Gilbert & Gubar (290)
"The Female Swerve" from The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)
(the book deals mainly with 19th-Century literature)
Claim that woman wrote within accepted genres but created "submerged meanings"
(290)
[cf. Austen in Northanger Abbey; Braddon in Lady
Audley's Secret]
Second, women writers don't fit into standard categories (290)
[e.g., women poets of "Romantic" period, such as Mary Robinson,
Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans; not romantic. And Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
a critique of romantic values. But female novelists and later poets? Don't we
define the Victorian period in part by accomplishments of Brontës, Eliot; Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti ??]
That female authors revised male genres, "swerved" from male literary history;
created "palimpsests," hidden meanings (291)
["tell it slant": is this just the "Rule of Abstract Displacement"
again? (Rabinowitz, 139)]
Model of colonialism applied to women's position; woman writer's problem of
being subversive (291)
[cf. Woolf's problems: language, convention; does this point
to Cixous's concept of an ecriture féminine?]
For this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded - which doesn't mean
that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulated
the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those
subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. ("Medusa"; cited by Moi,
Sexual/Textual 109)
Example of Frankenstein
Hence the "evasions and concealments" of women writers (292)
[example of Gothic, cf. Radcliffe's Udolpho; Brontë's
Jane Eyre]
The angel in the house: women reacting to male image (293)
[cf. Patmore poem; but also the image of woman in Gregory,
Hays, More]
One (hidden) plot: woman's quest for her own story, for self-definition (293)
[danger of essentialism here; all women telling the same
story]
Need to shatter the mirror held up to woman, the male image of woman (293)
-- As if to reveal a madwoman beneath (294)
Characters that seek to destroy patriarchal structures (294)
[Austen, Braddon? -- in figures of General Tilney; whether
Lady Audley the heroine for abandoning George Talboys]
Moi (295)
From Sexual/Texual Politics (1985)
Critique of Gilbert and Gubar:
That author and character are identified; as if woman's writing were closer
to her experience (295-6)
Reductionist strategy: what lies beneath, always feminist rage; transforms all
texts by women to feminist (296)
Must reject transcendental signified of author; Barthes's "death of the author"
(297)
How did woman manage to write at all in face of monolithic patriarchy? (297)
Liberal humanism enabling independence of women; Wollstonecraft, Mill (298)
Distinguishing female (gender) from feminine (social construction) (298)
G & G hold the hypothesis that all woman adopt same strategies against patriarchy
(299)
Women's writing must become organically whole, G & G (299)
On the dangers of speaking for women, patriarchal replication (300)
Comments
Feminist literary theory: another form of cultural criticism that seeks to
locate literature in a wider cultural field (as with race, class)
Grounds to challenge the literary institution:
(a) historically, rereading canonical texts by women; recuperating misread or
neglected women writers;
(b) on philosophical grounds, revealing biases in Western culture and thinking.
-- See for example, the binaries of Cixous (Moi 104), unthinking assimilation
of woman to one pole:
Activity/Passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Head/Emotions
Intelligible/Sensitive
If logocentrism is the prevailing bias of masculine discourse, deconstructing
this will find assistance in Derrida (différance), Lacan (the Imaginary/Symbolic
Order).
return to Literary Institution
Document prepared April 2nd 2005