethAbel's
Writing
nd
Sexual
Difference (Chicago:University
of
Chicago
Press,
1982),
Abel,
Marianne
Hirsch,
and Elizabeth
Langland's
The
Voyage
In: Fictions
of
Female
Development
Hanover,
N.H.:
University
Press
of
New
England,
1983),
Cathy
N.
Davidson
and E. M. Broner's The Lost Tradition:
Mothersand
Daughters
n Literature
New
York:
Ungar,
1980),
Gayle
Greene
and
Coppelia
Kahn's
Making
a
Difference:
Feminist
Literary
Criticism
(New
York:
Methuen, 1985),
Catherine Rainwater and
William
J.
Scheick's
Contemporary
mericanWomenWriters:Narrative
Strategies Lexington:
University
Press of
Kentucky,
1985),
and Elaine
Showalter's
The New FeministCriticism:
Essays
on
Women,Literature,
and
Theory
(New
York:
Pantheon,
1985).
SondraO'Neale calls such efforts
at editorial
ntegration
tokenism
( Inhibiting
Midwives,
Usurping
Creators:
The
StrugglingEmergence
f
Black Women
in American
Fiction,
n
de
Lauretis,ed., 145).
Valerie
Smith makes the more
damningcharge
that black women are fetish-
ized in white
scholarship
in muchthe same
way
as
they
are in mass
culture where black
women are
employed,
f
not
sacrificed,
o human-
ize theirwhite
superordinates,
o teach
them
something
aboutthe content
6
See,
e.g.,
Blanche Wiesen
Cook,
'Women Alone Stir
My Imagination':
Lesbianism
and
the Cultural
Tradition,
Signs
4,
no.
4
(Summer
1979):
718-39;
Margaret
Cruik-
shank, ed.,
Lesbian Studies: Present
and Future
(Old
Westbury,
N.Y.:
Feminist
Press,
1982);
Lillian
Faderman,
Surpassing
the Love
of
Men: Romantic
Friendship
and Love
between
Women
from
the Renaissance
to the
Present
(New
York:
Morrow,
1981);
the
Frontiers
special
issue Lesbian
History
(vol.
4
[Fall
1979]);
The
Lesbian
Issue
of
Signs
(vol.
9,
no.
4
[Summer
1984]);
Judith
McDaniel,
Lesbians and
Literature,
Sinis-
ter Wisdom 1 (1976): 20-23; Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge
Called
My
Back:
Writings
by
Radical Women
of
Color
(1981;
reprint,
New York:
Kitchen Table: Women
of Color
Press,
1983);
and
Catharine R.
Stimpson,
Zero
Degree
Deviancy:
The Lesbian Novel
in
English,
Critical
Inquiry
8
(Winter 1981):
363-80.
352 SIGNS
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1993
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FEMINIST CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S FICTION
Rose
of their
own
subjectpositions
( Black
Feminist
Theory
and the
Repre-
sentation
of the
'Other,'
in
Changing
Our Own Words:
Essays
on
Criticism,
Theory,
and
Writingby
Black
Women,
ed.
Cheryl
Wall
[New
Brunswick,
N.J.:
Rutgers
University
Press, 1989], 46).
Judith
Roof de-
votesanentire
chapter
of herrecent
book,
A Lure
of
Knowledge:
Lesbian
Sexuality
and
Theory
(New
York:
Columbia
University
Press, 1991),
to
configurations
of
lesbianism
n
three
anthologies
of
feminist criticism
published
n
1985
(Greene
and Kahn's
Making
a
Difference,
Showalter's
The New Feminist
Criticism,
and
Judith
Newton and Deborah
Rosen-
felt's
FeministCriticism nd Social
Change
New
York:
Methuen,
1985]).
In
Roof's
view,
the
inclusionof
essays
by
black, esbian,
or black
esbian
contributors
alls
far short of what is needed to
integrate
multiple
dif-
ferences
among
women into feminist
heory.
The
programmatic lace-mentof black and lesbian as
players
n what in 1985 are
white,
straight
feminist
arguments revents
he
recognition
f
the radical
mplications
f
these
differingparadigms
or
any
acceptance
of their
contributionsas
theoretical
in
themselvesrather than
as
augmentativediversity
. .
as
backup
for a more
overarching
nd
all-encompassing
eminist
theory
(225).
As
will
become evident later
in
this
essay,
I
find these
critiques
bruisingly
persuasive.
In
addition
to
demanding
hat
white,
middle-class
eminist scholars
acknowledge
he
significance
f
race, class,
and sexual
preference
n
the
construction f
gender,
he Barnard onference
brought
hem
face
to
face
with the
challenge
o their
scholarshipposed by
Continental
heory.
Pa-
pers
on
contemporary
eminist
thought
in
France were
presented
by
French, Canadian,
and
U.S.
scholars,
and
a
workshop
took
place
on
Psychoanalysis
nd Feminism
n
France. 7
n
1975,
Elaine Showalter
observed
n
a
Signs
review
essay
on
Literary
Criticism
hat American
feministcriticism
and
scholarship
were
stubbornly mpirical,
nd
she
predicted
hat this would
prove
o be a
liability.
Because
eministcriticism
looked
deceptively asy,
he
academy then-and
still-dominated
by
white,
middle-class
men)
did
not,
and
would continue
not
to,
take
it
very seriously (Signs
1,
no.
2
[Winter
1975]: 435-60,
esp.
436).
It
was,
coincidentally,
lso
in
1975 that
Laura
Mulvey published
Visual
Pleasureand NarrativeCinema
(reprinted
n
Feminism
and Film
The-
ory,
ed. Constance
Penley
New
York:
Routledge,
1988], 57-68),
which
appropriated sychoanalytic heory
as
a
political weapon,
demon-
strating
the
way
the
unconscious
of
patriarchal
ociety
has structured
7
In
Eisenstein and
Jardine,
eds.,
black and lesbian
challenges
to
white,
middle-class,
heterocentrist
scholarship
are offered in
essays
by Quandra
Prettyman,
Barbara Omo-
lade,
and
Tucker Pamela
Farley;
for
the difference
represented
by
French
intellectuals,
see the
essays
by
Domna
Stanton,
Josette
Feral,
Christiane
Makward,
Jane
Gallop,
Caro-
lyn
G.
Burke,
and Naomi
Schor.
Winter
1993
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Rose
FEMINIST CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S FICTION
film form to
provide pleasure
for male
spectators
of
classic
Hollywood
films
(57).8
In
1976,
Signs published
a
translation
of
Helene Cixous's
feminist
literary
manifesto,
The
Laugh
of
the Medusa
(trans.
Keith
Cohen
and Paula
Cohen,
Signs
2,
no. 1
[Autumn
1976]: 875-93),
and
in
1980 Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron's New FrenchFeminisms:
An
Anthology
(Amherst:
University
of Massachusetts
Press)
brought
translations
of
additional French feminists to American
readers. With
language
no
longer
a barrier and the
example
of British
film theorists and
French
feminists
to
suggest
how
male-authored
theoretical
paradigms
might
be
subverted to
women's
advantage,
the
psychoanalysis
and semi-
otics
of
Jacques
Lacan were
rapidly supplemented
with
the deconstruc-
tion
of
Jacques
Derrida,
the
dialogics
of
Mikhail
Bakhtin,
and the
gene-
alogy
of
Michel
Foucault as
useful-perhaps
even
necessary-tools
in
the
feminist theoretical arsenal.
By
the
mid-eighties,
many
American femi-
nists
had turned their
backs
scornfully
on
what
they
labeled
images
of
women
criticism.
By
the
end
of
the
1980s,
it was considered
inexcusably
naive to look for
unproblematized
representations
of
women
in
fiction
if
one
were
to
be
Theoretically
Correct.
Much has
changed,
then,
since the
early
1970s when feminist scholars
as
well
as
common
readers
asked
of a
novel,
What does this
say
about
my
life? The canon
has,
it
could be
argued,
been
opened
to
contempo-
rary
women writers:
volumes
on several
of them
(including
Atwood,
Drabble,
Lessing,
and
Morrison)
are
part
of
well-respected
book
series,
the
Margaret
Atwood
and
Doris
Lessing
societies are allied
organizations
of the
MLA,
and even
the staid
English
Institute-generally regarded
as
the most
prestigious
forum for
literary
scholars
in
this
country-which
did not
include
a
panel
on
feminist
criticism
until
1981,
devoted one
of
its
1989 sessions
to
Toni Morrison
in
Perspective. 9
In
its new
post-
8
The feminist
ilm
theorypioneered
n
Britain
n
the mid-1970s
by
Mulvey,
Pam
Cook,
and Claire
Johnston
was
profoundly
nfluenced
y
French
heory,
particularly
JacquesLacan's emioticrevisionof Freudian sychoanalysisnd LouisAlthusser'swork
on
ideology.
Their nfluential
arly
essays
and
other now-classic
xamples
of
feminist
film
theory
are
reprinted
n
Penley,
d.,
who
provides
a
helpful
historical ntroduction
o
the
subject.
See also
Judith
Mayne's
review
essay
on
Feminist
ilm
Theory
and
Criti-
cism,
Signs
11,
no.
1
(Autumn
1985):
81-100.
9
G. K.
Hall's Critical
Approaches
eries
ncludes
Judith
McComb,ed.,
CriticalEs-
says
on
Margaret
Atwood
(Boston,
1988),
Ellen Cronan
Rose,
ed.,
Critical
Essays
on
Margaret
Drabble
(Boston,
1985),
Claire
Sprague
and
Virginia
Tiger's
Critical
Essays
on
Doris
Lessing
(Boston,
1986),
and Nellie
Y.
McKay's
Critical
Essays
on
Toni Morrison
(Boston,
1988).
The
MLA's
Approaches
o
Teaching
WorldLiterature eries
ncludes
Carey Kaplan
and
Ellen
Cronan
Rose,
eds.,
Approaches
to
Teaching Lessing's
The
Golden
Notebook
(New
York:
MLA, 1989);
and
Shirley
Geok-lin
Lim,
ed.,
Ap-
proaches to Teaching Kingston's The Woman Warrior (New York: MLA, 1991). Two
of
the
English
nstitute's
Morrison
papers
are
published
n Hortense
.
Spillers,
d.,
Comparative
American
Identities:
Race, Sex,
and
Nationality
in the Modern
Text
(New
York:
Routledge,
1991).
For
lluminating
tatistics
about
the
participation
f women
in
354
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FEMINIST CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S FICTION Rose
modernist
clothes,
feminist
iterary
criticism s
so
fashionable hat even
men
are
doing
it.10
What effects has the institutionalization
f
feminist
iterary
scholar-
ship
and the
ascendency
of
theory
had
on
feministcritics'
approach
o
contemporary
women's novels and more
particularly
n their sense of
what
relation
that fiction has to
women,
experience,
and
politics?
The
books under review here
(the
best
of
them,
at
least)
demonstrate hat it
is
possible
to theorize
the relations
between
iteratureand
life,
discourse
and
experience,
and fiction
and
politics.
Taken
ogether,
hese books
also
raise
questions
about selectivecanon formationand
indicatethe
persis-
tence,
even as
we
enterthe last
decade
of
the
century,
f the view that
the
experience
and
writing
of
lesbians
and
women of color
are
marginal.
Although
he
books beforeme
can
be
variously
classifiedand
catego-
rized,
they
all
focus
on
novels that most common
readerswould
take to
be more
or
less verisimilar
epresentations
f real
people,
engaged
n
familiar
activities,
confronting
he kinds of
decisions readers
recognize
from
their
own
experience.
This
is not to
say
that these scholars
assume,
as
perhaps
some
common
readers
do,
that
novels
are
unmediated
epre-
sentationsof real ife. Most would
agree
with
Rita Felski
hat
any ap-
proach
to
fiction that
posits
a
direct
relationship
between
iterature
and
life is
theoreticallynadequate
because t failsto account for
ideolog-
ical
and
intertextualdeterminants
f
both
subjectivity
nd
textual mean-
ing
(50). Indeed,
virtually
all
feminist
literary
scholarswho-for
one
reasonor
other-retain
an
interest
n
realist ictionare
confronted
by
and
obliged
to
deal with
what
has
come to
be known as
the
Franco-American
dividewithin feminist
iterary heory
(the
American iew
that
women's
writing
reflects women's
experience
because
language
is a
transparent
medium
vs.
the French
view
that
experience
is
constituted
in
and
by
language);
in
addition,
they
must
contend with
postmodernism's
assault
on the
very
notion of a
unified,
experiencing
self. 11
the
English
Institute
prior
to
1981,
see Diana Hume
George,
Stumbling
on
Melons:
Sexual Dialectics and
Discrimination in
English
Departments,
in
English
Literature:
Opening
Up
the
Canon,
ed. Leslie
A.
Fiedler and
Houston A.
Baker,
Jr.
(Baltimore:
Johns
Hopkins
University
Press, 1981),
107-36.
10
For
a
recent
example
of male feminist criticism
that also
surveys
the
history
of
the
genre,
see
Joseph
A. Boone
and Michael
Cadden,
eds.,
Engendering
Men: The
Ques-
tion
of
Male
Feminist Criticism
(New
York:
Routledge,
1990).
Feminist
skepticism
about
this
activity
has
been most
recently
voiced
by
Tania
Modleski
in
her Feminism
without
Women: Culture and
Criticism
in
a
Postfeminist
Age
(New
York:
Routledge,
1991).
11The terms of the
Anglo-American
debate are
lucidly
set forth in Homans's 'Her
Very
Own Howl'
;
Toril
Moi's Sexual/Textual
Politics
(New
York:
Methuen,
1985);
and Alice
Jardine's
Gynesis:
Configurations of
Woman
and
Modernity
(Ithaca,
N.Y.:
Cornell
University
Press,
1985);
the debate is
economically
summarized
by
Betsy
Draine
Winter 1993
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Rose FEMINIST CRITICISM
OF
WOMEN'S FICTION
The writers
of
several
of
the books under review
justify
their
focus
on
realist novels
on the
grounds
that this is the fiction that has
meant the
most to
women
readers-in
other
words,
implicitly endorsing
the
view
I
associated with the
early days
of
feminist criticism and of the women's
movement,
that
people
read novels because
they
believe these texts have
something
to tell them about
life.
Felski,
Gayle
Greene,
Melissa
Walker,
Nancy
Walker,
and Bonnie Zimmerman
are
interested
in
the social
and
political
functions
of
fiction,
the
potential
that novels
possess
to
effect
personal
and social
change.
Felski
charges
literary
theorists who
empha-
size the self-referential
and
metalinguistic
character
of
fiction
to
remember
that literature is
also a medium which can
profoundly
influ-
ence
individual and cultural
self-understanding
in
the
sphere
of
everyday
life,
charting
the
changing
preoccupations
of
social
groups
through sym-
bolic fictions
by
means of which
they
make sense of
experience
(7).
Even
Molly
Hite,
who thinks
Anglo-American
reflectionist criticism has done
a
disservice to
women's
innovatory
writing practices
with its
exagger-
ated
theory
of
mimesis,
the
notion that art imitates
life,
acknowledges
the
political
utility
to feminism
of
realist
fiction
by citing
Ann Barr
Sni-
tow's
observation that since
the
inception
of the
form, [realist]
novels
have been
'how-to' manuals for
groups gathering
their
identity
through
self-description
(Hite,
14,
quoting
Snitow from her
essay
The Front
Line: Notes
on
Sex
in
Novels
by
Women, 1969-1979,
Signs
5,
no.
4
[Summer
1980]:
702-18,
esp.
705).
Greene
and Zimmerman
testify personally
to the transformative ef-
fects
of
reading contemporary
women's fiction. Zimmerman recalls the
affirmation she
and other lesbian feminists
experienced
as
a
generation
of authors
began
to
write us into existence
(xi).
Greene
says
that she was
so
haunted
by
The
Golden
Notebook that she returned
to it
year
after
year
and
finally
reorganized
my professional
life
around
it,
changing
my
field from Renaissance
to
contemporary
literature
(57).
Several recent
books
explicitly
relate
contemporary
women's fiction to
movements
for
social
change.
Melissa
Walker's
Down
from
the
Moun-
taintop
focuses
on
a
group
of
novels
that are
in
her view
directly
related
to
the
issues,
events,
and
consequences
of
the
civil
rights
movement
(2).
Zimmerman's
The
Safe
Sea
of
Women,
which
surveys
some 167 lesbian
novels
and
short-story
collections
published
between
1969
and
1989,
is
governed
by
the thesis that this literature
helped
shape
a
lesbian
con-
sciousness,
community,
and culture
(2)
from the
beginning
of the
in
her review
essay,
Refusing
the Wisdom of
Solomon: Some Recent
Feminist
Literary
Theory, Signs 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 144-70. For a succinct yet comprehensive sur-
vey
of the
promising
but
problematic
relationship
between
feminism and
postmodern-
ism,
see
Linda
J.
Nicholson, ed.,
Feminism/Postmodernism
(New
York:
Routledge,
1990).
356
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FEMINIST CRITICISM OF
WOMEN'S
FICTION Rose
lesbian-feminist
movement,
which
she
dates from the
watershed
year
in which
lesbians
and
gay
men rioted
at the Stonewall nn in New
York's
Greenwich
Village
(xvi):
The
purpose
of this
writing-self-aware
or
not-is to create esbian
dentity
and
culture,
o
say,
this is what it means
to be a
lesbian,
this is how lesbians
are,
this is what lesbians believe.
Whatever heiraesthetic
value,
lesbian exts are 'sacred
objects'
hat bind
the
community ogether
and
help express-by
which I
mean both reflect
and
create-its ideas
about
itself
(20-21).
The first
chapter
of
Greene's
Changing
he
Story
persuasively
orrelates he
efflorescence
f
fiction
by
women writers
in
the 1960s
and
1970s with the
white,
middle-class
women's movement.Numerous
quotations
from
feminist
scholars,
ac-
tivists,
and writers
provide
at least anecdotalevidence hat it
was fem-
inist
writing-fiction, poetry,
and nonfiction-that
transformed onfu-
sion to
consciousness,
enabling
women to understand he
changesthey
were
living through
and
to
interpret
he
personal
n
terms of
the
polit-
ical
(50).
In
Feminist
Alternatives,
Nancy
Walker
comparescontempo-
rary
women's fiction to
consciousness-raising roups:
both
helped
women readers see the connectionbetween
he
personal
and
the
polit-
ical
(18).
And
the reason
Felski,
who also likenscertain
women'snovels
published
n
the
early
1970s to
consciousness-raising
115),
wants to
go
beyond
eministaesthetics
n
her book of that title
is to examine
the
social functionof literature
n
relationto a
relatively
broad-basedwom-
en's movement
7).
Both Zimmerman's nd Melissa Walker's tudiesof
fiction's ntersec-
tions with movement
politics
constructnarratives f their own
about
the
last
twenty years.
The
Safe
Sea
of
Women s
organized
chronologi-
cally.
After an
introductory hapter
hat
provides
historical
background
for
the
emergence
of lesbian
consciousness
and
lesbian-feminist
iction,
Zimmerman evotes
a
chapter
ach to the
threecentral
myths
of
origin
in
lesbian iction: he formationof the lesbian
self
(the
coming-out
tory),
the lesbian
couple,
and
the lesbian
community.
These
chapters
are fol-
lowed
by
one that takes account of the
fissuresthat
difference and
identity
politics
uncoveredwithin the
hypothetical,
and
idealized,
esbian
community,primarily
hrough
books
by
lesbiansof color.
An
intention-
ally
inconclusive inal
chaptersurveys
esbian fiction
published
between
1986
and
1989 to
attempt
to
discern
what
established
genericpatterns
continue
and
what new directions
might
be
signaled.
Melissa Walker's
tudy
of black
women's novels
published
between
1966 and
1989 resemblesZimmerman's ook
both
in
the
connections t
draws betweenfiction and
events
in
the
history
and
consciousnessof a
community
and in its
chronologicalorganization,
which subordinates
individual
novels to a
larger
historicalnarrative:
The
eighteen
novels
consideredhere are
grouped
in
chapters
according
to
their historical
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FEMINIST CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S
FICTION
setting-where
we have
been. Within the
chapters they
are
arranged
according
to
date
of
publication-where
we are
(or
were
at
the time of
publication),
which
is often as
significant
in
terms
of
the
movement
and
its
aftermath as
the
historical
setting
itself
(4).
Accordingly,
the first
chapter
considers three novels set
during
the
period
of
slavery
and re-
construction,
arranged chronologically
by
date
of
publication:
Margaret
Walker's
Jubilee
(New
York:
Bantam, 1966),
Sherley
Anne
Williams's
Dessa Rose
(New
York:
Morrow, 1986),
and
Morrison's Beloved
(New
York:
Knopf,
1987).
Chapter
2
concerns the
period
between the two
world
wars,
as
represented
in
Morrison's
The Bluest
Eye
and
Alice Walk-
er's
The Color
Purple
(New
York:
Harcourt,
1982).
Chapter
3
considers
three novels set
in
Harlem,
from
the 1930s
to
the eve
of
the
Montgomery,
Alabama,
bus
boycott,
Louise Meriwether's
Daddy
Was a Number Run-
ner
(New
York:
Jove
Books, 1970),
Alice Childress's A Short Walk
(New
York:
Avon, 1979),
and Rosa
Guy's
A
Measure
of
Time
(New
York:
Bantam, 1983).
Chapter
4 discusses Alice Walker's
Grange
Copeland
and
Morrison's
Sula as records
of
private
lives lived
in
isolated communities
between the end
of
the First
World War and
the
beginning
of
the civil
rights
movement. The
four
novels discussed
in
chapter
5 are set at
the
height
of
the movement-Morrison's
Song
of
Solomon
(New
York:
Knopf,
1977),
Kristin Hunter's The
Lakestown Rebellion
(New
York:
Charles
Scribner's, 1978),
and
Ntozake
Shange's
Sassafrass,
Cypress,
and
Indigo
(New
York: St.
Martin's, 1982)
and
Betsey
Brown
(New
York:
St.
Martin's,
1985).
The three novels discussed
in
chapter
6 are set
in
the
postmovement
mid-seventies
-Alice Walker's
Meridian,
Toni
Cade
Bam-
bara's
The Salt Eaters
(New
York:
Random
House,
1980),
and
Morri-
son's
Tar
Baby
(New
York: New American
Library,
1981).
An
afterword
considers Alice Walker's
The
Temple
of
My
Familiar,
which is
set
at
approximately
the
same
time
as
its
publication
(New
York:
Harcourt,
1989).
Greene's
book is
only
in
part
a narrative of feminist fiction's relation-
ship
to the women's
movement,
but it too has
a
chronological spine:
her
analysis
of
novels
by
Lessing,
Drabble,
Margaret
Laurence,
and
Atwood
is framed
by historicizing
chapters
on
the 1950s
and
the
postfeminist
1980s.
An
implicit
and
often
covert tendentiousness
is built into chro-
nological
or
developmental
narratives
such as
Greene's,
Melissa Walk-
er's,
and Zimmerman's.
A
golden age
of
politically
valuable art is
preceded
by unenlightened
preconsciousness
and followed
by
a
devolu-
tionary
loss of vision.
Neither
Zimmerman nor Melissa
Walker theorizes the
relationship
she
asserts
among
author,
audience,
and historical moment. Zimmerman's
book
is
part
introduction
to the
general
public
of a
body
of
fiction
published largely
by
small,
alternative
presses;
part
taxonomy
of
genres,
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Rose
tropes,
and
conventions
of that
fiction;
part history
of
and
commentary
on lesbian
consciousness,
ommunity,
nd culture rom the
birth
of
the
gay
and lesbian
civil
rights
movement
n
the Stonewallriot
to
the
present.
For
example,
her
chapter
on
the lesbian self
briefly
summarizes he
plots
of more than a dozen novels
(e.g.,
Sharon Isabell's
Yesterday's
Lessons
[Oakland,
Calif.:Women'sPress
Collective,
1974],
ElanaNach-
man's
Riverfinger
Woman
[Plainfield,
Vt.:
Daughters
nc., 1974],
Carol
Anne
Douglas's
To the ClevelandStation
[Tallahassee,
la.:Naiad
Press,
1982]),
describesthe
conventions of the three
principal
forms
of
the
coming-out
novel
(quest,picaresque,
and
bildungsroman),
nd
suggests
that
the differential
valuation
of
born
and
born-again
esbians
in
lesbianfiction
may
reflect the rancorbetween he 'real' esbiansand
the
'political'
esbians
n
the
early
days
of lesbian feminism
53).
MelissaWalker's
nterpretations
ndevaluationsof the
eighteen
nov-
els
she
discusses
revealher
primary
nterest o be how
a
novel
may
reflect
the culturalnorms
prevailing
at the
time it
was
written
(or
published).
A
good
example
is
her
second
chapter,
which contrasts
Morrison's
The
Bluest
Eye, published
when the
euphoria
of
the
mid-sixties
had
givenway
to
despair
and
failing energies
48),
with Walker'sThe Color
Purple,
published
at
the
height
of
the
Reagan
era. The
mature,
self-critical
oice
of
Claudia,
The Bluest
Eye's
narrator,
passes
udgment
n
blackswho
made
t
into the middleclass at
the
expense
of
those left behind
(48),
but
MelissaWalker indsno narrative oice with moral
authority
n The
Color
Purple
to
speak
of
the
responsibility
hat
privilegedpeople
have
for
the
oppressed
49).
MelissaWalker
oncludes
hat this
difference as
something
o do with the
spirit
of the
time
in
which
the books are
being
read
(50).
She insists
that she does not mean to
imply
that at
a
par-
ticulartime there is
a
monolithic
zeitgeistdetermining
he
kinds
of
nar-
rativeswriters
produce
and
readers
affirm
8),
but
her
unwillingness
o
blame
Alice Walker or
what she considers
he moral
apses
of
The
Color
Purple
comes
dangerously
close to
reducing
the artist
to a
mindless,
volitionlessreflectorof
her
culture:
Perhaps
he
stories
novelists ell are
so conditioned
by
the
receptiveness
f
the
culture
hat
even
a
writer
ike
Walker-who
for more than
twenty-fiveyears
has been
committed to
social action on
many
fronts,
including
the
civil
rights
movement,
the
women's
and
the
antinuclear
movements-inadvertently
peaks
to
the
valuesof the audiencedominant
at
the time she
composes
a
novel,
in
this
case
an
audience
istening
for reassurance hat
seeking
economic
pros-
perity
and
personal
gratification
re valid
enterprises
72-73).
If
Me-
lissa Walkerwere interested
n
theorizing
he
relationship
between au-
thorsandthe
zeitgeist,
she
might
at this
point
invokeLouis Althusseror
Pierre
Macherey,
FrenchMarxists whose work
on the
relationship
be-
tween
ideology
and cultural
production
have
proved
useful
to
a
number
Winter 1993
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FEMINIST
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WOMEN'S FICTION
of Marxist
and feminist
literary
and cultural
critics.12
But,
as
I
said,
neither
she
nor Zimmerman is
as much
interested
in
theory
as in
narra-
tion and
taxonomy.
Felski,
on the other
hand,
seems less interested
in
the
texts she
discusses
in
Beyond
Feminist Fiction than
in
constructing
a
theory
that can address the social
meanings
and functions of literature
in relation
to women writers
and
readers
and to feminism
as an
oppo-
sitional
politics
(19).
Drawing
on
Jiirgen
Habermas's
model
of
the
bourgeois public
sphere,
she
proposes
the
concept
of a
feminist
public sphere
to account
for
the
diverse
artistic
and cultural
productions
that have
emerged
in
response
to
second-wave
feminism.
Terry Eagleton,
who also
invokes
Habermas
in
his
The Function
of
Criticism
(London: Verso,
1984),
characterizes the
public
sphere
of the
seventeenth-
and
eighteenth-century bourgeoisie
as
a distinct discursive
space
carved out from within a
repressive po-
litical
regime,
a realm of social
institutions such as
clubs,
coffeehouses,
and
periodicals,
in
which
private
individuals
assemble
for
the
free,
equal
interchange
of
reasonable
discourse,
thus
welding
themselves
into a
rel-
atively
cohesive
body
whose
deliberations
may
assume
the form of
a
powerful
political
force
(9).13
Felski's feminist
public
sphere
is one of
several
counter-public
spheres
that affirm
identity
politics.
Like
the
original
bourgeois
public
sphere,
she
says,
the feminist
public
sphere
constitutes
a
discursive
space
which defines itself
in
terms of
a
common
identity;
here it is the
shared
experience
of
gender-based
oppression
which
provides
the
mediating
factor intended
to unite
all
participants
beyond
their
specific
differences
(166).
Felski
recognizes
that
the
femi-
12
The
essay by
Althusser
that
has,
perhaps,
most influenced
cultural and
literary
critics is
Ideology
and
Ideological
State
Apparatuses,
in
his Lenin
and
Philosophy
and
Other
Essays,
trans.
Ben
Brewster
(New
York:
Monthly
Review
Press, 1971).
See
also
Althusser's
For
Marx,
trans. Ben Brewster
(New
York:
Pantheon, 1969);
Althusser and
Etienne
Balibar's
Reading
Capital,
trans.
Ben Brewster
(New
York:
Pantheon,
1971);
and Pierre
Macherey's
A
Theory
of Literary
Production,
trans.
Geoffrey
Wall
(London:
Routledge, 1978). For many English and American readers, post-Althusserian Marxist
theory
is
epitomized by
Terry
Eagleton
and Fredric
Jameson
(Eagleton,
Marxism and
Literary
Criticism
[Berkeley:
University
of California
Press, 1976];
and
Jameson,
The
Political
Unconscious:
Narrative as
a
Socially
Symbolic
Act
[Ithaca,
N.Y.:
Cornell
Uni-
versity
Press,
1981]).
For
a
sample
of
Marxist feminist cultural
criticism,
see
Judith
Newton
and Deborah
Rosenfelt,
eds.,
Feminist Criticism
and
Social
Change:
Sex, Class,
and Race
in Literature
and Culture
[New
York:
Methuen, 1985].
An
earlier,
but still
pertinent,
volume is
Lillian S. Robinson's
Sex,
Class,
and Culture
(1978;
reprint,
New
York:
Methuen,
1986).
13
See
Jiirgen
Habermas,
Die
Strukturwandel
der
Offentlichkeit: Untersuchungen
zu
einer
Kategorie
der
burgerlichen
Gesellschaft
(1962;
reprint,
Darmstadt:
Luchterhand,
1984),
and his
The Public
Sphere:
An
Encyclopaedia
Article,
New
German
Critique
1,
no. 2 (1974): 49-55. See also Peter U. Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca,
N.Y.:
Cornell
University
Press,
1982),
esp. chap.
7,
Critical
Theory,
Public
Sphere
and
Culture:
Jiirgen
Habermas
and His Critics.
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OF WOMEN'S FICTION
Rose
nist
public sphere
is,
at
best,
an
enabling
fiction that
engenders
a
sense of
collective
identity by suspending
or
obscuring
material
differences
among
women
(169).
She finds
theoretical value
in
this
con-
tradictory
tension,
however,
because she
says
it
helps
locate
(and
ac-
count
for)
diverse
forms of
literary
and cultural
productions,
from
realist
fictions
to
avant-garde practices.
How
useful Felski's
notion of the feminist
public
sphere might
be in
explaining
the
relationship,
if
any,
between
avant-garde
or
experimental
feminist
fiction and social
change
remains to
be
demonstrated. Combined
with
sociologist Anthony
Giddens's structuration
theory,
which
describes
a
dynamic
relationship
between
human
agency
and social
structures,
it
does
enable
Felski
to illuminate
the social functions of certain
autobio-
graphical
realist narratives that have been
popular
with women readers.14
She
focuses
on
texts written
in
the
last
twenty years
to underscore her
contention that
feminist
confessional
narratives
like Kate Millett's Sita
(New
York:
Farrar,1977)
and
narratives of
female
self-discovery
like At-
wood's
Surfacing
(New
York: Simon
&
Schuster, 1972)
or
Paule Mar-
shall's
Praisesong
for
the Widow
(New
York:
Dutton, 1984)
do
not
make
up
a
self-generating
discourse to be
judged
in
abstraction
from
existing
social
conditions, but that
they
must be
understood
in
relation to
needs
and
expectations
generated by
the
contemporary
women's movement
(121).
Felski's
claim
that a novel like
Surfacing
is an
ideological
site,
an
active
process
of
meaning production
(126),
like her
contention that
feminist literature does not reveal an
already
given
female
identity,
but
is itself
involved
in
the construction of
this
self
(78),
is
in
keeping
with
the
prevailing
approach
to
contemporary
women's
fiction
in
recent fem-
inist
criticism: to
explore
the interrelations
of
literary
and social conven-
tions,
and
in
so
doing,
to
theorize what
some earlier critics took as
self-evident,
the
relation of
fiction to
experience
and social
change.15
14
Felski
cites
Anthony
Giddens's
New
Rules
of
Sociological
Method:
A
Positive Cri-
tique
of
Interpretative
Sociology
(London:
Hutchinson,
1976)
and his
Central Problems
in
Social
Theory:
Action,
Structure and
Contradiction in
Social
Analysis
(London:
Mac-
millan,
1979).
15
There
are,
of
course,
important
recent
books
that do
not
emphasize
the
ideological
implications
of narrative
conventions.
For
example,
in
her
Free Women:
Ethics
and
Aes-
thetics in
Twentieth-Century
Women's Fiction
(Philadelphia:
Temple University
Press,
1990),
Kate Fullbrook seeks to
demonstrate that certain
twentieth-century
women writ-
ers,
including
Doris
Lessing,
Margaret
Atwood,
and
Toni
Morrison,
used
fiction
to
re-
structure
the ethical
landscape
by
devising
new
patterns
for
assessing
moral
success or
failure
(1).
Patricia
Waugh's
Feminine Fictions:
Revisiting
the Postmodern
(New
York:
Routledge, 1989) develops the argument that, while more innovatory than they are typi-
cally perceived
to
be,
contemporary
women
writers like
Margaret
Drabble,
Anita
Brookner,
Sylvia
Plath,
Anne
Tyler,
Grace
Paley,
Margaret
Atwood,
and
Fay
Weldon dif-
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In
her
Writing beyond
the
Ending:
Narrative
Strategies
of
Twentieth-
Century
Women Writers
(Bloomington:
Indiana
University
Press, 1985),
Rachel
Blau DuPlessis
proposed
that narrative
may
function on a
small
scale the
way
that
ideology
functions
on
a
large
scale-as
a
'system
of
representations by
which we
imagine
the world as it is'
(3,
quoting
Althusser),
thus
theorizing
what
first-generation
second
wave feminists
intuited-that,
as
Rich
put
it,
our
language
has
trapped
as
well as
liberated us
( When
We Dead
Awaken,
35).
In
DuPlessis's
elegant
formulation,
ideology
is
coiled
in narrative
structure,
particularly
in
the romance
plot
which,
broadly
speaking,
is a
trope
for
the
sex-gender
system
as
a
whole
(5).16
DuPlessis not
only
provided
a theoretical basis
for
understanding
how
narrative
conventions
encode cultural mandates
but
she also
argued
that
it was
possible
to write
beyond
the
ideological
as well as formal con-
straints
of
the
romance
plot,
to invent narrative
strategies
that
express
critical dissent from
dominant
[cultural
as well as
literary]
narrative
(5).
Nevertheless,
though
she characterized the
disruptions
of
narrative con-
ventions
by
twentieth-century
women writers as
a
critique
of
traditional
gender arrangements,
DuPlessis
did not
suggest
that
changing
the
story
would effect social/cultural
change.
Linda Anderson also discusses
the
interrelationship
of fiction and ide-
ology
in the introduction
to
Plotting Change,
a
collection of
essays
she
edited in 1990. She uses the term
intertextuality -usually given
the
strictly
literary
sense
of a text
building
itself out
of
other
texts-to de-
scribe
a
way
of
thinking
about
experience
as
already
structured
by
the
modalities of
fiction. The stories
women
inherit from
culture are
powerfully oppressive,
Anderson
writes;
and
part
of that
oppression
lies
in
their
unitary
character,
their
repression
of
alternative
stories,
other
possibilities,
hidden
or secret
scripts
(vii).
This idea is
developed
in
greater
detail
by
Molly
Hite,
who notes that
any story
is
always
some-
body's
story, privileged
over
any
number
of
stories that do not
get
told
because
they
are
suppressed
by
literary
conventions that are
always
ideo-
logically
valenced.
Novels
by
twentieth-century
writers such as
Jean
Rhys,
Zora Neale
Hurston,
Lessing,
Alice
Walker,
and Atwood
make
changes
in
emphasis
and value
that articulate the 'other side' of a
fer
significantly
rom male
postmodernists
nd
that,
therefore,
iterary
historiansand
theorists
hould
revisit
nd
reconceive
ostmodernist
iction.
16
In The Heroine's
Text:
Readings
n
the French
and
English
Novel,
1722-1782
(New
York:Columbia
University
ress,
1980),
Nancy
K. Milleralertedreaders o the
way
certain
narrative onventions-in
particular
he heterosexual omance
plot
of
the
heroine's ext -reinforce culturalnorms.The firstcriticto make the connectionwas, of
course,
Joanna
Russ
in
her
landmark
ssay,
What
Can a HeroineDo? Or
Why
Women
Can't
Write,
n
Cornillon,
3-20.
DuPlessis
acknowledges
oth Russ'sand Miller's
groundbreaking
ork.
362
SIGNS
Winter
1993
-
8/17/2019 American Feminist Criticism
19/31
FEMINIST
CRITICISM
OF WOMEN'S FICTION Rose
culturally
mandated
tory,exposing
the limits
it
inscribes
n
the
process
of
affirming
a dominant
deology
(4).
DuPlessis,Anderson,
and
Hite
emphasize
extual
exposes
of
the he-
gemonic
intentions
of
culturally
mandatedstories. The
most
any
of
themwill claimis that a woman writer'snarrativennovations
may
free
her from
the
coercive ictions
of
her
culture hat
pass
as
truth
(Ander-
son, vii).
In
her
Living
Stories,
Telling
Lives,
published
a
year
after Du-
Plessis's
Writing
beyond
the
Ending,
Joanne
Frye
made the further
claim
that to alter
literary
form is to
participate
n
the
process
of
altering
women's
[i.e., readers']
lives
(33).
Though
many
novels
educate
women into their
expected
social/sexual
roles
and
are thus
ideologically
conservative,
Frye
maintains hat the
novel is
a form
sufficiently
lexible
to
register
new
patterns
and
possibilities
or women and
thus to act
as
an
agent
of cultural
change.
Otherscholarsshare her view that formal in-
novations can have social
and cultural
consequences-can empower
readers
as
well as writers.
Gayle
Greene,
whose
personal testimony
to the
transformational
power
of
contemporary
women's
fiction
I
have
already
recorded,
s
par-
ticularly
nterested
n
fiction that is self-consciousabout
its
own con-
struction and narrative conventions- metafiction -because it most
purely
fulfills the terms
of her definition
of
feminist fiction: We
may
term a
novel
'feminist' or
its
analysis
of
gender
as
socially
constructed
and its sensethat what has been constructed
may
be reconstructed-for
its
understanding
hat
change
is
possible
and
that narrative an
play
a
part
in
it
(2).
Critics
convinced hat
contemporary
women's
iction
uses
discourse
n
the serviceof
experience-to
recall
the
openingepigraph
rom
Teresade
Lauretis-must
perforce
come
to
terms
with a
French
eminist
skep-
ticism about
language
that
has
challenged
American
eminist criticism
since
1980,
when
Marks
and de Courtivron
mported
new
French em-
inisms
to
these shores.
Citing
as
precedentMargaret
Homans's 1983
article 'Her
Very
Own
Howl,'
JoanneFrye
and
Nancy
Walker