Sexual/Textual Polit ics

‘Neither a purely objective documentary nor a narrowly sectarian

polemic . . . this book exemplifies feminist theory-making at its
rigorous best.’
Women’s Review

What are the political implications of a feminist critical practice?

How do the problems of the literary text relate to the priorities and
perspectives of feminist politics as a whole?

Sexual/Textual Politics addresses these fundamental questions and

examines the strengths and limitations of the two main strands in
feminist criticism, the Anglo-American and the French, paying
particular attention to the works of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva.

In the years since publication this book has rightly attained the
status of a classic. Written for readers with little knowledge of
the subject, Sexual/Textual Politics nevertheless makes its own
intervention into key debates, arguing provocatively for a com-
mitedly political and theoretical criticism as against merely textual
or apolitical approaches.

With a new afterword in this edition, Sexual/Textual Politics is a

brilliantly accessible must-read for all those interested in feminist
literary theory.

Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance

Studies at Duke University, North Carolina. She is the author of
several influential works on feminist literary theory, including What
is a Woman? (1999).
 IN THE SAME SERIES
Alternative Shakespeares ed. John Drakakis
Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 ed. Terence Hawkes
Critical Practice Catherine Belsey
Deconstruction: Theory and Practice Christopher Norris
Dialogue and Difference: English for the Nineties ed. Peter Brooker
and Peter Humm
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literature Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion Rosemary Jackson
Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World Michael Holquist
Formalism and Marxism Tony Bennett
Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism ed. Gayle Green and
Coppélia Kahn
Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
Patricia Waugh
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word Walter J. Ong
The Politics of Postmodernism Linda Hutcheon
Post-Colonial Shakespeares ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin
Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley
The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir Elam
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory Toril Moi
Structuralism and Semiotics Terence Hawkes
Studying British Cultures: An Introduction ed. Susan Bassnett
Subculture: The Meaning of Style Dick Hebdige
Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction
Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires
Translation Studies Susan Bassnett
Toril

Moi
Sexual/Textual Politics
Feminist Literary Theory

2nd Edition

London and New York

First published 1985 by Methuen & Co. Ltd
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This second edition first published 2002
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 1985, 2002 Toril Moi
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-42603-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-44041-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0–415–28011–7 (Hbk)
ISBN 0–415–28012–5 (Pbk)
Til mamma og pappa
 CONTENTS

General Editor’s Preface xi

Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xvii
A Note on the Text xix

Introduction: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Feminist

readings of Woolf 1
The rejection of Woolf 2
Rescuing Woolf for feminist politics: some points
towards an alternative reading 9

PART I Anglo-American feminist criticism

1 Two feminist classics 21
Kate Millett 24
Mary Ellmann 31
2 ‘Images of Women’ criticism 41
3 Women writing and writing about women 49
Towards a woman-centred perspective 49
‘Literary Women’ 52
viii contents
‘A Literature of Their Own’ 54
‘The Madwoman in the Attic’ 56
4 Theoretical reflections 69
Annette Kolodny 69
Elaine Showalter 74
Myra Jehlen 79

PART II French feminist theory

5 From Simone de Beauvoir to Jacques Lacan 89
Simone de Beauvoir and Marxist feminism 89
French feminism after 1968 93
Jacques Lacan 97
6 Hélène Cixous: an imaginary utopia 100
Patriarchal binary thought 102
Difference 103
Ecriture féminine 1) masculinity, femininity, bisexuality 106
The gift and the proper 108
Ecriture féminine 2) the source and the voice 112
Imaginary contradictions 117
Power, ideology, politics 119
7 Patriarchal reflections: Luce Irigaray’s looking-glass 126
Speculum 128
Specul(ariz)ation and mimeticism 131
Freud 131
Mysticism 135
The inexorable logic of the Same 137
Womanspeak: a tale told by an idiot? 142
Idealism and ahistoricism 146
8 Marginality and subversion: Julia Kristeva 149
L’Etrangère 149
Kristeva and Anglo-American feminist linguistics 150
Sex differences in language use 152
Sexism in language 155
 contents ix
Language, femininity, revolution 160
The acquisition of language 160
Femininity as marginality 162
Feminism, Marxism, anarchism 166

Afterword 173
Notes 186
References 197
Index 211
 GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

No doubt a third General Editor’s Preface to New Accents seems hard to

justify. What is there left to say? Twenty-five years ago, the series began
with a very clear purpose. Its major concern was the newly perplexed
world of academic literary studies, where hectic monsters called
‘Theory’, ‘Linguistics’ and ‘Politics’ ranged. In particular, it aimed
itself at those undergraduates or beginning postgraduate students who
were either learning to come to terms with the new developments
or were being sternly warned against them.
New Accents deliberately took sides. Thus the first Preface spoke darkly,
in 1977, of ‘a time of rapid and radical social change’, of the ‘erosion
of the assumptions and presuppositions’ central to the study of litera-
ture. ‘Modes and categories inherited from the past’ it announced, ‘no
longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation’. The
aim of each volume would be to ‘encourage rather than resist the
process of change’ by combining nuts-and-bolts exposition of new
ideas with clear and detailed explanation of related conceptual devel-
opments. If mystification (or downright demonisation) was the
enemy, lucidity (with a nod to the compromises inevitably at stake
there) became a friend. If a ‘distinctive discourse of the future’
beckoned, we wanted at least to be able to understand it.
xii general editor’s preface

With the apocalypse duly noted, the second Preface proceeded

piously to fret over the nature of whatever rough beast might stagger
portentously from the rubble. ‘How can we recognise or deal with the
new?’, it complained, reporting nevertheless the dismaying advance of
‘a host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuring
names’ and promising a programme of wary surveillance at ‘the
boundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable’. Its
conclusion, ‘the unthinkable, after all, is that which covertly shapes our
thoughts’ may rank as a truism. But in so far as it offered some sort of
useable purchase on a world of crumbling certainties, it is not to be
blushed for.
In the circumstances, any subsequent, and surely final, effort can
only modestly look back, marvelling that the series is still here, and not
unreasonably congratulating itself on having provided an initial outlet
for what turned, over the years, into some of the distinctive voices and
topics in literary studies. But the volumes now re-presented have more
than a mere historical interest. As their authors indicate, the issues they
raised are still potent, the arguments with which they engaged are still
disturbing. In short, we weren’t wrong. Academic study did change
rapidly and radically to match, even to help to generate, wide reaching
social changes. A new set of discourses was developed to negotiate
those upheavals. Nor has the process ceased. In our deliquescent world,
what was unthinkable inside and outside the academy all those years
ago now seems regularly to come to pass.
Whether the New Accents volumes provided adequate warning of,
maps for, guides to, or nudges in the direction of this new terrain is
scarcely for me to say. Perhaps our best achievement lay in cultivating
the sense that it was there. The only justification for a reluctant third
attempt at a Preface is the belief that it still is.
TERENCE HAWKES
 PREFACE

This introduction to feminist literary theory, the first full introduction

to this field, I believe, to be published in English, is intended for the
general reader as well as for students of literature.1 I have aimed to
present the two main approaches to feminist literary theory, the Anglo-
American and the French, through detailed discussion of the most
representative figures on each side. Though I hope to have given an
accurate and comprehensive account of the main tendencies within the
field, the book does not set out to provide a survey of the vast number
of feminist critical studies published since the late 1960s. Nor does it
offer a survey of different feminist readings or interpretations of liter-
ary works. Its main concern is to discuss the methods, principles and
politics at work within feminist critical practice.
One of the central principles of feminist criticism is that no account
can ever be neutral. My own presentation of the feminist field is there-
fore an explicitly critical one. Arguing as I do from a position that often
leads me to disagree with other feminists, it would seem that I expose
myself to accusations of lack of solidarity with other women. Should
feminists criticize each other at all? If it is true, as I believe, that femi-
nist criticism today is stifled by the absence of a genuinely critical
debate about the political implications of its methodological and
theoretical choices, the answer to that question is surely an unqualified
xiv preface
affirmative. The suppression of debate within the camp has been a
prominent feature of precisely the kind of male leftist politics to which
feminists have objected. To let the idea of sisterhood stifle discussion of
our politics is surely not a constructive contribution to the feminist
struggle. When Simone de Beauvoir was asked whether one ought to
criticize women as severely as men, she answered: ‘I think one must be
able to say, “No: no, that won’t do! Write something else, try and do
better. Set higher standards for yourselves! Being a woman is not
enough” ’ (Simone de Beauvoir Today, 117).
The principal objective of feminist criticism has always been politi-
cal: it seeks to expose, not to perpetuate, patriarchial practices. I have
therefore tried to situate my critique of the theoretical positions of
other feminists clearly within the perspective of feminist politics: it is
after all primarily on that terrain that we as feminists must be able to
legitimate our own work. Constructive criticism should, however, indi-
cate the position from which it is speaking; simply to say that one is
speaking as a feminist is not a sufficient response to that responsibility.
Like many other feminist academics, I speak as a woman with only a
tenuous foothold in a male-dominated profession. I also speak as a
Norwegian teaching French literature in England, as a stranger both
to France and to the English-speaking world, and thus as a woman
writing in a foreign language about matters to which in many ways she
remains marginal. Any marginalization is of course relative: I also speak
as a white European trained within the mainstream of Western
thought, which is why I feel that the issues raised by continental,
British and American feminism are still of crucial importance to my
own critical and political practice.
A final point: the terms ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘French’ must not be
taken to represent purely national demarcations: they do not signal the
critics’ birthplace but the intellectual tradition within which they
work. Thus I do not consider the many British and American women
deeply influenced by French thought to be ‘Anglo-American’ critics.

I would like to thank Clare Hall, Cambridge for awarding me their

Hambro Fellowship for 1981/2; though I did not in fact write the
book there, my year in Cambridge gave me the time to think through
many of the issues raised in this text. Kate Belsey’s energetic support
 preface xv
was instrumental in getting the project off the ground in the first
place. I am also grateful for the stimulating response from my many
Australian audiences in the summer of 1983: they gave me much-
needed encouragement and self-confidence. I would also like to thank
Penny Boumelha, Laura Brown, Terry Eagleton and my editor, Terence
Hawkes, for their constructive criticism.
Lady Margaret Hall
Oxford
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ appeared, in a slightly different

version, in The Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory (1985) 9, 1–2,
Winter/Spring.
Sections of chapters 3 and 4 in Part One and chapter 4 in Part Two
appeared in an essay entitled ‘Sexual/textual politics’, in Francis Barker
et al. (eds) (1983) The Politics of Theory. Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the
Sociology of Literature, July 1982. Colchester: University of Essex, 1–14.
 A NOTE ON THE TEXT

Full bibliographical references are listed at the end of the book.

Throughout the text parenthetical documentation has been limited to
give only the amount of information needed to identify a work in the
list of references. At times no parenthetical reference has been needed.
For example, ‘Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel has discussed the problem of
female creativity’ refers to the only work by Chasseguet-Smirgel
included in the list of works cited. Parenthetical references to the actual
book or article have thus only been supplied when the final list of
references include more than one work by the same author.
 INTRODUCTION

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf ?

Feminist readings of Woolf

On a brief survey, the answer to the question posed in the title of this
chapter would seem to be: quite a few feminist critics. It is not of
course surprising that many male critics have found Woolf a frivolous
Bohemian and negligible Bloomsbury aesthete, but the rejection of this
great feminist writer by so many of her Anglo-American feminist
daughters requires further explanation. A distinguished feminist critic
like Elaine Showalter, for example, signals her subtle swerve away from
Woolf by taking over, yet changing, Woolf ’s title. Under Showalter’s
pen A Room of One’s Own becomes A Literature of Their Own, as if she wished
to indicate her problematic distance from the tradition of women
writers she lovingly uncovers in her book.
In this chapter I will first examine some negative feminist responses to
Woolf, exemplified particularly in Elaine Showalter’s long, closely argued
chapter on Woolf in A Literature of Their Own. Then I will indicate some
points towards a different, more positive feminist reading of Woolf,
before finally summing up the salient features of the feminist response to
Woolf ’s writings. The point of this exercise will be to illuminate the
2 sexual/textual politics

relationship between feminist critical readings and the often

unconscious theoretical and political assumptions that inform them.

THE REJECTION OF WOOLF

Elaine Showalter devotes most of her chapter on Woolf to a survey of
Woolf ’s biography and a discussion of A Room of One’s Own. The title of
her chapter, ‘Virginia Woolf and the flight into androgyny’, is indica-
tive of her treatment of Woolf ’s texts. She sets out to prove that for
Woolf the concept of androgyny, which Showalter defines as ‘full bal-
ance and command of an emotional range that includes male and female
elements’ (263), was a ‘myth that helped her evade confrontation with
her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her
anger and ambition’ (264). For Showalter, Woolf ’s greatest sin against
feminism is that ‘even in the moment of expressing feminist conflict,
Woolf wanted to transcend it. Her wish for experience was really a wish
to forget experience’ (282). Showalter sees Woolf ’s insistence on the
androgynous nature of the great writer as a flight away from a ‘troubled
feminism’ (282) and locates the moment of this flight in Room.
In opening her discussion of this essay Showalter claims that:

What is most striking about the book texturally and structurally is its
strenuous charm, its playfulness, its conversational surface. . . . The
techniques of Room are like those of Woolf ’s fiction, particularly
Orlando, which she was writing at the same time: repetition, exagger-
ation, 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.
(282)

Showalter gives the impression here that Woolf ’s use of ‘repetition,

exaggeration, parody, whimsy, and multiple viewpoint’ in Room con-
tributes only to creating an impression of ‘strenuous charm’, and
therefore somehow distracts attention from the message Woolf
wants to convey in the essay. She goes on to object to the imperson-
ality of Room, an impersonality that springs from the fact that
Woolf ’s use of many different personae to voice the narrative ‘I’
 introduction 3
results in frequently recurring shifts and changes of subject position,
leaving the critic no single unified position but a multiplicity of
perspectives to grapple with. Furthermore, Woolf refuses to reveal her
own experience fully and clearly, but insists on disguising or parodying
it in the text, obliging Showalter to point out for us that ‘Fernham’ really
is Newnham College, that ‘Oxbridge’ really is Cambridge and so on.
The steadily shifting, multiple perspectives built up by these tech-
niques evidently exasperate Showalter, who ends by declaring that ‘The
entire book is teasing, sly, elusive in this way; Woolf plays with her
audience, refusing to be entirely serious, denying any earnest or sub-
versive intention’ (284). For Showalter, the only way a feminist can
read the book properly is by remaining ‘detached from its narrative
strategies’ (285); and if she manages to do so, she will see that Room is
in no way a particularly liberating text:

If one can see A Room of One’s Own 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.
(285)

For Showalter, Woolf ’s writing continually escapes the critic’s perspec-

tive, always refusing to be pinned down to one unifying angle of
vision. This elusiveness is then interpreted as a denial of authentic
feminist states of mind, namely the ‘angry and alienated ones’ (287),
and as a commitment to the Bloomsbury ideal of the ‘separation of
politics and art’ (288). This separation is evident, Showalter thinks, in
the fact that Woolf ‘avoided describing her own experience’ (294).
Since this avoidance makes it impossible for Woolf to produce really
committed feminist work, Showalter naturally concludes that Three
Guineas as well as Room fail as feminist essays.
My own view is that remaining detached from the narrative strat-
egies of Room is equivalent to not reading it at all, and that Showalter’s
impatience with the essay is motivated much more by its formal and
stylistic features than by the ideas she extrapolates as its content. But in
order to argue this point more thoroughly, it is necessary first to take a
4 sexual/textual politics

closer look at the theoretical assumptions about the relationship

between aesthetics and politics that can be detected in Showalter’s
chapter.
Showalter’s theoretical framework is never made explicit in A Litera-
ture of Their Own. From what we have seen so far, however, it would be
reasonable to assume that she believes that a text should reflect the
writer’s experience, and that the more authentic the experience is felt
to be by the reader, the more valuable the text. Woolf ’s essays fail to
transmit any direct experience to the reader, according to Showalter,
largely because as an upper-class woman Woolf lacked the necessary
negative experience to qualify as a good feminist writer. This becomes
particularly evident in Three Guineas, Showalter argues:

Here Woolf was betrayed by her own isolation from female main-
stream. Many people were infuriated by the class assumptions in the
book, as well as by its political naiveté. More profoundly, however,
Woolf was cut off from an understanding of the day-to-day life of the
women whom she wished to inspire; characteristically, she rebelled
against aspects of female experience that she had never personally
known and avoided describing her own experience.
(294)

So Showalter quotes Q. D. Leavis’s ‘cruelly accurate Scrutiny review’ with

approval, since ‘Leavis addressed herself to the question of female
experience, making it clear that from her point of view, Woolf knew
damn little about it’ (295).
Showalter thus implicitly defines effective feminist writing as work
that offers a powerful expression of personal experience in a social
framework. According to this definition, Woolf ’s essays can’t be very
political either. Showalter’s position on this point in fact strongly
favours the form of writing commonly known as critical or bourgeois
realism, precluding any real recognition of the value of Virginia
Woolf ’s modernism. It is not a coincidence that the only major literary
theoretician Showalter alludes to in her chapter on Woolf is the Marxist
critic Georg Lukács (296). Given that Showalter herself can hardly be
accused of Marxist leanings, this alliance might strike some readers as
curious. But Lukács was a major champion of the realist novel, which
 introduction 5
he viewed as the supreme culmination of the narrative form. For him,
the great realists, like Balzac or Tolstoy, succeeded in representing the
totality of human life in its social context, thus representing the fun-
damental truth of history: the ‘unbroken upward evolution of man-
kind’ (Lukács, 3). Proclaiming himself a ‘proletarian humanist’, Lukács
states that ‘the object of proletarian humanism is to reconstruct the
complete human personality and free it from the distortion and dis-
memberment to which it has been subjected in class society’ (5). He
reads the great classical tradition in art as the attempt to sustain this
ideal of the total human being even under historical conditions that
prevent its realization outside art.
In art the necessary degree of objectivity in the representation of the
human subject, both as a private individual and as a public citizen, can
be attained only through the representation of types. Lukács argues that the
type is ‘a peculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general
and the particular both in characters and situations’ (6). He then goes
on to insist that ‘true great realism’ is superior to all other art forms:

True great realism thus depicts man and society as complete entities,
instead of showing merely one or the other of their aspects. Measured
by this criterion, artistic trends determined by either exclusive intro-
spection or exclusive extraversion equally impoverish and distort real-
ity. Thus realism means a three-dimensionality, an all-roundness, that
endows with independent life characters and human relationships.
(6)

Given this view of art, it follows that for Lukács any art that repre-
sents ‘the division of the complete human personality into a public and
private sector’ contributes to the ‘mutilation of the essence of man’
(9). It is easy to see how this aspect of Lukács’s aesthetics might appeal
to many feminists. The lack of a totalizing representation of both the
private and the working life of women is Patricia Stubbs’s main com-
plaint against all novels written by both men and women in the period
between 1880 and 1920, and Stubbs echoes Showalter’s objection to
Woolf ’s fiction when she claims that in Woolf ‘there is no coherent
attempt to create new models, new images of women’, and that ‘this
failure to carry her feminism through into her novels seems to stem, at
6 sexual/textual politics

least in part, from her aesthetic theories’ (231). But this demand for
new, realistic images of women takes it for granted that feminist
writers should want to use realist fictional forms in the first place.
Thus both Stubbs and Showalter object to what they regard as
Woolf ’s tendency to wrap everything in a ‘haze of subjective percep-
tions’ (Stubbs, 231), perilously echoing in the process Lukács’s
Stalinist views of the ‘reactionary’ nature of modernist writing.
Modernism, Lukács held, signified an extreme form of the fragmented,
subjectivist, individualist psychologism typical of the oppressed and
exploited human subject of capitalism.1 For him, futurism as well as
surrealism, Joyce as well as Proust, were decadent, regressive descen-
dants of the great anti-humanist Nietzsche, and their art thus lent
itself to exploitation by fascism. Only through a strong, committed
belief in humanist values could art become an effective weapon in the
struggle against fascism. It was this emphasis on a totalizing, humanist
aesthetics that led Lukács to proclaim as late as 1938 that the great
writers of the first part of the twentieth century would undoubtedly
turn out to be Anatole France, Romain Rolland and Thomas and
Heinrich Mann.
Showalter is not of course like Lukács, a proletarian humanist. Even so,
there is detectable within her literary criticism a strong, unquestioned
belief in the values, not of proletarian humanism, but of traditional
bourgeois humanism of a liberal-individualist kind. Where Lukács sees
the harmonious development of the ‘whole person’ as stunted and
frustrated by the inhuman social conditions imposed by capitalism,
Showalter examines the oppression of women’s potential by the relent-
less sexism of patriarchal society. It is certainly true that Lukács
nowhere seems to show any interest in the specific problems of women’s
difficulties in developing as whole and harmonious human beings
under patriarchy; no doubt he assumed naively that once communism
had been constructed everybody, including women, would become
free beings. But it is equally true that Showalter in her own criticism
takes no interest in the necessity of combatting capitalism and fascism.
Her insistence on the need for political art is limited to the struggle
against sexism. Thus she gives Virginia Woolf no credit for having
elaborated a highly original theory of the relations between sexism and
fascism in Three Guineas; nor does she appear to approve of Woolf ’s
 introduction 7
attempts to link feminism to pacifism in the same essay, of which she
merely comments that:

Three Guineas rings false. Its language, all too frequently, is empty
sloganeering and cliché; the stylistic tricks of repetition, exaggeration,
and rhetorical question, so amusing in A Room of One’s Own, become
irritating and hysterical.
(295)

Showalter’s traditional humanism surfaces clearly enough when she

first rejects Woolf for being too subjective, too passive and for wanting
to flee her female gender identity by embracing the idea of androgyny,
and then goes on to reproach Doris Lessing for merging the ‘feminine
ego’ into a greater collective consciousness in her later books (311).
Both writers are similarly flawed: both have in different ways rejected
the fundamental need for the individual to adopt a unified, integrated
self-identity. Both Woolf and Lessing radically undermine the notion
of the unitary self, the central concept of Western male humanism and
one crucial to Showalter’s feminism.
The Lukácsian case implicitly advocated by Stubbs and Showalter
holds that politics is a matter of the right content being represented in
the correct realist form. Virginia Woolf is unsuccessful in Stubbs’s eyes
because she fails to give a ‘truthful picture of women’, a picture that
would include equal emphasis on the private and the public. Showalter
for her part deplores Woolf ’s lack of sensitivity to ‘the ways in which
[female experience] had made [women] strong’ (285). Implicit in
such criticism is the assumption that good feminist fiction would pres-
ent truthful images of strong women with which the reader may iden-
tify. Indeed it is this that Marcia Holly recommends in an article
entitled ‘Consciousness and authenticity: towards a feminist aesthetic’.
According to Holly, the new feminist aesthetic may move ‘away
from formalist criticism and insist that we judge by standards of
authenticity’ (4). Holly, again quoting Lukács, also argues that as
feminists:

We are searching for a truly revolutionary art. The content of a given

piece need not be feminist, of course, for that piece to be humanist,
8 sexual/textual politics

and therefore revolutionary. Revolutionary art is that which roots out

the essentials about the human condition rather than perpetuating
false ideologies.
(42)

For Holly, this kind of universalizing humanist aesthetic leads

straight to a search for the representation of strong, powerful women
in literature, a search reminiscent of The Soviet Writers’ Congress’s
demand for socialist realism in 1934. Instead of strong, happy tractor
drivers and factory workers, we are now, presumably, to demand
strong, happy women tractor drivers. ‘Realism’, Holly argues, ‘first of all
demands a consistent (noncontradictory) perception of those issues
(emotions, motivations, conflicts) to which the work has been limited’
(42). Once again, we are confronted with a version of Showalter’s
demand for a unitary vision, with her exasperation at Woolf ’s use
of mobile, pluralist viewpoints, with her refusal to let herself be iden-
tified with any of the many ‘I’s in her text; the argument has come full
circle.
What feminists such as Showalter and Holly fail to grasp is that the
traditional humanism they represent is in effect part of patriarchal
ideology. At its centre is the seamlessly unified self – either individual
or collective – which is commonly called ‘Man’. As Luce Irigaray or
Hélène Cixous would argue, this integrated self is in fact a phallic self,
constructed on the model of the self-contained, powerful phallus.
Gloriously autonomous, it banishes from itself all conflict, contradic-
tion and ambiguity. In this humanist ideology the self is the sole author
of history and of the literary text: the humanist creator is potent, phal-
lic and male – God in relation to his world, the author in relation to his
text.2 History or the text become nothing but the ‘expression’ of this
unique individual: all art becomes autobiography, a mere window on
to the self and the world, with no reality of its own. The text is reduced
to a passive, ‘feminine’ reflection of an unproblematically ‘given’,
‘masculine’ world or self.
 introduction 9

RESCUING WOOLF FOR FEMINIST POLITICS: SOME

POINTS TOWARDS AN ALTERNATIVE READING
So far we have discussed some aspects of the crypto-Lukácsian perspec-
tive implicit in much contemporary feminist criticism. The major
drawback of this approach is surely signalled in the fact that it proves
incapable of appropriating for feminism the work of the greatest
British woman writer of this century, despite the fact that Woolf was
not only a novelist of considerable genius but a declared feminist and
dedicated reader of other women’s writings. It is surely arguable that if
feminist critics cannot produce a positive political and literary assess-
ment of Woolf ’s writing, then the fault may lie with their own critical
and theoretical perspectives rather than with Woolf ’s texts. But do
feminists have an alternative to this negative reading of Woolf? Let us
see if a different theoretical approach might rescue Virginia Woolf for
feminist politics.3
Showalter wants the literary text to yield the reader a certain secur-
ity, a firm perspective from which to judge the world. Woolf, on the
other hand, seems to practise what we might now call a ‘decon-
structive’ form of writing, one that engages with and thereby exposes
the duplicitous nature of discourse. In her own textual practice, Woolf
exposes the way in which language refuses to be pinned down to an
underlying essential meaning. According to the French philosopher
Jacques Derrida, language is structured as an endless deferral of mean-
ing, and any search for an essential, absolutely stable meaning must
therefore be considered metaphysical. There is no final element, no
fundamental unit, no transcendental signified that is meaningful in itself and
thus escapes the ceaseless interplay of linguistic deferral and difference.
The free play of signifiers will never yield a final, unified meaning that
in turn might ground and explain all the others.4 It is in the light of
such textual and linguistic theory that we can read Woolf ’s playful
shifts and changes of perspective, in both her fiction and in Room, as
something rather more than a wilful desire to irritate the serious-
minded feminist critic. Through her conscious exploitation of the
sportive, sensual nature of language, Woolf rejects the metaphysical
essentialism underlying patriarchal ideology, which hails God, the
Father or the phallus as its transcendental signified.
10 sexual/textual politics

But Woolf does more than practise a non-essentialist form of writ-

ing. She also reveals a deeply sceptical attitude to the male-humanist
concept of an essential human identity. For what can this self-identical
identity be if all meaning is a ceaseless play of difference, if absence as
much as presence is the foundation of meaning? The humanist concept
of identity is also challenged by psychoanalytic theory, which Woolf
undoubtedly knew. The Hogarth Press, founded by Virginia and
Leonard Woolf, published the first English translations of Freud’s
central works, and when Freud arrived in London in 1939 Virginia
Woolf went to visit him. Freud, we are tantalizingly informed, gave her
a narcissus.
For Woolf, as for Freud, unconscious drives and desires constantly
exert a pressure on our conscious thoughts and actions. For psycho-
analysis the human subject is a complex entity, of which the conscious
mind is only a small part. Once one has accepted this view of the
subject, however, it becomes impossible to argue that even our con-
scious wishes and feelings originate within a unified self, since we can
have no knowledge of the possibly unlimited unconscious processes
that shape our conscious thought. Conscious thought, then, must be
seen as the ‘overdetermined’ manifestation of a multiplicity of
structures that intersect to produce that unstable constellation the
liberal humanists call the ‘self ’. These structures encompass not only
unconscious sexual desires, fears and phobias, but also a host of con-
flicting material, social, political and ideological factors of which we
are equally unaware. It is this highly complex network of conflicting
structures, the anti-humanist would argue, that produces the subject
and its experiences, rather than the other way round. This belief does
not of course render the individual’s experiences in any sense less real
or valuable; but it does mean that such experiences cannot be under-
stood other than through the study of their multiple determinants –
determinants of which conscious thought is only one, and a potentially
treacherous one at that. If a similar approach is taken to the literary text,
it follows that the search for a unified individual self, or gender
identity or indeed ‘textual identity’ in the literary work must be seen as
drastically reductive.
It is in this sense that Showalter’s recommendation to remain
detached from the narrative strategies of the text is equivalent to not
 introduction 11
reading it at all. For it is only through an examination of the detailed
strategies of the text on all its levels that we will be able to uncover
some of the conflicting, contradictory elements that contribute to
make it precisely this text, with precisely these words and this configur-
ation. The humanist desire for a unity of vision or thought (or as Holly
puts it, for a ‘noncontradictory perception of the world’) is, in effect, a
demand for a sharply reductive reading of literature – a reading that,
not least in the case of an experimental writer like Woolf, can have little
hope of grasping the central problems posed by pioneering modes of
textual production. A ‘noncontradictory perception of the world’, for
Lukács’s Marxist opponent Bertolt Brecht, is precisely a reactionary
one.
The French feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva has argued that the
modernist poetry of Lautréamont, Mallarmé and others constitutes a
‘revolutionary’ form of writing. The modernist poem, with its abrupt
shifts, ellipses, breaks and apparent lack of logical construction is a
kind of writing in which the rhythms of the body and the unconscious
have managed to break through the strict rational defences of con-
ventional social meaning. Since Kristeva sees such conventional mean-
ing as the structure that sustains the whole of the symbolic order – that
is, all human social and cultural institutions – the fragmentation of
symbolic language in modernist poetry comes for her to parallel and
prefigure a total social revolution. For Kristeva, that is to say, there is a
specific practice of writing that is itself ‘revolutionary’, analogous to sexual
and political transformation, and that by its very existence testifies to
the possibility of transforming the symbolic order of orthodox society
from the inside.5 One might argue in this light that Woolf ’s refusal to
commit herself in her essays to a so-called rational or logical form of
writing, free from fictional techniques, indicates a similar break with
symbolic language, as of course do many of the techniques she deploys
in her novels.
Kristeva also argues that many women will be able to let what she
calls the ‘spasmodic force’ of the unconscious disrupt their language
because of their strong links with the pre-Oedipal mother-figure. But if
these unconscious pulsations were to take over the subject entirely, the
subject would fall back into pre-Oedipal or imaginary chaos and
develop some form of mental illness. The subject whose language lets
12 sexual/textual politics

such forces disrupt the symbolic order, in other words, is also the
subject who runs the greater risk of lapsing into madness. Seen in this
context, Woolf ’s own periodic attacks of mental illness can be linked
both to her textual strategies and to her feminism. For the symbolic
order is a patriarchal order, ruled by the Law of the Father, and any
subject who tries to disrupt it, who lets unconscious forces slip
through the symbolic repression, puts her or himself in a position of
revolt against this regime. Woolf herself suffered acute patriarchal
oppression at the hands of the psychiatric establishment, and Mrs Dal-
loway contains not only a splendidly satirical attack on that profession
(as represented by Sir William Bradshaw), but also a superbly perspica-
cious representation of a mind that succumbs to ‘imaginary’ chaos in
the character of Septimus Smith. Indeed Septimus can be seen as the
negative parallel to Clarissa Dalloway, who herself steers clear of the
threatening gulf of madness only at the price of repressing her passions
and desires, becoming a cold but brilliant woman highly admired in
patriarchal society. In this way Woolf discloses the dangers of the inva-
sion of unconscious pulsions as well as the price paid by the subject
who successfully preserves her sanity, thus maintaining a precarious
balance between an overestimation of so-called ‘feminine’ madness and
a too precipitate rejection of the values of the symbolic order.6
It is evident that for Julia Kristeva it is not the biological sex of a
person, but the subject position she or he takes up, that determines
their revolutionary potential. Her views of feminist politics reflect this
refusal of biologism and essentialism. The feminist struggle, she
argues, must be seen historically and politically as a three-tiered one,
which can be schematically summarized as follows:
1 Women demand equal access to the symbolic order. Liberal
feminism. Equality.
2 Women reject the male symbolic order in the name of difference.
Radical feminism. Femininity extolled.
3 (This is Kristeva’s own position.) Women reject the dichotomy
between masculine and feminine as metaphysical.
The third position is one that has deconstructed the opposition
between masculinity and femininity, and therefore necessarily
challenges the very notion of identity. Kristeva writes:
 introduction 13
In the third attitude, which I strongly advocate – which I imagine? –
the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival
entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics. What can
‘identity’, even ‘sexual identity’, mean in a new theoretical and scien-
tific space where the very notion of identity is challenged?

(‘Women’s time’, 33–4)

The relationship between the second and the third positions here
requires some comment. If the defence of the third position implies a
total rejection of stage two (which I do not think it does), this would
be a grievous political error. For it still remains politically essential for
feminists to defend women as women in order to counteract the
patriarchal oppression that precisely despises women as women. But
an ‘undeconstructed’ form of ‘stage two’ feminism, unaware of the
metaphysical nature of gender identities, runs the risk of becoming
an inverted form of sexism. It does so by uncritically taking over the
very metaphysical categories set up by patriarchy in order to keep
women in their places, despite attempts to attach new feminist values
to these old categories. An adoption of Kristeva’s ‘deconstructed’
form of feminism therefore in one sense leaves everything as it was –
our positions in the political struggle have not changed – but
in another sense radically transforms our awareness of the nature of
that struggle.
Here, I feel, Kristeva’s feminism echoes the position taken up by
Virginia Woolf some sixty years earlier. Read from this perspective, To
the Lighthouse illustrates the destructive nature of a metaphysical belief
in strong, immutably fixed gender identities – as represented by Mr
and Mrs Ramsay – whereas Lily Briscoe (an artist) represents the
subject who deconstructs this opposition, perceives its pernicious
influence and tries as far as is possible in a still rigidly patriarchal
order to live as her own woman, without regard for the crippling
definitions of sexual identity to which society would have her con-
form. It is in this context that we must situate Woolf ’s crucial concept
of androgyny. This is not, as Showalter argues, a flight from fixed
gender identities, but a recognition of their falsifying metaphysical
nature. Far from fleeing such gender identities because she fears them,
14 sexual/textual politics

Woolf rejects them because she has seen them for what they are. She
has understood that the goal of the feminist struggle must precisely be
to deconstruct the death-dealing binary oppositions of masculinity
and femininity.
In her fascinating book Toward Androgyny, published in 1973, Carolyn
Heilbrun sets out her own definition of androgyny in similar terms
when she describes it as the concept of an ‘unbounded and hence
fundamentally indefinable nature’ (xi). When she later finds it neces-
sary to distinguish androgyny from feminism, and therefore implicitly
defines Woolf as a non-feminist, her distinction seems to be based on
the belief that only the first two stages of Kristeva’s three-tiered strug-
gle could count as feminist strategies. She acknowledges that in modern-
day society it might be difficult to separate the defenders of
androgyny from feminists, ‘because of the power men now hold, and
because of the political weakness of women’ (xvi–xvii), but refuses to
draw the conclusion that feminists can in fact desire androgyny. As
opposed to Heilbrun, I would stress with Kristeva that a theory that
demands the deconstruction of sexual identity is indeed authentically
feminist. In Woolf ’s case the question is rather whether or not her
remarkably advanced understanding of feminist objectives prevented
her from taking up a progressive political position in the feminist
struggles of her day. In the light of Three Guineas (and of A Room of One’s
Own), the answer to this question is surely no. The Woolf of Three Guineas
shows an acute awareness of the dangers of both liberal and radical
feminism (Kristeva’s positions one and two), and argues instead for a
‘stage three’ position; but despite her objections she ends up firmly in
favour of women’s right to financial independence, education and
entry into the professions – all central issues for feminists of the 1920s
and 1930s.
Nancy Topping Bazin reads Woolf ’s concept of androgyny as the
union of masculinity and femininity – precisely the opposite, in fact, of
viewing it as the deconstruction of the duality. For Bazin, masculinity
and femininity in Woolf are concepts that retain their full essential
charge of meaning. She thus argues that Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse
must be read as being just as feminine as Mrs Ramsay, and that the
androgynous solution of the novel consists in a balance of the masculine
and the feminine ‘approach to truth’ (138). Herbert Marder,
 introduction 15
conversely, advances in his Feminism and Art the trite and traditional
case that Mrs Ramsay must be seen as an androgynous ideal in herself:
‘Mrs. Ramsay as wife, mother, hostess, is the androgynous artist in life,
creating with the whole of her being’ (128). Heilbrun rightly rejects
such a reading, claiming that:

It is only in groping our way through the clouds of sentiment and

misplaced biographical information that we are able to discover Mrs.
Ramsay, far from androgynous and complete, to be as one-sided and
life-denying as her husband.
(155)

The host of critics who with Marder read Mrs Ramsay and Mrs Dal-
loway as Woolf ’s ideal of feminity are thus either betraying their ves-
tigial sexism – the sexes are fundamentally different and should stay
that way – or their adherence to what Kristeva would call a ‘stage two’
feminism: women are different from men and it is time they
began praising the superiority of their sex. These are both, I believe,
misreadings of Woolf ’s texts, as when Kate Millett writes that:

Virginia Woolf glorified two housewives, Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs.

Ramsay, recorded the suicidal misery of Rhoda in The Waves without
ever explaining its causes, and was argumentative yet somehow
unsuccessful, perhaps because unconvinced, in conveying the frustra-
tions of the woman artist in Lily Briscoe.
(139–40)

A combination of Derridean and Kristevan theory, then, would seem

to hold considerable promise for future feminist readings of Woolf. But
it is important to be aware of the political limitations of Kristeva’s
arguments. Though her views on the ‘politics of the subject’ constitute
a significant contribution to revolutionary theory, her belief that the
revolution within the subject somehow prefigures a later social revolu-
tion poses severe problems for any materialist analysis of society. The
strength of Kristevan theory lies in its emphasis on the politics of
language as a material and social structure, but it takes little or no
account of other conflicting ideological and material structures that
16 sexual/textual politics

must be part of any radical social transformation. These and other

problems will be discussed in the chapter on Kristeva (pp. 149–72). It
should nevertheless be emphasized that the ‘solution’ to Kristeva’s
problems lies not in a speedy return to Lukács, but in an integration
and transvaluation of her ideas within a larger feminist theory of
ideology.
A Marxist-feminist critic like Michèle Barrett has stressed the materi-
alist aspect of Woolf ’s politics. In her introduction to Virginia Woolf:
Women and Writing, she argues that:

Virginia Woolf ’s critical essays offer us an unparalleled account of the

development of women’s writing, perceptive discussion of her pre-
decessors and contemporaries, and a pertinent insistence on the
material conditions which have structured women’s consciousness.
(36)

Barrett, however, considers Woolf only as essayist and critic, and seems
to take the view that when it comes to her fiction, Woolf ’s aesthetic
theory, particularly the concept of an androgynous art, ‘continually
resists the implications of the materialist position she advances in A
Room of One’s Own’ (22). A Kristevan approach to Woolf, as I have argued,
would refuse to accept this binary opposition of aesthetics on the one
hand and politics on the other, locating the politics of Woolf ’s writing
precisely in her textual practice. That practice is of course much more marked
in the novels than in most of the essays.
Another group of feminist critics, centred around Jane Marcus, con-
sistently argue for a radical reading of Woolf ’s work without recourse
to either Marxist or post-structuralist theory. Jane Marcus claims Woolf
as a ‘guerrilla fighter in a Victorian skirt’ (1), and sees in her a cham-
pion of both socialism and feminism. Marcus’s article ‘Thinking back
through our mothers’, however, makes it abundantly clear that it is
exceptionally difficult to argue this case convincingly. Her article opens
with this assertion:

Writing, for Virginia Woolf, was a revolutionary act. Her alienation from
British patriarchal culture and its capitalist and imperialist forms and
values, was so intense that she was filled with terror and determination
 introduction 17
as she wrote. A guerrilla fighter in a Victorian skirt, she trembled with
fear as she prepared her attacks, her raids on the enemy.
(1)

Are we to believe that there is a causal link between the first and the
following sentences – that writing was a revolutionary act for Woolf
because she could be seen to tremble as she wrote? Or should the passage
be read as an extended metaphor, as an image of the fears of any woman
writing under patriarchy? In which case it no longer tells us anything
specific about Woolf ’s particular writing practices. Or again, perhaps
the first sentence is the claim that the following sentences are meant to
corroborate? If this is the case, the argument also fails. For Marcus here
unproblematically evokes biographical evidence to sustain her thesis
about the nature of Woolf ’s writing: the reader is to be convinced by
appeals to biographical circumstances rather than to the texts. But does
it really matter whether or not Woolf was in the habit of trembling at
her desk? Surely what matters is what she wrote? This kind of emotion-
alist argument surfaces again in Marcus’s extensive discussion of the
alleged parallels between Woolf and the German Marxist critic Walter
Benjamin (‘Both Woolf and Benjamin chose suicide rather than exile
before the tyranny of fascism’ (7)). But surely Benjamin’s suicide at the
Spanish frontier, where as an exiled German Jew fleeing the Nazi occu-
pation of France he feared being handed over to the Gestapo, must be
considered in a rather different light from Woolf ’s suicide in her own
back garden in unoccupied England, however political we might wish
her private life to be? Marcus’s biographical analogies strive to establish
Woolf as a remarkable individual, and so fall back into the old-style
historical-biographical criticism much in vogue before the American
New Critics entered the scene in the 1930s. How far a radical feminist
approach can simply take over such traditional methods untransformed
is surely debatable.

We have seen that current Anglo-American feminist criticism tends to

read Woolf through traditional aesthetic categories, relying largely on a
liberal-humanist version of the Lukácsian aesthetics, against which
Brecht so effectively polemicized. The anti-humanist reading I have
advocated as yielding a better understanding of the political nature of
18 sexual/textual politics

Woolf ’s aesthetics has yet to be written. The only study of Woolf to

have integrated some of the theoretical advances of post-structuralist
thought is written by a man, Perry Meisel, and though it is by no
means an anti-feminist or even an unfeminist work, it is nevertheless
primarily concerned with the influence on Woolf of Walter Pater. Mei-
sel is the only critic of my acquaintance to have grasped the radically
deconstructed character of Woolf ’s texts:

With ‘difference’ the reigning principle in Woolf as well as Pater, there

can be no natural or inherent characteristics of any kind, even between
the sexes, because all character, all language, even the language of
sexuality, emerges by means of a difference from itself.
(234)

Meisel also shrewdly points out that this principle of difference makes
it impossible to select any one of Woolf ’s works as more representative,
more essentially ‘Woolfian’ than any other, since the notable
divergence among her texts ‘forbids us to believe any moment in
Woolf ’s career to be more conclusive than another’ (242). It is a mis-
take, Meisel concludes, to ‘insist on the coherence of self and author in
the face of a discourse that dislocates or decentres them both, that
skews the very categories to which our remarks properly refer’ (242).
The paradoxical conclusion of our investigations into the feminist
reception of Woolf is therefore that she has yet to be adequately wel-
comed and acclaimed by her feminist daughters in England and
America. To date she has either been rejected by them as insufficiently
feminist, or praised on grounds that seem to exclude her fiction. By
their more or less unwitting subscription to the humanist aesthetic
categories of the traditional male academic hierarchy, feminist critics
have seriously undermined the impact of their challenge to that very
institution. The only difference between a feminist and a non-feminist
critic in this tradition then becomes the formal political perspective of
the critic. The feminist critic thus unwittingly puts herself in a position
from which it becomes impossible to read Virginia Woolf as the pro-
gressive, feminist writer of genius she undoubtedly was. A feminist
criticism that would do both justice and homage to its great mother
and sister: this, surely, should be our goal.
Part I
Anglo-American Feminist Criticism
 1
TWO FEMINIST CLASSICS

In the 1960s, for the first time since the women’s vote was won,
feminism again surfaced as an important political force in the Western
world. Many women now see Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique,
published in 1963, as the first sign that American women were becom-
ing increasingly unhappy with their lot in affluent post-war society.
The early initiatives towards a more specific organization of women as
feminists came from activists in the civil rights movement, and later
also from women involved in protest actions against the war in Viet-
nam.1 Thus the ‘new’ feminists were politically committed activists
who were not afraid to take a stand and fight for their views. The link
between feminism and women’s struggle for civil rights and peace was
not a new one, nor was it coincidental. Many nineteenth-century
American feminists, women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.
Antony, were first active in the struggle for the abolition of slavery.
Both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries women involved in
campaigns against racism soon came to see that the values and strat-
egies that contributed to keeping blacks in their place mirrored the
values and strategies invoked to keep women subservient to men. In the
civil rights movement, women rightly took offence when both black
and white male liberationists aggressively refused to extend their ideals
to the oppression of women. Remarks like those of Stokely Carmichael:
22 anglo-american feminist criticism

‘The only position for women in the SNCC is prone’ (1966), or

Eldridge Cleaver: ‘Women? I guess they ought to exercise Pussy Power’
(1968),2 contributed to the alienation of many women from the male-
dominated civil rights groups. In other politically progressive move-
ments (the anti-war movements, various Marxist groups), women
were experiencing the same discrepancy between male activists’ egali-
tarian commitment and their crudely sexist behaviour towards female
comrades. In the late 1960s, women were increasingly starting to form
their own liberation groups, both as a supplement and an alternative to
the other forms of political struggle in which they were involved.
By 1970, there were already many different strands of political
thought in the ‘new’ women’s movement. Robin Morgan clearly char-
acterizes NOW (National Organization of Women), the organization
founded by Betty Friedan, as middle-class, liberal and reformist, declar-
ing that the ‘only hope of a new feminist movement is some kind of
only now barely emerging politics of revolutionary feminism’ (xxiii).
Though Morgan is hazy about the definition of ‘revolutionary’ in this
statement (does it mean anti-capitalist, separatist, or both?), it is clear
that two major brands of modern feminism were already crystallizing
as conflicting tendencies within the broad spectrum of the women’s
movement. The bibliography and contact addresses in Sisterhood is Power-
ful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by
Robin Morgan and published in 1970, run to 26 pages, amply docu-
menting the fact that by 1970 the women’s movement as we now
know it was well-established in the USA.
What then, was the role of literary criticism in this movement? The
densely printed pages of bibliography in Sisterhood is Powerful yield only
five references to works wholly or partly concerned with literature:
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1927), Simone de Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex (1949), Katharine M. Rogers’s The Troublesome Helpmate (1966),
Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women (1968) and Kate Millett’s Sexual
Politics (1969). These works, then, form the basis for the explosive
development of Anglo-American feminist criticism. Sisterhood is Powerful
carries only one article on literature (the first chapter of Kate Millett’s
essay).
If we are to judge by Robin Morgan’s selection, then, literary criti-
cism was hardly a central factor in the early period of the new women’s
 two feminist classics 23
movement. Much like any other radical critic, the feminist critic can be
seen as the product of a struggle mainly concerned with social and
political change; her specific role within it becomes an attempt to
extend such general political action to the cultural domain. This
cultural/political battle is necessarily two-pronged: it must work to
realize its objective both through institutional changes and through the
medium of literary criticism. For many feminist critics, a central prob-
lem has therefore been that of uniting political engagement with what
is conventionally regarded as ‘good’ literary criticism. For if the exist-
ing criteria of what counts as ‘good’ are laid down by white bourgeois
males, there seems little chance of feminist work satisfying the very
criteria it is trying to challenge and subvert. The aspiring feminist
critic, then, has apparently only two options: to work to reform those
criteria from within the academic institution, producing a judicious
critical discourse that strives to maintain its feminism without grossly
upsetting the academic establishment, or to write off the academic
criteria of evaluation as reactionary and of no importance to her work.
In the early stages of feminist criticism in particular, some feminists,
such as Lillian S. Robinson, consciously chose the second option:

Some people are trying to make an honest woman out of the feminist
critic, to claim that every ‘worthwhile’ department should stock one. I
am not terribly interested in whether feminist criticism becomes a
respectable part of academic criticism; I am very much concerned that
feminist critics become a useful part of the women’s movement.
(35)

This has not, however, been the most typical response to the apparent
dilemma. Like all other literary critics, the overwhelming majority of
feminist critics in the 1980s work within academic institutions, and are
thus inevitably caught up in the professional struggle for jobs, tenure
and promotion. This professionalization of feminist criticism is not
necessarily a negative phenomenon, but, as we shall see later, the real
or apparent conflict between critical standards and political engage-
ment recurs in various guises in the writings of feminist critics
throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. One of the reasons for Kate
Millett’s success may be that she, as no other feminist critic, managed
24 anglo-american feminist criticism

to bridge the gap between institutional and non-institutional criticism:

Sexual Politics must surely be the world’s best-selling PhD thesis. The
book earned Millett an academic degree at a reputable university, and
also had a powerful political impact on a world-wide audience both
inside and outside the women’s movement.

KATE MILLETT
Sexual Politics is divided into three parts: ‘Sexual politics’, ‘Historical
background’ and ‘The literary reflection’. The first part presents Mil-
lett’s thesis about the nature of power relationships between the sexes,
the second surveys the fate of feminist struggle and its opponents in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the final section sets out to
show how the sexual power-politics described in her preceding chap-
ters is enacted in the works of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman
Mailer and Jean Genet. The book established the feminist approach to
literature as a critical force to be reckoned with. Its impact makes it the
‘mother’ and precursor of all later works of feminist criticism in the
Anglo-American tradition, and feminists of the 1970s and 1980s have
never been reluctant to acknowledge their debt to, or disagreement
with, Millett’s path-breaking essay. Her criticism represented a striking
break with the ideology of American New Criticism, which at that time
still retained a dominant position within the literary academy. In
courageous opposition to the New Critics, Millett argued that social
and cultural contexts must be studied if literature was to be properly
understood, a view she shares with all later feminist critics regardless of
their otherwise differing interests.
The most striking aspect of Millett’s critical studies, though, is the
boldness with which she reads ‘against the grain’ of the literary text.
Her approach to Miller or Mailer is devoid of what was in 1969 a
conventional respect for the authority and intentions of the author. Her
analysis openly posits another perspective from the author’s, and
shows how precisely such conflict between reader and author/text can
expose the underlying premises of a work. Millett’s importance as a
literary critic lies in her relentless defence of the reader’s right to posit
her own viewpoint, rejecting the received hierarchy of text and reader.
As a reader, Kate Millett is thus neither submissive nor lady-like: her
 two feminist classics 25
style is that of a hard-nosed street kid out to challenge the author’s
authority at every turn. Her approach destroys the prevailing image of
the reader/critic as passive/feminine recipient of authoritarian dis-
course, and as such is exactly suited to feminism’s political purposes.
Unfortunately for later feminist critics, the positive aspects of
Millett’s study are entangled with a series of less-successful tactics,
which seriously flaw Sexual Politics as a feminist literary study. While
readily acknowledging Millett’s importance, many feminists have
noticed with dismay her extreme reluctance to acknowledge any debt
to her own feminist precursors. Her views of patriarchal politics are
obviously deeply influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering
analysis in The Second Sex, but this debt is never acknowledged by Millett,
who makes only two tangential references to Beauvoir’s essay. Though
Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women contains many discussions of
Norman Mailer’s work, often quoting the very passages that Millett later
selects for her own book, the latter only briefly mentions Ellmann’s
‘witty essay’ (329), and acknowledges no direct influence. Katharine M.
Rogers’s study of misogyny in literature is mentioned in a general foot-
note (45), but though her thesis about the cultural causes of male miso-
gyny is strikingly similar to Millett’s own, it is passed over in silence.
This astonishing absence in a feminist writer of due recognition of
her feminist precursors is also evident in Millett’s treatment of women
authors. We have already seen that she dismisses Virginia Woolf in one
brief passage; in fact, with the sole exception of Charlotte Brontë, Sexual
Politics deals exclusively with male authors. It is as if Millett wishes
consciously or unconsciously to suppress the evidence of earlier
antipatriarchal works, not least if her precursors were women: she
discusses John Stuart Mill at length, for example, but not Mary
Wollstonecraft. That she chooses to read the French homosexual Jean
Genet’s texts as representations of a subversive perception of gender
roles and sexual politics, but never even mentions women writers like
Edith Wharton or Doris Lessing, reinforces this impression. It is as if
Millett, to give birth to her own text, must at all cost reject any possible
‘mother-figures’.
There are, however, more concrete reasons for Millett’s superficial
treatment of other women writers and theoreticians. Millett defines the
‘essence of politics’ as power, seeking to prove that ‘However muted its
26 anglo-american feminist criticism

present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as

perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its
most fundamental concepts of power’ (25). Her definition of sexual
politics is simply this: the process whereby the ruling sex seeks to
maintain and extend its power over the subordinate sex. Her book as a
whole is the elaboration of this single statement, rhetorically structured
so as to demonstrate the persistence and pervasiveness of this process
throughout cultural life. All of Millett’s topics and examples are chosen
for their capacity to illustrate this thesis. As a rhetorical statement, the
book is therefore remarkably unified, a powerful fist in the solar plexus
of patriarchy. Every detail is organically subordinated to the political
message, and this, one might claim, is the real motive for Millett’s
reluctance to acknowledge her forceful female precursors. For to
devote much of her book to analysing patterns of subversion in women
writers would unwittingly undermine her own thesis about the
remorseless, all-encompassing, monolithic nature of sexual power-
politics. Millett’s view of sexual ideology cannot account for the evi-
dent fact that throughout history a few exceptional women have indeed
managed to resist the full pressure of patriarchal ideology, becoming
conscious of their own oppression and voicing their opposition to
male power. Only a concept of ideology as a contradictory construct,
marked by gaps, slides and inconsistencies, would enable feminism to
explain how even the severest ideological pressures will generate their
own lacunae.
Millett’s limited theory of patriarchal oppression also explains her
unwillingness to acknowledge Katharine M. Rogers’s contribution to
the study of sexism in literature. In her study of male misogyny, Rogers
lists a variety of cultural reasons for the phenomenon: 1) rejection of
or guilt about sex; 2) a reaction against the idealization with which
men have glorified women; 3) patriarchal feeling, the wish to keep
women subject to men. This last reason, Rogers claims, is the ‘most
important cause of misogyny, because the most widely and firmly
entrenched in society’ (272). Millett’s own thesis comes extremely
close to Rogers’s third proposition, a fact that one might expect her to
acknowledge. Instead, Millett does not refer to this part of Rogers’s
work, and persists in arguing her own theory of one single cause of
patriarchal oppression. Her reductionist approach leads her to explain
 two feminist classics 27
all cultural phenomena purely in terms of power politics, as for instance
in her account of the courtly love tradition:

One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is a game the

master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level. . . . As
the sociologist Hugo Beigel has observed, both the courtly and the
romantic versions of love are ‘grants’ which the male concedes out of
his total power. Both have had the effect of obscuring the patriarchal
character of Western culture and in their general tendency to attribute
impossible virtues to women, have ended by confining them in a
narrow and often remarkably conscribing sphere of behavior.
(37)

The rhetorical requirements of Millett’s thesis also force her into

sometimes inaccurate or truncated accounts of opposing theories. Her
widely influential presentation of Freudian and post-Freudian theory
sets out to prove that ‘Sigmund Freud was beyond question the strong-
est individual counterrevolutionary force in the ideology of sexual
politics during the period’ (178). But any rhetorical reduction of con-
tradiction is bound to have particularly damaging effects in the case of
Freud, whose texts are notoriously difficult to pin down to a single,
unified position – not only because of his theory of the unconscious,
but also because of his constant revisions of his own standpoint. Mil-
lett’s brusque technique is to discard all Freud’s own confessions of
tentativeness and uncertainty as mere ‘moments of humble confusion’
(178), before proceeding to what she sees as a savage demolition of
psychoanalytical theory – a demolition that can now be demonstrated
to be based on misreadings and misunderstandings on Millett’s part.
Her final diatribe against Freud and psychoanalytic theory claims with-
out nuance or reservation that psychoanalysis is a form of biological
essentialism – that is, a theory that reduces all behaviour to inborn
sexual characteristics:

Now it can be said scientifically that women are inherently subservi-

ent, and males dominant, more strongly sexed and therefore entitled
to sexually subjugate the female, who enjoys her oppression and
deserves it, for she is by her very nature vain, stupid, and hardly better
28 anglo-american feminist criticism

than barbarian, if she is human at all. Once this bigotry has acquired
the cachet of science, the counterrevolution may proceed pretty
smoothly.
(203)

Millett’s rejection of Freud rests largely on her distaste for what she
takes to be his theories of penis envy, female narcissism and female
masochism. But these readings of Freud have now been powerfully
challenged by other feminists. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose have
persuasively argued that Freud does not take sexual identity to be an in-
born, biological essence, and that Freudian psychoanalysis in fact sees
sexual identity as an unstable subject position which is culturally and
socially constructed in the process of the child’s insertion into human
society. As for Millett’s interpretation of penis envy and female narcis-
sism and masochism, these too have all been challenged by other
women: Sarah Kofman and Ulrike Prokop have both in different con-
texts read Freud’s account of the narcissistic woman as a representation
of female power, and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel has argued a cogent
case for seeing female penis envy as a manifestation of the little girl’s
need to establish a sense of her own identity as separate from the
mother, a process which for Chasseguet-Smirgel is crucial for the later
development of the woman’s creativity.
Another interesting aspect of Millett’s account of Freud is that she
effectively suppresses all references to Freud’s arguably most funda-
mental insight: the influence of unconscious desire on conscious
action. As Cora Kaplan has convincingly argued, Millett’s theory of
sexual ideology as a set of false beliefs deployed against women by a
conscious, well-organized male conspiracy ignores the fact that not all
misogyny is conscious, and that even women may unconsciously
internalize sexist attitudes and desires. In her discussion of Sexual Politics,
Kaplan emphasizes the consequences of this view for Millett’s selection
of authors to be discussed:

Gender renegades such as Mill and Engels, are allowed to espouse

contradictions, but Feminism itself must be positivistic, fully con-
scious, morally and politically correct. It must know what it wants, and
since what many women wanted was full of contradictions and
 two feminist classics 29
confusions, still entangled in what patriarchy wanted them to be or
wanted for them, Millett does not let them reveal too much of their
‘weakness’.
(10)

During the first part of the 1970s, at least until the publication in
1974 of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Millett’s unremit-
tingly negative account of psychoanalysis remained mostly unchal-
lenged among feminists in England and America. As late as 1976,
Patricia Meyer Spacks (35) praised the account of psychoanalysis in
Sexual Politics as one of the book’s strong points. Though, as we have
seen, there exists today a varied, highly developed body of feminist
readings and appropriations of Freudian theory, Millett’s denunciation
of psychoanalysis is still widely accepted by feminists both inside and
outside the women’s movement. The continuing effectiveness of her
views on this point may be linked to the fact that her theory of sexual
oppression as a conscious, monolithic plot against women leads to a
seductively optimistic view of the possibilities for full liberation. For
Millett, woman is an oppressed being without a recalcitrant
unconscious to reckon with; she merely has to see through the false
ideology of the ruling male patriarchy in order to cast it off and be
free. If, however, we accept with Freud that all human beings – even
women – may internalize the standards of their oppressors, and that
they may distressingly identify with their own persecutors, liberation
can no longer be seen solely as the logical consequence of a rational
exposure of the false beliefs on which patriarchal rule is based.
Millett’s literary criticism is flawed by the same relentless rhetorical
reductionism that mars her critique of more general cultural theories.
A case in point is her reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. As Patricia
Spacks has pointed out, this contains some serious and elementary
misreadings: Millett states that ‘Lucy will not marry Paul even after the
tyrant has softened’ (146), even though Brontë has Lucy accept Paul
Emmanuel’s offer of future marriage; she also comments that ‘The
keeper turned kind must be eluded anyway; Paul turned lover is
drowned’ (146), when in fact Brontë leaves the question of Paul’s
possible death unsettlingly open so that the reader may construct her
own conclusion to the text. One might agree with Spacks, however, that
30 anglo-american feminist criticism

what Millett’s readings lack in style and accuracy they make up for in
passion and engagement. The force of Millett’s eloquent, angry
indictments indeed lends considerable authority to her survey of male
sexual violence against women as displayed in modern literature: there
can be no doubt that the writers she attacks (principally Henry Miller
and Norman Mailer) do exhibit an offensive interest in male degra-
dations of female sexuality. But Millett’s critical readings, like her
cultural analysis, are guided by a monolithic conception of sexual
ideology that renders her impervious to nuances, inconsistencies and
ambiguities in the works she examines. For Millett, it appears, every-
thing is dichotomy or opposition, utterly black or untaintedly white.
Though she recognizes that Lucy Snowe in Villette is trapped in the
sexual and cultural contradictions of her time, she nevertheless lam-
basts Brontë for the ‘deviousness of her fictional devices, her continual
flirtation with the bogs of sentimentality which period feeling man-
dates she sink in’ (146). She rejects as a purely conventional device the
irruption of romantic (‘sentimental’) discourse into the predominantly
realist Villette, whereas later feminist critics, particularly Mary Jacobus
(‘The buried letter’), have shown that it is precisely in the fissures and
dislocations created by this irruption that we can locate some of the
deeper implications of sexuality and femininity in the novel.
As a literary critic, Millett pays little or no attention to the formal
structures of the literary text: hers is pure content analysis. She also
unproblematically assumes the identity of author, narrator and hero
when this suits her case, and statements like ‘Paul Morel is of course
Lawrence himself ’ (246) abound. The title of the main literary section
of Sexual Politics is ‘The literary reflection’, which would seem to imply a
somewhat mechanical, simplistic theory of the relationship between
literature and the social and cultural forces she has previously dis-
cussed. But Millett does not in fact succeed in showing exactly what
literature is a reflection of, or precisely how it reflects. The title keeps us
suspended in mid-air, positing a relationship between the literary and
some other region, a relationship which is neither explicitly stated nor
detailedly explored.
Sexual Politics, then, can hardly be taken as a model for later genera-
tions of feminist critics. Indeed even Millett’s radical assault on
hierarchical modes of reading, which posit the author as a god-like
 two feminist classics 31
authority to be humbly hearkened to by the reader/critic, has its limits.
She can produce this admirably iconoclastic form of reading only
because her study treats of texts that she rightly finds deeply distasteful:
those written by male authors positing and parading male sexual
supremacy. Feminist criticism in the 1970s and 1980s, by contrast, has
focused mainly on women’s texts. Since Millett avoids any feminist or
female-authored text (except Villette), she is not confronted with the
problem of how to read women’s texts. Can they be read in the same
splendidly anti-authoritarian fashion? Or must women reading
women’s texts take up the old, respectfully subordinate stance in rela-
tion to the author? Kate Millett’s criticism, wholly preoccupied as it is
with the abominable male, can give us no guidance on these matters.

MARY ELLMANN
Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women (1968) was published before Kate
Millett’s Sexual Politics. If I choose to discuss it after Millett’s essay, this in
part reflects the fact that Ellmann’s brilliant book never became as
influential as Millett’s among feminists at large. The more narrow
appeal of Ellmann’s essay is probably in large measure due to the fact
that Thinking About Women does not deal with the political and historical
aspects of patriarchy independently of literary analysis. As Ellmann
herself puts it in her preface: ‘I am most interested in women as words’
(xv), an approach that gives her book a direct appeal to feminists with
literary interests, though it is quite clearly written for a general reader-
ship rather than for a specialized academic one. Where Millett’s text
abounds in footnotes and bibliography, Ellmann’s relatively few foot-
notes are mostly sardonic or satirical, and she gives her more academic
readers no bibliography to peruse. Together with Millett’s essay,
Ellmann’s book constitutes the basic source of inspiration for what is
often called ‘Images of Women’ criticism, the search for female stereo-
types in the work of male writers and in the critical categories
employed by male reviewers commenting on women’s work. This type
of criticism will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.
The main thesis of Thinking About Women is that Western culture at all
levels is permeated by a phenomenon Ellmann labels ‘thought by sex-
ual analogy’. According to Ellmann, this can best be described as our
32 anglo-american feminist criticism

general tendency to ‘comprehend all phenomena, however shifting, in

terms of our original and simple sexual differences; and . . . classify
almost all experience by means of sexual analogy’ (6). This intellectual
habit deeply influences our perception of the world: ‘Ordinarily, not
only sexual terms but sexual opinions are imposed upon the external
world. All forms are subsumed by our concept of male and female
temperament’ (8). The purpose of Ellmann’s essay is to expose the
ludicrous and illogical nature of this sexual mode of thought. She
therefore sets out to give us an example of the kind of society in which
thinking by sexual analogy might be justified, before contrasting this
with our own situation:

Men are stronger than women, and the reproductive role of women is
more prolonged and more arduous than men. An utterly practical
(though not an ideal) society would be one in which these facts were
of such importance that all men and women were totally absorbed in
their demonstration – that is in the use of strength and the completion
of pregnancies. Both sexes would live without intermissions in which
to recognize their own monotony or, more often, to describe the
complex fascination in which their senses disguised it . . .

But leisure is primarily mindful, and as we escape the exigency of

sexual roles, we more fully indulge the avocation of sexual analogies.
The proportions of the two seem particularly grotesque now when the
roles themselves have taken on an unprecedented irrelevance. It is
strangely as though we had come upon circumstances which render
the physiology of sex nearly superfluous, and therefore comic in its
eager and generous self-display.
(2–3)

In our modern world the reproductive capacity of women has

become socially almost obsolescent, and the physical strength of men
gratuitous. We should therefore no longer feel the need to think in
sexual stereotypes of the ‘male = strong and active’ and ‘female = weak
and passive’ kind. But, as Thinking About Women amply documents, these
and similar sexual categories influence all aspects of human life, not
least so-called intellectual activities, where, as Ellmann points out, the
 two feminist classics 33
metaphors of fertilization, gestation, pregnancy and birth are of central
importance.
Ellmann’s second chapter, ‘Phallic criticism’, deals with sexual ana-
logy in the field of literary criticism. Her analysis of this phenomenon
can be gleaned from the following passage:

With a kind of inverted fidelity, the discussion of women’s books by

men will arrive punctually at the point of preoccupation, which is the
fact of femininity. Books by women are treated as though they them-
selves were women, and criticism embarks, at its happiest, upon an
intellectual measuring of busts and hips.
(29)

One of the most comic instances of ‘phallic criticism’ is Ellmann’s

spoof of a male reviewer’s treatment of Françoise Sagan; for the sake of
brevity, I first quote the male review and then immediately juxtapose
Ellmann’s countermove:

Poor old Françoise Sagan. Just one more old-fashioned old-timer,

bypassed in the rush for the latest literary vogue and for youth.
Superficially, her career in America resembles the lifespan of those
medieval beauties who flowered at 14, were deflowered at 15, were
old at 30 and crones at 40.

From a review of a new novel by the popular French novelist,

François Sagan:

Poor old François Sagan. . . . Superficially, his career in America

resembles the life-span of those medieval troubadours who
masturbated at 14, copulated at 15, were impotent at 30 and
prostate cases at 40.
(30)

In the largest single section of her book, Ellmann then sums up the
eleven major stereotypes of femininity as presented by male writers
and critics: formlessness, passivity, instability, confinement, piety,
materiality, spirituality, irrationality, compliancy, and finally ‘the two
34 anglo-american feminist criticism

incorrigible figures’ of the Witch and the Shrew. The fourth chapter,
entitled ‘Differences in tone’, discusses the assertion that ‘the male
body lends credence to assertions while the female takes it away’
(148). Ellmann’s point is that men have traditionally chosen to write in
an assertive, authoritarian mode, whereas women have been confined
to the language of sensibility. Since the 1960s, however, much modern
literature has sought to resist or subvert authoritarian modes of
writing, and this has created the conditions for a new kind of writing
by women:

I hope to define the way in which it is now possible for women to write
well. Quite simply, having not had physical or intellectual authority
before, they have no reason to resist a literature at odds with authority.
(166)

Since Ellmann’s own favourites among modern women writers are

Dorothy Richardson, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Nathalie Sarraute (but
oddly enough not Virginia Woolf), we can see where her distaste for
authority and also of traditional realism takes her.
Ellmann’s point about the authority we consciously or
unconsciously accord to male over female voices has been beautifully
illustrated by the Danish feminist critic Pil Dahlerup in an article
entitled ‘Unconscious attitudes of a reviewer’, published in Sweden in
1972. Here Dahlerup discusses the response of one particular male
reviewer to the Danish poet Cecil Bødtker’s poetry. Cecil being an
ungendered name in Danish, the critic automatically assumed that he
was dealing with a male poet in his review of her first collection of
poetry (1955). This glowing review abounds in active verbs and has
relatively few adjectives, though the ones that do occur are powerfully
positive ones: ‘joyous’, ‘enthusiastic’, ‘rich’, and so on. A year later the
same critic reviewed Cecil Bødtker’s second collection of poetry. By
now he had discovered that she was a woman, and though he still was
warmly enthusiastic about her poetry the vocabulary of praise has
undergone an interesting transformation: now Cecil Bødtker’s poetry is
no more than ‘pleasant’, there are three times as many adjectives, and
these have not only changed in nature (‘pretty’, ‘healthy’, ‘down to
earth’), but also show an alarming propensity for taking on modifiers
 two feminist classics 35
(‘somewhat’, ‘a certain’, ‘probably’ – none of which occurred in the
first review). Furthermore, the adjectives ‘little’ or ‘small’ suddenly
become central in the critic’s discourse, whereas they only made one
appearance in the ‘male’ review. As Dahlerup puts it: ‘the male poet
apparently did not write a single “small” poem’. Her conclusion is that
the critic’s attitude unconsciously reveals the fact that, as Mary Ellmann
suggests, male reviewers just cannot attach the same degree of author-
ity to a voice they know to be female. Even when they do give a good
review to a woman they automatically select adjectives and phrases that
tend to make the woman’s poetry charming and sweet (as women
should be), as opposed to serious and significant (as men are supposed
to be).
Ellmann’s final chapter, entitled ‘Responses’, deals with the various
strategies employed by women writers to cope with the patriarchal
onslaught described in her first four chapters. She shows how women
writers have known how to exploit, for their own subversive purposes,
the stereotypes of them and their writing created by men. Jane Austen,
for instance, undermines the authoritarian voice of the writer by her
wit and irony – or, as Ellmann puts it, ‘We assume that authority and
responsibility are incompatible with amusement’ (209). But Ellmann’s
praise of Jane Austen’s prose is also highly relevant to her own way of
writing. Thinking About Women is an ironic masterpiece, and the wit
Ellmann displays throughout her book (though less in the ‘Responses’
section), is, as we shall see, an important part of her argument.
Ellmann’s sardonic humour contributed significantly to the warm criti-
cal reception of her book, though ironically enough some critics were
unable to resist the temptation to couch their praise in precisely the
stereotypical terms that Ellmann denounces. The back of the Harvest
edition of Thinking About Women, for instance, displays the following
example of fervent praise: ‘The sexual silliness which warps our
thinking about women has never been so well exposed. But the best
and most fervent accolade last: Mary Ellmann has written a funny
feminist book.’ In other words: we all know that feminists are dreary
puritans, so all the more reason for praising Ellmann as an exception to
the rule. Or as Ellmann herself puts it, when discussing the way in
which sexual analogy infects the praise of work that deserves ‘asexual’
approval:
36 anglo-american feminist criticism

In this case, enthusiasm issues in the explanation of the ways in which

the work is free of what the critic ordinarily dislikes in the work of a
woman. He had despaired of ever seeing a birdhouse built by a
woman; now here is a birdhouse built by a woman. Pleasure may
mount even to an admission of male envy of the work examined: an
exceptionally sturdy birdhouse at that!
(31)

But what exactly is the effect on her own arguments of Ellmann’s

lavish use of irony? Patricia Meyer Spacks feels that Ellmann writes ‘in
the distinctive voice of a woman’ (23), and that the specific femininity
of her discourse consists in its display of ‘a particularly feminine sort
and function of wit’ (24). Spacks continues:

A new category suggests itself for her: not the passivity of formless-
ness or the purposelessness of instability, but the feminine resource of
evasiveness. The opponent who would presume to attack her finds her
not where she was when he took aim. She embodies woman as quick-
silver, always in brilliant, erratic motion.
(24)

Spacks here evades the concept of irony perhaps because this has never
been considered a specifically feminine mode. Instead she centres on
the accusation of ‘evasiveness’, and tries to invent a new feminine
stereotype that would accommodate Ellmann’s way of writing. But this
is surely to miss the point of her style. I will attempt to show that it is
precisely through the use of satirical devices that Ellmann manages to
demonstrate first that the very concepts of masculinity and femininity
are social constructs which refer to no real essence in the world, and
second that the feminine stereotypes she describes invariably decon-
struct themselves. The point can be made through a closer look at her
presentation of the stereotype of ‘the Mother’;

The Mother is particularly useful as an illustration of the explosive

tendency: each stereotype has a limit; swelled to it, the stereotype
explodes. Its ruin takes two forms: (1) total vulgarization and (2) a
reorganization of the advantage, now in fragments, about a new
 two feminist classics 37
center of disadvantage. In this second form, the same elements which
had constituted the previous ideal make up the present anathema.
(131)

This is also one of the very few passages where Ellmann explicitly sums
up the theory behind the rhetorical strategy of her book. For most of
the time she is content to show through practical illustrations how the
stereotype is both ideal and horror, inclusive as well as exclusive – as
for instance where she first demonstrates how ‘the Mother’ as a stereo-
type slides from venerated idol to castrating and aggressive bitch, and
then continues:

But our distrust of maternity is an innocuous preoccupation in con-

trast to our resentment of those who do not take part in it. Nothing is
more reliable than the irritability of all references to prolonged virgin-
ity: behind us, and undoubtedly before us, stretch infinite tracts
of abuse of maiden ladies, old maids, schoolmarms, dried-up spinsters,
etc., etc.
(136)

Here the use of the plural pronouns ‘our’ and ‘us’ comfortably
suggest that the narrator is doing no more than pointing out some-
thing ‘we all’ indulge in, whereas the implication of her first sentence,
with its powerful paradox, is that ‘we’ must be either mad or stupid to
pursue such an illogical practice. The narrative devices deployed here
work to make the reader (‘we’) reject the stupidity described, while at
the same time softening the blow with the reassuring use of ‘us’ and
‘our’. If the narrator includes herself in this example of malpractice,
‘we’ at least don’t have to feel alone in our stupidity. But this is not the
only effect of Ellmann’s tactical use of the first person plural here. It
also makes it impossible for the reader to reject the implications of the
paradox of the first sentence: since the narrator does not position her-
self at a different level from us, but on the contrary is to be found
among us, ‘we’ are deprived of a convenient external target for our
aggression. In these sentences there is simply no single instance we can
choose to attack as a man-hating, castrating bitch if we feel thus
inclined. Thus the reader’s nagging suspicion that the narrator after all
38 anglo-american feminist criticism

may be pulling his (or her) leg, that she might just not entirely count
herself as one of ‘us’, can find no target, and her or his mounting
aggression is therefore defused in the very act that kindles it.
This narrative technique cannot in my view be labelled ‘feminine
elusiveness’, since it is an integral part of a general rhetorical enterprise
that seeks to deconstruct our sexual categories in exactly the same way
as the reader’s aggression here is both fostered and defused. The effect
of Ellmann’s irony is to expose two different aspects of patriarchal
ideology. In the first passage quoted above, she states abstractly the way
in which any stereotype is self-destructive, easily transformed into its
own unstable contradiction, and thereby demonstrates that such stereo-
types’ only existence is as verbal constructs in the service of ruling
patriarchal ideology. But unlike Millett, Ellmann does not for a
moment fall prey to the fiction that this ruling ideology forms a con-
sistent and unified whole. On the contrary, both passages amply illus-
trate the self-contradictory tangles that emerge as soon as one aspect of
this ideology is confronted with another.
Thinking About Women abounds in examples of this deconstructive,
decentring style. Ellmann’s favourite method is to juxtapose
contradictory statements while depriving the reader of any authorial
comment, as for instance in the following passage: ‘When men are
searching for the truth, women are content with lies. But when men
are searching for diversion or variety, women counter with their stulti-
fying respect for immediate duty’ (93–4). The absence of an identifi-
able narrator’s voice here fulfils a role similar to the consoling presence
of the possibly treacherous ‘us’ in the passage discussed above:
deprived of authoritative commentary as to which of the positions
advanced the narrator wishes the reader to accept, she is kept reading
on in the hope of finding such a guideline for interpretation. Such
‘anchoring points’ can in fact be found in Thinking About Women – indeed
the paragraph just quoted is preceded by a fairly straightforward state-
ment: ‘At any rate, the incongruity of deceit and piety represents only
another of the necessary sacrifices of logic to contrast’ (93). Though it
seems obvious here that the narrator finds such oppositions incongru-
ous and that they represent a sacrifice of logic, this evaluation is not
allowed to stand wholly unchallenged: the sacrifice of logic is charac-
terized as ‘necessary’, and this single adjective is enough to throw the
 two feminist classics 39
reader back into uncertainty. Necessary for whom? Or for what higher
purpose? Does the narrator endorse this evaluation of necessity or not?
The irony here is weaker because of the evaluative ‘incongruity’ that is
allowed to dominate the first part of the sentence, but it is still not
wholly absent. Even when Ellmann allows her discourse to be fixed to a
certain position, she takes care to avoid total paralysis: there is always a
trace of unsettling wit somewhere in her sentences.
When Patricia Spacks characterizes Ellmann’s style as essentially
feminine, as an example of the way in which ‘the woman critic dem-
onstrates how feminine charm can combat masculine forcefulness’
(26), she falls into the very metaphysical trap that Ellmann seeks to
deconstruct. Thinking About Women is, after all, a book about the insidious
effects of thinking by sexual analogy, not a recommendation that we
should continue the practice. In order to ensure that the reader gets this
point, Ellmann first proclaims quite unequivocally that ‘it seems
impossible to determine a sexual sentence’ (172), and quotes Virginia
Woolf to reinforce her view. For Ellmann, then, sexuality is not visible at
the level of sentence construction or rhetorical strategies. She therefore
praises Jane Austen’s irony precisely for its capacity to enable us to
think outside of (or elsewhere than) the field of sexual analogy: ‘Jane
Austen . . . had available to her imagination a scene which must now
seem to us singularly monistic: neither sex appears to be good or bad
for much’ (212).
As part of her deconstructive project, Ellmann therefore recom-
mends exploiting the sexual stereotypes for all they are worth for our
own political purposes. This, at least, is her own practice in Thinking
About Women. When Patricia Spacks holds that Ellmann’s style is elusive,
it is because she believes that behind the ‘charming’ facade her text
hides a good deal of ‘feminine anger’ (27). The implication is that
whereas Kate Millett, according to Spacks, lets her anger show through
in passionate if muddled and obfuscating sentences, Mary Ellmann
conceals the same anger somewhere under her elegant wit. This argu-
ment is based on two assumptions: that feminists must at all costs be
angry all the time, and that all textual uncertainty such as that created
by irony must be explained in the end by reference to an underlying,
essential and unitary cause. But, as the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin
has shown in his influential study of Rabelais (Rabelais and His World),
40 anglo-american feminist criticism

anger is not the only revolutionary attitude available to us. The power
of laughter can be just as subversive, as when carnival turns the old
hierarchies upside-down, erasing old differences, producing new and
unstable ones.
Ellmann’s suavely polished wit makes us laugh. But it may not, after
all, make us laugh in quite the carnivalesque way of a Rabelais. How
then should we evaluate the effects of her book? Politically speaking,
the ironist is extremely hard to assail precisely because it is virtually
impossible to fix her or his text convincingly. In the ironic discourse,
every position undercuts itself, thus leaving the politically engaged
writer in a position where her ironic discourse might just come to
deconstruct her own politics. Mary Ellmann’s solution to this dilemma
is to furnish enough non-ironic ‘anchoring-points’ in her own text to
make the position from which she is speaking reasonably clear. This
method, however, carries the obvious danger of undermining the satire
it seeks to preserve. Ellmann chooses to write the last section,
‘Responses’, from a fairly ‘direct’ point of view, thus leaving irony to
the sections dealing with male discourse on women. Since the more
conventionally written final section does not deal with the same prob-
lems as the ironic parts of the book, this still leaves a gap, a space for the
necessary uncertainty of ironic discourse.3
There is, then, no reason to argue that Mary Ellmann’s sardonic
prose should be inherently less unsettling than Kate Millett’s explicit
anger. The best-selling British competitor to Millett’s book, Germaine
Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), also relies on irony, and has been none
the less influential in the women’s movement for all that.4 Patricia
Spack’s reaction to Ellmann’s essay – on the one hand taking stereo-
types for essentialist categories, on the other hand stipulating anger as
the fundamental feminist emotion – is paradigmatic of the general
feminist reception of Thinking About Women. For though the feminist
critics who in the early 1970s took up the brand of feminist criticism
known as ‘Images of Women’ criticism often invoke Ellmann as one of
their precursors, they invariably proceed to adopt the very categories
Ellmann tries to deconstruct as models for their own readings.
 2
‘IMAGES OF WOMEN’
CRITICISM

The ‘Images of Women’ approach to literature has proved to be an

extremely fertile branch of feminist criticism, at least in terms of the
actual number of works it has generated: specialist bibliographies list
hundreds if not thousands of items under this heading. In order to limit
the amount of bibliographical references in the following account of its
aims and methods, I will refer mainly to the articles printed in one
central collection of essays, suitably enough entitled Images of Women in
Fiction: Feminist Perspectives. In American colleges in the early 1970s, the
great majority of courses on women in literature centred on the study
of female stereotypes in male writing (Register, 28). Images of Women in
Fiction was published in 1972 as the first hardback textbook aimed at
this rapidly expanding academic market. The book obviously corres-
ponded to a deeply felt need among teachers and students, since it was
reprinted several times in rapid succession.1 What kind of perspectives,
then, does this book present as ‘feminist’? In her preface, the editor,
Susan Koppelman Cornillon, states that the idea for the book came
from her own experience in teaching women’s studies:

In all courses I felt the desperate need for books that would study
literature as being writings about people. This volume is an effort to
42 anglo-american feminist criticism

supply that need. . . . These essays lead us into fiction and then back
out again into reality, into ourselves and our own lives. . . . This book
will be a useful tool for raising consciousness not only in classrooms,
but for those not involved in the academic world who are committed
to personal growth.
(x)

The new field of feminist literary studies is here presented as one

essentially concerned with nurturing personal growth and raising the
individual consciousness by linking literature to life, particularly to the
lived experience of the reader. This fundamental outlook is reflected in
the essays of all the 21 contributors (19 women, 2 men). Both male
and female authors, mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth centur-
ies, are studied in these essays, and both sexes come in for harsh
criticism for their creation of ‘unreal’ female characters. Indeed, the
editor, in her essay ‘The fiction of fiction’, accuses women writers of
being worse than male writers in this respect, since they, unlike the men,
are betraying their own sex.
In ‘Images of Women’ criticism the act of reading is seen as a com-
munication between the life (‘experience’) of the author and the life of
the reader. When the reader becomes a critic, her duty is to present an
account of her own life that will enable her readers to become aware of
the position from which she speaks. In one of the essays in Images of
Women in Fiction, Florence Howe succinctly presents this demand for
autobiography in criticism:

I begin with autobiography because it is there, in our consciousness

about our own lives, that the connection between feminism and litera-
ture begins. That we learn from lives is, of course, a fundamental
assumption of literature and of its teacher-critics.
(255)

Such an emphasis upon the reader’s right to learn about the writer’s
experience strongly supports the basic feminist contention that no
criticism is ‘value-free’, that we all speak from a specific position
shaped by cultural, social, political and personal factors. It is authoritar-
ian and manipulative to present this limited perspective as ‘universal’,
 ‘images of women’ criticism 43
feminists claim, and the only democratic procedure is to supply the
reader with all necessary information about the limitations of one’s
own perspective at the outset. The importance of this principle cannot
be overestimated: it remains one of the fundamental assumptions of
any feminist critic to date.
Problems do however arise if we are too sanguine about the actual
possibility of making one’s own position clear. Hermeneutical theory,
for instance, has pointed out that we cannot fully grasp our own ‘hori-
zon of understanding’: there will always be unstated blindspots, fun-
damental presuppositions and ‘pre-understandings’ of which we are
unaware. Psychoanalysis furthermore informs us that the most power-
ful motivations of our psyche often turn out to be those we have most
deeply repressed. It is therefore difficult to believe that we can ever fully
be aware of our own perspective. The prejudices one is able to formulate
consciously are precisely for that reason likely to be the least important
ones. These theoretical difficulties are not just abstract problems for the
philosophers among us: they return to manifest themselves quite evi-
dently in the texts of the feminist critic who tries to practise the auto-
biographical ideal in her work. In trying to state her own personal
experience as a necessary background for the understanding of her
research interests, she may for instance discover, to her cost, that there
is no obvious end to the amount of ‘relevant’ detail that might be taken
into account in such a context. She then runs the risk of reading like a
more or less unwilling exhibitionist rather than a partisan of egalitar-
ian criticism. One such extreme case can be found in a feminist study
of Simone de Beauvoir, where, in the middle of the book, the critic
suddenly decides to spend sixteen pages on an autobiographical
account of her own life and her feelings about Beauvoir.2 This kind of
narcissistic delving into one’s own self can only caricature the valuable
point of principle made by feminist critics: that no criticism is neutral,
and that we therefore have a responsibility to make our position rea-
sonably apparent to our readers. Whether this is necessarily always best
done through autobiographical statements about the critic’s emotional
and personal life is a more debatable point.
As one reads on in Images of Women in Fiction, one quickly becomes
aware of the fact that to study ‘images of women’ in fiction is equiva-
lent to studying false images of women in fiction written by both sexes.
44 anglo-american feminist criticism

The ‘image’ of women in literature is invariably defined in opposition

to the ‘real person’ whom literature somehow never quite manages to
convey to the reader. In Cornillon’s volume, ‘reality’ and ‘experience’
are presented as the highest goals of literature, the essential truths that
must be rendered by all forms of fiction. This viewpoint occasionally
leads to an almost absurd ‘ultra-realist’ position, as when, for instance,
Cornillon points out that a significant part of the modern American
woman’s life is spent shaving her legs and removing hairs from various
other parts of her body. She rightly emphasizes the degrading and
oppressive nature of the male demand for well-shaved women, but
then goes on to make her main literary point: ‘And yet, with all that
attaches itself to female leg-shaving slavery, I have never seen any
fictional character either shave or pluck a hair’ (117).
I would not be surprised if Cornillon turned out to be right – toe-
nail clipping and the disposal of sanitary towels also seem neglected as
fictional themes – but her complaint rests on the highly questionable
notion that art can and should reflect life accurately and inclusively in
every detail. The extreme reflectionism (or ‘naturalism’ in Lukács’s
sense of the word) advocated in Images of Women in Fiction has the advan-
tage of emphasizing the way in which writers constantly select the ele-
ments they wish to use in their texts; but instead of acknowledging this
as one of the basic facts of textual creativity, reflectionism posits that
the artist’s selective creation should be measured against ‘real life’, thus
assuming that the only constraint on the artist’s work is his or her
perception of the ‘real world’. Such a view resolutely refuses to con-
sider textual production as a highly complex, ‘over-determined’ pro-
cess with many different and conflicting literary and non-literary
determinants (historical, political, social, ideological, institutional,
generic, psychological and so on). Instead, writing is seen as a more or
less faithful reproduction of an external reality to which we all have equal
and unbiased access, and which therefore enables us to criticize the
author on the grounds that he or she has created an incorrect model of
the reality we somehow all know. Resolutely empiricist in its approach,
this view fails to consider the proposition that the real is not only
something we construct, but a controversial construct at that.
Literary works can and should of course be criticized for having
selected and shaped their fictional universe according to oppressive and
 ‘images of women’ criticism 45
objectionable ideological assumptions, but that should not be confused
with failing to be ‘true to life’ or with not presenting ‘an authentic
expression of real experience’. Such an insistent demand for authen-
ticity not only reduces all literature to rather simplistic forms of auto-
biography, it also finds itself ruling the greater part of world literature
out of bounds. What these critics fail to perceive is the fact that though
Shakespeare probably never in his life found himself mad and naked on
a heath, King Lear nevertheless reads ‘authentically’ enough for most
people. It is significant that all the contributors to Cornillon’s volume
(with the notable exception of Josephine Donovan) adhere to a rather
simple form of content analysis when confronted with the literary text.
Extreme reflectionism simply cannot accommodate notions of formal
and generic constraints on textual production, since to acknowledge
such constraints is equivalent to accepting the inherent impossibility of
ever achieving a total reproduction of reality in fiction.
The wider question at issue here is clearly the problem of realism
as opposed to modernism. Predictably enough, several essays in the
volume lash out against modernism, and its somewhat vaguely termed
‘formalist’ fellow-traveller. The modernist is accused of neglecting the
‘exclusions based on class, race and sex’ in order to ‘take refuge in his
formalist concerns, secure in his conviction that other matters are
irrelevant’ (286). But this is not all:

Modernism, by contrast, seeks to intensify isolation. It forces the work

of art, the artist, the critic, and the audience outside of history. Mod-
ernism denies us the possibility of understanding ourselves as agents
in the material world, for all has been removed to an abstract world of
ideas, where interactions can be minimized or emptied of meaning
and real consequences. Less than ever are we able to interpret the
world – much less change it.
(300–1)3

In another essay, feminist criticism is succinctly defined as ‘a material-

ist approach to literature which attempts to do away with the formalist
illusion that literature is somehow divorced from reality’ (326).4 The
‘formalist’ critics referred to in this passage seem to be identifiable
as the American New Critics, concerned as they were with the formal
46 anglo-american feminist criticism

aspects of the literary work at the expense of historical and sociological

factors. At this point, however, it is worth noting that though American
feminist critics from Kate Millett onwards have consistently argued
against the New Critics’ ahistoricism, this has not prevented them
from uncritically adopting the aesthetic ideals of the very same
New Critics.
In Images of Women in Fiction, the double rejection of ‘modernist’
literature and ‘formalist’ criticism highlights the deep realist bias of
Anglo-American feminist criticism. An insistence on authenticity and
truthful reproduction of the ‘real world’ as the highest literary values
inevitably makes the feminist critic hostile to non-realist forms of
writing. There is nevertheless no automatic connection between
demands for a full reproduction of the totality of the ‘real’ and what is
known as a ‘realist’ fiction. At least two famous literary attempts at
capturing reality in its totality, Tristram Shandy and Ulysses, end up by
mischievously transgressing traditional realism in the most radical
fashion precisely because of their doomed attempt to be all-inclusive.
And some feminist critics have for instance objected to Joyce’s
portrayal of Molly Bloom’s chamberpot and menstrual cycle (there is
no reference to leg-shaving) on the grounds that, in spite of their
undeniable realism, these factors contribute precisely to presenting
her as a biologically determined, earthbound creature that no woman
reader can really admire.
In this case the demand for realism clashes with another demand:
that for the representation of female role-models in literature. The
feminist reader of this period not only wants to see her own experi-
ences mirrored in fiction, but strives to identify with strong, impressive
female characters. Cheri Register, in an essay published in 1975, suc-
cinctly sums up this demand: ‘A literary work should provide role-
models, instill a positive sense of feminine identity by portraying women
who are “self-actualizing, whose identities are not dependent on
men” ’ (20).5 This might however clash with the demand for authen-
ticity (quite a few women are ‘authentically’ weak and unimpressive);
on this point Register is unambiguous: ‘It is important to note here that
although female readers need literary models to emulate, characters
should not be idealized beyond plausibility. The demand for
authenticity supercedes all other requirements’ (21).
 ‘images of women’ criticism 47
Register’s choice of words here (‘should’, ‘demand’, ‘requirements’)
reflects the strong normative (or prescriptive, as she prefers to call it)
aspect of much of this early feminist criticism. The ‘Images of Women’
critics downgrade literature they find lacking in ‘authenticity’ and ‘real
experience’ according to their own standards of what counts as ‘real’. In
case of doubt about the degree of authenticity in a work, Register
recommends several tests: ‘One obvious check the reader might make
on authenticity would be to compare the character’s life with the
author’s’ (12), she suggests. One may also use sociological data in order
to check up on the social aspects of the author’s work, though inner
emotions must be subjected to a different form of control:

While it is useful to compile statistical data on a collection of works

from a limited time period to see how accurately they mirror female
employment, educational attainment, marital status, birthrate, and
the like, it is impossible to measure the authenticity of a single female
protagonist’s inner turmoil. The final test must be the subjective
response of the female reader, who is herself familiar with ‘female
reality’. Does she recognize aspects of her own experience?
(13)

Though Register hastens to warn us against too simplistic conclu-

sions, since ‘female reality is not monolithic, but has many nuances
and variations’ (13) such a governess mentality (the ‘Big-Sister-is-
watching-you’ syndrome) must be considered one of the perhaps
inevitable excesses of a new and rapidly expanding branch of research.
In the 1970s, this approach led to a great number of published and
unpublished papers dealing with literature from a kind of inverted
sociological perspective: fiction was read in order to compare the
empirical sociological facts in the literary work (as for instance the
number of women working outside the home or doing the dishes) to
the corresponding empirical data in the ‘real’ world during the
author’s lifetime.
It is easy today to be reproving of this kind of criticism: to take it to
task for not recognizing the ‘literariness’ of literature, for tending
towards a dangerous anti-intellectualism, for being excessively naive
about the relationship between literature and reality and between
48 anglo-american feminist criticism

author and text, and for being unduly censorious of the works of
women writers who often wrote under ideological conditions that
made it impossible for them to fulfil the demands of the feminist critics
of early 1970s. Though it is impossible not to deplore the wholesale
lack of theoretical (or even literary) awareness of these early feminist
critics, their enthusiasm and commitment to the feminist cause are
exemplary. For a generation educated within the ahistorical, aestheti-
cizing discourse of New Criticism, the feminists’ insistence on the
political nature of any critical discourse, and their will to take historical
and sociological factors into account must have seemed both fresh and
exciting; to a large extent those are precisely the qualities present-day
feminist critics still strive to preserve.
 3
WOMEN WRITING AND
WRITING ABOUT WOMEN

TOWARDS A WOMAN-CENTRED PERSPECTIVE

It soon became evident, however, that the simplistic, undiscriminating
approach of ‘Images of Women’ criticism was losing its inspirational
force. From about 1975, interest started to focus exclusively on the
works of women writers. As early as 1971, Elaine Showalter had advo-
cated the study of women writers as a group:

Women writers should not be studied as a distinct group on the

assumption that they write alike, or even display stylistic resemblances
distinctively feminine. But women do have a special history suscep-
tible to analysis, which includes such complex considerations as the
economics of their relation to the literary marketplace; the effects of
social and political changes in women’s status upon individuals, and
the implications of stereotypes of the woman writer and restrictions of
her artistic autonomy.1

Showalter’s view gradually gained acceptance. Images of Women in Fic-

tion has two male contributors, contains more analyses of male writers
than of female writers and often takes a negative attitude to works of
50 anglo-american feminist criticism

women writers. By 1975, the situation had decisively changed. When

in that year Cheryl L. Brown and Karen Olson began to compile their
anthology Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry and Prose they felt
surprised (and upset) that ‘what women critics were writing about
women’s literature was not being published in respectable numbers
and not readily accessible to concerned students and teachers’ (preface,
xiii). To compensate for this bias, their anthology (which remained
unpublished until 1978) has no male contributors, and all its essays
deal either with theoretical questions or with the work of women
writers. This woman-centred approach has now become the dominant
trend within Anglo-American feminist criticism.
Before studying more closely the major works of this powerful ‘sec-
ond phase’ of feminist research, it should be pointed out that not all
books by women critics on women writers are examples of feminist
criticism. In the early years of feminist criticism, many non-feminist
works enjoyed considerable influence due to the confusion of these
categories, as did for example Patricia Beer’s Reader, I Married Him from
1974. In her preface, the author clearly distances herself from other
writings ‘on the subject of Women’s Lib’ (ix), since these all share a
serious flaw:

Whatever they may claim to do, in fact they treat literature as if it were
a collection of tracts into which you dip for illustrations of your own
polemic, falsifying and omitting as necessary, your argument being of
more moment than the other person’s work of art. This rhetorical
approach seems a pity as novels and plays are so much more illumin-
ating if they are not used as a means to an end, either by writer or
reader.
(ix)

Beer’s own book is going to be free from this deplorable bias, since
‘The novel in particular, without benefit of anyone’s argument, can
show quite precisely how things are or were’ (ix). The author, in other
words, trusts precisely the sort of ‘value-free’ scholarship that feminists
denounce as always subservient to existing hierarchies and power
structures. Beer also seems convinced that she can capture true reality
through the novels she is studying, particularly since she herself is free
 women writing and writing about women 51
from feminist leanings. Other sorts of political engagement apparently
have no power to distort the true representation of reality Beer seeks, or
if they do she does not mention them. Her book is not written for
fanatics, but for the discerning reader: ‘[I felt] that the subject might be
of interest to readers who, without being necessarily either students of
English literature or supporters of Women’s Lib, had a concern in the
novel and the cause of female emancipation’ (ix).
The author is both fascinated and repelled by the ‘women’s lib’
label, clearly wanting to banish it from her book yet at the same time
eager to mention it (twice in half a page), since she knows that it is
among the supporters of this ‘rhetorical approach’ that she will find
many of her readers. If feminist criticism is a political criticism, sus-
tained by a commitment to combat all forms of patriarchy and sexism,
Patricia Beer’s book is evidently not a work of feminist criticism.
Dominant in her preface (and in her arguments throughout the book)
is the desire to exercise a kind of liberal brinkmanship. Positioning
herself somewhere in the middle ground ‘good liberals’ pursue, she is
neither a supporter of ‘women’s lib’ nor an opponent of it; on the
contrary, she will acknowledge a deep ‘concern’ both in the novel and
in the ‘cause of female emancipation’. This kind of ‘pseudo-feminist’
criticism is of no substantial interest to students of feminist approaches
to literature.

In the late 1970s, three major studies appeared on women writers seen
as part of a specifically female literary tradition or ‘subculture’: Ellen
Moers, Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own
(1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic
(1979). Taken together, these three books represent the coming-of-age
of Anglo-American feminist criticism. Here at last were the long
awaited major studies of women writers in British and American literary
history. Competent and committed, illuminating and inspiring, these
works immediately found a deservedly large and enthusiastic audience
of women scholars and students. Today it is clear that the works of
Moers, Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar have already taken their places
among the modern classics of feminist criticism.
All three books strive to define a distinctively female tradition in
literature on the grounds that, as Elaine Showalter puts it, ‘the female
52 anglo-american feminist criticism

literary tradition comes from the still-evolving relationships between

women writers and their society’ (12). For these critics, it is in other
words society, not biology, that shapes women’s different literary percep-
tion of the world. This basic similarity of approach should not,
however, prevent us from noticing the often interesting divergences
and differences among these three influential works.

‘LITERARY WOMEN’
Ellen Moers’s Literary Women was the result of a long process of reflection
on women and literature, a process that started in 1963, the year in
which Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published, a book which
brought Moers to change her views on the need to treat women writers
as a separate group. ‘At one time’, she writes, ‘I held the narrow view
that separating major writers from the general course of literary history
on the basis of sex was futile, but several things have changed my
mind’ (xv). The reasons for this change of heart were, first, the con-
vincing results of such a separation, then the fact that ‘we already
practice a segregation of major women writers unknowingly’ (xv),
and, finally, a deeper understanding of the real nature of women’s
history. Moers thus mirrors the development of many academic
women: from suspecting all attempts at segregating women from the
mainstream of historical development as a form of anti-egalitarianism,
they came, during the 1960s, to accept the political necessity of view-
ing women as a distinctive group if the common patriarchal strategy of
subsuming women under the general category of ‘man’, and thereby
silencing them, was to be efficiently counteracted.
Literary Women was the first attempt at describing the history of
women’s writing as a ‘rapid and powerful undercurrent’ (63) running
under or alongside the main male tradition, and, because it mapped a
relatively unknown territory for the first time, it received wide acclaim.
Tillie Olsen saw Literary Women as a ‘catalyst, a landmark book [which]
authoritatively establishes the scope, depth, variety of literature written
by women . . . no one can read it unchanged’.2 Ellen Moers surely
deserved this praise in 1977, but it is indicative of the pace with which
feminist criticism has developed that the reader who picks up Literary
Women in 1985 may not quite share Tillie Olsen’s elation. Literary Women
 women writing and writing about women 53
remains a well-written and interesting book, though at times some-
what given to sentimental hyperbole, as when Moers enthuses over
George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

What positively miraculous beings they were. A magnetism emanates

from their life stories, some compelling power which drew the world
to them – and all the goods and blessings of the kind that facilitate
and ornament the woman’s life in letters.
(5)

Nevertheless, the first enthusiasm over the discovery of new terrain is

now fading, and the 1985’s reader may feel that Ellen Moers’s book is
not really satisfactory either as literary history or as literary criticism. It
is too engrossed in circumstantial details, too unaware of any kind of
literary theory to function well as criticism, and far too limited in its
conception of history and its relations to literature to be convincing as
historiography.
Moers sees history first and foremost as a good story, or as a
compelling plot with which to identify and sympathize:

The main thing to change my mind about a history of literary women

has been history itself, the dramatically unfolding, living literary his-
tory of the period of my work on this book. Its lesson has been that
one must know the history of women to understand the history of
literature.
(xvi)

For her, history is a chronicle in the medieval sense: a careful noting

down of everything the chronicler feels is relevant to his or her particu-
lar perspective. In this sense, the chronicler believes that her version of
events, often presented as raw and unstructured ‘facts’, constitute ‘his-
tory’. Similarly, Ellen Moers believes that she, as the author of her
history, has had no influence on it: ‘The literary women themselves,
not any doctrine of mine, have done the organizing of the book – their
concerns, their language’ (xii). This belief in the possibility of a neutral
registration of events sounds strangely out of place in a work that is,
after all, avowedly feminist in its approach.
54 anglo-american feminist criticism

Moers’s trust in conventional aesthetic and literary categories, not-

ably her belief that we just know which writers are ‘great’ (the subtitle
of Literary Women is ‘The Great Writers’), avoids confronting the fact that
the category of ‘greatness’ has always been an extremely contentious
one for feminists, given that the criteria for ‘greatness’ militate heavily
against the inclusion of women in the literary canon. As an overview of
the field of English, American and French writing by women in the
period stretching from the late-eighteenth to the twentieth century,
Literary Women, with its plot summaries, emphasis on personal details
and biographical anecdotes serves a useful purpose as a preliminary
introduction, but it can hardly now be read as anything but a pioneer
work, a stepping-stone for the more mature feminist literary histories
that emerged within a year or two of its publication.

‘A LITERATURE OF THEIR OWN’

Elaine Showalter disagrees with Moers’s emphasis on women’s litera-
ture as an international movement ‘apart from, but hardly subordinate
to the mainstream: an undercurrent, rapid and powerful’ (quoted in
Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 10), stressing instead, with Germaine
Greer, the ‘transience of female literary fame’ or the fact that women
writers celebrated in their own lifetimes seem to vanish without trace
from the records of posterity. Showalter comments:

Thus 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. Given this perpetual disruption
and also the self-hatred that has alienated women writers from a sense
of collective identity, it does not seem possible to speak of a
‘movement’.
(11–12)

In A Literature of Their Own, Showalter sets out to ‘describe the female

literary tradition in the English novel from the generation of the
Brontës to the present day, and to show how the development of this
tradition is similar to the development of any literary subculture’ (11).
In her efforts to fill in the terrain between the ‘literary landmarks’ of
 women writing and writing about women 55
the ‘Austen peaks, the Brontë cliffs, the Eliot range and the Woolf hills’
(vii), she uncovers three major phases of historical development
claimed to be common to all literary subcultures:

First, there is a prolonged phase of imitation of the prevailing modes

of the dominant tradition, and internalization of its standards of art
and its views on social roles. Second, there is a phase of protest
against these standards and values, and advocacy of minority rights
and values, including a demand for autonomy. Finally, there is a phase
of self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency
of opposition, a search for identity. An appropriate terminology for
women writers is to call these stages, Feminine, Feminist and Female.
(13)

The Feminine period starts with the appearance of male pseudonyms

in the 1840s and lasts until the death of George Eliot in 1880; the
Feminist phase lasts from 1880 until 1920 and the Female phase starts
in 1920 and is still continuing, though it took a new turn in the 1960s
with the advent of the women’s movement.
This, then, is the general perspective that informs Showalter’s
guided tour of the female literary landscape in Britain since the 1840s.
Her major contribution to literary history in general, and to feminist
criticism in particular, is the emphasis she places on the rediscovery of
forgotten or neglected women writers. It is in no small part due to
Showalter’s efforts that so many hitherto unknown women writers are
beginning to receive the recognition they deserve; A Literature of Their
Own is a veritable goldmine of information about the lesser-known
literary women of the period. This epochal book displays wide-ranging
scholarship and an admirable enthusiasm and respect for its subject. Its
flaws must be located elsewhere: in its unstated theoretical assumptions
about the relationship between literature and reality and between
feminist politics and literary evaluation, questions that already have
been dealt with in the context of Showalter’s chapter on Virginia Woolf
in A Literature of Their Own. Since Showalter, as opposed to Moers and
Gilbert and Gubar, has also written several articles on the theory of
feminist criticism, I have found it unnecessary to elucidate further the
theoretical implications of her practice of criticism in A Literature of Their
56 anglo-american feminist criticism
Own. Her theoretical perspectives will instead be discussed more fully
in chapter 4’s discussion of ‘Theoretical reflections’.

‘THE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC’

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s massive volume presents the
feminist reader with an impressive set of probing, incisive studies of
the major women writers of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen, Mary
Shelley, the Brontës (particularly Charlotte), George Eliot, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson are all
exhaustively studied by the two critics. But The Madwoman in the Attic is
more than ‘just’ a set of readings. If on the one hand it aims to provide
us with a new understanding of the nature of the ‘distinctively female
literary tradition’ (xi) of the nineteenth century, it also aspires to
elaborate an ambitious new theory of women’s literary creativity.
The first substantial section, entitled ‘Towards a feminist poetics’,
presents the authors’ efforts to ‘provide models for understanding the
dynamics of female literary response to male literary assertion and
coercion’ (xii).
Gilbert and Gubar’s enquiry shows that in the nineteenth century (as
still today) the dominant patriarchal ideology presents artistic creativ-
ity as a fundamentally male quality. The writer ‘fathers’ his text; in the
image of the Divine Creator he becomes the Author – the sole origin
and meaning of his work. Gilbert and Gubar then ask the crucial ques-
tion: ‘What if such a proudly masculine cosmic Author is the sole
legitimate model for all early authors?’ (7). Their answer is that since
this is indeed the case under patriarchy, creative women have a rough
time coping with the consequences of such a phallocentric myth of
creativity:

Since both patriarchy and its texts subordinate and imprison women,
before women can even attempt that pen which is so rigorously kept
from them they must escape just those male texts which, defining
them as ‘Cyphers’, deny them the autonomy to formulate alternatives
to the authority that has imprisoned them and kept them from
attempting the pen.
(13)
 women writing and writing about women 57
Since creativity is defined as male, it follows that the dominant literary
images of femininity are male fantasies too. Women are denied the
right to create their own images of femaleness, and instead must seek
to conform to the patriarchal standards imposed on them. Gilbert and
Gubar clearly demonstrate how in the nineteenth century the ‘eternal
feminine’ was assumed to be a vision of angelic beauty and sweetness:
from Dante’s Beatrice and Goethe’s Gretchen and Makarie to Coventry
Patmore’s ‘Angel in the House’, the ideal woman is seen as a passive,
docile and above all selfless creature. The authors stingingly comment
that:

To be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead. A life that has no

story, like the life of Goethe’s Makarie, is really a life of death, a death-
in-life. The ideal of ‘contemplative purity’ evokes, finally, both heaven
and the grave.
(25)

But behind the angel lurks the monster: the obverse of the male
idealization of women is the male fear of femininity. The monster
woman is the woman who refuses to be selfless, acts on her own
initiative, who has a story to tell – in short, a woman who rejects the
submissive role patriarchy has reserved for her. Gilbert and Gubar men-
tion characters like Shakespeare’s Goneril and Regan and Thackeray’s
Becky Sharp, as well as the traditional array of such ‘terrible sorceress-
goddesses as the Sphinx, Medusa, Circe, Kali, Delilah, and Salome, all of
whom possess duplicitous arts that allow them both to seduce and to
steal male generative energy’ (34). The monster woman for Gilbert
and Gubar is duplicitous, precisely because she has something to tell:
there is always the possibility that she may choose not to tell – or to tell
a different story. The duplicitous woman is the one whose conscious-
ness is opaque to man, whose mind will not let itself be penetrated by
the phallic probings of masculine thought. Thus Lilith and the Queen
in Snow-White become paradigmatic instances of the monster woman in
the male imagination.
The authors of The Madwoman in the Attic then turn to the situation of
the woman artist under patriarchy: ‘For the female artist the essential
process of self-definition is complicated by all those patriarchal
58 anglo-american feminist criticism

definitions that intervene between herself and herself’ (17). The dire
consequence of this predicament is that the woman writer inevitably
comes to suffer from a debilitating anxiety of authorship. If the author
is defined as male and she finds herself already defined by him as his
creature, how can she venture to take up the pen at all? Gilbert and
Gubar raise, but do not answer, this question. They do, however, go on
to posit what they see as the fundamental problems of feminine literary
criticism:

Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like
the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his point of
view? Or does she ‘talk back’ to him in her own vocabulary, her own
timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint? We believe these are basic
questions feminist literary criticism – both theoretical and practical –
must answer, and consequently they are questions to which we shall
turn again and again, not only in this chapter but in all our readings of
nineteenth-century literary women.
(46)

Gilbert and Gubar’s answer to their own question is a complex one.

Tracing as they do ‘the difficult paths by which nineteenth-century
women overcame their “anxiety of authorship”, repudiated debilitating
patriarchal prescriptions, and recovered or remembered the lost fore-
mothers who could help them find their distinctive female power’ (59),
they apparently believe that there is such a thing as a ‘distinctive female
power’, but that this power, or voice, would have to take a rather round-
about route to express itself through or against the oppressive effects of
the dominant patriarchal modes of reading. This, then, is the main thesis
of The Madwoman in the Attic: women writers have, in Emily Dickinson’s
words, chosen to ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant’, or as Gilbert and
Gubar put it in perhaps the most crucial passage of their book:

Women from Jane Austen and Mary Shelley to Emily Brontë and Emily
Dickinson produced literary works that are in some sense palimpses-
tic, works whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less
accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning. Thus these
authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary
 women writing and writing about women 59
authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal
literary standards.
(73)

For Gilbert and Gubar, in other words, the female voice is a duplicitous,
but nevertheless true, and truly female voice. The female textual strat-
egy, as they see it, consists in ‘assaulting and revising, deconstructing
and reconstructing those images of women inherited from male litera-
ture, especially . . . the paradigmatic polarities of angel and monster’
(76). And this is where the eponymous madwoman makes her entrée
into their argument. The madwoman, like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, is:

Usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own

anxiety and rage. Indeed, much of the poetry and the fiction written
by women conjures up this mad creature so that female authors can
come to terms with their own uniquely female feelings of fragmenta-
tion, their own keen sense of the discrepancies between what they are
and what they are supposed to be.
(78)

The ‘mad double’ or the ‘female schizophrenia of authorship’ (78)

is the common factor in all the nineteenth-century novels studied in
this book, and Gilbert and Gubar claim that she is an equally crucial
figure in twentieth-century fiction by women (78). The figure of the
madwoman is then literally the answer to the questions raised about
female creativity:

In projecting their anger and dis-ease into dreadful figures, creating

dark doubles for themselves and their heroines, women writers are
both identifying with and revising the self-definitions patriarchal cul-
ture has imposed on them. All the nineteenth-and-twentieth-century
literary women who evoke the female monster in their novels and
poems alter her meaning by virtue of their own identification with her.
For it is usually because she is in some sense imbued with inferiority
that the witch-monster-madwoman becomes so crucial an avatar of
the writer’s own self.
(79)
60 anglo-american feminist criticism

The figure of the madwoman becomes emblematic of a sophisticated

literary strategy that, according to Gilbert and Gubar, gives nineteenth-
century female fiction its revolutionary edge: ‘Parodic, duplicitous, extra-
ordinarily sophisticated, all this female writing is both revisionary and
revolutionary, even when it is produced by writers we usually think of
as models of angelic resignation’ (80). The angel and the monster, the
sweet heroine and the raging madwoman, are aspects of the author’s
self-image, as well as elements of her treacherous anti-patriarchal strat-
egies. Gilbert and Gubar expand this series of binary oppositions by
stressing the recurrent use of imagery of confinement and escape, dis-
ease and health and of fragmentation and wholeness in the fiction they
study. Their often truly inventive and original readings and their com-
plex theory of women’s creativity has already inspired many feminist
critics to continue the subtle textual work they have begun.3
Gilbert and Gubar are theoretically aware. Their own brand of
feminist critical theory is seductively sophisticated, particularly when
contrasted with the general level of theoretical debate among
Anglo-American feminist critics. But what kind of theory are they
really advocating? And what are the political implications of their
theses? The first troubling aspect of their approach is their insistence on
the identity of author and character. Like Kate Millett before them,
Gilbert and Gubar repeatedly claim that the character (particularly the
madwoman) is the author’s double, ‘an image of her own anxiety and
rage’ (78), maintaining that it is

through the violence of the double that the female author enacts her
own raging desire to escape male houses and male texts, while at the
same time it is through the double’s violence that this anxious author
articulates for herself the costly destructiveness of anger repressed
until it can no longer be contained.
(85)

Their critical approach postulates a real woman hidden behind the

patriarchal textual facade, and the feminist critic’s task is to uncover her
truth. In an incisive review of The Madwoman in the Attic, Mary Jacobus
rightly criticizes the authors’ ‘unstated complicity with the auto-
biographical “phallacy”, whereby male critics hold that women’s
 women writing and writing about women 61
writing is somehow closer to their experience than men’s, that the
female text is the author, or at any rate a dramatic extension of her
unconscious’ (520). Though the two critics avoid oversimplistic con-
clusions, they nevertheless end up at times in a dangerously reduction-
ist position: under the manifest text, which is nothing but a ‘surface
design’ which ‘conceals or obscures deeper, less accessible . . . levels of
meaning’ (73), lies the real truth of the texts.
This is reminiscent of reductionist varieties of psychoanalytic or
Marxist criticism, though it is no longer the author’s Oedipus complex
or relation to the class struggle that counts as the only truth of the text,
but her constant, never-changing feminist rage. This position, which in
less sophisticated guises is perhaps the most recurrent theme of Anglo-
American feminist criticism, manages to transform all texts written by
women into feminist texts, because they may always and without
exception be held to embody somehow and somewhere the author’s
‘female rage’ against patriarchal oppression. Thus Gilbert and Gubar’s
readings of Jane Austen lack the force of their readings of Charlotte
Brontë precisely because they persist in defining anger as the only posi-
tive signal of a feminist consciousness. Austen’s gentle irony is lost on
them, whereas the explicit rage and moodiness of Charlotte Brontë’s
texts furnish them with superb grounds for stimulating exegesis.
Quite apart from the reductive aspects of this approach, the insist-
ence on the female author as the instance that provides the only true
meaning of the text (that meaning being, in general, the author’s
anger) actually undermines Gilbert and Gubar’s anti-patriarchal stance.
Having quoted Edward Said’s Beginnings with its ‘miniature meditation
on the word authority’ (4) as a description of ‘both the author and the
authority of any literary text’ (5), they quote Said’s claim that ‘the
unity or integrity of the text is maintained by a series of genealogical
connections: author-text, beginning-middle-end, text-meaning,
reader-interpretation, and so on. Underneath all these is the imagery of succes-
sion, of paternity, of hierarchy’ (5).4 But it seems inconsistent, to say the least,
to accept with Said that the traditional view of the relationship between
author and text is hierarchical and authoritarian, only to proceed to
write a book of over 700 pages that never once questions the authority
of the female author. For if we are truly to reject the model of the author
as God the Father of the text, it is surely not enough to reject the
62 anglo-american feminist criticism

patriarchal ideology implied in the paternal metaphor. It is equally

necessary to reject the critical practice it leads to, a critical practice that
relies on the author as the transcendental signified of his or her text.
For the patriarchal critic, the author is the source, origin and meaning
of the text. If we are to undo this patriarchal practice of authority, we
must take one further step and proclaim with Roland Barthes the death
of the author. Barthes’s comments on the role of the author are well
worth quoting in this context:

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes

quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to
furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception
suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important
task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history,
psyché, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found,
the text is ‘explained’ – victory to the critic.
(‘The death of the Author’, 147)

The relevance of Barthes’s critique of the author(ity)-centred critic

for The Madwoman in the Attic should be clear. But what then is the alterna-
tive? According to Barthes, it is to accept the multiplicity of writing
where ‘everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered’ (‘The death of
the Author’, 147):

The space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing cease-

lessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a sys-
tematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it
would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a
‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text),
liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that
is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to
refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law.
(‘The death of the Author’, 147)

Gilbert and Gubar’s belief in the true female authorial voice as the
essence of all texts written by women masks the problems raised by
their theory of patriarchal ideology. For them, as for Kate Millett,
 women writing and writing about women 63
ideology becomes a monolithic unified totality that knows no contra-
dictions; against this a miraculously intact ‘femaleness’ may pit its
strength. If patriarchy generates its own all-pervasive ideological struc-
tures, it is difficult to see how women in the nineteenth century could
manage to develop or maintain a feminist consciousness untainted by
the dominant patriarchal structures. As Mary Jacobus has pointed out,
Gilbert and Gubar’s emphasis on the deceitful strategies of the woman
writer makes her ‘evasive at the cost of a freedom which twentieth-
century women poets have eagerly sought: the freedom of being read
as more than exceptionally articulate victims of a patriarchally
engendered plot’ (‘Review of The Madwoman in the Attic’, 522).
In other words: how did women manage to write at all, given the
relentless patriarchal indoctrination that surrounded them from the
moment they were born? Gilbert and Gubar avoid this question,
blandly stating as the conclusion of their first chapter that ‘Despite the
obstacles presented by those twin images of angel and monster, despite
the fears of sterility and the anxieties of authorship from which
women have suffered, generations of texts have been possible for female
writers’ (44). Indeed, but why? Only a more sophisticated account of
the contradictory, fragmentary nature of patriarchal ideology would
help Gilbert and Gubar to answer this question. In this context, Cora
Kaplan’s arguments against Kate Millett are still relevant.5
Feminists must be able to account for the paradoxically productive
aspects of patriarchal ideology (the moments in which the ideology
backfires on itself, as it were) as well as for its obvious oppressive
implications if they are to answer the tricky question of how it is that
some women manage to counter patriarchal strategies despite the odds
stacked against them. In the nineteenth century, for instance, it would
seem true to say that bourgeois patriarchy’s predilection for liberal
humanism as a ‘legitimizing ideology’ lent ammunition and argu-
ments to the growing bourgeois feminist movement. If one held that
the rights of the individual were sacred, it became increasingly difficult
to argue that women’s rights somehow were not. Just as Mary Woll-
stonecraft’s essay on the rights of woman was made possible by the
emancipatory if bourgeois-patriarchal ideas of liberté, égalité and fraternité,
so John Stuart Mill’s essay on the subjection of women was the product
of patriarchal liberal humanism. Gilbert and Gubar overlook these
64 anglo-american feminist criticism

points, referring to Mill only twice en passant, and both times as a parallel
to Mary Wollstonecraft. Their theory of covert and inexpressed rage as
the essence of century ‘femaleness’ cannot comfortably cope with a
‘male’ text that openly tackles the problem of women’s oppression.
This impasse in Gilbert and Gubar’s work is both accentuated and
compounded by their persistent use of the epithet ‘female’. It has long
been an established practice among most feminists to use ‘feminine’
(and ‘masculine’) to represent social constructs (patterns of sexuality and
behaviour imposed by cultural and social norms), and to reserve
‘female’ and ‘male’ for the purely biological aspects of sexual differ-
ence. Thus ‘feminine’ represents nurture and ‘female’ nature in this
usage. ‘Femininity’ is a cultural construct: one isn’t born a woman, one
becomes one, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it. Seen in this perspective,
patriarchal oppression consists of imposing certain social standards of
femininity on all biological women, in order precisely to make us
believe that the chosen standards for ‘femininity’ are natural. Thus a
woman who refuses to conform can be labelled both unfeminine and
unnatural. It is in the patriarchal interest that these two terms (femininity
and femaleness) stay thoroughly confused. Feminists, on the con-
trary, have to disentangle this confusion, and must therefore always
insist that though women undoubtedly are female, this in no way guar-
antees that they will be feminine. This is equally true whether one defines
femininity in the old patriarchal ways or in a new feminist way.
Gilbert and Gubar’s refusal to admit a separation between nature and
nurture at the lexical level renders their whole argument obscure.
For what is this ‘female creativity’ they are studying? Is it a natural,
essential, inborn quality in all women? Is it ‘feminine’ creativity in
the sense of a creativity conforming to certain social standards of
female behaviour, or is it a creativity typical of a feminine subject
position in the psychoanalytical sense? Gilbert and Gubar seem to hold
the first hypothesis, though in a slightly more historicized form: in a
given patriarchal society all women (because they are biologically
female) will adopt certain strategies to counter patriarchal oppression.
These strategies will be ‘female’ since they will be the same for
all women submitted to such conditions. Such an argument relies
heavily on the assumption that patriarchal ideology is homogeneous
and all-encompassing in its effects. It also gives little scope for an
 women writing and writing about women 65
understanding of how genuinely difficult it is for women to achieve
anything like ‘full femininity’, or of the ways in which women can
come to take up a masculine subject position – that is to say, become
solid defenders of the patriarchal status quo.
In the last chapter of their theoretical preamble (‘The parables of the
cave’), Gilbert and Gubar discuss Mary Shelley’s ‘Author’s introduc-
tion’ to The Last Man (1826) where the author tells us how she found
the scattered leaves of the Sibyl’s messages during a visit to her cave.6
Mary Shelley then decides to spend her life deciphering and transmit-
ting the message of these fragments in a more coherent form. Gilbert
and Gubar use this story as a parable of their understanding of the
situation of the woman writer under patriarchy:

This last parable is the story of the woman artist who enters the cavern
of her own mind and finds there the scattered leaves not only of her
own power but of the tradition which might have generated that
power. The body of her precursor’s art, and thus the body of her own
art lies in pieces around her, dismembered, dis-remembered, disinte-
grated. How can she remember it and become a member of it, join it
and rejoin it, integrate it and in doing so achieve her own integrity, her
own selfhood?
(98)

This parable is also a statement of Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist aesthet-

ics. The emphasis here is on wholeness – on the gathering of the Sibyl’s
leaves (but nobody asks why the Sibyl of the myth chose to scatter her
wisdom in the first place): women’s writing can only come into exist-
ence as a structured and objectified whole. Parallel to the wholeness of
the text is the wholeness of the woman’s self; the integrated humanist
individual is the essence of all creativity. A fragmented conception of
self or consciousness would seem to Gilbert and Gubar the same as a
sick or dis-eased self. The good text is an organic whole, in spite of the
sophisticated apparatus the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic bring to
bear on the works they study.
But this emphasis on integrity and totality as an ideal for women’s
writing can be criticized precisely as a patriarchal or – more accurately –
a phallic construct. As Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida have argued,
66 anglo-american feminist criticism

patriarchal thought models its criteria for what counts as ‘positive’

values on the central assumption of the Phallus and the Logos as tran-
scendental signifiers of Western culture.7 The implications of this are
often astonishingly simplistic: anything conceived of as analogous to
the so-called ‘positive’ values of the Phallus counts as good, true or
beautiful; anything that is not shaped on the pattern of the Phallus is
defined as chaotic, fragmented, negative or non-existent. The Phallus
is often conceived of as a whole, unitary and simple form, as opposed
to the terrifying chaos of the female genitals. Now it can be argued that
Gilbert and Gubar’s belief in unitary wholes plays directly into the
hands of such phallic aesthetic criteria. As we have seen in the case of
the feminist reception of Virginia Woolf, a certain feminist preference
for realism over modernism can be interpreted in the same way. To this
extent, some Anglo-American feminism – and Gilbert and Gubar are
no exceptions – is still labouring under the traditional patriarchal
aesthetic values of New Criticism.
Gilbert and Gubar’s final hope that their book will contribute to
recreate a lost ‘female’ unity bears out this assumption:

There is a sense in which, for us, this book is a dream of the rising of
Christina Rossetti’s ‘mother country’. And there is a sense in which it
is an attempt at reconstructing the Sibyl’s leaves, leaves which haunt
us with the possibility that if we can piece together their fragments the
parts will form a whole that tells the story of the career of a single
woman artist, a ‘mother of us all’, as Gertrude Stein would put it, a
woman whom patriarchal poetics dismembered and whom we have
tried to remember.
(101)

The passage continues with a rough outline of the story of this single
woman artist from Jane Austen and Maria Edgworth to George Eliot
and Emily Dickinson. The concern with wholeness, with the woman
writer as the meaning of the texts studied, is here pressed to its logical
conclusion: the desire to write the narrative of a mighty ‘Ur-woman’.
From one viewpoint this is a laudable project, since feminists obvi-
ously wish to make women speak; but from another viewpoint it car-
ries some dubious political and aesthetic implications. For one thing it
 women writing and writing about women 67
is not an unproblematic project to try to speak for the other woman,
since this is precisely what the ventriloquism of patriarchy has always
done: men have constantly spoken for women, or in the name of
women. Is it right that women now should take up precisely that
masculine position in relation to other women? We might argue, in
other words, that Gilbert and Gubar arrogate to themselves the same
authorial authority they bestow on all women writers. As for ‘telling a
story’, this can in itself be constructed as an autocratic gesture. As we
have seen, Gilbert and Gubar quote Edward Said approvingly when he
writes that underneath ‘beginning-middle-end’ is the ‘imagery of suc-
cession, of paternity, of hierarchy’ (5). But a story is precisely that
which ever since Aristotle has been the very model of a beginning, a
middle and an end. Perhaps it isn’t such a good feminist idea to
start telling the whole, integrated and unified story of the Great
Mother-Writer after all? As Mary Jacobus has remarked:

This enormously energetic, often witty, shrewd and resourceful book

is, it seems to me, limited in the end precisely by its preoccupation
with plot; though its arts are not the traditionally female ones of the
wicked Queen, they risk in their own way being as reductive. They
become a form of tight lacing which immobilizes the play of meaning
in the texts whose hidden plots they uncover. What they find there,
again and again, is not just ‘plot’ but ‘author’, the madwoman in the
attic of their title. . . . Like the story of Snow White, this is a plot
doomed to repetition; their book (ample partly because it can only
repeat) reenacts endlessly the revisionary struggle, unlocking the
secrets of the female text again and again with the same key.
(‘Review of The Madwoman in the Attic’, 518–19)

In the end, Jacobus argues, this eternal return to the ‘original and
originating “story” of women’s repression by patriarchy’ occurs at the
cost of ignoring precisely the political implications of the critics’ own
stance: ‘If culture, writing, and language are inherently repressive, as
they may be argued to be, so is interpretation itself; and the question
which arises for the feminist critic is, How are they specifically repres-
sive for the woman writer?’ (‘Review’, 520). Jacobus concludes that
‘the story between the lines may be feminist criticism’s problematic
68 anglo-american feminist criticism

relation to the patriarchal criticism it sets out to revise’ (‘Review’,

522). At this point, surely, we should ask ourselves if it is not time to
revise a feminist aesthetics that seems in these particular respects to
lead to the same patriarchal and authoritarian dead end. In other
words, it is time for us to confront the fact that the main problem in
Anglo-American feminist criticism lies in the radical contradiction it
presents between feminist politics and patriarchal aesthetics.
 4
THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS

Anglo-American feminist critics have been mostly indifferent or even

hostile towards literary theory, which they have often regarded as a
hopelessly abstract ‘male’ activity. This attitude is now beginning to
change, and it seems likely that the 1980s will mark the breakthrough
of theoretical reflections within the field of feminist criticism. In this
section I will examine some of the precursors of this evolution towards
a greater degree of feminist reflection on the purpose and function of
literature and literary criticism. I have chosen for this purpose to
concentrate on the theoretical work of what I take to be three fairly
representative Anglo-American feminist critics: Annette Kolodny,
Elaine Showalter and Myra Jehlen.

ANNETTE KOLODNY
One of the first texts to break the theoretical silence among feminist
critics was Annette Kolodny’s ‘Some notes on defining a “feminist
literary criticism” ’, first published in the journal Critical Inquiry in 1975.
The opening passage declares the freshness of Kolodny’s approach: ‘As
yet, no one has formulated any exacting definition of the term “femi-
nist criticism” ’ (75). After a brief survey of the varieties of feminist
criticism, Kolodny turns to her main subject: the study of women’s
70 anglo-american feminist criticism

writing as a separate category. While showing that this kind of criti-

cism is based on the ‘assumption that there is something unique about
women’s writing’ (76), she is anxious that this approach might lead to
over-hasty conclusions about women’s nature, or to endless debates
over ‘the relative merits of nature versus nurture’ (76). She is also
concerned about what she sees as the ‘abiding commitment [in femi-
nist criticism] to discover what, if anything, makes women’s writing
different from men’s’ (78); since gender is a relational entity, it is clearly
impossible to locate a difference of style or content without com-
parison. ‘If we insist on discovering something we can clearly label as a
“feminine mode”, then we are honor-bound, also, to delineate its
counter-part, the “masculine mode” ’ (78). Kolodny thus advocates a
kind of feminist comparativism, much as Myra Jehlen was to do six
years later.
In spite of such cautionary warnings, Kolodny nevertheless believes
that we may arrive inductively at a number of conclusions about
feminine style in literature if we

begin by treating each author and each separate work by each author
as itself unique and individual. Then, slowly, we may over the course of
time and much reading discover what kind of things recur and, more
important still, if things recur.
(79)

This method, however, is somewhat contradictory. For though Kolodny

wants us to jettison all preconceived notions about women’s writing
(‘We must . . . begin not with assumptions (acknowledged or not) but
with questions’ (79)), it is difficult to see how these more or less
unconscious preconceptions can be prevented from influencing our
reading of each ‘unique and individual’ author, as well as our selection
of features to be isolated and compared. Kolodny herself locates several
typical stylistic patterns in female fiction, of which the two most
important are ‘reflexive perception’ and ‘inversion’. Reflexive percep-
tion occurs when a character ‘discover[s] herself or find[s] some part
of herself in activities she had not planned or in situations she cannot
fully comprehend’ (79), and inversion occurs when the ‘stereotyped,
traditional literary images of women . . . are being turned around in
 theoretical reflections 71
women’s fiction, either for comic purposes, . . . to reveal their hidden
reality [or] . . . come to connote their opposites’ (80). Inversion thus
comes to sound like an early version of Gilbert and Gubar’s theory of
the subversive strategies located beneath the surface of women’s fiction.
Singling out ‘the fear of being fixed in false images or trapped in
inauthentic roles’ as ‘the most compelling fear in women’s fiction
today’ (83), Kolodny immediately acknowledges that this is hardly a
theme peculiar to women, but insists that the critic’s job is to look for
the difference of experience underlying women’s use of such imagery. Femi-
nist critics, according to Kolodny, always seek the reality behind the fiction
and therefore must ‘tread very carefully before asserting that the some-
times grotesque or apparently outré perceptions of reality granted us by
women writers and their female characters are a distortion of any kind’
(84). Her preoccupation with the experience ‘behind’ the text emerges
with particular force in the following passage, dealing as it does with
possible differences between male and female use of the same imagery:

A man’s sense of entrapment on the job and a woman’s in the home

may both finally share the same psychiatric label, but the language of
literature, if it is honest, will reveal to us the building blocks, the
minute-by-minute experience of what it feels like to be trapped in those
very different settings.
(85)

In general, Kolodny’s programme for feminist criticism remains

firmly planted on New Critical ground:

The overriding task of an intellectually vigorous feminist criticism as I

see it, therefore, must be to school itself in rigorous methods for
analyzing style and image and then without preconception or pre-
conceived conclusions to apply those methodologies to individual
works. Only then will we be able to train our students, and our col-
leagues, to read women writers properly, with greater appreciation for
their individual aims and particular achievements (goals which I am
convinced must structure any legitimate literary criticism, regardless
of its subject).
(87)
72 anglo-american feminist criticism

Quite apart from its use of the somewhat masculinist-sounding adjec-

tives ‘vigorous’ and ‘rigorous’ to describe the ‘right’ kind of feminist
criticism, this insistence on analysis without preconception (as if that were
possible) as the basis for proper readings of women writers betrays the
traditionalism of Kolodny’s approach. The rebel feminist who might
want to study literature improperly (as Kate Millett did), to read ‘against
the grain’ and question the established structures of ‘legitimate literary
criticism’ (why should feminists reject illegitimacy?), can find little
foothold in the space opened up by critics like Kolodny, Showalter and
Jehlen. Kolodny even recommends that feminist criticism should be
‘obliged to separate political ideologies from aesthetic judgments’
(89), since, as she puts it, political commitment may make ‘dishonest’
critics of us.1 She ends her essay by claiming that the aim of feminist
criticism must be ‘the reenfranchising of women writers into the
mainstream of our academic curriculum through fairer, non sex
biased, and more judicious appraisals of their work’ (91). Though few
are likely to disagree violently with this, it remains an unusually mod-
est framework for the feminist struggle within academia. It is worth
pondering whether such reformism may be the inevitable outcome of
a feminist analysis based on an unquestioned acceptance of so many
aspects of New Critical doctrine.
Five years later, in an article entitled ‘Dancing through the minefield:
some observations on the theory, practice and politics of a feminist
literary criticism’, published in Feminist Studies, Kolodny returns to some
of the questions she raised in 1975, complaining that after a decade
energetically developing a whole new field of intellectual enquiry,
feminist criticism had still not been granted ‘an honored berth on that
ongoing intellectual journey which we loosely term in academia, “criti-
cal analysis”. Instead of being welcomed onto the train . . . we’ve been
forced to negotiate a minefield’ (6). According to Kolodny, the aca-
demic establishment’s hostile reactions to feminist criticism might be
‘transformed into a true dialogue’ (8) if we made our own methodo-
logical and theoretical assumptions explicit; and this, precisely, is what
she then sets out to do. Arguing that feminist criticism is a funda-
mentally ‘suspicious’ approach to literature, Kolodny sees the principal
task of the feminist critic as that of examining the validity of our
aesthetic judgments: ‘What ends do those judgments serve, the
 theoretical reflections 73
feminist asks; and what conceptions of the world or ideological stances
do they (even if unwittingly) help to perpetuate?’ (15). This is surely
one of her most valuable insights.
The problem arises when she proceeds from this to a wholesale
recommendation of pluralism as the appropriate feminist stance. Femi-
nist criticism lacks systematic coherence, she argues, and this fact (‘the
fact of our diversity’), should ‘place us securely where, all along, we
should have been: camped out, on the far side of the minefield, with
the other pluralists and pluralisms’ (17). Feminists cannot and indeed
should not provide that ‘internal consistency as a system’ that Kolodny
ascribes to psychoanalysis and Marxism. In her discourse, these two
theoretical formations come to figure as monolithically oppressive
blocks towering over the diversified, anti-authoritarian feminist field.
But it is not only untrue that Marxism and psychoanalysis offer such a
unified theoretical field; it is also surely doubtful that feminist criticism
is that diversified.2 Kolodny acknowledges that feminist politics is the
basis for feminist criticism; so that though we may argue over what
constitutes proper feminist politics and theory, that debate nevertheless
takes place within a feminist political framework, much like debates
within contemporary Marxism. Without common political ground,
there can simply be no recognizable feminist criticism. In this context,
Kolodny’s ‘pluralist’ approach risks throwing the baby out with the
bathwater:

Adopting a ‘pluralist’ label does not mean, however, that we cease to

disagree; it means only that we entertain the possibility that different
readings, even of the same text, may be differently useful, even
illuminating, within different contexts of inquiry.
(18)

But if we wax pluralistic enough to acknowledge the feminist position

as just one among many ‘useful’ approaches, we also implicitly grant
the most ‘masculinist’ of criticism the right of existence: it just might be
‘useful’ in a very different context from ours.
Kolodny’s intervention in the theoretical debate pays too little atten-
tion to the role of politics in critical theory. When she states, correctly,
that ‘If feminist criticism calls anything into question, it must be that
74 anglo-american feminist criticism

dog-eared myth of intellectual neutrality’ (21), she still seems not to

recognize that even critical theory carries with it its own political
implications. Feminist criticism cannot just

initiate nothing less than a playful pluralism, responsive to the

possibilities of multiple critical schools and methods, but captive of
none, recognizing that the many tools needed for our analysis will
necessarily be largely inherited and only partly of our own making.
(19)

Feminists must surely also conduct a political and theoretical evaluation

of the various methods and tools on offer, to make sure that they don’t
backfire on us.

ELAINE SHOWALTER
Elaine Showalter is rightly acknowledged as one of the most important
feminist critics in America. Her theoretical observations are therefore
of particular interest to us. I want now to examine two of her articles
on feminist literary theory, ‘Towards a feminist poetics’ (1979) and
‘Feminist criticism in the wilderness’ (1981).3
In the first article, Showalter distinguishes between two forms of
feminist criticism. The first type is concerned with woman as reader,
which Showalter labels ‘feminist critique’. The second type deals with
woman as writer, and Showalter calls this ‘gynocritics’. ‘Feminist cri-
tique’ deals with works by male authors, and Showalter tells us that this
form of criticism is a ‘historically grounded inquiry which probes the
ideological assumptions of literary phenomena’ (25). This sort of ‘sus-
picious’ approach to the literary text seems however to be largely
absent from Showalter’s second category, since among the primary
concerns of ‘gynocritics’ we find ‘the history, themes, genres and
structures of literature by women’ as well as the ‘psychodynamics of
female creativity’ and ‘studies of particular writers and works’ (25).
There is no indication here that the feminist critic concerned with
women as writers should bring other than sympathetic, identity-
seeking approaches to bear on works written by women. The ‘hermen-
eutics of suspicion’, which assumes that the text is not, or not only,
 theoretical reflections 75
what it pretends to be, and therefore searches for underlying contradic-
tions and conflicts as well as absences and silences in the text, seems to
be reserved for texts written by men. The feminist critic, in other
words, must realize that the woman-produced text will occupy a totally
different status from the ‘male’ text.
Showalter writes:

One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented.

If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the
limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what
women have felt and experienced, but only what men have thought
women should be.
(27)

The implication is not only that the feminist critic should turn to
‘gynocritics’, the study of women’s writings, precisely in order to learn
‘what women have felt and experienced’, but also that this experience
is directly available in the texts written by women. The text, in other
words, has disappeared, or become the transparent medium through
which ‘experience’ can be seized. This view of texts as transmitting
authentic ‘human’ experience is, as we have seen, a traditional
emphasis of Western patriarchal humanism. In Showalter’s case, this
humanist position is also tinged by a good portion of empiricism. She
rejects theory as a male invention that apparently can only be used on
men’s texts (27–8). ‘Gynocritics’ frees itself from pandering to male
values and seeks to ‘focus . . . on the newly visible world of female
culture’ (28). This search for the ‘muted’ female culture can best be
carried out by applying anthropological theories to the female author
and her work: ‘Gynocritics is related to feminist research in history,
anthropology, psychology and sociology, all of which have developed
hypotheses of a female subculture’ (28). The feminist critic, in other
words, should attend to historical, anthropological, psychological and
sociological aspects of the ‘female’ text; in short, it would seem, to
everything but the text as a signifying process. The only influences
Showalter appears to recognize as constitutive of the text are of an
empirical, extra-literary sort. This attitude, coupled with her fear of
‘male’ theory and general appeal to ‘human’ experience, has the
76 anglo-american feminist criticism

unfortunate effect of drawing her perilously close to the male critical

hierarchy whose patriarchal values she opposes.
In ‘Feminist criticism in the wilderness’, Showalter tends to repeat
the same themes. The new component of this article is a lengthy
presentation of what she takes to be the four main directions of
present-day feminist criticism: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic
and cultural criticism. Though her particular division of the field may
be queried, it does as a whole reveal that Showalter has come to recog-
nize that necessity of theory. She still employs a division between
‘feminist critique’ (which she here also calls ‘feminist reading’) and
‘gynocritics’. The feminist critique or reading is, we are told, ‘in
essence a mode of interpretation’. Showalter continues: ‘It is very dif-
ficult to propose theoretical coherence in an activity [i.e. interpreta-
tion] which by its nature is so eclectic and wide-ranging, although as a
critical practice feminist reading has certainly been very influential’
(182). In this way she attempts to escape intractable ‘male’ questions
like: What is interpretation? What does it mean to read? What is a text?
Showalter once more rejects all meddling with ‘male critical theory’,
since it ‘keeps us dependent upon it and retards our progress in solving
our own theoretical problems’ (183). Her dichotomy between ‘male
critical theory’ and ‘our own theoretical problems’ is not argued or
elaborated in detail, which leaves us to discover for ourselves that while
she denounces the ‘white fathers’, Lacan, Macherey and Engels
(183–4), she ends up by extolling as particularly suitable for ‘gyno-
critical’ activity the cultural theory developed by Edwin Ardener and
Clifford Geertz. Despite a token excuse for this glaring inconsistency (‘I
don’t mean . . . to enthrone Ardener and Geertz as the new white
fathers in place of Freud, Lacan and Bloom’ (205)), she nevertheless
manages by this gesture to bemuse the reader who has followed her so
far. Should the aspiring ‘gynocritic’ use ‘male’ theory or should she not?
Showalter’s final answer to this question is frankly evasive, based as it is
on a dubious contrast between ‘theory’ and ‘knowledge’: ‘No theory,
however suggestive, can be a substitute for the close and extensive know-
ledge of women’s texts which constitutes our essential subject’ (205).
But what ‘knowledge’ is ever uninformed by theoretical assumptions?
And so we are back where we started: the lack of a suitable theory of
feminist criticism has become a virtuous necessity, since too much
 theoretical reflections 77
theoretical study would prevent us from achieving that ‘close and
extensive knowledge of women’s texts’ that Showalter herself has so
richly displayed in A Literature of Their Own. Her fear of the text and its
problems is well-justified, since any real engagement with this field of
enquiry would lead to the exposure of the fundamental complicity
between this empiricist and humanist variety of feminist criticism and
the male academic hierarchy it rightly resists.
I will try briefly to show how this complicity works. The humanist
believes in literature as an excellent instrument of education: by read-
ing ‘great works’ the student will become a finer human being. The
great author is great because he (occasionally even she) has managed to
convey an authentic vision of life; and the role of the reader or critic is
to listen respectfully to the voice of the author as it is expressed in the
text. The literary canon of ‘great literature’ ensures that it is this ‘repre-
sentative experience’ (one selected by male bourgeois critics) that is
transmitted to future generations, rather than those deviant, un-
representative experiences discoverable in much female, ethnic and
working-class writing. Anglo-American feminist criticism has waged
war on this self-sufficient canonization of middle-class male values. But
they have rarely challenged the very notion of such a canon. Showal-
ter’s aim, in effect, is to create a separate canon of women’s writing,
not to abolish all canons. But a new canon would not be intrinsically
less oppressive than the old. The role of the feminist critic is still to sit
quietly and listen to her mistress’s voice as it expresses authentic female
experience. The feminist reader is not granted leave to get up and
challenge this female voice; the female text rules as despotically as the
old male text. As if in compensation for her obedience, the feminist
critic is allowed to launch sceptical critiques of ‘male’ literature, pro-
vided she keeps this critical stance well separate from her concern with
women writers. But if texts are seen as signifying processes, and both
writing and reading grasped as textual production, it is likely that even
texts written by women will be subjected to irreverent scrutiny by
feminist critics. And if this were to happen, it is clear that the Showal-
terian ‘gynocritic’ would face a painful dilemma, caught between the
‘new’ feminists with their ‘male’ theories and the male humanist
empiricists with their patriarchal politics.
The limitations of this mode of feminist criticism become
78 anglo-american feminist criticism

particularly clear when it is confronted with a woman’s work that

refuses to conform to the humanistic expectations of an authentic,
realistic expression of ‘human’ experience. It is not accidental that
Anglo-American feminist criticism has dealt overwhelmingly with fic-
tion written in the great period of realism between 1750 and 1930,
with a notable concentration on the Victorian era. Monique Wittig’s Les
guérillères (1969) is an example of an altogether quite different sort of
text. This utopian work consists of a series of fragments depicting life
in an Amazonian society involved in a war against men. The war is
finally won by the women, and peace is celebrated by them and the
young men who have been won over to their cause. This fragmented
work is interrupted at regular intervals by a different text: a series of
women’s names printed in capital letters in the middle of a blank page.
In addition to the hundreds of names contained in this series, the text
also comprises a couple of poems and three large circles representing
the vulva, a symbolism that is rejected as a form of inverted sexism at a
later stage in the book. Wittig’s book offers no individual characters,
no psychology and no recognizable ‘experience’ to be strongly felt by
the reader. But it is evident that the work is a deeply feminist one, and
as such Anglo-American feminist critics have often tried to engage
with it.
Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women offers these comments on the
women’s names intervening in the text:

The women’s names that are ritualistically chanted seem a human

joke, since they are attached to no characters we come to know:

DEMONA EPONINA GABRIELA

FULVIA ALEXANDRA JUSTINE (p. 43)

and so on. Though these names take on their own incantatory life, the
empty resonance of their sound is also the death of the real people we
used to read novels to meet.
(190–1)

Wittig’s text in fact nowhere indicates that the names are spoken by
anyone: the ‘ritualistic chanting’ represents Auerbach’s own attempt to
attribute the fragmented text to a unitary human voice. When the text
 theoretical reflections 79
no longer offers an individual grasped as the transcendental origin of
language and experience, humanist feminism must lay down its arms.
Auerbach therefore wistfully hopes for better days in a human-feminist
future: ‘Perhaps once women have proved their strength to themselves,
it will be possible to return to the individuality of Meg, Jo, Beth, and
Amy, or to the humanly interdependent courtesy of Cranford’ (191). If
a nostalgic reversion to Cranford or Little Women is all this brand of criti-
cism can yearn for, the urgent examination of other, more theoretically
informed critical practices must surely be a pressing item on the
agenda of Anglo-American feminist critics.

MYRA JEHLEN
Myra Jehlen’s article ‘Archimedes and the paradox of feminist criti-
cism’ seems to have voiced central concerns among many American
feminists: first published in the summer of 1981, it has already been
anthologized twice.4 Her essay does indeed engage with important
issues, devoted as it is to a discussion of the contradiction between
what she calls ‘appreciative and political readings’ (579). Jehlen con-
fronts this fundamental problem not only in feminist criticism, but
argues the case for ‘radical comparativism’ (585) in feminist studies
as a whole. According to her, the woman-centered works by Spacks,
Moers, Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar suffer from their exclusive
focus on the female tradition in literature. Deploring the feminist
tendency to create ‘an alternative context, a sort of female enclave
apart from the universe of masculinist assumptions’ (576), Jehlen
wants women’s studies to become the ‘investigation, from women’s
viewpoint, of everything’ (577). This project in itself is both ambi-
tious and energetic. Feminist criticism actually began by examining
the dominant male culture (Ellmann, Millett) and there is no reason
for women today to reject this aspect of feminist work. But Jehlen
takes a step further. In recommending comparison in order to locate
‘the difference between women’s writing and men’s that no study
of only women’s writing can depict’ (584), she points to Kate
Millett’s Sexual Politics as being ‘all about comparison’ (586). But this is
clearly untrue: Millett’s book, as we have seen, is all about men’s
writing.
80 anglo-american feminist criticism

There is a dangerous sliding in Jehlen’s argument from a much-

needed insistence on the relational nature of gender, to a recommenda-
tion that feminists return to studying the traditional patriarchal canon
of literature. The ambiguity of her argument at this point reflects her
conviction that a ‘standpoint from which we can see our conceptual
universe whole but which nonetheless rests firmly on male ground, is
what feminists really need’ (576). This ambiguity is caused in no small
part by certain highly confusing rhetorical manoeuvres around the
image of Archimedes and his fulcrum. Arguing that feminist thinking
is a ‘radical skepticism’ (575) that creates unusual difficulties for its
practitioners, Jehlen writes:

Somewhat like Archimedes, who to lift the earth with his lever
required someplace else on which to locate himself and his fulcrum,
feminists questioning the presumptive order of both nature and his-
tory – and thus proposing to remove the ground from under their own
feet – would appear to need an alternative base.
(575–6)

Jehlen alludes here to a central paradox of feminism: given that there is

no space outside patriarchy from which women can speak, how do we
explain the existence of a feminist, anti-patriarchal discourse at all?
Jehlen’s insistence on the fulcrum image (‘What Archimedes really
needed was a terrestrial fulcrum’ (576) ) has the unfortunate effect of
implying that such an effort is doomed to failure (a terrestrial fulcrum
will never shift the earth). Instead of shifting the earth, Jehlen wants to
shift feminism back on to ‘male ground’ – but that is, of course,
precisely where feminism, both woman-centred and otherwise, has
always been. If there is no space uncontaminated by patriarchy from
which women can speak, it follows that we really don’t need a fulcrum
at all: there is simply nowhere else to go.
In her response to Jehlen, Elaine Showalter opposes her recom-
mendation of a shift towards ‘radical comparativism’ on the grounds
that ‘such a shift might mean an abandonment of a feminist enterprise
which still frightens us by its audacity’ (‘Comment on Jehlen’, 161).
Showalter defends the study of a female tradition in literature as a
‘methodological choice rather than a belief ’, declaring that:
 theoretical reflections 81
No woman, we know, is ever cut off from the real male world; but in
the world of ideas we can draw boundaries that open up new vistas of
thought, that allow us to see a problem in a new way.
(161)

But the study of a female tradition in literature, while not necessarily an

attempt to create ‘a female enclave’, is surely more than a methodo-
logical choice: it is an urgent political necessity. If patriarchy oppresses
women as women, defining us all as ‘feminine’ regardless of individual
differences, the feminist struggle must both try to undo the patriarchal
strategy that makes ‘femininity’ intrinsic to biological femaleness, and
at the same time insist on defending women precisely as women. In a
patriarchal society that discriminates against women writers because
they are women, it is easy enough to justify a discussion of them as a
separate group. The problem, more urgently, is how to avoid bringing
patriarchal notions of aesthetics, history and tradition to bear on the
‘female tradition’ we have decided to construct. Showalter herself did
not avoid these pitfalls in A Literature of Their Own, and Jehlen seems
hardly to be aware of the problem: her acceptance of the most tradi-
tional patriarchal aesthetic categories is, as we shall see, little short of
astonishing in a critic who calls herself a feminist.
Jehlen approaches the problem of ‘critical appreciation’ as opposed
to ‘political readings’ by stating that:

What makes feminist literary criticism especially contradictory is the

peculiar nature of literature as distinct from the objects of either phys-
ical or social scientific study. Unlike these, literature is itself already an
interpretation that it is the critic’s task to decipher. It is certainly not
news that the literary work is biased: indeed that is its value. Critical
objectivity enters in only at a second level to provide a reliable reading,
though even here many have argued that reading too is an exercise in
creative interpretation.
(577)

This statement takes for granted that the literary text is an object to be
deciphered. But as Roland Barthes has argued: ‘Once the Author is
removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile’ (‘The death
82 anglo-american feminist criticism

of the Author’, 147). Jehlen believes that texts are the encoded message
of the author’s voice: ‘critical objectivity’ then presumably consists in
faithfully reproducing this encoded message in a more accessible form.
The status of the author and the text is initially left somewhat unclear
in Jehlen’s essay. While rightly stating that feminism as the ‘philosophy
of the Other’ has had to reject the Romantic belief that ‘to be a great
poet was to tell the absolute truth, to be the One prophetic voice for all
Mankind’ (579), she nevertheless goes on to state that the aim of
criticism is to ‘do justice’ to – precisely – the author in order to
reproduce ‘the distinct vision’ of the literary subject. Or in her own
words:

We should begin therefore, by acknowledging the separate wholeness

of the literary subject, its distinct vision that need not be ours – what
the formalists have told us and told us about: its integrity. We need to
acknowledge, also, that to respect that integrity by not asking ques-
tions of the text that it does not ask itself, to ask the text what
questions to ask, will produce the fullest, richest reading.
(579)

It follows from this that Jehlen must take Kate Millett to task, since
her ‘intentionally tangential approach violated the terms of Henry
Miller’s work’ (579) and did ‘damage to his architecture’ (580). For
Jehlen, Millett’s approach was improper and violent; her reading becomes
the rape of the virginal integrity of Henry Miller’s text. It is as if
there was a set of objective facts about the work in question that
anybody could see if they just tried hard enough and that at all
costs must dominate the critic’s – any critic’s – approach. Jehlen’s
insistence on the proper reading to which feminists must submit, or else
suffer expulsion into the outer darkness of ‘improper’ or ‘dishonest’
critical approaches, here echoes Annette Kolodny’s views. Sue Warrick
Doederlein is right when she argues that:

New insights in linguistics and anthropology have surely given the lie
to any view of autonomous works of art whose sanctity we must not
violate and whose space we only enter (in our abject objectivity) ‘to
provide a reliable reading’. Feminist critics can (carefully) take certain
 theoretical reflections 83
postulates from current masculinist-endorsed hypotheses that will
allow us never to apologize for ‘misreading’ or ‘misinterpreting’ a text
again.
(165–6)

Patrocinio Schweickart, also taking issue with Jehlen on this point,

demonstrates the complicity of her theory with the doctrines of New
Criticism, and comments:

It is worth noting that the formalist basis of Jehlen’s argument – the

notion of the autotelic art object and the concomitant notion that to
read literature qua literature (rather than, say, as a sociological docu-
ment) one must stay within the terms intrinsic to (i.e. authorized by)
the text – has been seriously contested by structuralism, by decon-
struction, and by some reader-response-theories. I am not saying that
we should follow critical fashion blindly. My point is simply that, at the
very least, the basic tenets of New Criticism have been rendered
problematical. We should not take them as axiomatic.
(172)

But if Jehlen’s distinction between ‘critical appreciation’ and ‘politi-

cal reading’ is based on a traditionalist definition of the former, from a
feminist perspective it is her desire to maintain such an absolute dis-
tinction in the first place that raises the more difficult political ques-
tions. For the difference between feminist and non-feminist criticism is
not, as Jehlen seems to believe, that the former is political and the latter
is not, but that the feminist openly declares her politics, whereas
the non-feminist may either be unaware of his own value-system or
seek to universalize it as ‘non-political’. That Jehlen, writing as she
does after 15 years of feminist criticism in America, should appar-
ently have no qualms in abandoning one of the most fundamental
political insights of former feminist analysis, is particularly bizarre.
Jehlen argues for the separation of politics and aesthetics in an
attempt to solve a perennial problem for radical critics: the problem of
how to evaluate a work of art that one finds aesthetically valuable but
politically distasteful. If she nevertheless ends up arguing herself out of
any recognizable feminist position on this problem, it is because she
84 anglo-american feminist criticism

refuses to see both that aesthetic value judgements are historically rela-
tive and also that they are deeply imbricated in political value judge-
ments. An aesthetics recommending organic unity and the harmonic
interaction of all parts of the poetic structure for example, is not politi-
cally innocent. A feminist might wonder why anybody would want to
place such an emphasis on order and integration in the first place, and
whether it could have something to do with the social and political
ideals of the exponents of such critical theories. It would of course be
hopelessly reductive to argue that all aesthetic categories carry automatic
political overtones. But it is just as reductive to argue that aesthetic
structures are always and unchangingly politically neutral, or ‘non-
political’ as Jehlen puts it. The point is, surely, that the same aesthetic
device can be politically polyvalent, varying with the historical, politi-
cal and literary context in which it occurs. Only a non-dialectical
mode of thought can argue, as Jehlen does, that Pierre Macherey’s view
of cultural products as ‘relatively autonomous’ in relation to the histori-
cal and social context in which they are produced is inherently contra-
dictory: to require a simple and uncomplicated answer to the highly
complex problem of the relationship between politics and aesthetics is
surely the most reductive approach of all.
Jehlen believes that ‘ideological criticism’ (which to her is identical
with ‘political’ or ‘biased’ criticism) is reductive. Modern critical
theory tells us that all readings are in some sense reductive, in that they
all impose some kind of closure on the text. If all readings are also in
some sense political, it will hardly do to maintain the New Critics’
binary opposition between reductive political readings on the one
hand and rich aesthetic appraisal on the other. If aesthetics raises the
question of whether (and how) the text works effectively with an
audience, it obviously is bound up with the political: without an aes-
thetic effect there will be no political effect either. And if feminist
politics is about, among other things, ‘experience’, then it is already
related to the aesthetic. It should be clear by now that one of the chief
contentions of this book is that feminist criticism is about deconstruct-
ing such an opposition between the political and the aesthetic: as a
political approach to criticism, feminism must be aware of the politics
of aesthetic categories as well as of the implied aesthetics of political
approaches to art. This is why Jehlen’s views seem to me to undermine
 theoretical reflections 85
some of the most basic tenets of feminist criticism. If feminism does
not revolt against patriarchal notions of cultural criticism as a ‘value-
free’ exercise, it is in imminent danger of losing the last shreds of its
political credibility.5

Some feminists might wonder why I have said nothing about black or
lesbian (or black-lesbian) feminist criticism in America in this survey.
The answer is simple: this book purports to deal with the theoretical
aspects of feminist criticism. So far, lesbian and/or black feminist criti-
cism have presented exactly the same methodological and theoretical prob-
lems as the rest of Anglo-American feminist criticism. In her valuable
survey of lesbian criticism, Bonnie Zimmerman emphasizes the paral-
lels between feminist and lesbian criticism. Lesbian critics are engaged
in establishing a lesbian literary tradition, analysing images and stereo-
types of lesbians, and problematizing the concept of ‘lesbian’. As far as
I can judge, they thus encounter precisely the same theoretical problems
as do ‘straight’ feminist critics. It is the contents of her work that make
the lesbian critic’s study different, not her method. Instead of focusing
on ‘women’ in literature, the lesbian critic focuses on ‘lesbian women’,
as the black feminist critic will focus on ‘black women’ in literature.6
My point, then, is simply that in so far as textual theory is concerned there is
no discernible difference between these three fields. This is not to say
that black and lesbian criticism have no political importance; on the
contrary, by highlighting the different situations and often conflicting
interests of specific groups of women, these critical approaches force
white heterosexual feminists to re-examine their own sometimes
totalitarian conception of ‘woman’ as a homogeneous category. These
‘marginal feminisms’ ought to prevent white middle-class First-World
feminists from defining their own preoccupations as universal female (or
feminist) problems. In this respect, recent work on Third-World
women has much to teach us.7 As for the complex interactions of
class and gender, they too have received little attention among
Anglo-American feminist critics.8

I have tried in this survey of Anglo-American feminist criticism to

throw light on the fundamental affiliations between traditional human-
ist and patriarchal criticism and recent feminist scholarship. Despite
86 anglo-american feminist criticism

claims that Anglo-American feminist literary criticism is already gener-

ating new methods and analytical procedures, I can find little evidence
of such developments.9 The radically new impact of feminist criticism
is to be found not at the level of theory or methodology, but at the level
of politics. Feminists have politicized existing critical methods and
approaches. If feminist criticism has subverted established critical
judgements it is because of its radically new emphasis on sexual politics. It
is on the basis of its political theory (which has already engendered
many highly divergent forms of political strategy) that feminist criti-
cism has grown to become a new branch of literary studies. Feminists
therefore find themselves in a position roughly similar to that of other
radical critics: speaking from their marginalized positions on the out-
skirts of the academic establishments, they strive to make explicit the
politics of the so-called ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ works of their col-
leagues, as well as to act as cultural critics in the widest sense of the
word. Like socialists, feminists can in a sense afford to be tolerantly
pluralistic in their choice of literary methods and theories, precisely
because any approach that can be successfully appropriated to their
political ends must be welcome.
The key word here is ‘successfully’: a political evaluation of critical
methods and theories is an essential part of the feminist critical enter-
prise. My reservations about much Anglo-American feminist criticism
are thus not primarily that it has remained within the lineage of male-
centred humanism but that it has done so without sufficient awareness
of the high political costs this entails. The central paradox of Anglo-
American feminist criticism is thus that despite its often strong, explicit
political engagement, it is in the end not quite political enough; not in
the sense that it fails to go far enough along the political spectrum, but
in the sense that its radical analysis of sexual politics still remains
entangled with depoliticizing theoretical paradigms. There is nothing
surprising in this: all forms of radical thought inevitably remain mort-
gaged to the very historical categories they seek to transcend. But our
understanding of this historically necessary paradox should not lead us
complacently to perpetuate patriarchal practices.
Part II
French Feminist Theory
 5
FROM SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
TO JACQUES LACAN

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND MARXIST FEMINISM

Simone de Beauvoir is surely the greatest feminist theorist of our time.
Yet in 1949, when she published The Second Sex, she was convinced that
the advent of socialism alone would put an end to the oppression of
women and consequently considered herself a socialist, not a feminist.
Today her position is somewhat different. In 1972 she joined the MLF
(Women’s Liberation Movement) and publicly declared herself a
feminist for the first time. She explained this belated recognition of
feminism by pointing to the new radicalism of the women’s move-
ment: ‘The women’s groups which existed in France before the MLF
was founded in 1970 were generally reformist and legalistic. I had no
desire to associate myself with them. The new feminism is radical, by
contrast’ (Simone de Beauvoir Today, 29). This change of emphasis has not
however led her to repudiate socialism:

At the end of The Second Sex I said that I was not a feminist because I
believed that the problems of women would resolve themselves
automatically in the context of socialist development. By feminist, I
meant fighting on specifically feminine issues independently of the
90 french feminist theory

class struggle. I still hold the same view today. In my definition, femin-
ists are women – or even men, too – who are fighting to change
women’s condition, in association with the class struggle, but
independently of it as well, without making the changes they strive for
totally dependent on changing society as a whole. I would say that,
in that sense, I am a feminist today, because I realised that we must
fight for the situation of women, here and now, before our dreams of
socialism come true.
(Simone de Beauvoir Today, 32)

In spite of its commitment to socialism, The Second Sex is based not on

traditional Marxist theory, but on Sartre’s existentialist philosophy.
Beauvoir’s main thesis in this epochal work is simple: throughout
history, women have been reduced to objects for men: ‘woman’ has
been constructed as man’s Other, denied the right to her own subjecti-
vity and to responsibility for her own actions. Or, in more existentialist
terms: patriarchal ideology presents woman as immanence, man as
transcendence. Beauvoir shows how these fundamental assumptions
dominate all aspects of social, political and cultural life and, equally
important, how women themselves internalize this objectified vision,
thus living in a constant state of ‘inauthenticity’ or ‘bad faith’, as Sartre
might have put it. The fact that women often enact the roles patriarchy
has prescribed for them does not prove that the patriarchal analysis is
right: Beauvoir’s uncompromising refusal of any notion of a female
nature or essence is succinctly summed up in her famous statement
‘One is not born a woman; one becomes one’.1
Though most feminist theorists and critics of the 1980s acknow-
ledge their debt to Simone de Beauvoir, relatively few of them seem to
approve of her espousal of socialism as the necessary context for femi-
nism. In this respect it would seem that her most faithful followers are
to be found in Scandinavia and in Britain. In the Scandinavian social
democracies the debate within the women’s movement has never
explicitly pitted non-socialist against socialist feminists, whereas con-
siderable energy has been spent arguing over the kind of socialism
feminists ought to adopt. Thus in the early 1970s in Norway there was
a considerable degree of hostility between the centralized Maoist
‘Women’s Front’ and the more anti-hierarchical ‘Neo-feminists’
 from simone de beauvoir to jacques lacan 91
whose adherents represented everything from right-wing social dem-
ocracy to more radical, left-wing forms of socialism and Marxism.2
Scandinavian feminist criticism reflects this emphasis on socialism, par-
ticularly in its tendency to situate the textual analysis within a thor-
oughly researched account of class structures and class struggle at the
time of the literary text’s production.3 The recent rise to power of
conservative political parties in many of the Scandinavian countries has
only superficially modified this picture: in spite of the emergence of
some ‘light-blue’ Establishment feminists, the overwhelming majority
of Scandinavian feminists still feel at home somewhere on the political
Left.
Traditionally, British feminism has been more open to socialist ideas
than has its American counterpart. Most Marxist-feminist work in Brit-
ain, however, is not carried out within the specific field of literary
theory and criticism. In the 1980s it is women working within the
recently developed areas of cultural studies, film studies and media
studies, or in sociology or history, who are producing the most inter-
esting political and theoretical analyses. Though Marxist or socialist
feminists like Rosalind Coward, Annette Kuhn, Juliet Mitchell, Terry
Lovell, Janet Wolff and Michèle Barrett have all written on literary
topics, their most important and challenging work nevertheless falls
outside the scope of this book.4 My project has been to develop a
critical presentation of the current debates within feminist literary
criticism and theory. It is a sad fact that Marxist-feminist concerns have
not been central in this debate, and it is also, perhaps, an indictment of
this book that its basic structure does not represent a more radical
challenge to the current dominance of the Anglo-American and the
French critical perspectives.
In the specific field of literary studies, the Marxist-Feminist Litera-
ture Collective’s pioneering article ‘Women’s writing: Jane Eyre, Shirley,
Villette, Aurora Leigh’ draws on the theories of the French Marxists Louis
Althusser and Pierre Macherey in order to develop an analysis of the
marginalization of the woman writer and her work in terms of both
class and gender. This approach has been followed up and developed by
Penny Boumelha in her excellent analysis of sexual ideology in Thomas
Hardy’s work (Thomas Hardy and Women), which also finds its basic theory
of ideology in Althusser. Cora Kaplan, an erstwhile member of the
92 french feminist theory

Collective, continued its approach in her introduction to Aurora Leigh and

Other Poems. In America, Judith Lowder Newton’s Women, Power, and Subver-
sion focuses on the conjuncture of class and gender in British
nineteenth-century literature.
The Machereyan approach adopted by Penny Boumelha and The
Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective in particular seems to open up a
productive field of enquiry for feminist critics. For Macherey, the liter-
ary work is neither a unified whole, nor the unchallengeable ‘message’
of the Great Author/Creator. Indeed, for Macherey, the silences, gaps
and contradictions of the text are more revealing of its ideological
determinations than are its explicit statements. Terry Eagleton has given
a succinct summary of Macherey’s arguments on this point:

It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absences that the
presence of ideology can be most positively felt. It is these silences
which the critic must make ‘speak’. The text is, as it were, ideologically
forbidden to say certain things; in trying to tell the truth in his own
way, for example, the author finds himself forced to reveal the limits of
the ideology within which he writes. He is forced to reveal its gaps and
silences, what it is unable to articulate. Because a text contains these
gaps and silences, it is always incomplete. Far from constituting a
rounded, coherent whole, it displays a conflict and contradiction of
meanings; and the significance of the work lies in the difference rather
than unity between these meanings. . . . The work for Macherey is
always ‘de-centred’; there is no central essence to it, just a continuous
conflict and disparity of meanings.
(Marxism and Literary Criticism, 34–5)

The study of the silences and contradictions of the literary work will
enable the critic to link it to a specific historical context in which a
whole set of different structures (ideological, economic, social, politi-
cal) intersect to produce precisely those textual structures. Thus the
author’s personal situation and intentions can become no more than
one of the many conflicting strands that make up the contradictory
construct we call the text. This kind of Marxist-feminist criticism has
thus been particularly interested in studying the historical construction
of the categories of gender and in analysing the importance of culture
 from simone de beauvoir to jacques lacan 93
in the representation and transformation of those categories. In this
perspective, Marxist-feminist criticism offers an alternative both to the
homogenizing author-centred readings of the Anglo-American critics
and to the often ahistorical and idealist categories of the French
feminist theorists.
It is, however, only fair to say that much Marxist-feminist criticism,
whether British, American or Scandinavian, simply adds ‘class’ as
another theme to be discussed within the general framework estab-
lished by Anglo-American feminist criticism. And it is unfortunately
equally true that, so far, few feminist critics have attempted to examine
the work of Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Walter Ben-
jamin or Theodor Adorno in order to see whether their insights into
the problems of representing the tradition of the oppressed can be
appropriated for feminism.

FRENCH FEMINISM AFTER 1968

The new French feminism is the child of the student revolt of May
1968 in Paris, which almost toppled one of the more repressive of the
so-called Western democracies. For a while, the realization that ‘May
’68’ had almost managed the apparently impossible inspired an
exuberant political optimism among left-wing intellectuals in France.
‘Les événements’ enabled them to believe both that change was at hand
and that intellectuals had a real political role to play within it. At the
end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, political activism and inter-
vention thus seemed meaningful and relevant to students and
intellectuals on the Left Bank.
It was in this politicized intellectual climate, dominated by various
shades of Marxism, particularly Maoism, that the first French feminist
groups were formed. In many ways, the direct experience that led to
the formation of the first French women’s groups in the summer of
1968 was strikingly similar to that of the American women’s move-
ment.5 In May, women had fought alongside men on the barricades
only to find that they were still expected to furnish their male comrades
with sexual, secretarial and culinary services as well. Predictably
enough, they took their cue from American women and started to
form their own women-only groups. One of the very first of these
94 french feminist theory

groups chose to call itself ‘Psychanalyse et Politique’. Later, when the

politics of feminism had reached a more advanced stage, this group,
which in the meantime had founded the influential publishing house
des femmes (‘women’), renamed itself ‘politique et psychanalyse’, revers-
ing the priorities of politics and psychoanalysis and dropping the hier-
archical capitals once and for all. The concern with psychoanalysis
signals a central preoccupation in the Parisian intellectual milieux.
Whereas the American feminists of the 1960s had started by vigor-
ously denouncing Freud, the French took it for granted that psycho-
analysis could provide an emancipatory theory of the personal and a
path to the exploration of the unconscious, both of vital importance to
the analysis of the oppression of women in patriarchal society. In the
English-speaking world, the feminist arguments in favour of Freud
were not heard until Juliet Mitchell published her influential book
Psychoanalysis and Feminism in 1974, which was translated and published
in France by des femmes.
Though French feminist theory was already flourishing by 1974, it
has taken a considerable period to reach women outside France. One
of the reasons for the relatively limited influence of French theory on
Anglo-American feminists is the ‘heavy’ intellectual profile of the
former. Steeped as they are in European philosophy (particularly
Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger), Derridean deconstruction and Laca-
nian psychoanalysis, French feminist theorists apparently take for
granted an audience as Parisian as they are. Though rarely wilfully
obscure, the fact that few pedagogical concessions are made to the
reader without the ‘correct’ intellectual co-ordinates smacks of elitism
to the outsider. This holds for Hélène Cixous’s intricate puns and Luce
Irigaray’s infuriating passion for the Greek alphabet, as well as for
Julia Kristeva’s unsettling habit of referring to everyone from St Ber-
nard to Fichte or Artaud in the same sentence. That the exasperated
reader sometimes feels alienated by such uncompromising intel-
lectualism is hardly surprising. Once the Anglo-American reader has
overcome the effects of this initial culture-shock, however, it doesn’t
take long to discover that French theory has contributed powerfully
to the feminist debate about the nature of women’s oppression, the
construction of sexual difference and the specificity of women’s
relations to language and writing.
 from simone de beauvoir to jacques lacan 95
One problem for the English-speaking reader, however, is caused by
the French word ‘féminin’. In French there is only one adjective to
‘femme’, and that is ‘féminin’,6 whereas English has two adjectives to
‘woman’: ‘female’ and ‘feminine’. It has long been recognized usage
among many English-speaking feminists to use ‘feminine’ (and ‘mascu-
line’) to represent social constructs (gender) and to reserve ‘female’
(and ‘male’) for purely biological aspects (sex). The problem is that this
fundamental political distinction is lost in French. Does écriture féminine,
for instance, mean ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ writing? How can we know
whether this or any other such expression refers to sex or to gender?
There is of course no standard answer: in the following presentations
my readings of the French ‘féminin’ are interpretations based on the
context and on my overall understanding of the works in question.
For the Anglo-American feminist critic, the fact that there is very
little feminist literary criticism in France may be disconcerting. With a few
exceptions, such as Claudine Herrmann and Anne-Marie Dardigna,7
French feminist critics have preferred to work on problems of textual,
linguistic, semiotic or psychoanalytic theory, or to produce texts
where poetry and theory intermingle in a challenge to established
demarcations of genre. Despite their political commitment, such theor-
ists have been curiously willing to accept the established patriarchal
canon of ‘great’ literature, particularly the exclusively male pantheon
of French modernism from Lautréamont to Artaud or Bataille. There
can be no doubt that the Anglo-American feminist tradition has been
much more successful in its challenge to the oppressive social and
political strategies of the literary institution.
In the following presentation of French feminist theory I have
chosen to focus on the figures of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia
Kristeva. They have been chosen partly because their work is the most
representative of the main trends in French feminist theory, and partly
because they are more closely concerned with the specific problems
raised by women’s relation to writing and language than many other
feminist theorists in France. Thus I have decided not to discuss the
work of women like Annie Leclerc, Michèle Montrelay, Eugénie
Lemoine-Luccioni, Sarah Kofman and Marcelle Marini. Many American
feminist critics have also found their richest source of inspiration in the
theories of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, but lack of space
96 french feminist theory

prevents me from doing justice to the suggestive work of women such

as Jane Gallop, Shoshana Felman and Gayatri Spivak.8

It has often been claimed that the new generation of French feminist
theorists have rejected Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist feminism
entirely. Turning away from Beauvoir’s liberal desire for equality with
men, the argument goes, these feminists have emphasized difference.
Extolling women’s right to cherish their specifically female values, they
reject ‘equality’ as a covert attempt to force women to become like
men.9 The picture, however, is somewhat more complex than this. For
all her existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir remains the great mother-
figure for French feminists, and the symbolic value of her public sup-
port for the new women’s movement was enormous. Nor is it true to
say that her brand of socialist feminism remains without followers in
France. In 1977 Beauvoir and other women founded the journal Ques-
tions féministes, which aims to provide a forum precisely for various
socialist and anti-essentialist forms of feminism.10 The Marxist-
feminist sociologist Christine Delphy, who holds that women
constitute a class, was, for example, one of its founding members.
In spite of her very different theoretical orientation, many of Julia
Kristeva’s central preoccupations (her desire to theorize a social revolu-
tion based on class as well as gender, her emphasis on the construction
of femininity) have much more in common with Beauvoir’s views
than with Hélène Cixous’s romanticized vision of the female body as
the site of women’s writing. Similarly, Luce Irigaray’s impressive cri-
tique of the repression of woman in patriarchal discourse reads at times
like a post-structuralist rewriting of Beauvoir’s analysis of woman as
man’s Other. (Given that Heidegger seems to be the common source of
both Lacan’s psychoanalytic ‘Other’, which influenced Irigaray’s study,
and Beauvoir’s existentialist ‘Other’, this is hardly surprising.) Though
existentialism in general was marginalized by the shift to structuralism
and post-structuralism in the 1960s, it would seem that nothing dates
The Second Sex more, in relation to the new women’s movement in
France, than Beauvoir’s rejection of psychoanalysis. Cixous, Irigaray
and Kristeva are all heavily indebted to Lacan’s (post-) structuralist
reading of Freud, and any further investigation of their work therefore
requires some knowledge of the most central Lacanian ideas.11
 from simone de beauvoir to jacques lacan 97

JACQUES LACAN
The Imaginary and the Symbolic Order constitute one of the most
fundamental sets of related terms in Lacanian theory and are best
explained in relation to each other. The Imaginary corresponds to the
pre-Oedipal period when the child believes itself to be a part of the
mother, and perceives no separation between itself and the world. In
the Imaginary there is no difference and no absence, only identity and
presence. The Oedipal crisis represents the entry into the Symbolic
Order. This entry is also linked to the acquisition of language. In the
Oedipal crisis the father splits up the dyadic unity between mother and
child and forbids the child further access to the mother and the
mother’s body. The phallus, representing the Law of the Father (or
the threat of castration), thus comes to signify separation and loss to
the child. The loss or lack suffered is the loss of the maternal body, and
from now on the desire for the mother or the imaginary unity with her
must be repressed. This first repression is what Lacan calls the primary
repression and it is this primary repression that opens up the
unconscious. In the Imaginary there is no unconscious since there is
no lack.
The function of this primary repression becomes particularly evi-
dent in the child’s use of the newly acquired language. When the child
learns to say ‘I am’ and to distinguish this from ‘you are’ or ‘he is’, this
is equivalent to admitting that it has taken up its allotted place in the
Symbolic Order and given up the claim to imaginary identity with all
other possible positions. The speaking subject that says ‘I am’ is in fact
saying ‘I am he (she) who has lost something’ – and the loss suffered is
the loss of the imaginary identity with the mother and with the world.
The sentence ‘I am’ could therefore best be translated as ‘I am that
which I am not’, according to Lacan. This re-writing emphasizes the
fact that the speaking subject only comes into existence because of the
repression of the desire for the lost mother. To speak as a subject is
therefore the same as to represent the existence of repressed desire: the
speaking subject is lack, and this is how Lacan can say that the subject is
that which it is not.
To enter into the Symbolic Order means to accept the phallus as the
representation of the Law of the Father. All human culture and all life in
98 french feminist theory

society is dominated by the Symbolic Order, and thus by the phallus as

the sign of lack. The subject may or may not like this order of things,
but it has no choice: to remain in the Imaginary is equivalent to
becoming psychotic and incapable of living in human society. In some
ways it may be useful to see the Imaginary as linked to Freud’s pleasure
principle and the Symbolic Order to his reality principle.
This exposition of the transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic
Order requires some further comments. The Imaginary is, for Lacan,
inaugurated by the child’s entry into the Mirror Stage. Lacan seems to
follow Melanie Klein’s views of child development in so far as he
postulates that the child’s earliest experience of itself is one of fragmen-
tation. One might have said that at first the baby feels that its body is in
pieces, if this wouldn’t give the mistaken impression that the baby has a
sense of ‘its’ body at this early stage. Between the ages of 6 to 8 months
the baby enters the Mirror Stage. The principal function of the Mirror
Stage is to endow the baby with a unitary body image. This ‘body ego’,
however, is a profoundly alienated entity. The child, when looking at
itself in the mirror – or at itself on its mother’s arm, or simply at
another child – only perceives another human being with whom it
merges and identifies. In the Imaginary there is, then, no sense of a
separate self, since the ‘self’ is always alienated in the Other. The Mirror
Stage thus only allows for dual relationships. It is only through the
triangulation of this structure, which, as we have seen, occurs when
the father intervenes to break up the dyadic unity between mother
and child, that the child can take up its place in the Symbolic Order,
and thus come to define itself as separate from the other.
Lacan distinguishes between the Other (Autre) with a capital ‘O’ and
the other with a small ‘o’. For our purposes it is useful to look at a few
of the many different significations these concepts take on in Lacan’s
texts. The most important usages of the Other are those in which the
Other represents language, the site of the signifier, the Symbolic Order
or any third party in a triangular structure. Another, slightly different
way of putting this is to say that the Other is the locus of the constitu-
tion of the subject or the structure that produces the subject. In yet
another formulation, the Other is the differential structure of language
and of social relations that constitute the subject in the first place and in
which it (the subject) must take up its place.
 from simone de beauvoir to jacques lacan 99
If, for Lacan, it is the entry into the Symbolic Order that opens up the
unconscious, this means that it is the primary repression of the desire
for symbiotic unity with the mother that creates the unconscious. In
other words: the unconscious emerges as the result of the repression of
desire. In one sense the unconscious is desire. Lacan’s famous statement
‘The unconscious is structured like a language’ contains an important
insight into the nature of desire: for Lacan, desire ‘behaves’ in precisely
the same way as language: it moves ceaselessly on from object to object
or from signifier to signifier, and will never find full and present satis-
faction just as meaning can never be seized as full presence. Lacan calls
the various objects we invest with our desire (in the symbolic order)
objet a (‘objet petit a’ – ‘a’ here standing for the other (autre) with a
small ‘a’). There can be no final satisfaction of our desire since there is
no final signifier or object that can be that which has been lost forever
(the imaginary harmony with the mother and the world). If we accept
that the end of desire is the logical consequence of satisfaction (if we
are satisfied, we are in a position where we desire no more), we can see
why Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, posits death as the ultimate
object of desire – as Nirvana or the recapturing of the lost unity, the
final healing of the split subject.
 6
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

An imaginary utopia

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then . . . I contradict myself;
I am large . . . I contain multitudes.
(Walt Whitman)

It is largely due to the efforts of Hélène Cixous that the question of an

écriture féminine came to occupy a central position in the political and
cultural debate in France in the 1970s. Between 1975 and 1977 she
produced a whole series of theoretical (or semi-theoretical) writings,
all of which set out to explore the relations between women, feminin-
ity, feminism and the production of texts: La Jeune Née (in collaboration
with Catherine Clément, 1975), ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (1975), trans-
lated as ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), ‘Le Sexe ou la tête?’ (1976),
translated as ‘Castration or decapitation?’ (1981) and La Venue à l’écriture
(1977). These texts are closely interrelated: thus ‘Sorties’, Cixous’s
main contribution to La Jeune Née, contains long passages of the separ-
ately published ‘The laugh of the Medusa’. The fact that many central
ideas and images are constantly repeated, tends to present her work as a
 hélène cixous 101
continuum that encourages non-linear forms of reading.1 Her style is
often intensely metaphorical, poetic and explicitly anti-theoretical, and
her central images create a dense web of signifiers that offers no obvi-
ous edge to seize hold of for the analytically minded critic. It is not
easy to operate cuts into, open vistas in or draw maps of Cixous’s
textual jungle; moreover, the texts themselves make it abundantly clear
that this resistance to analysis is entirely intentional. Cixous believes
neither in theory nor analysis (though she does practise both – as for
instance in her doctoral thesis L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’art du remplacement
(1968), translated in 1972 as The Exile of James Joyce or the Art of Replace-
ment, or in her Prénoms de personne from 1974); nor, indeed, does she
approve of feminist analytical discourses: she is, after all, the woman
who first flatly declared that ‘I am not a feminist’ (RSH, 482) and later
went on to say that ‘I do not have to produce theory’ (Conley, 152).
Accusing feminist researchers in the humanities of turning away from
the present towards the past, she rejects their efforts as pure ‘themat-
ics’. According to Cixous, such feminist critics will inevitably find
themselves caught up in the oppressive network of hierarchical binary
oppositions propagated by patriarchal ideology (RSH, 482–3). Hope-
ful feminist analysts of Cixous’s ‘literary theory’ might just as well not
apply.
And yet this is not a wholly accurate picture of Cixous’s position.
The statements quoted, taken out of their contemporary French con-
text, tend to fix her views in an altogether too rigid mould. Her refusal
of the label ‘feminism’ is first and foremost based on a definition of
‘feminism’ as a bourgeois, egalitarian demand for women to obtain
power in the present patriarchal system; for Cixous, ‘feminists’ are
women who want power, ‘a place in the system, respect, social legitim-
ation’ (RSH, 482).2 Cixous does not reject what she prefers to call the
women’s movement (as opposed to the static rigidity of so-called ‘femi-
nism’); on the contrary, she is strongly in favour of it, and between
1976 and 1982 published all her works with des femmes to demonstrate
her political commitment to the anti-patriarchal struggle. To many
French feminists, as well as to most feminists outside France, however,
this kind of scholastic wrangling over the word ‘feminist’ would seem
to be politically damaging to the women’s movement as a whole. In
France it caused members of the collective ‘politique et psychanalyse’
102 french feminist theory
to march in the streets on International Women’s Day carrying placards
reading ‘Down with feminism!’, thus generating a considerable
amount of hostility and acrimony within the women’s movement,
much of which was displayed in public. The main effect of the ‘anti-
feminist’ initiative of the ‘politique et psychanalyse’ group seems to
have been the production of a general impression of rancour and dis-
array within French feminism. I have therefore no intention of follow-
ing Cixous’s lead on this point: according to accepted English usage,
her indubitable commitment to the struggle for women’s liberation in
France, as well as her strong critique of patriarchal modes of thought,
make her a feminist. Having said this, it is of course both relevant and
necessary to go on to explore the kind of feminist theory and politics
she represents.

PATRIARCHAL BINARY THOUGHT

One of Cixous’s most accessible ideas is her analysis of what one might
call ‘patriarchal binary thought’. Under the heading ‘Where is she?’,
Cixous lines up the following list of binary oppositions:

Activity/Passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Father/Mother
Head/Emotions
Intelligible/Sensitive
Logos/Pathos
(JN, 115)

Corresponding as they do to the underlying opposition man/woman,

these binary oppositions are heavily imbricated in the patriarchal value
system: each opposition can be analysed as a hierarchy where the
‘feminine’ side is always seen as the negative, powerless instance. For
Cixous, who at this point is heavily indebted to Jacques Derrida’s work,
Western philosophy and literary thought are and have always been
caught up in this endless series of hierarchical binary oppositions that
 hélène cixous 103
always in the end come back to the fundamental ‘couple’ of male/
female.

Nature/History
Nature/Art
Nature/Mind
Passion/Action
(JN, 116)

These examples show that it doesn’t much matter which ‘couple’ one
chooses to highlight: the hidden male/female opposition with its
inevitable positive/negative evaluation can always be traced as the
underlying paradigm.3
In a typical move, Cixous then goes on to locate death at work in this
kind of thought. For one of the terms to acquire meaning, she claims, it
must destroy the other. The ‘couple’ cannot be left intact: it becomes a
general battlefield where the struggle for signifying supremacy is for-
ever re-enacted. In the end, victory is equated with activity and defeat
with passivity; under patriarchy, the male is always the victor. Cixous
passionately denounces such an equation of femininity with passivity
and death as leaving no positive space for woman: ‘Either woman is
passive or she doesn’t exist’ (JN, 118). Her whole theoretical project
can in one sense be summed up as the effort to undo this logocentric4
ideology: to proclaim woman as the source of life, power and energy
and to hail the advent of a new, feminine language that ceaselessly
subverts these patriarchal binary schemes where logocentrism colludes
with phallocentrism5 in an effort to oppress and silence women.

DIFFERENCE
Against any binary scheme of thought, Cixous sets multiple, hetero-
geneous difference. In order to understand her arguments at this point,
however, it is necessary first to examine Jacques Derrida’s concept of
difference (or, rather différance). Many early structuralists, as for instance
A. J. Greimas in his Sémantique structurale, held that meaning is produced
precisely through binary oppositions. Thus in the opposition
masculine/feminine, each term only achieves significance through its
104 french feminist theory
structural relationship to the other: ‘masculine’ would be meaningless
without its direct opposite ‘feminine’ and vice versa. All meaning
would be produced in this way. An obvious counter-argument to
this theory is the many examples of adjectives or adverbs of degree
(much – more – most, little – less – least), which seem to produce
their meaning in relation to the other items in the same series, not in
relation to their binary opposites.
Derrida’s critique of binary logic, however, is more far-reaching in
its implications. For Derrida, meaning (signification) is not produced
in the static closure of the binary opposition. Rather it is achieved
through the ‘free play of the signifier’. One way of illustrating
Derrida’s arguments at this point is to use Saussure’s concept of the
phoneme, defined as the smallest differential – and therefore signifying –
unit in language. The phoneme can in no way be said to achieve signi-
fication through binary opposition alone. In itself the phoneme /b/
does not signify anything at all. If we had only one phoneme, there
would be no meaning and no language. /b/ only signifies in so far as
it is perceived to be different from say /k/ or /h/. Thus /bat/:/kat/:
/hat/ are all perceived to be different words with different meanings in
English. The argument is that /b/ signifies only through a process
that effectively defers its meaning on to other differential elements in
language. In a sense it is the other phonemes that enable us to determine
the meaning of /b/. For Derrida, signification is produced precisely
through this kind of open-ended play between the presence of one
signifier and the absence of others.6
This, then, is the basic significance of the Derridean term différance.
Spelt with an ‘a’ to distinguish it – in writing, not in speech – from the
normal French word for difference (différence), it acquires the more
active sense of the ending ‘-ance’ in French, and can therefore be
translated both as ‘difference’ and as ‘deferral’ in English. As we have
seen, the interplay between presence and absence that produces mean-
ing is posited as one of deferral: meaning is never truly present, but is
only constructed through the potentially endless process of referring to
other, absent signifiers. The ‘next’ signifier can in a sense be said to give
meaning to the ‘previous’ one, and so on ad infinitum. There can thus be
no ‘transcendental signified’ where the process of deferral somehow
would come to an end. Such a transcendental signified would have to
 hélène cixous 105
be meaningful in itself, fully present to itself, requiring no origin and no
end other than itself. An obvious example of such a ‘transcendental
signified’ would be the Christian concept of God as Alpha and Omega,
the origin of meaning and final end of the world. Similarly, the
traditional view of the author as the source and meaning of his or her
own text casts the author in the role of transcendental signified.
Derrida’s analysis of the production of meaning thus implies a fun-
damental critique of the whole of Western philosophical tradition,
based as it is on a ‘metaphysics of presence’, which discerns meaning
as fully present in the Word (or Logos). Western metaphysics comes to
favour speech over writing precisely because speech presupposes the
presence of the speaking subject, who thus can be cast as the unitary origin
of his or her discourse. The idea that a text is somehow only fully
authentic when it expresses the presence of a human subject would be
one example of the implicit privileging of voice or speech over writing.
Christopher Norris provides an excellent summary of Derrida’s views
on this point:

Voice becomes a metaphor of truth and authenticity, a source of self-

present ‘living’ speech as opposed to the secondary lifeless eman-
ations of writing. In speaking one is able to experience (supposedly)
an intimate link between sound and sense, an inward and immediate
realization of meaning which yields itself up without reserve to perfect,
transparent understanding. Writing, on the contrary, destroys this
ideal of pure self-presence. It obtrudes an alien, depersonalized
medium, a deceiving shadow which falls between intent and meaning,
between utterance and understanding. It occupies a promiscuous
public realm where authority is sacrificed to the vagaries and whims of
textual ‘dissemination’. Writing, in short, is a threat to the deeply
traditional view that associates truth with self-presence and the ‘nat-
ural’ language wherein it finds expression.
(28)

In order to grasp Derrida’s distinction between writing and speech, it

is important to realize that writing as a concept is closely related to
différance; thus Norris defines writing as the ‘endless displacement of
meaning which both governs language and places it for ever beyond
106 french feminist theory
the reach of a stable, self-authenticating knowledge’ (29). Derrida’s
analysis undermines and subverts the comforting closure of the binary
opposition. Throwing the field of signification wide open, writing –
textuality – acknowledges the free play of the signifier and breaks open
what Cixous perceives as the prison-house of patriarchal language.

ECRITURE FÉMININE 1) MASCULINITY,

FEMININITY, BISEXUALITY
Cixous’s concept of feminine writing is crucially related to Derrida’s analy-
sis of writing as différance. For Cixous, feminine texts are texts that ‘work
on the difference’, as she once put it (RSH, 480), strive in the direction
of difference, struggle to undermine the dominant phallogocentric
logic, split open the closure of the binary opposition and revel in the
pleasures of open-ended textuality.
However, Cixous is adamant that even the term écriture féminine or
‘feminine writing’ is abhorrent to her, since terms like ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’ themselves imprison us within a binary logic, within the
‘classical vision of sexual opposition between men and women’
(Conley, 129). She has therefore chosen to speak either of a ‘writing
said to be feminine’ (or masculine) or, more recently, of a ‘decipher-
able libidinal femininity which can be read in writing produced by a
male or a female’ (Conley, 129). It is not, apparently, the empirical sex
of the author that matters, but the kind of writing at stake. She thus
warns against the dangers of confusing the sex of the author with the
‘sex’ of the writing he or she produces:

Most women are like this: they do someone else’s – man’s – writing,
and in their innocence sustain it and give it voice, and end up pro-
ducing writing that’s in effect masculine. Great care must be taken in
working on feminine writing not to get trapped by names: to be signed
with a woman’s name doesn’t necessarily make a piece of writing
feminine. It could quite well be masculine writing, and conversely,
the fact that a piece of writing is signed with a man’s name does not
in itself exclude femininity. It’s rare, but you can sometimes find
femininity in writings signed by men: it does happen.
(‘Castration’, 52)
 hélène cixous 107
Indeed one of the reasons why Cixous is so keen to get rid of the old
opposition between masculine and feminine, and even of terms like
male or female, is her strong belief in the inherently bisexual nature of all
human beings. In ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ (and also in La Jeune Née –
some of the passages dealing with these themes are reproduced in both
texts) she first attacks the ‘classic conception of bisexuality’, which is
‘squashed under the emblem of castration fear and along with the
fantasy of a “total” being (though composed of two halves), would do
away with the difference’ (‘Medusa’, 254/46, JN, 155). This homo-
geneous conception of bisexuality is designed to cater for the male fear
of the Other (woman) in so far as it allows him to fantasize away the
ineluctable signs of sexual difference. Opposing this view, Cixous pro-
duces what she calls the other bisexuality, which is multiple, variable and
ever-changing, consisting as it does of the ‘non-exclusion either of the
difference or of one sex’. Among its characteristics is the ‘multiplica-
tion of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts of my body
and the other body, indeed, this other bisexuality doesn’t annul differ-
ences, but stirs them up, pursues them, increases them’ (‘Medusa’,
254/46, JN, 155).
Today, according to Cixous, it is ‘for historico-cultural reasons . . .
women who are opening up to and benefiting from this vatic bi-
sexuality’, or as she puts it: ‘In a certain way, “woman” is bisexual;
man – it’s a secret to no one – being poised to keep glorious phallic
monosexuality in view’ (‘Medusa’, 254/46, JN, 156–7). She denies
the possibility of ever defining a feminist practice of writing:

For this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded – which

doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the dis-
course that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take
place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-
theoretical domination.
(‘Medusa’, 253/45)

She does, however, supply a definition that not only echoes Derrida’s
concept of écriture, but also seems to be identical with her own concept
of the ‘other bisexuality’:
108 french feminist theory
To admit that writing is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspect-
ing the process of the same and of the other without which nothing
can live, undoing the work of death – to admit this is first to want the
two, as well as both, the ensemble of one and the other, not fixed in
sequence of struggle and expulsion or some other form of death but
infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one
subject to another.
(‘Medusa’, 254/46)

Here it would seem that for Cixous writing as such is bisexual. However,
she also argues that, at least at present, women (which clearly indicates
biological females as opposed to males) are much more likely to be
bisexual in this sense than men. Bisexual writing is therefore over-
whelmingly likely to be women’s writing, though some exceptional men
may in certain cases manage to break with their ‘glorious monosexuality’
and achieve bisexuality as well. This position is clearly logical enough.
In keeping with this anti-essentialist vein, Cixous, in ‘The laugh of the
Medusa’, argues that in France only Colette, Marguerite Duras and Jean
Genet really qualify as feminine (or bisexual) writers. In La Jeune Née she
also points to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and Kleist’s Penthesilea as
powerful representations of the feminine libidinal economy.
So far, then, Cixous’s position would seem to constitute a forceful
feminist appropriation of Derridean theory. Anti-essentialist and anti-
biologistic, her work in this field seems to displace the whole feminist
debate around the problem of women and writing away from an
empiricist emphasis on the sex of the author towards an analysis of the
articulations of sexuality and desire within the literary text itself.
Unfortunately, this is not the whole story. As we shall see, Cixous’s
theory is riddled with contradictions: every time a Derridean idea is
evoked, it is opposed and undercut by a vision of woman’s writing
steeped in the very metaphysics of presence she claims she is out to
unmask.

THE GIFT AND THE PROPER

Cixous’s distinction between the gift and the proper provides the first
signs of a slippage away from Derridean anti-essentialism. Though she
 hélène cixous 109
refuses to accept the binary opposition of femininity and masculin-
ity, Cixous repeatedly insists on her own distinction between a ‘mas-
culine’ and a ‘feminine’ libidinal economy. These are marked,
respectively, by the Realm of the Proper and the Realm of the Gift.
Masculinity or masculine value systems are structured according to
an ‘economy of the proper’. Proper – property – appropriate: signal-
ling an emphasis on self-identity, self-aggrandizement and arrogative
dominance, these words aptly characterize the logic of the proper
according to Cixous. The insistence on the proper, on a proper
return, leads to the masculine obsession with classification, system-
atization and hierarchization. Her attack on class has little to do with
the proletariat:

There’s work to be done against class, against categorization, against

classification – classes. ‘Doing classes’ in France means doing military
service. There’s work to be done against military service, against all
schools, against the pervasive masculine urge to judge, diagnose,
digest, name . . . not so much in the sense of the loving precision of
poetic naming as in that of the repressive censorship of philosophical
nomination/conceptualization.
(‘Castration’, 51)

Theoretical discourse is in other words inherently oppressive, a result

of masculine libidinal investment. Even the question ‘What is it?’ is
denounced as a sign of the masculine impulse to imprison reality in
rigid hierarchical structures:

As soon as the question ‘What is it?’ is posed, from the moment a

question is put, as soon as a reply is sought, we are already caught up
in masculine interrogation. I say ‘masculine interrogation’: as we say so-
and-so was interrogated by the police.
(‘Castration’, 45)

Linking the Realm of the Proper to a ‘masculine libidinal economy’

is of course impeccably anti-biologistic. Defining it essentially as the
male fear of castration (here labelled the ‘masculine fear of the loss of
the attribute’), however, is not:
110 french feminist theory
One realizes that the Realm of the Proper is erected on the basis of a
fear which as a matter of fact is typically masculine: a fear of expropri-
ation, of separation, of the loss of the attribute. In other words: the
impact of the threat of castration.
(JN, 147)

In her article ‘Castration or decapitation?’ Cixous elaborates on this

idea of the proper as proper to the male:

Etymologically, the ‘proper’ is ‘property’, that which is not separable

from me. Property is proximity, nearness: we must love our neighbors,
those close to us as ourselves: we must draw close to the other so that
we may love him/her, because we love ourselves most of all. The
Realm of the Proper, culture, functions by the appropriation articu-
lated, set in to play, by man’s classic fear of seeing himself expropri-
ated, seeing himself deprived . . . by his refusal to be deprived, in a
state of separation, by his fear of losing the prerogative, fear whose
response is all of History. Everything must return to the masculine.
‘Return’: the economy is founded on a system of returns. If a man
spends and is spent, it’s on condition that his power returns.
(‘Castration’, 50)

The now male Realm of the Proper seems a textbook illustration of

Derrida’s ‘metaphysics of presence’ (see also JN, 146–7). One might
therefore expect its opponent, the Realm of the Gift, to illustrate a more
deconstructive approach. Cixous distinguishes between two different
kinds of gifts. First there is the gift as it is perceived by men. For the
male psyche, to receive a gift is a dangerous thing:

For the moment you receive something you are effectively ‘open’ to
the other, and if you are a man you have only one wish, and that is
hastily to return the gift, to break the circuit of an exchange that could
have no end . . . to be nobody’s child, to owe no one a thing.
(‘Castration’, 48)

In the Realm of the Proper, the gift is perceived as establishing an

inequality – a difference – that is threatening in that it seems to open
 hélène cixous 111
up an imbalance of power. Thus the act of giving becomes a subtle
means of aggression, of exposing the other to the threat of one’s own
superiority. The woman, however, gives without a thought of return.
Generosity is one of the most positive words in Cixous’s vocabulary:

If there is a ‘propriety of woman’, it is paradoxically her capacity to

depropriate unselfishly, body without end, without appendage, with-
out principal ‘parts’. . . . This doesn’t mean that she’s an undifferenti-
ated magma, but that she doesn’t lord it over her body or her
desire. . . . Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide.
Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning
contours, daring to make these vertiginous crossings of the other(s)
ephemeral and passionate sojourns in him, her, them, whom she
inhabits long enough to look at from the point closest to their
unconscious from the moment they awaken, to love them at the point
closest to their drives; and then further, impregnated through and
through with these brief, identificatory embraces, she goes and passes
into infinity. She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where
she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-
language. She lets the other language speak – the language of 1,000
tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death.
(‘Medusa’, 259–60/50, JN, 161–2)

The slippage from ‘feminine’ to ‘female’ (or ‘woman’) can here clearly
be seen. Elaborating on her theme, Cixous adds that woman gives
because she doesn’t suffer from castration anxiety (fear of ex-
propriation, as she often puts it) in the way men do. In spite of its clear
biologism, the Realm of the Gift does seem to correspond fairly closely
to a Derridean definition of writing: the feminine/female libidinal
economy is open to difference, willing to be ‘traversed by the other’,
characterized by spontaneous generosity; the Realm of the Gift isn’t
really a realm at all, but a deconstructive space of pleasure and orgasmic
interchange with the other. There is no doubt that Cixous explicitly
tries to give her exposition of the two ‘libidinal economies’ a Derri-
dean profile. She warns, for instance, that ‘one must beware of blindly
or complaisantly falling into essentialist ideological interpretations’
(JN, 148), and refuses to accept any theory that posits a thematic origin
112 french feminist theory
of power and sexual difference. This effort is, however, not only partly
undercut by her biologism: in her evocations of a specifically female
writing she seems actively intent on promoting an utterly metaphysical
case.

ECRITURE FÉMININE 2) THE SOURCE AND THE VOICE

In La Jeune Née Cixous first reiterates her refusal to theorize about writing
and femininity, only to indicate that she is, after all, willing to open up
a discussion on the matter. What she describes as some tentative com-
ments turn out to be no less than a lyrical, euphoric evocation of the
essential bond between feminine writing and the mother as source and
origin of the voice to be heard in all female texts. Femininity in writing
can be discerned in a privileging of the voice: ‘writing and voice . . . are
woven together’ (JN, 170). The speaking woman is entirely her voice:
‘She physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with
her body’ (‘Medusa’, 251/44, JN, 170). Woman, in other words, is
wholly and physically present in her voice – and writing is no more
than the extension of this self-identical prolongation of the speech act.
The voice in each woman, moreover, is not only her own, but springs
from the deepest layers of her psyche: her own speech becomes the
echo of the primeval song she once heard, the voice the incarnation of
the ‘first voice of love which all women preserve alive . . . in each
woman sings the first nameless love’ (JN, 172). It is, in short, the Voice
of the Mother, that omnipotent figure that dominates the fantasies of
the pre-Oedipal baby: ‘The Voice, a song before the Law, before the
breath [le souffle] was split by the symbolic, reappropriated into
language under the authority that separates. The deepest, most ancient
and adorable of visitations’ (JN, 172).
Finding its source in a time before the Law came into being, the
voice is nameless: it is placed firmly in the pre-Oedipal stage before the
child acquires language, and thereby the capacity to name itself and its
objects. The voice is the mother and the mother’s body: ‘Voice:
inexhaustible milk. She has been found again. The lost mother. Eternity:
it is the voice mixed with milk’ (JN, 173). The speaking/writing
woman is in a space outside time (eternity), a space that allows no
naming and no syntax. In her article ‘Women’s Time’, Julia Kristeva has
 hélène cixous 113
argued that syntax is constitutive of our sense of chronological time by
the very fact that the order of words in a sentence marks a temporal
sequence: since subject, verb, object cannot be spoken simultaneously,
their utterance necessarily cuts up the temporal continuum of ‘eter-
nity’. Cixous, then, presents this nameless pre-Oedipal space filled with
mother’s milk and honey as the source of the song that resonates
through all female writing.
The fact that women have this ‘privileged relationship to the voice’ is
due to their relative lack of defence-mechanisms: ‘No woman ever
heaps up as many defences against their libidinal drives as a man does’
(JN, 173). Whereas man represses the mother, woman doesn’t (or
hardly does): she is always close to the mother as the source of good.
Cixous’s mother-figure is clearly what Melanie Klein would call the
Good Mother: the omnipotent and generous dispenser of love, nour-
ishment and plenitude. The writing woman is thus immensely power-
ful: hers is a puissance féminine derived directly from the mother, whose
giving is always suffused with strength: ‘The more you have, the more
you give the more you are, the more you give the more you have’ (JN,
230).
The most explicit description of an actual example of female writing
produced under the Sign of the Voice, Cixous’s article on the Brazilian
writer Clarice Lispector, stresses both her openness and generosity
(‘L’approche’, 410, n. 7), and, in a deeply un-Derridean passage, her
capacity to endow words with their essential meaning:

There is almost nothing left of the sea but a word without water: for we
have also translated the words, we have emptied them of their speech,
dried, reduced and embalmed them, and they cannot any longer
remind us of the way they used to rise up from the things as the peal of
their essential laughter . . . But a clarice voice only has to say: the sea,
the sea, for my keel to split open, the sea is calling me, sea! calling me,
waters!
(‘L’approche’, 412)

In her article on Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous, Christiane

Makward distinguishes between twelve different kinds of style in
Cixous’s novel LA: seven poetic and five narrative levels. Five of the
114 french feminist theory
seven poetic levels of style can be characterized as in some way biblical,
liturgical or mythological. These high poetic inflections find their way
into Cixous’s more theoretical writings as well. La Venue à l’écriture opens
on the biblical note of ‘In the beginning I adored’ (VE, 9). In this text,
as in many others, Cixous casts herself, if not as a goddess, at least as a
prophetess – the desolate mother out to save her people, a feminine
Moses as well as the Pharaoh’s daughter:

The tears I shed at night! The waters of the world flow from my eyes, I
wash my people in my despair, I bathe them, I lick them with my love, I
go to the banks of the Nile to gather the peoples abandoned in wicker
baskets; for the fate of the living I have the tireless love of a mother,
that is why I am everywhere, my cosmic belly, I work on my world-wide
unconscious, I throw death out, it comes back, we begin again, I am
pregnant with beginnings.
(VE, 53)

Laying claim to all possible subject positions, the speaking subject can
indeed proudly proclaim herself as a ‘feminine plural’ (VE, 53), who
through reading and writing partakes of divine eternity:

The book – I could reread it with the help of memory and forgetting.
Start over again. From another perspective, from another and yet
another. Reading, I discovered that writing is endless. Everlasting.
Eternal.
Writing or God. God the writing. The writing God.
(VE, 30)

Cixous’s predilection for the Old Testament is obvious, but her taste
for classical antiquity is no less marked. Her capacity for identification
seems endless: Medusa, Electra, Antigone, Dido, Cleopatra – in her
imagination she has been them all. In fact, she declares that ‘I am
myself the earth, everything that happens on it, all the lives that live me
there in my different forms’ (VE, 52–3): This constant return to bib-
lical and mythological imagery signals her investment in the world of
myth: a world that, like the distant country of fairy tales is perceived as
pervasively meaningful, as closure and unity. The mythical or religious
 hélène cixous 115
discourse presents a universe where all difference, struggle and discord
can in the end be satisfactorily resolved. Her mythical and biblical
allusions are often accompanied by – or interspersed with – ‘oceanic’
water imagery, evoking the endless pleasures of the polymorphously
perverse child:

We are ourselves sea, sand, coral, sea-weed, beaches, tides, swim-

mers, children, waves. . . . Heterogeneous, yes. For her joyous benefits
she is erogeneous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous: air-
borne swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself: she is dis-
persible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the
other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn’t, of him,
of you.
(‘Medusa’, 260/51)

For Cixous, as for countless mythologies, water is the feminine elem-

ent par excellence: the closure of the mythical world contains and reflects
the comforting security of the mother’s womb. It is within this space
that Cixous’s speaking subject is free to move from one subject
position to another, or to merge oceanically with the world. Her vision
of female writing is in this sense firmly located within the closure
of the Lacanian Imaginary: a space in which all difference has
been abolished.
Such an emphasis on the Imaginary can explain why the writing
woman enjoys such extraordinary freedom in Cixous’s universe. In the
Imaginary mother and child are part of a fundamental unity: they are
one. Protected by the all-powerful Good Mother, the writing woman can
always and everywhere feel deeply secure and shielded from danger:
nothing will ever harm her, distance and separation will never disable
her. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra becomes an example of such triumphant
femininity:

The intelligence, the strength of Cleopatra appear particularly in the

work she accomplishes – a work of love – on the distance, the gap, the
separation: she only evokes the gap in order to fill it to overflowing,
never tolerating a separation that could harm the lover’s body.
(JN, 235)
116 french feminist theory
Antony and Cleopatra can risk anything since they will always save each
other from harm: the self can be abandoned precisely in so far as it can
always be recuperated. If Cixous’s poetic discourse often acquires a
haunting beauty in its evocations of the paradise of childhood, it does
so not least through its refusal to accept the loss of that privileged
realm. The mother’s voice, her breasts, milk, honey and female waters
are all invoked as part of an eternally present space surrounding her
and her readers.
This Imaginary world, however, is not flawlessly homogeneous. We
have already seen that the female Realm of the Gift is one of a decon-
structive openness to difference, and though Cixous describes female
writing largely in terms of the abiding presence of the Mother’s Voice,
she also presents the voice as an operation of detachment, splitting and
fragmentation (JN, 174–5). In La Venue à l’écriture, the desire to write is
first of all presented as a force that she cannot consciously control: her
body contains ‘another limitless space’ (VE, 17) that demands she give
it a written form. Fighting against it – no blackmail will make her yield
– she nevertheless feels a secret fascination for this overpowering souffle:

Because it [il] was so strong and so furious, I loved and feared this
breath. To be lifted up one morning, snatched off the ground, swung in
the air. To be surprised. To find in myself the possibility of the
unexpected. To fall asleep as a mouse and wake up as an eagle! What
delight! What terror. And I had nothing to do with it, I couldn’t help it.
(VE, 18)

This passage, particularly with its French use of the masculine pro-
noun il for souffle throughout, reads somewhat like a transposition of a
well-known feminine rape fantasy: il sweeps the woman off her feet;
terrified and delighted she submits to the attack. Afterwards she feels
stronger and more powerful (like an eagle), as if she had integrated the
power of the phallus during the scene. And as in all rape fantasies, the
delight and jouissance spring from the fact that the woman is blameless:
she didn’t want it, so cannot be guilty of any illicit desires. (Needless to
say, this description only concerns rape fantasies and has nothing what-
soever to do with the reality of rape.) This is a brilliant evocation of
women’s relationship to language in the phallocentric symbolic order:
 hélène cixous 117
if a woman is to write, she will feel guilty about her desire to obtain
mastery over language unless she can fantasize away her own responsi-
bility for such an unspeakable wish. But Cixous’s account of the text as
rape also constitutes the background for her vision of the text as the
Good Mother: ‘I was eating the texts, I was sucking, licking, kissing
them, I am the innumerable child of their multitudes’ (VE, 19). A
Kleinian analysis of the mother’s nipple as a pre-Oedipal penis image
might illuminate this striking oral relationship to the text she reads –
which, after all, also must be the text she guiltily hopes some day to
write: ‘Write? I was dying to do it for love, to give the writing what it
[elle] had given to me. What an ambition! What impossible happiness.
Feed my own mother. Give her, in her turn, my milk? Mad
imprudence’ (VE, 20). The text as mother becomes the text as rape, in
a sequence of rapid transformations:

I said ‘write French’. One writes in. Penetration. Door. Knock before
you enter. Absolutely forbidden. . . . How could I not have wanted to
write? When books took me, transported me, pierced me to the depths
of my soul, let me feel their disinterested potency? . . . When my being
was being populated, my body traversed and fertilized, how could I
have closed myself up in silence?
(VE, 20–1)

Mother-text, rape-text; submission to the phallic rule of language as

differential, as a structure of gaps and absences; celebration of writing
as the realm of the omnipotent mother: Cixous will always incorporate
differences, juxtapose contradictions, work to undo gaps and distinc-
tions, fill the gap to overflowing, and happily integrate both penis and
nipple.

IMAGINARY CONTRADICTIONS
Fundamentally contradictory, Cixous’s theory of writing and feminin-
ity shifts back and forth from a Derridean emphasis on textuality as
difference to a full-blown metaphysical account of writing as voice,
presence and origin. In a 1984 interview, Cixous shows herself to be
perfectly aware of these contradictions:
118 french feminist theory
If I were a philosopher, I could never allow myself to speak in terms of
presence, essence, etc., or of the meaning of something. I would be
capable of carrying on a philosophical discourse, but I do not. I let
myself be carried off by the poetic word.
(Conley, 151–2)

In a reference to Derrida’s Of Grammatology she explains the relationship

(or lack of it) between Derrida’s concept and her own:

In Grammatology, he treats of writing in general, of the text in general.

When I talk about writing, that is not what I am talking about. One
must displace at the moment; I do not speak about the concept of
writing the way Derrida analyzes it. I speak in a more idealistic fashion.
I allow this to myself; I disenfranchise myself from the philosophical
obligations and corrections, which does not mean that I disregard
them.
(Conley, 150–1)

Though her own theoretico-poetic style apparently strives to undo

the opposition, Cixous’s work bases itself on a conscious distinction
between ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’ (a distinction Derrida himself
might well want to deconstruct). How then can we best illuminate
Cixous’s seeming passion for contradiction? Some might claim it as a
cunning strategy intended to prove her own point: by refusing to
accept the Aristotelian logic that excludes A from also being not A,
Cixous deftly enacts her own deconstruction of patriarchal logic. But
this argument assumes that Cixous’s point really is a deconstructive
one, and thus overlooks the many passages that present a thoroughly
metaphysical position. From a psychoanalytic perspective, it would
seem that her textual manoeuvres are designed to create a space in
which the différance of the Symbolic Order can co-exist peacefully with
the closure and identity of the Imaginary. Such co-existence, however,
covers only one aspect of Cixous’s vision: the level on which the female
essence is described in deconstructive terms, as for instance in the
Realm of the Gift, or in those passages relating to the heterogeneous
multiplicity of the ‘new bisexuality’. But we have seen that even the
openness of the Giving Woman or the plurality of bisexual writing are
 hélène cixous 119
characterized by biblical, mythological or elemental imagery that
returns us to a preoccupation with the Imaginary. The difference and
diversity in question thus seems more akin to the polymorphous per-
versity of the pre-Oedipal child than to the metonymic displacements
of desire in the symbolic order. The ‘new bisexuality’ in particular
seems ultimately an imaginary closure that enables the subject effort-
lessly to shift from masculine to feminine subject positions. In the end,
then, the contradictions of Cixous’s discourse can be shown to be
contained and resolved within the secure haven of the Imaginary. Her
supreme disregard for ‘patriarchal’ logic is not after all an indication of
her Barthesian concern for the liberation of the reader, though at first
glance Barthes’s description of readerly jouissance might seem strikingly
appropriate to our experience of Cixous’s texts:

Imagine someone (a kind of monsieur Teste in reverse) who abolishes

within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism
but by simple discard of that old spectre: logical contradiction; who
mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently
accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains pas-
sive in the face of Socratic irony (leading the interlocutor to the
supreme disgrace: self-contradiction) and legal terrorism (how much
penal evidence is based on a psychology of consistency!) . . . Now this
anti-hero exists: he is the reader of the text at the moment he takes his
pleasure.
(The Pleasure of the Text, 3)

The difference between the jouissance of the Barthesian reader and

Cixous’s text is that whereas the former signals absolute loss, a space
in which the subject fades to nothing, the latter will always finally
gather up its contradictions within the plenitude of the Imaginary.

POWER, IDEOLOGY, POLITICS

Cixous’s vision of feminine/female writing as a way of re-establishing
a spontaneous relationship to the physical jouissance of the female body
may be read positively, as a utopian vision of female creativity in a truly
non-oppressive and non-sexist society. Indeed a marked emphasis on
120 french feminist theory
the Imaginary is common in utopian writing. In 1972, for example,
Christiane Rochefort published a powerful feminist utopian novel,
Archaos ou le jardin étincelant, which in its narrative mode exhibits striking
parallels to Cixous’s preoccupation with the Imaginary as a utopian
solution to the problem of desire.
Utopian thought has always been a source of political inspiration
for feminists and socialists alike.7 Confidently assuming that change is
both possible and desirable, the utopian vision takes off from a nega-
tive analysis of its own society in order to create images and ideas that
have the power to inspire to revolt against oppression and exploitation.
Influenced by Frankfurt School theorists such as Ernst Bloch and Her-
bert Marcuse, Arnhelm Neusüss has shown that anti-utopian argu-
ments tend to be advanced from the right as part of a strategy aiming at
the neutralization or recuperation of the revolutionary contents of the
utopian dream. The most pernicious and widespread of the various anti-
utopian arguments described by Neusüss is the one we might call the
‘realist’ approach. While tending towards rationalism in its underestima-
tion of the possible political impact of human desire, the ‘realist’ position
also objects to the contradictory nature of many utopias: there is no point
in taking them seriously, the argument goes, since they are so illogical
that anybody could tell that they would never work in real life anyway.
Rejecting this position, Neusüss sees the contradictions embodied
by so many utopias as a justification of their social critique: signalling
the repressive effects of the social structures that gave rise to the utopia
in the first place, its gaps and inconsistencies indicate the pervasive
nature of the authoritarian ideology the utopian thinker is trying to
undermine. If Neusüss is right, the utopian project will always be
marked by conflict and contradiction. Thus, if we choose to read
Cixous as a utopian feminist, at least some of the contradictory aspects
of her texts may be analysed as structured by the conflict between an
already contradictory patriarchal ideology and the utopian thought
that struggles to free itself from that patriarchal stranglehold. But if it is
true that her contradictions are finally gathered up into the homogen-
izing space of the Imaginary, then they are more likely also to
constitute a flight from the dominant social reality.
In a critique of Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, himself a
vigorous defender of utopianism, describes Brown’s utopian ideal as
 hélène cixous 121
an effort towards the ‘restoration of original and total unity: unity of
male and female, father and mother, subject and object, body and soul
– abolition of the self, of mine and thine, abolition of the reality prin-
ciple, of all boundaries’ (234). While a positive effort towards abolish-
ing existing repressive structures, Brown’s Cixous-like cultivation of
the pleasure principle is for Marcuse unsatisfactory precisely because it
is located exclusively within the Imaginary:

The roots of repression are and remain real roots; consequently, their
eradication remains a real and rational job. What is to be abolished is
not the reality principle; not everything, but such particular things as
business, politics, exploitation, poverty. Short of this recapture of real-
ity and reason Brown’s purpose is defeated.
(235)

It is just this absence of any specific analysis of the material factors

preventing women from writing that constitutes a major weakness of
Cixous’s utopia. Within her poetic mythology, writing is posited as an
absolute activity of which all women qua women automatically partake.
Stirring and seductive though such a vision is, it can say nothing of the
actual inequities, deprivations and violations that women, as social
beings rather than as mythological archetypes, must constantly suffer.
Marcuse’s insistence on the need to recapture reason and reality for
the utopian project is a timely one. In her eagerness to appropriate
imagination and the pleasure principle for women, Cixous seems in
danger of playing directly into the hands of the very patriarchal ideo-
logy she denounces. It is, after all, patriarchy, not feminism, that insists
on labelling women as emotional, intuitive and imaginative, while
jealously converting reason and rationality into an exclusively male
preserve. Utopias, then, challenge us both on the poetic and the polit-
ical level. It is therefore understandable that, while acknowledging the
rhetorical power of Cixous’s vision, feminists should nevertheless want
to examine its specific political implications in order to discover exactly
what it is we are being inspired to do.
But is it justifiable to force Cixous’s writing into a political strait-
jacket, particularly when, as she argues, she is concerned less with
politics than with poetry?
122 french feminist theory
I would lie if I said that I am a political woman, not at all. In fact, I have
to assemble the two words, political and poetic. Not to lie to you, I
must confess that I put the accent on the poetic. I do it so that the
political does not repress, because the political is something cruel and
hard and so rigorously real that sometimes I feel like consoling myself
by crying and shedding poetic tears.
(Conley, 139–40)

The distance posited here between the political and the poetic is surely
one that feminist criticism has consistently sought to undo. And
though Cixous seems to be claiming ‘poetic’ status for her own texts,
this does not prevent her from writing directly about power and ideol-
ogy in relation to feminist politics. According to Cixous, ideology is a
‘kind of immense membrane that envelops everything. A skin that we
must know is there even if it covers us like a net or a closed eyelid’ (JN,
266–7). This view of ideology as total closure parallels Kate Millett’s
vision of it as a monolithic unity, and suffers from exactly the same
defects.8 How could we ever discover the nature of the ideology that
surrounds us if it were entirely consistent, without the slightest contra-
diction, gap or fissure that might allow us to perceive it in the first
place? Cixous’s image of ideology recreates the closure of the
mythological universe in which she constantly seeks refuge from the
contradictions of the material world. When Catherine Clément accuses
Cixous of speaking at a non-political level, she pinpoints precisely this
problem in Cixous’s work:

C[atherine Clément]. I must admit that your sentences are devoid of

reality for me, except if I take what you say in a poetic sense. Give me
an example. . . . Your level of description is one where I don’t recog-
nize any of the things I think in political terms. It’s not that it’s ‘false’,
of course not. But it’s described in terms which seem to me to belong
to the level of myth or poetry; it all indicates a kind of desiring, fictive,
collective subject, a huge entity which alternately is free and revo-
lutionary or enslaved, asleep or awake. . . . Those are not subjects
existing in reality.
(JN, 292–3)
 hélène cixous 123
Equally disturbing is Cixous’s discourse on power. In an interview in
La Revue des sciences humaines, she distinguishes between one ‘bad’ and one
‘good’ kind of power:

I would indeed make a clear distinction when it comes to the kind of

power that is the will to supremacy, the thirst for individual and narcis-
sistic satisfaction. That power is always a power over others. It is
something that relates back to government, control, and beyond that,
to despotism. Whereas if I say ‘woman’s powers’, first it isn’t one
power any longer, it is multiplied, there is more than one (therefore it is
not a question of centralization – that destroys the relation with the
unique, that levels everything out) and it is a question of power over
oneself, in other words of a relation not based on mastery but on
availability [disponibilité].
(RSH, 483–4)

Both kinds of power are entirely personal and individual: the struggle
against oppression seems to consist in a lame effort to affirm a certain
heterogeneity of woman’s powers (a heterogeneity belied by the sin-
gular of ‘woman’), which in any case seems to come down to claiming
that a strong woman can do what she likes. In French, the term disponi-
bilité carries a heavy bourgeois-liberal heritage, partly because of its
central status in the works of André Gide. To be ‘available’ can thus
imply a certain egoistic desire to be ‘ready for anything’, not to be
bogged down in social and interpersonal obligations. Cixous’s global
appeal to ‘woman’s powers’ glosses over the real differences among
women, and thus ironically represses the true heterogeneity of
women’s powers.
Cixous’s poetic vision of writing as the very enactment of liberation,
rather than the mere vehicle of it, carries the same individualist over-
tones. Writing as ecstatic self-expression casts the individual as
supremely capable of liberating herself back into union with the
primeval mother. For Cixous, women seem to relate to each other
exclusively on a dualistic (I/you) pattern: as mothers and daughters,
lesbian couples or in some variety of the teacher/student or
prophet/disciple relationship. The paucity of references to a wider
community of women or to collective forms of organization is not
124 french feminist theory
only conspicuous in the work of a feminist activist, but indicative of
Cixous’s general inability to represent the non-Imaginary, triangulated
structures of desire typical of social relationships.
Given the individualist orientation of Cixous’s theory, it is perhaps
not surprising that some of her students should present her politics as a
simple prolongation of her persona, as in Verena Andermatt Conley’s
account of Cixous’s appearance at the University of Paris at Vincennes
(‘a school notorious for a certain regal squalor’):

Cixous used to enter the complex in a dazzling ermine coat whose

capital worth most probably surpassed the means of many in the
classroom. Her proxemics marked a progressive use of repression. As
a replica of Bataille’s evocation of Aztec ceremony, she surged from
the context of the cheaply reinforced concrete of classroom shelters.
She then became a surplus value and a zero-degree term, the sover-
eign center of a decorous, eminently caressive body where her politics
splintered those of an archaic scene in which the king would have his
wives circulate about him.
(Conley, 80)

Ermine as emancipation: it is odd that the women of the Third

World have been so ludicrously slow to take up Cixous’s sartorial
strategy.

For a reader steeped in the Anglo-American approach to women and

writing, Hélène Cixous’s work represents a dramatic new departure. In
spite of the vicissitudes that the concept undergoes in her texts, writing
for her is always in some sense a libidinal object or act. By enabling
feminist criticism to escape from a disabling author-centred empiri-
cism, this linking of sexuality and textuality opens up a whole new
field of feminist investigation of the articulations of desire in language,
not only in texts written by women, but also in texts by men.
As we have seen, a closer investigation of her work has to confront
its intricate webs of contradiction and conflict, where a deconstructive
view of textuality is countered and undermined by an equally pas-
sionate presentation of writing as a female essence. If these contradic-
tions in the end can be seen to be abolished within the Imaginary, this
 hélène cixous 125
in its turn raises a series of political problems for the feminist reader
of Cixous: marred as much by its lack of reference to recognizable
social structures as by its biologism, her work nevertheless constitutes
an invigorating utopian evocation of the imaginative powers of
women.
 7
PATRIARCHAL REFLECTIONS

Luce Irigaray’s looking-glass

Luce Irigaray’s monumental doctoral thesis Spéculum de l’autre femme

(‘Speculum of the other woman’, 1974) led to her immediate expul-
sion from Lacan’s École freudienne at Vincennes. It is tempting to see this
dramatic enactment of patriarchal power as clear evidence of the
book’s intrinsic feminist value: any text that annoys the Fathers to such
an extent must be deserving of feminist support and applause. But if
Spéculum has been heavily criticized by mainstream Lacanians,1 it has
also been the object of much acrimonious feminist debate. At times it
looks as if the only thing Irigaray’s various critics agree on is that the
book is worth all the attention they so liberally bestow on it.2
Irigaray’s first book, Le Langage des déments (‘The language of dementia’,
1973), was a study of the patterns of linguistic disintegration in senile
dementia: a field that at first glance may seem far removed from the
feminist preoccupations of Spéculum. For readers of the latter, the con-
clusions of Le Langage des déments nevertheless take on a familiar ring:
‘Spoken more than speaking, enunciated more than enunciating, the
demented person is therefore no longer really an active subject of the
enunciation . . . He is only a possible mouthpiece for previously
 patriarchal reflections 127
pronounced enunciations’ (351). This passive, imitative or mimetic
relationship to the structures of language is strikingly similar to the
way in which, according to Spéculum, women relate to phallocratic
discourse.
In 1977, Spéculum was followed by a collection of texts entitled Ce sexe
qui n’en est pas un (‘This sex which is not one’). Though a much shorter
and in many ways more accessible volume than its predecessor, Ce sexe
alone does not provide a wholly accurate impression of Irigaray’s
theories. Its relationship to Spéculum is too close for that; consisting
partly of poetic or semi-theoretical texts, partly of traditionally theor-
etical pieces, even containing transcripts of seminars on the previous
book, Ce sexe develops many of the central concerns first launched in
Spéculum in a way that often requires some knowledge of that context.
Since 1977, Irigaray has published two shorter texts that focus on
the relationship between mother and daughter: Et l’une ne bouge pas sans
l’autre (‘And the one doesn’t stir without the other’, 1979) and Le Corps-
à-corps avec la mère (‘Clasped with the mother’, 1981). Continuing the
critique of the Western philosophical tradition begun in Spéculum, she
has also, in Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche (‘Friedrich Nietzsche’s marine
lover’, 1980), published a poetico-theoretical reading of Nietzsche
focused on his use of water imagery. Water was the element most alien
to Nietzsche, Irigaray argues, and therefore the one with the highest
‘deconstructive’ potential for his particular discourse. Passions élémentaires
(‘Elementary passions’, 1982) represents a return to the basic themes
of Spéculum and Ce sexe, this time in the form of a poetic monologue
where the speaking subject, a woman, chants her pleasure in the nat-
ural elements and her passion for her male lover. L’Oubli de l’air chez Martin
Heidegger (‘Forgetting the air: the case of Martin Heidegger’, 1983)
provides a critique of Heidegger based on his repression of air imagery
where his discourse soon becomes the point of departure for Irigaray’s
own analysis of air as a female element that deconstructs the simplistic
divisions of male thought. In La Croyance même (‘Even belief ’/‘The same
belief ’/ ‘The belief in the Same’, 1983), a short lecture on Freud’s
analysis of the fort-da game, Irigaray argues that Freud ignores the
child’s crucial relationship to the air as the only element that enables it
to come to terms with the loss of the placenta and the mother’s body.
My presentation of Irigaray’s feminist theory will nevertheless centre
128 french feminist theory
on the two texts in which she develops the main tenets of her feminist
analysis: first and foremost Spéculum de l’autre femme, but also Ce sexe qui n’en
est pas un.3

SPECULUM
Given her background in psycholinguistics and her profession as a
psychoanalyst, it may seem odd that Irigaray chose to present herself
for the prestigious and highly scholarly French doctorat d’Etat in philo-
sophy. For Irigaray herself, the choice of philosophy was an obvious
one: in our culture, philosophy has enjoyed the status of ‘master dis-
course’, as she puts it: ‘It is indeed philosophical discourse one must
question and disturb because it lays down the law for all the others,
because it constitutes the discourse of discourses’ (S, 72). If the first
part of Spéculum contains an abrasive critique of Freud’s theory of femi-
ninity, it is precisely a critique that consists in showing how Freud’s
otherwise revolutionary discourse submits to the misogynist rules of
Western philosophical tradition as far as femininity is concerned. Iriga-
ray, unlike Kate Millett, has no wish to reject psychoanalysis as a useless
or inherently reactionary theory:

It is more a question of displaying its still inoperative implications. To

say that although Freudian theory certainly gives us something that
can shake the whole philosophical order of discourse, it paradoxically
remains submissive to that order when it comes to the definition of
sexual difference.
(CS, 70)

Spéculum de l’autre femme is divided into three main parts: the first, ‘La
tache aveugle d’un vieux rêve de symétrie’ (‘The blindspot of an old
dream of symmetry’),4 consists of a remarkably detailed reading of
Freud’s statements about femininity, principally in his lecture on femi-
ninity in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, but also in other
texts where he approaches the question of female psychosexual
development and/or sexual difference. The second part, ‘Spéculum’,
contains a series of readings of Western philosophers from Plato to
Hegel, as well as some chapters presenting Irigaray’s own theoretical
 patriarchal reflections 129
positions. The third part, ‘L’µστερα de Platon’ (Plato’s hustera [cave]) is
a close reading of Plato’s cave parable in the light of the preceding
critique of Western philosophy. Though this part of Irigaray’s book
will not be a central concern in the following presentation, it should be
said that it is a highly sophisticated feminist deconstruction or critique
of patriarchal discourse and provides much inspiration for women in
search of new models for resourceful political readings of literary or
philosophical texts.
The composition of Spéculum, however, is more intricate than this
description suggests. According to the OED, a speculum is, among other
things:

1. (Surg.) instrument for dilating cavities of human body for inspec-

tion. 2. mirror, usu. of polished metal e.g. ∼um metal (alloy of copper
and tin), esp. in reflecting telescope.

Its original Latin meaning was mirror, from specere, ‘to look’. As we shall
see, the word itself already condenses several of the main themes of
Irigaray’s analysis. But the construction of her book also strives to enact
a speculum-like structure. By starting with Freud and ending with
Plato, Irigaray reverses the normal historical order in an action which
resembles that of the concave mirror which is the speculum gynae-
cologists use to inspect the ‘cavities’ of the female body. To make this
point Irigaray quotes Plato, who writes of the concave mirror: ‘Turned
horizontally in relation to the face, this concavity will make it seem as if
it was turned upside down’ (S, 183).5 But the concave mirror is also a
focal point, a lens that can concentrate light-rays so as to ‘shed light
on the secrets of caves’ and to ‘pierce the mystery of the woman’s sex’
(S, 182). The speculum is a male instrument for the further penetration
of the woman, but it is also a hollow surface, like the one it seeks to
explore. A speculum entering and illuminating the woman’s vagina can
only do so by virtue of its own concave shape; it is, paradoxically,
through the imitation of its object that the speculum objectifies it in
the first place.
Irigaray’s Spéculum de l’autre femme is shaped like a hollow surface on the
model of the speculum/vagina. At the centre, the section entitled
‘Spéculum’ is framed by the two massive sections on Freud and Plato
130 french feminist theory
respectively; it is as if the more fragmentary middle section sinks
between the solid, upright volumes of the master thinkers. Within the
middle section, this framing technique is both repeated and reversed:
Irigaray presents her own discourse in the first and last chapters, so
framing the seven middle sections dealing mainly with male philo-
sophers from Plato to Hegel. The structure is the same, but the relation
between male and female has been reversed. Within the seven middle
sections, yet another framing device seems to be at work: after two
highly critical chapters on Plato and Aristotle, there follows a chapter
‘on’ Plotinus consisting entirely of excerpts from his Enneads. In this
context (or, more appropriately, con-texte – con in French means ‘cunt’),
seemingly straightforward quotation undermines Plotinus’s discourse:
these are, after all, no longer Plotinus’s words, but Irigaray’s expert
(literal) imitation of them. Her perfect mimicry manages subtly to
expose his narcissistic phallocentrism.
This imitative chapter is placed immediately before a more
traditional analysis of Descartes, which in its turn is followed by a
fascinating reading of the discourse of female mystics entitled ‘La
mystérique’. A chapter on Kant and one on Hegel precede the last
chapter, where Irigaray’s own theoretical discourse takes over again.
Since the Descartes chapter is at the exact centre of the ‘Spéculum’
section (and of the whole book), the effect is again one of a frame.
Surrounded by the chapter ‘on’ Plotinus, entitled ‘La mère de glace’
(‘The ice/mirror mother/ ocean’), and the chapter on ‘La mys-
térique’ (‘The mystic/hysterical/mysterious woman’), Descartes sinks
into the innermost cavity of the book: in a phallic, instrumental move
the speculum illuminates him while simultaneously pointing to his
position within the feminine, as if to demonstrate Irigaray’s conten-
tion that woman constitutes the silent ground on which the patri-
archal thinker erects his discursive constructs. It is perhaps not a
coincidence that it is precisely Descartes, the rationalist theoret-
ician of the body/mind split who still exercises a profound influence
on French intellectual life, that Irigaray chooses to encompass in
this way.
 patriarchal reflections 131

SPECUL(ARIZ)ATION AND MIMETICISM

Irigaray’s style owes much to the techniques of deconstructive criti-
cism. Since most of her points in Spéculum are made through the skilful
manipulation of quotations and her own comments, it is difficult to
convey the flavour of her writing without quoting her as extensively as
she quotes Freud or Plato. In the following presentation, in order to
highlight her approach as well as to focus on some of its more prob-
lematic aspects, I have chosen to concentrate mainly on her critique of
Freud and her analysis of female mysticism.

Freud
Freud’s lecture on femininity takes as its point of departure the mystery
of woman. Aiming to shed some scientific light on the dark continent
of femininity, Freud starts by posing the question ‘What is woman?’
His use of light/darkness imagery, Irigaray argues, already reveals his
subservience to the oldest of ‘phallocratic’ philosophical traditions.
The Freudian theory of sexual difference is based on the visibility of
difference: it is the eye that decides what is clearly true and what isn’t.6
Thus the basic fact of sexual difference for Freud is that the male has an
obvious sex organ, the penis, and the female has not; when he looks at
the woman, Freud apparently sees nothing. The female difference is
perceived as an absence or negation of the male norm.
This point is crucial for Irigaray’s argument: in our culture, woman
is outside representation: ‘The feminine has consequently had to be
deciphered as forbidden [interdit], in between signs, between the real-
ized meanings, between the lines’ (S, 20). She is, Irigaray claims, the
negative required by the male subject’s ‘specularization’. ‘Speculariza-
tion’ suggests not only the mirror-image that comes from the visual
penetration of the speculum inside the vagina; it also hints at a basic
assumption underlying all Western philosophical discourse: the neces-
sity of postulating a subject that is capable of reflecting on its own being.
The philosophical meta-discourse is only made possible, Irigaray
argues, through a process whereby the speculating subject contem-
plates himself; the philosopher’s speculations are fundamentally narcis-
sistic. Disguised as reflections on the general condition of man’s Being,
132 french feminist theory
the philosopher’s thinking depends for its effect on its specularity (its
self-reflexivity); that which exceeds this reflective circularity is that
which is unthinkable. It is this kind of specul(ariz)ation Irigaray has in
mind when she argues that Western philosophical discourse is incap-
able of representing femininity/woman other than as the negative of
its own reflection.
This logic of the same, according to Irigaray, can be traced in Freud’s
account of the development of sexual difference. For Freud there is no
sexual difference in the pre-Oedipal stage: through the oral, anal and
phallic phases, the little girl is no different from the little boy. It is at the
moment of Oedipal crisis that the crucial change in the little girl’s
orientation occurs: whereas the little boy continues to take his mother
as his object, the little girl has to turn from her pre-Oedipal attachment
to the mother and take her father as love-object instead. This shift is not
only hard to explain; it is also difficult to accomplish: it is even dubi-
ous, as Freud freely admits, whether most women really manage
wholly to relinquish their pre-Oedipal attachment and develop a fully
‘mature’ femininity.7 Irigaray’s argument is that Freud was forced into
developing this incoherent, contradictory and misogynist theory of
femininity by his unwitting subservience to the specular logic of the
same. For his theory amounts to casting the little girl as fundamentally
the same as the little boy: she is, as Irigaray caustically puts it, not a little
girl but a little man. In the phallic stage the clitoris is perceived by the
little girl herself as an inferior penis, Freud argues, thus deftly suppress-
ing the intrusion of difference into his reflections. This visual percep-
tion of deficiency on the part of the little girl is the fundamental
assumption behind the controversial Freudian theory of penis envy.
To hold that the woman first sees her clitoris as a small penis and
then decides that she has already been castrated, can be read, Irigaray
argues, in a manner reminiscent of Kate Millett, as a projection of the
male fear of castration: as long as the woman is thought to envy the man
his penis, he can rest secure in the knowledge that he must have it after
all. The function of female penis envy, in other words is to bolster up
the male psyche. ‘To castrate the woman is to inscribe her in the law of
the same desire, of desire for the same’, Irigaray comments (CS 64). The
thinking man not only projects his desire for a reproduction of himself
(for his own reflection) on to the woman; he is, according to Irigaray,
 patriarchal reflections 133
incapable of thinking outside this specular structure. Thus the female
castration complex becomes still more of the Same. Woman is not only
the Other, as Simone de Beauvoir discovered, but is quite specifically
man’s Other: his negative or mirror-image. This is why Irigaray claims
that patriarchal discourse situates woman outside representation: she is
absence, negativity, the dark continent, or at best a lesser man. In
patriarchal culture the feminine as such (and whatever that might be will
be the subject of further discussion) is repressed; it returns only in its
‘acceptable’ form as man’s specularized Other.
Freud’s own texts, particularly ‘The uncanny’, theorize the gaze as a
phallic activity linked to the anal desire for sadistic mastery of the
object.8 The specularizing philosopher is the potent master of his
insight; as the example of Oedipus demonstrates, the fear of blindness
is the fear of castration. As long as the master’s scopophilia (i.e. ‘love of
looking’) remains satisfied, his domination is secure. No wonder then
that the little girl’s rien à voir (‘nothing to be seen’) is threatening to the
male sexual theorist. As Jane Gallop has reminded us, the Greek theoria
comes from theoros, ‘spectator’, from thea, ‘a viewing’ (Gallop, 58). If
our theorist were to think the feminine, he might find himself
tumbling from his phallic lighthouse into the obscurity of the dark
continent.
Irigaray demonstrates the importance of the look (or gaze) in Freud-
ian theory in her characteristic style: posing as an inquisitive little girl
daring to challenge the father’s authority, she slowly unravels his con-
structions. Quoting Freud’s graphic account of the little girl’s desire to
have a penis instead of her own inferior clitoris, she finds herself
musing over its implications:

Not a bad dramatization. And one could imagine or dream up scenes

of this kind of recognition taking place in the consulting room of
Freud the psychoanalyst. Although the question of their respective
relations to the look, to the eye and to sexual difference ought to crop
up since he tells us that one has to see in order to believe. Should
one then not see [ne pas voir] in order to review [revoir] the matter?
Probably. . . . But still. . . . Unless all the power and the difference (?)
there has shifted into the look(s)? So that Freud can see without
being seen? Without being seen seeing? Not even questioned as to
134 french feminist theory
the power of his gaze? Is that where the envy of the omnipotence of
this look, of this knowledge, comes from? Power over the genitals/
woman/sex [le sexe]. Envy, jealousy of the penis-eye, the phallic look?
He would see that I haven’t got it, would decide as much in a twink-
ling of an eye. I can’t see whether he’s got one. Whether he’s got
more than I have. But he will let me know. Castration displaced? Right
away the look would be at stake. One really ought not to forget what
‘castration’, or the knowledge of/about castration owes to the look,
in Freud’s case at any rate. The look at stake/in play [en jeu] as
always. . . .
But the little girl, the woman, would have nothing to show. She
would expose, exhibit the possibility of a nothing to be seen.
(S, 53)

The woman, for Freud as for other Western philosophers, becomes a

mirror for his own masculinity. Irigaray concludes that in our society
representation, and therefore also social and cultural structures, are
products of what she sees as a fundamental hom(m)osexualité. The pun in
French is on homo (‘same’) and homme (‘man’): the male desire for the
same. The pleasure of self-representation, of her desire for the same, is
denied woman: she is cut off from any kind of pleasure that might be
specific to her.
Caught in the specular logic of patriarchy, woman can choose either
to remain silent, producing incomprehensible babble (any utterance
that falls outside the logic of the same will by definition be incompre-
hensible to the male master discourse), or to enact the specular repre-
sentation of herself as a lesser male. The latter option, the woman as
mimic, is, according to Irigaray, a form of hysteria. The hysteric mimes
her own sexuality in a masculine mode, since this is the only way in
which she can rescue something of her own desire. The hysteric’s
dramatization (or mise en scène) of herself is thus a result of her exclusion
from patriarchal discourse. No wonder, then, that phallocracy perceives
the hysteric’s symptoms as an inauthentic copy of an original drama
relating to the male (her desire to seduce her own father). And no
wonder, either, that Freud’s treatment of little Hans exhibits a startling
degree of identification between the analyst and his little clone,
whereas his analysis of Dora bears all the marks of his own fear of
 patriarchal reflections 135
losing control and succumbing to the terrifying castrating void (the rien
à voir) exhibited in Dora’s hysteria.9

Mysticism
The first chapter of the middle section of Spéculum starts with an exam-
ination of the concept of subjecthood: ‘All theories of the subject have
always been appropriated to the “masculine”. When the woman sub-
mits to them, she unknowingly gives up her specific relationship to the
imaginary’ (S, 165). Subjectivity is denied to women, Irigaray claims,
and this exclusion guarantees the constitution of relatively stable
objects for the (specularizing) subject. If one imagined that the woman
imagines anything at all, the object (of speculation) would lose its
stability and thus unsettle the subject itself. If the woman cannot repre-
sent the ground, the earth, the inert or opaque matter to be appropri-
ated or repressed, how can the subject be secure in its status as a
subject? Without such a non-subjective foundation, Irigaray argues, the
subject would not be able to construct itself at all. The blindspot of the
master thinker’s discourse is always woman: exiled from representa-
tion, she constitutes the ground on which the theorist erects his specu-
lar constructs, but she is therefore also always the point on which his
erections subside.
If, as Irigaray argues, the mystical experience is precisely an experi-
ence of the loss of subjecthood, of the disappearance of the subject/
object opposition, it would seem to hold a particular appeal for
women, whose very subjectivity is anyway being denied and repressed
by patriarchal discourse. Though not all mystics were women, mysti-
cism nevertheless seems to have formed the one area of high spiritual
endeavour under patriarchy where women could and did excel more
frequently than men. For Irigaray, mystical discourse is the ‘only place
in Western history where woman speaks and acts in such a public way’
(S, 238). Mystical imagery stresses the night of the soul: the obscurity
and confusion of consciousness, the loss of subjecthood. Touched by
the flames of the divine, the mystic’s soul is transformed into a fluid
stream dissolving all difference. This orgasmic experience eludes the
specular rationality of patriarchal logic: the sadistic eye/I must be
closed; if he is to discover the delights of the mystic, the philosopher
136 french feminist theory
must escape from his philosophy in a ‘blind flight out of the closed
chamber of philosophy, of the speculative matrix where he has
enclosed himself in order clearly to consider the all’ (S, 239). The
ecstatic vision (from the Greek ex, ‘outside’, and histēmi, ‘place’) is one
that seems to escape specularity. If women sought and obtained ecstasy
(or ex-stase as Irigaray spells it) it was because they were already outside
scopic representation; the mystic’s ignorance, her utter abjection
before the divine, was part and parcel of the feminine condition she
was brought up in: ‘[In this system] the poorest in science and the
most ignorant were the most eloquent and the richest in revelations.
Historically therefore women. Or at least the “feminine” ’ (S, 239).
But what if there is a mirror/speculum hidden at the centre even of
this bottomless abyss? The mystics do after all frequently use the image
of the burning mirror (or miroir ardent) to describe certain aspects of their
experience. Though the burning mirror does seem to be the one
mirror that reflects nothing, the phrase nevertheless signals a move
towards the specularization of the mystical experience. This, Irigaray
argues, is due to the theologization of mysticism. Theology makes
mysticism teleological by providing it with a (masculine) object: the
mystic experience comes to reflect God in all his glory, and is thus
reduced to yet another example of male specularization where the
hom(m)osexual economy of God desiring his Son (and vice versa)
becomes reflected in the nothingness (néant) in the mystic’s heart. But,
as Irigaray notes, this effort towards male recuperation of mysticism
may well backfire: God, even in theology, exceeds all representation;
the human incarnation of the Son is the ‘most feminine of all men’
(S, 249). Christ undoes specular logic, and the mystic’s self-abasement
re-enacts his passion: victory is to be attained precisely in the deepest
of all abysses. The mystic’s self-representation escapes the specular
logic of non-representation imposed on her under patriarchy.
Modelled on the image of the suffering Christ, the mystic’s often
self-inflicted abjection paradoxically opens up a space where her
own pleasure can unfold. Though still circumscribed by male discourse,
this is a space that nevertheless is vast enough for her to feel no
longer exiled.
 patriarchal reflections 137
The inexorable logic of the Same
Irigaray’s exaltation of mysticism may come as a surprise to many
feminists. Her argument, after all, is that the mystic experience allows
femininity to discover itself precisely through the deepest acceptance
of patriarchal subjection. But mysticism is nevertheless a special case.
Irigaray is perhaps not claiming that all women really are mystics at
heart, simply that under patriarchy, mysticism (like hysteria a few
centuries later) offers women a real if limited possibility of discovering
some aspects of a pleasure that might be specific to their libidinal
drives. But how can we know what ‘woman’s pleasure’ is or might be?
If specular logic dominates all Western theoretical discourse, how can
Luce Irigaray’s doctoral thesis escape its pernicious influence? If her
study of the mystics leads her to take pleasure in the image of woman
imitating the sufferings of Christ, is she not caught in a logic that
requires her to produce an image of woman that is exactly the same as
the specular constructions of femininity in patriarchal logic? In a
perceptive passage, Shoshana Felman has raised a series of pertinent
questions that pinpoint the problems Irigaray faces when she presents
herself as a woman theorist or a theorist of woman:

If ‘the woman’ is precisely the Other of any conceivable Western

theoretical locus of speech, how can the woman as such be speaking
in this book? Who is speaking here, and who is asserting the other-
ness of the woman? If, as Luce Irigaray suggests, the woman’s silence
or the repression of her capacity to speak, are constitutive of philo-
sophy and of theoretical discourse as such, from what theoretical
locus is Luce Irigaray herself speaking in order to develop her own
theoretical discourse about women? Is she speaking as a woman, or in
the place of the (silent) woman, for the woman, in the name of the
woman? Is it enough to be a woman in order to speak as a woman? Is
‘speaking as a woman’ a fact determined by some biological condition
or by a strategic, theoretical position, by anatomy or by culture? What if
‘speaking as a woman’ were not a simple ‘natural’ fact, could not be
taken for granted? (Felman, 3)

Though Irigaray never actually acknowledges the fact, her analysis of

male specular logic is deeply indebted to Derrida’s critique of Western
138 french feminist theory
philosophical tradition. If the textual analyses of Spéculum are inspiring
examples of anti-patriarchal criticism, it is because Irigaray knows how
to expose the flaws and inconsistencies of phallocentric discourse. It is
Irigaray’s work, not least, that Gayatri Spivak has in mind when she
commends certain aspects of French feminism for its resourceful
approach to the ruling forms of discourse:

In the long run, the most useful thing that a training in French femi-
nism can give us is politicized and critical examples of ‘Symptomatic
reading’ not always following the reversal-displacement technique of a
deconstructive reading. The method that seemed recuperative when
used to applaud the avant-garde is productively conflictual when used
to expose the ruling discourse.
(Spivak, 177)

But if, as Derrida has argued, we are still living under the reign of
metaphysics, it is impossible to produce new concepts untainted by the
metaphysics of presence. This is why he sees deconstruction as an
activity rather than as a new ‘theory’. Deconstruction is in other words
self-confessedly parasitic upon the metaphysical discourses it is out to
subvert. It follows that any attempt to formulate a general theory of
femininity will be metaphysical. This is precisely Irigaray’s dilemma:
having shown that so far femininity has been produced exclusively in
relation to the logic of the Same, she falls for the temptation to produce
her own positive theory of femininity. But, as we have seen, to define
‘woman’ is necessarily to essentialize her.
Irigaray herself is aware of this problem and struggles hard to avoid
falling into the essentialist trap. Thus at one point she explicitly rejects
any attempt to define ‘woman’. Women ought not to try to become the
equals of men, she writes:

They must not pretend to rival them by constructing a logic of the

feminine that again would take as its model the onto-theological. They
must rather try to disentangle this question from the economy of the
logos. They must therefore not pose it in the form ‘What is woman?’
They must, through repetition-interpretation of the way in which the
 patriarchal reflections 139
feminine finds itself determined in discourse – as lack, default, or as
mime and inverted reproduction of the subject – show that on the
feminine side it is possible to exceed and disturb this logic.
(CS, 75–6)

One way of disrupting patriarchal logic in this way is through mimeti-

cism, or the mimicry of male discourse. We have already seen how
Irigaray herself uses such a mimetic strategy with considerable success
in her chapter ‘on’ Plotinus. In reply to Shoshana Felman’s questions
one might well claim that Irigaray, in Spéculum, is speaking as a woman
miming male discourse. Thus the academic apparatus of the doctoral
thesis, still perceptible in Spéculum, may be an ironic gesture: coming
from a woman arguing the case Irigaray is presenting, her impeccably
theoretical discourse is displaced and relocated as a witty parody of
patriarchal modes of argument. If as a woman under patriarchy, Iriga-
ray has, according to her own analysis, no language of her own but can
only (at best) imitate male discourse, her own writing must inevitably
be marked by this. She cannot pretend to be writing in some pure
feminist realm outside patriarchy: if her discourse is to be received as
anything other than incomprehensible chatter, she must copy male
discourse. The feminine can thus only be read in the blank spaces left
between the signs and lines of her own mimicry.
But if this is the case, then Irigaray’s mimicry in Spéculum becomes a
conscious acting out of the hysteric (mimetic) position allocated to all
women under patriarchy. Through her acceptance of what is in any
case an ineluctable mimicry, Irigaray doubles it back on itself, thus
raising the parasitism to the second power. Hers is a theatrical staging
of the mime: miming the miming imposed on woman, Irigaray’s
subtle specular move (her mimicry mirrors that of all women) intends to
undo the effects of phallocentric discourse simply by overdoing them. Hers
is a fundamentally paradoxical strategy that reflects that of the mystics:
if the mystic’s abject surrender becomes the moment of her liberation,
Irigaray’s undermining of patriarchy through the overmiming of its
discourses may be the one way out of the straitjacket of phallocentrism.
The question, however, is whether and under what circumstances
this strategy actually works. One way of studying the effects of mimicry
in Irigaray’s texts is by looking at her use of analogic or comparative
140 french feminist theory
arguments. In Spéculum she sees analogic reading as a typical expression
of the male passion for the Same:

The interpreters of dreams themselves had only one desire: to find the
same. Everywhere. And it was certainly insistent. But from that
moment, didn’t interpretation also get caught up in this dream of an
identity, equivalence, analogy, homology, symmetry, comparison, imi-
tation etc. which would be more or less right, that is to say, more or
less good?
(S, 27)

We might therefore expect Irigaray to mime this kind of thinking

through equivalence and homology in order to undo its stabilizing,
hierarchical effects. But this is not always what happens. In her essay ‘Le
marché des femmes’ (‘Women on the market’, CS, 165–85), she
claims that ‘Marx’s analysis of the commodity as the basic form of
capitalist wealth can . . . be understood as an interpretation of the status
of woman in so-called patriarchal societies’ (CS, 169). According to
Irigaray, woman can in the first instance be read both as use value and
as exchange value: she is ‘nature’ (use value), which is subjected to
human labour and transformed into exchange value. It is in her role as
exchange value that she can be analysed as a commodity on the market:
her value resides not in her own being but in some transcendental
standard of equivalence (money, the phallus). In a significant footnote
Irigaray defends the case for her extensive use of analogy in this essay:

And didn’t Aristotle, a ‘giant thinker’ according to Marx, determine the

relationship between form and matter through an analogy with the
relationship between male and female? To return to the question of
sexual difference is therefore rather a new passage [retraversée]
through analogism.
(CS, 170)

In other words: when she as a woman employs a particular rhe-

torical strategy, that strategy is immediately placed in a new (non-
male?) context with different political effects. Thus the question of the
political efficacy of female mimicry comes to hinge on the power of
 patriarchal reflections 141
the new context provided by the woman’s miming. If the strategy
proved to be highly successful in the case of Plotinus, it was due to the
anti-sexist analysis provided immediately before the imitative chapter
‘on’ Plotinus. But in the case of Marx, it is difficult to see how Marxist
discourse is undermined by her mimicry. Rather it would seem that
Irigaray is using Marx’s analysis in an entirely conventional way: appar-
ently delighted at having discovered the Same, she proceeds to develop
the suggestive implications of her analogy rather than to expose the
flaws of what presumably is Marx’s phallocentric discourse. Her essay
thus reads more like a vindication of Marx’s insights than as a critique
of his specular logic. In another essay, ‘La “mécanique” des fluides’
(‘The “mechanics” of fluids’, CS, 103–16), the analogic mimicry
seems to fail entirely as a political device. Here the analogy lies between
femininity and masculinity on the one hand and fluids and solids on
the other. Phallocratic science is unable to account for the movement
of fluids, Irigaray claims, just as it cannot account for woman. Thus
woman’s language, she argues, behaves just like the fluids scorned by
male physicists:

It is continuous, compressible, dilatable, viscous, conductive, diffus-

ible. . . . It never ends, it is powerful and powerless through its
resistance to that which can be counted, it takes its pleasure and
suffers through its hypersensitivity to pressure; it changes – in
volume or strength, for instance – according to the degree of heat,
it is in its physical reality determined by the friction between two
infinitely neighbouring forces – a dynamics of proximity and not of
property.
(CS, 109–10)

Here her mimicry of the patriarchal equation between woman and

fluids (woman as the life-giving sea, as the source of blood, milk and
amniotic fluid . . .) only succeeds in reinforcing the patriarchal dis-
course. This failure is due to her figuring of fluidity as a positive alternative
to the depreciating scopophilic constructions of the patriarchs. The
mimicry fails because it ceases to be perceived as such: it is no longer
merely a mockery of the absurdities of the male, but a perfect repro-
duction of the logic of the Same. When the quotation marks, so to
142 french feminist theory
speak, are no longer apparent, Irigaray falls into the very essentialist
trap of defining woman that she set out to avoid.
Mimicry or impersonation clearly cannot be rejected as unsuitable
for feminist purposes, but neither is it the panacea Irigaray occasion-
ally takes it to be. Shoshana Felman’s questions (Is Irigaray speaking
as a woman? For the woman? In the place of the woman?) cannot be
outflanked by a theory of female mimicry of male discourse. Felman
is insistently raising the question of positionality. From which
(political) position is Irigaray speaking? It is in her failure to confront
this question that Irigaray’s own blindspot appears. For what she
seems not to see is that sometimes a woman imitating male
discourse is just a woman speaking like a man: Margaret Thatcher is
a case in point. It is the political context of such mimicry that is surely
always decisive.

WOMANSPEAK: A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT?

We have seen how Irigaray’s attempt to establish a theory of femininity
that escapes patriarchal specul(ariz)ation necessarily lapses into a form
of essentialism. Her efforts to provide woman with a ‘gallant represen-
tation of her own sex’ (S, 130) are likewise doomed to become another
enactment of the inexorable logic of the Same. It is interesting to note
that in spite of certain divergences, Irigaray’s vision of femininity and
of feminine language remains almost indistinguishable from Cixous’s.
Irigaray’s theory of ‘woman’ takes as its starting point a basic assump-
tion of analogy between woman’s psychology and her ‘morphology’
(Gr. morphē, ‘form’), which she rather obscurely takes to be different
from her anatomy. Woman’s form is repressed by patriarchal phallo-
centrism, which systematically denies woman access to her own pleas-
ure: female jouissance cannot even be thought by specular logic. Male
pleasure, she claims, is seen as monolithically unified, represented as
analogous with the phallus, and it is this mode that is forcibly imposed
upon women. But as she argues in the article ‘This sex which is not
one’,10 woman’s sex is not one: her sexual organs are composed of
many different elements (lips, vagina, clitoris, cervix, uterus, breasts)
and her jouissance is therefore multiple, non-unified, endless:
 patriarchal reflections 143
A woman ‘touches herself’ constantly without anyone being able to
forbid her to do so, for her sex is composed of two lips which embrace
continually. Thus, within herself she is already two – but not divisible
into ones – who stimulate each other.
(MC, 100, CS, 24)

Woman therefore gives privilege not to the visual, but to the touch:

The prevalence of the gaze, discrimination of form, and individualiza-

tion of form is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman finds
pleasure more in touch than in sight and her entrance into a dominant
scopic economy signifies, once again, her relegation to passivity: she
will be the beautiful object. . . . In this system of representation and
desire, the vagina is a flaw, a hole in the representation’s scopophilic
objective. It was admitted already in Greek statuary that this ‘nothing
to be seen’ must be excluded, rejected from such a scene of represen-
tation. Woman’s sexual organs are simply absent from this scene: they
are masked and her ‘slit’ is sewn up.
(MC, 101, CS, 25–6)

Irigaray posits femininity as plural and multiple: woman’s economy

is not specular in the sense that it does not work on an either/or model.
Her sexuality is inclusive: she doesn’t after all have to choose between
clitoral and vaginal pleasure, as Freud assumed, but can have it both ways.
Like Cixous, Irigaray holds that woman is situated outside all ‘property’:

Property and propriety are undoubtedly rather foreign to all that is

female. At least sexually. Nearness, however, is not foreign to woman, a
nearness so close that any identification of one or the other, and there-
fore any form of property, is impossible. Woman enjoys a closeness
with the other which is so near she cannot possess it, any more than
she can possess herself.
(MC, 104–5, CS, 30)

Irigaray’s analysis of femininity is closely bound up with her idea of

a specific woman’s language which she calls ‘le parler femme’, or
‘womanspeak’. ‘Le parler femme’ emerges spontaneously when
144 french feminist theory
women speak together, but disappears again as soon as men are pres-
ent. This is one of the reasons why Irigaray sees women-only groups as
an indispensable step towards liberation, though she does warn against
these groups becoming simple reversals of the existing order: ‘If their
goal is to reverse the existing order – even if that were possible –
history would simply repeat itself and return to phallocratism, where
neither women’s sex, their imaginary, nor their language can exist’
(MC, 106, CS, 32). Otherwise, the first thing to be said about “woman-
speak” is that nothing can be said about it: ‘I simply cannot give you an
account of “womanspeak”: one speaks it, it cannot be meta-spoken’
(CS, 141), she once declared in a seminar. She nevertheless provides a
definition of woman’s style in terms of its intimate connection with
fluidity and the sense of touch:

This ‘style’ does not privilege the gaze but takes all figures back to
their tactile birth. There she re-touches herself without ever constitut-
ing herself, or constituting herself in another kind of unity. Simul-
taneity would be her ‘property’. A property that never fixes itself in the
possible identity of the self to another form. Always fluid without for-
getting the characteristics of fluids which are so difficult to idealize:
this friction between two infinitely neighbouring forces that creates
their dynamics. Her ‘style’ resists and explodes all firmly established
forms, figures, ideas, concepts.
(CS, 76)

The most famous – or infamous – passage in ‘This sex which is not

one’ is one in which she returns to the question of woman and her
language in order to show how woman escapes patriarchal logic. The
question is whether the attempt backfires, showing that Irigaray’s
‘woman’ is a product of the same patriarchal logic:

‘She’ is indefinitely other in herself. That is undoubtedly the reason

she is called temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious
– not to mention her language in which ‘she’ goes off in all directions
and in which ‘he’ is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning.
Contradictory words seem a little crazy to the logic of reason, and
inaudible for him who listens with ready-made grids, a code prepared
 patriarchal reflections 145
in advance. In her statements – at least when she dares to speak out –
woman retouches herself constantly. She just barely separates from
herself some chatter, an exclamation, a half-secret, a sentence left in
suspense – when she returns to it, it is only to set out again from
another point of pleasure or pain. One must listen to her differently in
order to hear an ‘other meaning’ which is constantly in the process of
weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet
casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilized. For when ‘she’
says something, it is already no longer identical to what she means.
Moreover, her statements are never identical to anything. Their dis-
tinguishing feature is one of contiguity. They touch (upon). And when
they wander too far from this nearness, she stops and begins again
from ‘zero’: her body-sex organ.
It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an exact definition
of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that the
meaning will be clear. They are already elsewhere than in the dis-
cursive machinery where you claim to take them by surprise. They
have turned back within themselves, which does not mean the same
thing as ‘within yourself’. They do not experience the same interiority
that you do and which perhaps you mistakenly presume they share.
‘Within themselves’ means in the privacy of this silent, multiple, diffuse
tact. If you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can
only reply: nothing. Everything.
(MC, 103, CS, 28–9)

Again, Shoshana Felman’s question about the positionality of Irigaray’s

discourse springs to mind. For who is speaking here? Who is this
speaking subject who addresses herself to a masculine (?) ‘you’,
reducing ‘women’ to the anonymous objects of her discourse? (‘They
do not experience the same interiority that you do.’) Is the speaking
subject a woman? And if so, how can she presume to speak anything
but ‘contradictory words [which] seem a little crazy to the logic of
reason’? For Monique Plaza at least, the answer is clear: Irigaray is a
patriarchal wolf in sheep’s clothing:

Luce Irigaray pursues her construction, cheerfully prescribing

woman’s social and intellectual existence from her ‘morphology’ . . . .
146 french feminist theory
Her method remains fundamentally naturalist and completely under
the influence of patriarchal ideology. For one cannot describe morph-
ology as though it presented itself to perception, without ideological
mediation. The positivism of the irigarayan construction is here
matched by a flagrant empiricism. . . . Every mode of existence which
ideology imputes to women as part of the Eternal Feminine and which
for a moment Luce Irigaray seemed to be posing as the result of
oppression, is from now on woman’s essence, woman’s being. All that
‘is’ woman comes to her in the last instances from her anatomical sex,
which touches itself all the time. Poor woman.
(Plaza, 31–2)

IDEALISM AND AHISTORICISM

Writing in Questions féministes, the journal founded by Simone de Beau-
voir, Monique Plaza criticizes Irigaray from a materialist perspective.
Reading Spéculum, it is easy to believe that power is a question of
philosophy alone. But, as Plaza argues, women’s oppression is by no
means purely ideological or discursive:

The notion of ‘Woman’ is imbricated in the materiality of existence:

women are enclosed in the family circle and work for free. The patri-
archal order is not only ideological, it is not in the simple domain of
‘value’; it constitutes a specific, material oppression. To reveal its
existence and lay bare its mechanisms, it is necessary to bring down
the idea of ‘woman’, that is, to denounce the fact that the category of
sex has invaded gigantic territories for oppressive ends.
(Plaza, 26)

Domestic economy does not figure alongside the specular and photo-
logic economies Irigaray studies in Spéculum: the material conditions of
women’s oppression are spectacularly absent from her work.11 But
without specific material analysis, a feminist account of power cannot
transcend the simplistic and defeatist vision of male power pitted
against female helplessness that underpins Irigaray’s theoretical
investigations. The paradox of her position is that while she strongly
defends the idea of ‘woman’ as multiple, decentred and undefinable,
 patriarchal reflections 147
her unsophisticated approach to patriarchal power forces her to analyse
‘woman’ (in the singular) throughout as if ‘she’ were indeed a simple,
unchanging unity, always confronting the same kind of monolithic
patriarchal oppression. For Irigaray, patriarchy would seem a univocal,
non-contradictory force that prevents women from expressing their
real nature. And one of the reasons why she fails in practice to carry
through her theoretical programme of recognizing the multiplicity of
women (rather than of ‘woman’) is her refusal to consider power as
anything but a male obsession. For her, power is something women are
against: ‘I for my part refuse to shut myself up in one single “group”
within the women’s liberation movement. Particularly if it falls into the
trap of wanting to exercise power’ (CS, 161). But women’s relationship
to power is not exclusively one of victimization. Feminism is not
simply about rejecting power, but about transforming the existing
power structures – and, in the process, transforming the very concept
of power itself. To be ‘against’ power is not to abolish it in a fine,
post-1968 libertarian gesture, but to hand it over to somebody else.
Linked to the absence of a materialist analysis of power is the lack of
historical orientation displayed in Spéculum. It is not that the book is
unhistorical – on the contrary, it shows how some patriarchal dis-
cursive strategies have remained constant from Plato to Freud. Also,
there is a good case for arguing that some aspects of women’s oppression
in the Western world may well have remained relatively unchanged
over the centuries, and Irigaray does an important job in trying to
expose certain recurrent patriarchal strategies. Spéculum is ahistorical,
rather, in that it implies that this is all there is to say about patriarchal
logic. Irigaray signally fails to study the historically changing impact of
patriarchal discourses on women. Thus Spéculum cannot really address
the question of historical specificity: what makes women’s lives in the
post-Freudian era different from the lives of Plato’s mother and sisters?
If the dominant discourses have barely changed, why aren’t we still
living in the gynaeceum?
Irigaray’s failure to consider the historical and economic specificity
of patriarchal power, along with its ideological and material contra-
dictions, forces her into providing exactly the kind of metaphysical
definition of woman she declaredly wants to avoid. She thus comes to
analyse ‘woman’ in idealist categories, just like the male philosophers
148 french feminist theory
she is denouncing. Her superb critique of patriarchal thought is partly
undercut by her attempt to name the feminine. If, as I have previously
argued, all efforts towards a definition of ‘woman’ are destined to be
essentialist, it looks as if feminist theory might thrive better if it aban-
doned the minefield of femininity and femaleness for a while and
approached the questions of oppression and emancipation from a dif-
ferent direction. This, to a great extent, is what Julia Kristeva has tried
to do. But it is also paradoxically one of the reasons why Kristeva, as
opposed to Cixous and Irigaray, cannot strictly speaking be considered
a purely feminist theorist.
 8
MARGINALITY AND
SUBVERSION

Julia Kristeva

L’ETRANGÈRE
When Roland Barthes in 1970 sat down to write an enthusiastic review
of one of Kristeva’s early works, he chose to call it ‘L’étrangère’, which
translates approximately as ‘the strange, or foreign, woman’. Though
an obvious allusion to Kristeva’s Bulgarian nationality (she first arrived
in Paris in 1966), this title captures what Barthes saw as the unsettling
impact of Kristeva’s work. ‘Julia Kristeva changes the place of things’,
Barthes wrote, ‘she always destroys the latest preconception, the one
we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be
proud . . . she subverts authority, the authority of monologic science’
(19).1 Barthes’s implication is that Kristeva’s alien discourse under-
mines our most cherished convictions precisely because it situates itself
outside our space, knowingly inserting itself along the borderlines of
our own discourse. No wonder, then, that Kristeva defiantly assumes
her disturbing position in the very first sentence of Séméiotiké: ‘To work
on language, to labour in the materiality of that which society regards as
150 french feminist theory
a means of contact and understanding, isn’t that at one stroke to declare
oneself a stranger (étranger) to language?’2 And no wonder either that I,
as an alien to this country and this language, have found precisely in
Kristeva, another étrangère, the most challenging point of departure for
my own feminist enquiry.
If the introductory chapter of this book drew on some of her ideas in
order to stage a confrontation with several currents in Anglo-American
feminist criticism, I would like to repeat that manoeuvre here and
examine Anglo-American feminist linguistics from a position
informed by Kristevan semiotics. This approach has the added advan-
tage of presenting the étrangère in terms of more familiar theories, but it
also runs the risk of unwittingly domesticating the alien. It is therefore
important to realize that Kristevan theory is only partly and fragmentar-
ily commensurate with what, in spite of the strong Australian influence
in this particular field, I have chosen to call Anglo-American feminist
linguistics. I should also make it clear that Kristeva herself, to my know-
ledge, has never published any comments on this kind of linguistics.
What follows is, therefore, my own attempt to examine some of the
issues raised by feminist linguistics from a ‘Kristevan’ perspective.3

KRISTEVA AND ANGLO-AMERICAN

FEMINIST LINGUISTICS
According to Cheris Kramer, Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, the
main areas of concern to Anglo-American feminist linguistics are:

(1) Sex differences and similarities in language use, in speech and

nonverbal communication; (2) sexism in language, with emphasis on
language structure and content; (3) relations between language struc-
ture and language use (two topics usually treated separately); (4)
efforts and prospects for change.
(639)

The worrying aspect of this enumeration is the lack of any discussion

of what ‘language’ might mean: it is as if the field or object of study
(‘language’) is unproblematical for these researchers. Kristeva, on the
other hand, spends much time discussing precisely the problem of
 marginality and subversion 151
‘language’. From the start she is acutely aware that ‘language’ is what-
ever linguists choose to define as their object of study. In an essay
entitled ‘The ethics of linguistics’, she confronts modern linguistics
with the ethical and political implications of its conception of ‘lan-
guage’. Accusing a ‘prominent modern grammarian’ of behaving in a
‘Janus-like fashion’, she points out that ‘in his linguistic theories he sets
forth a logical, normative basis for the speaking subject, while in
politics, he claims to be an anarchist’ (23). For her, contemporary
linguistics is still

bathed in the aura of systematics that prevailed at the time of its

inception. It is discovering the rules governing the coherence of our
fundamental social code: language, either system of signs or strategy
for the transformation of logical sequences.
(24)

Kristeva sees the ideological and philosophical basis for modern

linguistics as fundamentally authoritarian and oppressive:

As wardens of repression and rationalizers of the social contract in its

most solid substratum (discourse), linguists carry the Stoic tradition
to its conclusion. The epistemology underlying linguistics and
the ensuing cognitive processes (structuralism, for example), even
though constituting a bulwark against irrational destruction and soci-
ologizing dogmatism, seem helplessly anachronistic when faced with
the contemporary mutations of subject and society.
(24)

The way out of this impasse, she argues, lies in a shift away from the
Saussurian concept of langue towards a re-establishment of the speaking
subject as an object for linguistics. This would move linguistics away
from its fascination with language as a monolithic, homogeneous
structure and towards an interest in language as a heterogeneous
process. This will only happen, however, if one avoids defining the
‘speaking subject’ as any kind of transcendental or Cartesian ego. The
speaking subject must instead be constructed in the field of thought
developed after Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. Without the divided,
152 french feminist theory
decentred, overdetermined and differential notion of the subject
proposed by these thinkers, Kristevan semiotics is unthinkable.4 For
Kristeva, the speaking subject is posited as the ‘place, not only of
structure and its repeated transformation, but especially, of its loss, its
outlay’ (24). Language then, for her, is a complex signifying process
rather than a monolithic system. If linguists studied poetry, she writes,
they would change their view of language and come away ‘suspecting
that the signifying process is not limited to the language system,
but that there is also speech, discourse, and within them, a causality
other than linguistic: a heterogeneous destructive causality’ (27).

Sex differences in language use

Turning back to the aims of Anglo-American feminist linguistics
quoted above, we can start by focusing on ‘sex differences and similar-
ities in language use, in speech and nonverbal communication’. One
needs little recourse to theory to see that this kind of research may
quickly lead to a dead end. Kramer, Thorne and Henley, for instance,
glumly state that ‘What is notable is how few expected sex differences
have been firmly substantiated by empirical studies of actual speech’
(640). The research is further confused, they say, by the fact that ‘simi-
lar speech by females and by males has been shown to be perceived
differentially (e.g. boys’ “anger” vs. girls’ “fear”) and evaluated in
different ways’ (640–1). Thorne and Henley put this point more force-
fully in another context, when they write that: ‘In short, the signifi-
cance of gestures changes when they are used by men or women; no
matter what women do, their behavior may be taken to symbolize
inferiority’ (28). Kramer, Thorne and Henley also conclude that: ‘A
cluster of findings about who interrupts whom in conversations sug-
gests that differences of power and status are more salient than those of
gender alone’ (641). If we add to these difficulties Helen Petrie’s
observation that in her research it seemed that topic was more important
than sex in producing differences in speech,5 we are in a position to
question the basic assumption of difference underlying this kind of
project.
It would seem that the pursuit of sex difference in language is not
only a theoretical impossibility, but a political error. The concept of
 marginality and subversion 153
difference is theoretically tricky in that it denotes an absence or a gap
more than any signifying presence. Difference, Jacques Derrida has
argued, is not a concept.6 Differences always take us elsewhere, we might
say, involve us in an ever proliferating network of displacement and
deferral of meaning. To see difference principally as the gap between
the two parts of a binary opposition (as for instance between masculin-
ity and femininity) is therefore to impose an arbitrary closure on the
differential field of meaning.
This is precisely what much research on sex differences in language
does, and the effect is theoretically predictable: masculinity and femi-
ninity are posited as stable, unchanging essences, as meaningful pres-
ences between which the elusive difference is supposed to be located.
This is not to say that the researchers believe in biological essences; on the
contrary, they often work with the anthropological theory of women
as a ‘muted group’,7 which suggests that in a social power relationship
it is the subordinate group’s different social experience that constitutes
their different relationship to language. This does not, however, prevent
the theory from becoming oppressive in nature: once ‘women’ are
constituted as always and unchangingly subordinate and ‘men’ as
unqualifiedly powerful, the language structures of these groups are
perceived as rigid and unchanging. The researchers in this field there-
fore find themselves obliged to search ceaselessly for ways in which
language hampers women’s linguistic projects. Nothing could testify
more to their scientific integrity than the candour with which they
bleakly report the absence of such confirmation of their hypothesis.
Politically, this projection of male and female as unquestioned essences
is surely always dangerous for feminists: if any sex difference were
ever to be found, it could always (and always would) be used against
us, largely to prove that some particularly unpleasant activity is
‘natural’ for women and alien to men. The binary model of difference
as enclosed or captured between the two opposite poles of masculinity
and femininity blinds us to that which escapes this rigid structuration.
Kristeva’s theory of language as a heterogeneous signifying process
located in and between speaking subjects suggests an alternative
approach: the study of specific linguistic strategies in specific situ-
ations. But this kind of study will not allow us to generalize our find-
ings. In fact, it will take us towards a study of language as specific
154 french feminist theory
discourse rather than as universal langue. If we follow Kristeva’s example
and turn to the Soviet linguist V. N. Vološinov and his book Marxism and
the Philosophy of Language, first published in 1929,8 we may find some
indication of what this would entail. In order to focus on discourse,
linguistics must transcend the hitherto sacrosanct sentence barrier.
More than fifty years ago, Vološinov launched a sustained assault on
structuralist or system-oriented linguistics, which he labelled ‘abstract
objectivism’:

Linguistic thought goes no further than the elements that make up the
monologic utterance. The structure of a complex sentence (a period) –
that is the furthest limit of linguistic reach. The structure of a whole
utterance is something linguistics leaves to the competence of other
disciplines – to rhetoric and poetics. Linguistics lacks any approach to
the compositional forms of the whole. Therefore, there is no direct
transition between the linguistic forms of the elements of an utterance
and the forms of its whole, indeed, no connection at all! Only by
making a jump from syntax can we arrive at problems of composition.
(78–9)

Vološinov and Kristeva are in other words out to undo – to decon-

struct – the old disciplinary barriers between linguistics, rhetoric and
poetics in order to construct a new kind of field: semiotics or textual theory.
If, as Vološinov suggests, all meaning is contextual, it becomes vital
to study the context of each and every utterance. It does not follow,
however, that ‘context’ should be understood as a unitary phenom-
enon, to be isolated and determined once and for all. In his meditation
Eperons (Spurs), Jacques Derrida has shown how a text can be taken to
have any number of contexts. Inscribing a specific context for a text
does not close or fix the meaning of that text once and for all: there is
always the possibility of reinscribing it within other contexts,9 a possi-
bility that is indeed in principle boundless, and that is structural to any
piece of language. As far as the study of sex differences in language
goes, any analysis of isolated fragments (sentences) in literature, as for
instance in the much-quoted case of Virginia Woolf ’s theory of the
‘woman’s sentence’, will warrant no specific conclusions whatever,
since the very same structures can be found in male writers (Proust, for
 marginality and subversion 155
example, or other modernists). The only way of producing interesting
results from such texts is to take the whole of the utterance (the whole
text) as one’s object, which means studying its ideological, political
and psychoanalytical articulations, its relations with society, with the
psyche and – not least – with other texts. Indeed, Kristeva has coined
the concept of intertextuality to indicate how one or more systems of
signs are transposed into others. Léon Roudiez writes that ‘Any signify-
ing practice is a field (in the sense of space traversed by lines of force)
in which various signifying systems undergo such a transposition’
(15). This, among other things, is what Kristeva has in mind when she
stresses the necessity of ‘establishing poetic language as the object of lin-
guistics’ attention’ (‘The ethics of linguistics’, 25), and then goes on to
specify that:

What is implied is that language, and thus sociability, are defined by

boundaries admitting of upheaval, dissolution and transformation.
Situating our discourse near such boundaries might enable us to
endow it with a current ethical impact. In short, the ethics of a lin-
guistic discovery may be gauged in proportion to the poetry that it
presupposes.
(25)

Sexism in language
If we turn now to the second main category of Anglo-American femi-
nist linguistic research, the study of sexism in language, it becomes
evident that we run up against many of the same assumptions as in the
study of sex differences. Cheris Kramarae defines sexism in language
(‘language’ here seems to refer to the English language) as the way in
which the ‘English lexicon is a structure organized to glorify maleness
and ignore, trivialize or derogate femaleness’ (42). In Man Made Language
Dale Spender asserts that:

The English language has been literally man made and . . . it is still
primarily under male control. . . . This monopoly over language is one
of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and
consequently have ensured the invisibility or ‘other’ nature of females,
156 french feminist theory
and this primacy is perpetuated while women continue to use,
unchanged, the language which we have inherited.
(12)

This kind of project is clearly interested in language as a system or

structure, and thus falls under Kristeva’s strictures on a potentially
authoritarian linguistics. This is not ‘merely’ a theoretical point: even if
we grant the viability of the project of locating sexism in language (and
after all, as we shall see, even Kristeva concedes that language is also in
some way structured), we immediately run into problems. For if we
hold with Vološinov and Kristeva that all meaning is contextual, it
follows that isolated words or general syntactical structures have no
meaning until we provide a context for them. How then can they be
defined as either sexist or non-sexist per se? (A dictionary of course consti-
tutes one such specific, ideologically significant context.) If it is the
case, as Thorne and Henley argue, that similar speech by men and by
women tends to be interpreted quite differently, then there is surely
nothing inherent in any given word or phrase that can always and
forever be constructed as sexist. The crudely conspiratorial theory of
language as ‘man-made’, or as a male plot against women, posits an
origin (men’s plotting) to language, a kind of non-linguistic transcen-
dental signifier for which it is impossible to find any kind of theoretical
support. I will therefore try to supply an alternative explanation of the
well-documented instances of sexism in language.
The question of sexism is a question of the power relationship
between the sexes, and this power struggle will of course be part of the
context of all utterances under patriarchy. It does not follow, however,
that in each and every individual case the feminine interlocutor will
emerge as the underdog. As Michèle Barrett has written: ‘An analysis of
gender ideology in which women are always innocent, always passive
victims of patriarchal power, is patently not satisfactory’ (Women’s
Oppression Today, 110). If we now follow Vološinov’s analysis of the rela-
tionship of the class struggle to language, we will see how this analysis
might be appropriated for feminist use. ‘Class’, Vološinov writes,

does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with the community,
which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological
 marginality and subversion 157
communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the
same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in
every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of the class struggle.
(23)

This point is crucial to a non-essentialist feminist analysis of language.

It posits that we all use the same language but that we have different
interests – and interests must here be taken to mean political and power-
related interests which intersect in the sign. The meaning of the sign is
thrown open – the sign becomes ‘polysemic’ rather than ‘univocal’ –
and though it is true to say that the dominant power group at any given
time will dominate the intertextual production of meaning, this is not
to suggest that the opposition has been reduced to total silence. The
power struggle intersects in the sign.
Kristeva’s view of the productivity of the sign accounts for feminist
discourse itself, which on a strict reading of Dale Spender’s model
would be an impossibility. If language is productive (as opposed to a
mere reflection of social relations), then this explains how it is that we
can get more out of it than we put in. In more practical terms this
means that one can wholeheartedly accept all the empirical studies
that show how sexism dominates the English language (and prob-
ably all other languages as well). It is just that this fact does not
necessarily have to do with the inherent structure of the language,
let alone with any conscious plot. It is an effect of the dominant
power relationship between the sexes. The fact that feminists have
managed to fight back, have already made many people feel
uncomfortable in using the generic ‘he’ or ‘man’, have questioned
the use of words like ‘chairman’ and ‘spokesman’ and vindicated
‘witch’ and ‘shrew’ as positive terms surely proves the point: there
is no inherent sexist essence in the English language, since it shows
itself appropriable, through struggle, for feminist purposes. If we
won the struggle against patriarchy and sexism the sign would still
be an arena of this and other struggles, but this time the power
balance would have shifted and the context of our utterances would
therefore be dramatically different. What the studies of sexism in
language reveal is the past and present social-power balance between
the sexes.
158 french feminist theory
One specific argument within the study of sexism in language is the
question of naming. Feminists have consistently argued that ‘those who
have the power to name the world are in a position to influence reality’
(Kramarae, 165). It is argued that women lack this power and that, as a
consequence, many female experiences lack a name. Cheris Kramarae
discusses one such case in detail:

The women attending discussed shared experiences for which there

are no labels, and lists were drawn up of the things, relationships, and
experiences for which there are no labels. For example, one woman
talked about a common occurrence in her life which needed a label.
She and her husband, both working full-time outside the home, usu-
ally arrive home at about the same time. She would like him to share
the dinner-making responsibilities but the job always falls upon her.
Occasionally he says, ‘I would be glad to make dinner. But you do it so
much better than I.’ She was pleased to receive this compliment but
as she found herself in the kitchen each time she realized that he was
using a verbal strategy for which she had no word and thus had more
difficulty identifying and bringing to his awareness. She told people at
the seminar, ‘I had to tell you the whole story to explain to you how he
was using flattery to keep me in my female place’. She said she needed
a word to define the strategy, or a word to define the person who uses
the strategy, a word which would be commonly understood by both
women and men. Then, when he tried that strategy, she could explain
her feelings by turning to him and saying, ‘You are . . .’, or ‘What you
are doing is called . . .’. (7–8)

It seems to me that this woman managed perfectly well to convey

what was going on in her marriage even without a ‘label’, and that her
desire for a ‘label’ was based on a wish to fix meaning and use that
closure as a means of aggression: as an authoritative statement to which
there could be no reply. There is obviously everything right and noth-
ing wrong in hitting back at the oppressor, though one might question
how far one should use his own weapons. Definitions can certainly be
constructive. But – and this is the point overlooked by such arguments –
they can also be constraining. As we have seen, many French feminists
reject labels and names, and ‘isms’ in particular – even ‘feminism’ and
 marginality and subversion 159
‘sexism’ – because they see such labelling activity as betraying a phallo-
gocentric drive to stabilize, organize and rationalize our conceptual
universe. They argue that it is masculine rationality that has always
privileged reason, order, unity and lucidity, and that it has done so by
silencing and excluding the irrationality, chaos and fragmentation that
has come to represent femininity. My own view is that such conceptual
terms are at once politically crucial and ultimately metaphysical; it is
necessary at once to deconstruct the opposition between traditionally
‘masculine’ and traditionally ‘feminine’ values and to confront the full
political force and reality of such categories. We must aim for a society
in which we have ceased to categorize logic, conceptualization and
rationality as ‘masculine’, not for one from which these virtues have
been expelled altogether as ‘unfeminine’.
To impose names is, then, not only an act of power, an enactment of
Nietzsche’s ‘will-to-knowledge’; it also reveals a desire to regulate and
organize reality according to well-defined categories. If this is some-
times a valuable counter-strategy for feminists, we must nevertheless
be wary of an obsession with nouns. Contrary to what St Augustine
believed, language is not primarily constructed as a series of names or
nouns, and we do not actually learn to speak in the way he suggested:
‘When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved
towards something, I saw this and grasped that the thing was called by
the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out’.10 As Wittgen-
stein ripostes: ‘An ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in
every case’ (§28). The attempt to fix meaning is always in part doomed
to failure, for it is of the nature of meaning to be always already else-
where. As Bertolt Brecht puts it in Mann ist Mann: ‘When you name
yourself, you always name another’. This is not to say that we could or
should avoid naming – simply that it is a more slippery business than it
seems, and we should be alive to the dangers of fetishization. Even the
much-praised term ‘sexism’ is showing signs of being shaken by the
power struggle between the sexes, as Vološinov well might have pre-
dicted: some men now nod benignly at the word and agree that we all
hate and despise sexism, only to say later ‘I’m not being sexist, I’m just
being rational’. Sexism has become something that other, less-
enlightened, men do. Labels, in other words, are no safe haven for
anxious feminists; as Gayatri Spivak has enquired, how are we to
160 french feminist theory
choose between the average macho guerilla fighter in the jungle of El
Salvador, and the Vice-President of Standard Oil who has learnt to say
‘he or she’?

LANGUAGE, FEMININITY, REVOLUTION

The acquisition of language

We have seen how Kristevan semiotics emphasizes the marginal and the
heterogeneous as that which can subvert the central structures of trad-
itional linguistics. In order to show how Kristeva can posit language as
being at once structured and heterogeneous, and why this view pre-
supposes an emphasis on language as discourse uttered by a speaking
subject, it is necessary to study her theory of the acquisition of lan-
guage as it appears in her monumental doctoral thesis La Révolution du
langage poétique, published in Paris in 1974. Philip E. Lewis has pointed
out that all of Kristeva’s work up to 1974 constitutes an extensive
attempt to define or apprehend what she calls the procès de signifiance or
the ‘signifying process’ (Lewis, 30). In order to approach this problem,
she displaces Lacan’s distinction between the Imaginary and the Sym-
bolic Order into a distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic.11 The
interaction between these two terms then constitutes the signifying
process.
The semiotic is linked to the pre-Oedipal primary processes, the
basic pulsions of which Kristeva sees as predominantly anal and oral;
and as simultaneously dichotomous (life v. death, expulsion v. introjec-
tion) and heterogeneous. The endless flow of pulsions is gathered up in
the chora (from the Greek word for enclosed space, womb), which Plato
in the Timaeus defines as ‘an invisible and formless being which receives
all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and
is most incomprehensible’ (Roudiez, 6). Kristeva appropriates and
redefines Plato’s concept and concludes that the chora is neither a sign
nor a position, but ‘a wholly provisional articulation that is essentially
mobile and constituted of movements and their ephemeral stases. . . .
Neither model nor copy, it is anterior to and underlies figuration and
therefore also specularization, and only admits analogy with vocal or
kinetic rhythm’ (Révolution, 24).12
 marginality and subversion 161
For Kristeva, signifiance is a question of positioning. The semiotic con-
tinuum must be split if signification is to be produced. This splitting
(coupure) of the semiotic chora is the thetic phase (from thesis) and it
enables the subject to attribute differences and thus signification to
what was the ceaseless heterogeneity of the chora. Kristeva follows Lacan
in positing the mirror phase as the first step that ‘opens the way for the
constitution of all objects which from now on will be detached from
the semiotic chora’ (Révolution, 44), and the Oedipal phase with its threat
of castration as the moment in which the process of separation or
splitting is fully achieved. Once the subject has entered into the Sym-
bolic Order, the chora will be more or less successfully repressed and can
be perceived only as pulsional pressure on symbolic language: as contra-
dictions, meaninglessness, disruption, silences and absences in the
symbolic language. The chora is a rhythmic pulsion rather than a new
language. It constitutes, in other words, the heterogeneous, disruptive
dimension of language, that which can never be caught up in the
closure of traditional linguistic theory.
Kristeva is acutely aware of the contradictions involved in trying to
theorize the untheorizable chora, a contradiction located at the centre of
the semiotic enterprise. She writes:

Being, because of its explanatory metalinguistic force, an agent of

social cohesion, semiotics contributes to the formation of that
reassuring image which every society offers itself when it understands
everything, down to and including the practices which voluntarily
expend it.
(‘System’, 53)

If Kristeva nevertheless argues that semiotics should replace linguistics,

it is in the belief that although this new science is always already caught
up in the multiple networks of conflicting ideologies, it can still unsettle
these frameworks:

Semanalysis carries on the semiotic discovery . . . it places itself at the

service of the social law which requires systematization, communica-
tion, exchange. But if it is to do this, it must inevitably respect a
further, more recent requirement – and one which neutralizes the
162 french feminist theory
phantom of ‘pure science’: the subject of the semiotic metalanguage
must, however briefly, call himself in question, must emerge from the
protective shell of a transcendental ego within a logical system, and so
restore his condition with that negativity – drive-governed, but also
social, political and historical – which rends and renews the social
code.
(‘System’, 54–5)

It is already possible to distinguish here the theme of revolution within

Kristeva’s linguistic theory. Before we approach this question, however,
we must take a closer look at her views of the relationship between
language and femininity.

Femininity as marginality
Kristeva flatly refuses to define ‘woman’: ‘To believe that one “is a
woman” is almost as absurd and obscurantist as to believe that one “is a
man” ’, she states in an interview with women from the ‘psychanalyse
et politique’ group published in 1974 (‘La femme’, 20). Though politi-
cal reality (the fact that patriarchy defines women and oppresses them
accordingly) still makes it necessary to campaign in the name of
women, it is important to recognize that in this struggle a woman
cannot be: she can only exist negatively, as it were, through her refusal
of that which is given: ‘I therefore understand by “woman” ’, she
continues, ‘that which cannot be represented, that which is not spoken,
that which remains outside naming and ideologies’ (‘La femme’, 21).
Though this is reminiscent of Irigaray’s image of woman, Kristeva,
unlike Irigaray, sees her proposed ‘definition’ as entirely relational and
strategic. It is an attempt to locate the negativity and refusal pertaining
to the marginal in ‘woman’, in order to undermine the phallocentric
order that defines woman as marginal in the first place. Thus the ethics
of subversion that dominate Kristeva’s linguistic theory here feed into
her feminism as well. Her deep suspicion of identity (‘What can “iden-
tity”, even “sexual identity”, mean in a new theoretical and scientific
space where the very notion of identity is challenged?’ [Woman’s time,
34])13 leads her to reject any idea of an écriture féminine or a parler femme
that would be inherently feminine or female: ‘Nothing in women’s
 marginality and subversion 163
past or present publications seems to allow us to affirm that there is a
feminine writing (écriture féminine)’, she claims in an interview pub-
lished in 1977 (‘A partir de’, 496). It is possible, Kristeva admits, to
distinguish various recurrent stylistic and thematic peculiarities in
writing by women; but it is not possible to say whether these charac-
teristics should be ascribed to a ‘truly feminine specificity, socio-
cultural marginality or more simply to a certain structure (for instance
hysteric) which the present market favours and selects among the
totality of feminine potentiality’ (‘A partir de’, 496).
In a sense, then, Kristeva does not have a theory of ‘femininity’, and
even less of ‘femaleness’. What she does have is a theory of marginality,
subversion and dissidence.14 In so far as women are defined as marginal
by patriarchy, their struggle can be theorized in the same way as any
other struggle against a centralized power structure. Thus Kristeva uses
exactly the same terms to describe dissident intellectuals, certain
avant-garde writers and the working class;

As long as it has not analysed their relation to the instances of power,

and has not given up the belief in its own identity, any libertarian
movement (including feminism) can be recuperated by that power
and by a spirituality that may be laicized or openly religious. The solu-
tion? . . . Who knows? It will in any case pass through that which is
repressed in discourse and in the relations of production. Call it
‘woman’ or ‘oppressed classes of society’, it is the same struggle, and
never the one without the other.
(‘La femme’, 24)

The strength of this approach is its uncompromising anti-essentialism;

its principal weakness the somewhat glib homologization of quite dis-
tinct and specific struggles, a problem that will be further discussed in
the last section of this chapter.
The anti-essentialist approach is carried over into her theorization of
sexual difference. So far, we have seen that her theory of the constitu-
tion of the subject and the signifying process is mostly concerned with
developments in the pre-Oedipal phase where sexual difference does
not exist (the chora is a pre-Oedipal phenomenon). The question of
difference only becomes relevant at the point of entry into the
164 french feminist theory
symbolic order, and Kristeva discusses the situation for little girls at this
point in her book Des Chinoises (translated as About Chinese Women), pub-
lished in France in the same year as La Révolution du langage poétique. She
points out that since the semiotic chora is pre-Oedipal, it is linked to the
mother, whereas the symbolic, as we know, is dominated by the Law of
the Father. Faced with this situation, the little girl has to make a choice:
‘either she identifies with her mother, or she raises herself to the sym-
bolic stature of her father. In the first case, the pre-Oedipal phases (oral
and anal eroticism) are intensified’ (Chinese, 28). If on the other hand
the little girl identifies with her father, ‘the access she gains to the
symbolic dominance [will] censor the pre-Oedipal phase and wipe out
the last traces of dependence on the body of the mother’ (29).
Kristeva thus delineates two different options for women: mother-
identification, which will intensify the pre-Oedipal components of the
woman’s psyche and render her marginal to the symbolic order, or
father-identification, which will create a woman who will derive her
identity from the same symbolic order. It should be clear from these
passages that Kristeva does not define femininity as a pre-Oedipal and
revolutionary essence. Far from it, femininity for Kristeva comes about
as the result of a series of options that are also presented to the little
boy. This is surely why at the beginning of About Chinese Women she
repeats her contention that ‘woman as such does not exist’ (16).
The claim advanced by the Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective
(30) and by Beverly Brown and Parveen Adams that Kristeva associates
the semiotic with the feminine is thus based on a misreading. The fluid
motility of the semiotic is indeed associated with the pre-Oedipal
phase, and therefore with the pre-Oedipal mother, but Kristeva makes
it quite clear that like Freud and Klein she sees the pre-Oedipal mother
as a figure that encompasses both masculinity and femininity. This
fantasmatic figure, which looms as large for baby boys as for baby girls,
cannot, as Brown and Adams are well aware (40), be reduced to an
example of ‘femininity’, for the simple reason that the opposition
between feminine and masculine does not exist in pre-Oedipality. And
Kristeva knows this as well as anybody. Any strengthening of the semi-
otic, which knows no sexual difference, must therefore lead to a weak-
ening of traditional gender divisions, and not at all to a reinforcement
of traditional notions of ‘femininity’. This is why Kristeva insists so
 marginality and subversion 165
strongly on the necessary refusal of any theory or politics based on the
belief in any absolute form of identity. Femininity and the semiotic do,
however, have one thing in common: their marginality. As the femi-
nine is defined as marginal under patriarchy, so the semiotic is mar-
ginal to language. This is why the two categories, along with other
forms of ‘dissidence’, can be theorized in roughly the same way in
Kristeva’s work.
It is difficult, then, to maintain that Kristeva holds an essentialist or
even biologistic notion of femininity.15 It is certainly true that she
believes with Freud that the body forms the material basis for the
constitution of the subject. But this in no way entails a simplistic equa-
tion of desire with physical needs, as Jean Laplanche has shown. For
Laplanche ‘oral’ and ‘anal’ drives are ‘oral’ and ‘anal’ because they are
first produced as a spin-off to (as ‘anaclitic’ to) the satisfaction of the
purely physical needs linked to the mouth and anus, although they in
no way are reducible to or identical with those needs.
If ‘femininity’ has a definition at all in Kristevan terms, it is simply,
as we have seen, as ‘that which is marginalized by the patriarchal
symbolic order’. This relational ‘definition’ is as shifting as the various
forms of patriarchy itself, and allows her to argue that men can also be
constructed as marginal by the symbolic order, as her analyses of male
avant-garde artists (Joyce, Céline, Artaud, Mallarmé, Lautréamont) have
shown. In La Révolution du langage poétique, for instance, she claims that
Artaud, among others, strongly stresses the fluidity of sexual identifica-
tion for the artist when he states that ‘the “author” becomes at once his
“father”, “mother” and “himself ” ’ (606).
Kristeva’s emphasis on femininity as a patriarchal construct enables
feminists to counter all forms of biologistic attacks from the defenders
of phallocentrism. To posit all women as necessarily feminine and all
men as necessarily masculine is precisely the move that enables the
patriarchal powers to define, not femininity, but all women as marginal
to the symbolic order and to society. If, as Cixous and Irigaray have
shown, femininity is defined as lack, negativity, absence of meaning,
irrationality, chaos, darkness – in short, as non-Being – Kristeva’s
emphasis on marginality allows us to view this repression of the femi-
nine in terms of positionality rather than of essences. What is perceived as
marginal at any given time depends on the position one occupies. A
166 french feminist theory
brief example will illustrate this shift from essence to position: if patri-
archy sees women as occupying a marginal position within the sym-
bolic order, then it can construe them as the limit or borderline of that
order. From a phallocentric point of view, women will then come to
represent the necessary frontier between man and chaos; but because
of their very marginality they will also always seem to recede into and
merge with the chaos of the outside. Women seen as the limit of the
symbolic order will in other words share in the disconcerting proper-
ties of all frontiers: they will be neither inside nor outside, neither
known nor unknown. It is this position that has enabled male culture
sometimes to vilify women as representing darkness and chaos, to view
them as Lilith or the Whore of Babylon, and sometimes to elevate them
as the representatives of a higher and purer nature, to venerate them as
Virgins and Mothers of God. In the first instance the borderline is seen
as part of the chaotic wilderness outside, and in the second it is seen as
an inherent part of the inside: the part that protects and shields the
symbolic order from the imaginary chaos. Needless to say, neither
position corresponds to any essential truth of woman, much as the
patriarchal powers would like us to believe that they did.

Feminism, Marxism, anarchism

Kristeva’s work can in no way be characterized as primarily feminist: it is
not even consistently political in its approach. Having started out as a
linguist in the late 1960s, she first wrote about topics related to women
and feminism in 1974, roughly at the time she was beginning her train-
ing as a psychoanalyst. From the late 1970s onwards her work has been
marked by an increasing interest in psychoanalytic issues, often focusing
on problems of sexuality, femininity and love. Feminists will find much
of value in, for example, her approach to the question of motherhood.
Already in La Révolution du langage poétique she has claimed that it is not woman
as such who is repressed in patriarchal society, but motherhood (453). The
problem is not women’s jouissance alone, as Lacan has it in Encore, but the
necessary relationship between reproduction and jouissance:

If the position of women in the social code is a problem today, it does

not at all rest in a mysterious question of feminine jouissance . . . but
 marginality and subversion 167
deeply, socially and symbolically in the question of reproduction and
the jouissance that is articulated therein.
(Révolution, 462)

This perspective opens an interesting field of investigation for

feminists, and Kristeva has herself contributed several intriguing
analyses of the representation of motherhood in Western culture,
particularly as embodied in the figure of the Madonna (‘Héréthique
de l’amour’) and in Western pictorial art (‘Motherhood according to
Giovanni Bellini’). Her preoccupation with the figure of the
Madonna constitutes a significant development of her work in La
Révolution du langage poétique in that it questions the role of women in
the symbolic order through an ideological and psychoanalytical
analysis of what is also the material basis for women’s oppression:
motherhood. Similarly, much of her more recent work, like Pouvoirs
de l’horreur (1980, translated as Powers of Horror, 1982) and particularly
Histoires d’amour (‘Love stories’, 1983), could be valuably appropriated
for feminism.
It is no secret that Kristeva’s early commitment to Marxism, mixed
with various Maoist and anarchist influences, has given way to a new
scepticism towards political engagement. Rejecting in the late 1970s
her early idealization of Mao’s China, she suddenly revealed an alarm-
ing fascination with the libertarian possibilities of American-style late
capitalism.16 Her cavalier disregard for the unpalatable side of Ameri-
can capitalism rightly disconcerted the great majority of her readers on
the political Left. Their dismay was compounded by her wholesale
dismissal of politics as a new orthodoxy that it is time to outflank: ‘I am
not interested in groups. I am interested in individuals’, she declared in
a recent debate in London. Faithful to her own theory, she explains this
development away from politics in terms of her own specific circum-
stances: ‘It’s a point of personal history. I suppose from different
people here in this room, having different histories, the appreciation of
political actuality would be different’ (ICA, 24–5). This development
away from Marxism and feminism is not as surprising as it may seem at
first glance. Kristeva’s early Marxist or feminist work, with its emphasis
on the marginal, already reveals strong anarchist tendencies, and the
gap between libertarianism and straightforward liberal individualism
168 french feminist theory
has never been difficult to bridge. In the following brief examination of
her positions I will try to show how many of Kristeva’s most valuable
insights draw at times on highly contentious forms of subjectivist
politics.

Even in her early, more feminist work, Kristeva does not try to speak
from or for the ‘feminine’. For her, to ‘speak as a woman’ would in any
case be meaningless, since, as we know, she argues that ‘woman as such
does not exist’. Instead of an exclusive emphasis on the gender of the
speaker, she recommends an analysis of the many discourses (including
sexuality and gender) that together construct the individual:

It is there, in the analysis of her difficult relation to her mother and to her
own difference from everybody else, men and women, that a woman
encounters the enigma of the ‘feminine’. I favour an understanding of
femininity that would have as many ‘feminines’ as there are women.
(‘A partir de’, 499)

Thus the specificity of the individual subject is foregrounded at the

expense of a general theory of femininity and even of political
engagement tout court. Her later individualism (the rejection of
‘groups’) is clearly implicit in such statements.
Many women have objected to Kristeva’s highly intellectual style of
discourse on the grounds that as a woman and a feminist committed to
the critique of all systems of power, she ought not to present herself as
yet another ‘master thinker’.17 From one viewpoint, this accusation
would seem to be somewhat unfair: what seems marginal from one
perspective may seem depressingly central from another (absolute mar-
ginality cannot be had), and one cannot logically set out to subvert
dominant intellectual discourses (as Kristeva does) without simul-
taneously laying oneself open to the accusation of being intellectualist.
However, from another perspective, Kristeva, with her university chair
in linguistics and her psychoanalytic practice, would certainly seem to
have positioned herself at the very centre of the traditional intellectual
power structures of the Left Bank.

If the Kristevan subject is always already inserted in the symbolic order,

 marginality and subversion 169
how can such an implacably authoritarian, phallocentric structure be
broken up? It obviously cannot happen through a straightforward rejec-
tion of the symbolic order, since such a total failure to enter into human
relations would, in Lacanian terms, make us psychotic. We have to
accept our position as already inserted into an order that precedes us
and from which there is no escape. There is no other space from which
we can speak: if we are able to speak at all, it will have to be within the
framework of symbolic language.
The revolutionary subject, whether masculine or feminine, is a sub-
ject that is able to allow the jouissance of semiotic motility to disrupt the
strict symbolic order. The example par excellence of this kind of ‘revo-
lutionary’ activity is to be found in the writings of late-nineteenth
century avant-garde poets like Lautréamont and Mallarmé or modernist
writers such as Joyce. Since the semiotic can never take over the sym-
bolic, one may ask how it can make itself felt at all. Kristeva’s answer to
this point is that the only possible way of releasing some of the semi-
otic pulsions into the symbolic is through the predominantly anal (but
also oral) activity of expulsion or rejection. In textual terms this translates
itself as a negativity masking the death-drive, which Kristeva sees as
perhaps the most fundamental semiotic pulsion. The poet’s negativity
is then analysable as a series of ruptures, absences and breaks in the
symbolic language, but it can also be traced in his or her thematic
preoccupations. One of the problems with this account of the ‘revo-
lutionary’ subject is that it slides over the question of revolutionary
agency. Who or what is acting in Kristeva’s subversive schemes? In a
political context her emphasis on the semiotic as an unconscious force
precludes any analysis of the conscious decision-making processes that
must be part of any collective revolutionary project. The stress on negativ-
ity and disruption, rather than on questions of organization and soli-
darity, leads Kristeva in effect to an anarchist and subjectivist political
position. And on this point I would agree with the Marxist-Feminist
Literature Collective who arraign her poetics as ‘politically unsatisfac-
tory’ (30). Allon White also accuses Kristeva of political ineffective-
ness, claiming that her politics ‘remain purified anarchism in a
perpetual state of self-dispersal’ (16–17).
In the end, Kristeva is unable to account for the relations between
the subject and society. Though she discusses in exemplary fashion the
170 french feminist theory
social and political context of the poets she studies in La Révolution du
langage poétique, it is still not clear why it is so important to show that
certain literary practices break up the structures of language when they
seem to break up little else. She seems essentially to argue that the
disruption of the subject, the sujet en procès displayed in these texts,
prefigures or parallels revolutionary disruptions of society. But her
only argument in support of this contention is the rather lame one of
comparison or homology. Nowhere are we given a specific analysis
of the actual social or political structures that would produce such a
homologous relationship between the subjective and the social.

Equally noticeable is the lack of materialist analysis of social relations in

Kristeva’s concept of ‘marginality’, which lumps together all kinds of
marginal and oppositional groups as potentially subversive of the social
order. When in her article ‘Un nouveau type d’intellectuel: le dissident’
(‘A new kind of intellectual: the dissident’, 1977) she paraphrases
Marx and exclaims that ‘A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of the
dissidents’ (4), she conveniently chooses to overlook the differences
between the ‘dissident’ groups she enumerates: the rebel (who attacks
political power), the psychoanalyst, the avant-garde writer and women.
Elsewhere, as we have seen, she equates the struggle of women with
that of the working class. But in Marxist terms these groups are funda-
mentally disparate because of their different location in relation to the
mode of production. The working class is potentially revolutionary
because it is indispensable to the capitalist economy, not because it is
marginal to it. In the same way women are central – not marginal – to
the process of reproduction. It is precisely because the ruling order
cannot maintain the status quo without the continued exploitation and
oppression of these groups that it seeks to mask their central economic
role by marginalizing them on the cultural, ideological and political
levels. The paradox of the position of women and the working class is
that they are at one and the same time central and marginal(ized). In
the case of the intelligentsia, whether avant-garde artists or psycho-
analysts, it may well be the case that their role under late capitalism is
truly peripheral in the sense that they have no crucial function in the
economic order, much like the Lumpenproletariat Brecht idealized in his
Threepenny Opera. Thus Kristeva’s grossly exaggerated confidence in the
 marginality and subversion 171
political importance of the avant-garde is based precisely on her misrec-
ognition of the differences between its political and economic position
and that of women or the working class. Like the early Brecht,
Kristeva’s romanticizing of the marginal is an anti-bourgeois, but not
necessarily anti-capitalist, form of libertarianism.

The criticisms levelled here against Kristeva’s politics should not be

allowed to overshadow the positive aspects of her work. Her commit-
ment to thorough theoretical investigation of the problems of margin-
ality and subversion, her radical deconstruction of the identity of the
subject, her often extensive consideration of the material and historical
contexts of the works of art she studies, have opened up new perspec-
tives for further feminist enquiry. Her theory of language and its dis-
rupted subject (sujet en procès) allows us to examine both women’s and
men’s writing from an anti-humanist, anti-essentialist perspective.
Kristeva’s vision is not exclusively or essentially feminist, but it is one
in which the hierarchical closure imposed on meaning and language
has been opened up to the free play of the signifier. Applied to the field
of sexual identity and difference, this becomes a feminist vision of a
society in which the sexual signifier would be free to move; where the
fact of being born male or female no longer would determine the
subject’s position in relation to power, and where, therefore, the very
nature of power itself would be transformed.
Jacques Derrida once put the question: ‘What if we were to
approach . . . the area of a relationship to the other where the code of
sexual marks would no longer be discriminating?’ (‘Choreographies’,
76). I would like to end with his response, which, like many utopian
utterances, is at once sibylline and suggestive:

The relationship [to the other] would not be a-sexual, far from it, but
would be sexual otherwise: beyond the binary difference that governs
the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine,
beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality which come to the same
thing. As I dream of saving the chance that this question offers, I
would like to believe in the multiplicity of sexually marked voices.
I would like to believe in the masses, this indeterminable number of
blended voices, this mobile of non-identified sexual marks whose
172 french feminist theory
choreography can carry, divide, multiply the body of each ‘individual’,
whether he be classified as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ according to the criteria
of usage.
(76)
 AFTERWORD

Politics and theory, then and now

FROM ‘LITERARY THEORY’ to ‘THEORY’

Sexual/Textual Politics was written from 1982 to 1984 and published in
September 1985. The text is reprinted here without changes. In my
view, there is no way to update Sexual/Textual Politics. It is firmly a book of
its time and its moment, the moment of the ‘theory revolution’ of the
early 1980s, such as it was experienced in Britain. In the late 1990s, I
found that I had to write a very different kind of book about feminist
theory, namely What Is a Woman? (1999).1
Yet readers continue to find Sexual/Textual Politics useful. I suppose
this means that it raises questions that have remained relevant to
feminist theory, either because they still preoccupy us, or because
they are now considered necessary starting points for understanding
later developments in feminist theory. As long as this continues to be
the case, the book serves a useful purpose. Yet that purpose has
changed. In the early 1980s feminist theory was still a marginal and
somewhat suspect intellectual activity in the eyes of many academics
in Britain and Norway, where I was living then. Today feminist theory
174 afterword
is an established part of academia, not least in the United States
where I am living now. The change in cultural context has changed
the nature of Sexual/Textual Politics: in 1985 it was a controversial,
cutting-edge intervention in a subversive field; in 2002 it has become a
textbook.
I wrote Sexual/Textual Politics with two objectives in mind: first of all I
wanted to produce a serious and lucid analysis of what I took to be the
key issues in contemporary feminist theory. I was, essentially, trying to
write the book for which I had been searching in vain when I was
struggling to write a feminist PhD thesis in the late 1970s. But I also
wanted to intervene in the feminist debates that surrounded me as an
unemployed PhD living in Oxford. Intellectually, the anti-essentialist
argument that runs through the book owes everything to Simone de
Beauvoir’s ‘One is not born but rather becomes a woman.’ Politically,
however, it was a response to the discussions raging around me at the
time. Two events were particularly important: the Falklands War and
the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common.
On April 2, 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Mrs.
Thatcher immediately sent a Royal Navy task force to the South Atlantic.
British nationalism and militarism erupted with a vengeance. Thus the
sinking of the Belgrano with the loss of hundreds of lives provoked the
infamous headline ‘Gotcha!’ in the then rabidly pro-Thatcher tabloid
paper The Sun.2 By mid-July 1982 the war was over, leaving 255 British
and 652 Argentines dead. Mrs. Thatcher’s popularity reached an all-
time high. As early as the end of August 1981, the first women had
pitched their tents outside Greenham Common, an air force base near
Newbury, less than two hours’ drive from Oxford. They were protesting
against a NATO decision to deploy Cruise missiles in Britain. The protest
provoked intense debate about women’s nature, their relationship to
war and peace, and about men’s relationship to feminism. (In 1982,
after much controversy, the camp became women-only.) On December
12, 1982 more than 20,000, perhaps as many as 30,000, women came
to Greenham Common and joined hands to ‘embrace the base.’3
Greenham Common proved that women were more peace-loving
than men, some feminists claimed. But what about Mrs. Thatcher’s
evident pleasure in the Falklands War? Surely that undermined any easy
claims about women and peace? No, I was told, Mrs. Thatcher didn’t
 afterword 175
count because she wasn’t a ‘real woman,’ she was ‘male-identified,’
an ‘honorary man.’ I felt then, and still feel, that any feminist theory
that tries to define some women as ‘real women’ and others as
‘deviant,’ or ‘unfeminine’ or ‘masculine’ is doomed to failure.4
Feminism needs to acknowledge women’s obvious and striking differ-
ences. These differences comprise but are not reducible to differences
of race and sexual orientation. Sexual/Textual Politics is based on the idea
that any theory that sets out to define women’s essence or women’s
nature is detrimental to the goal of feminism: to obtain freedom and
equality for women.
In the aftermath of Greenham Common, many feminists in Oxford
felt that compared to feminist activism intellectual feminism was point-
less. Sexual/Textual Politics is a passionate attempt to convince such femin-
ists that even fairly abstract kinds of theory may have a political point.
Thus the introductory chapter (‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’)
sets out to make the case for theory by showing that feminists who
think they’re not being theoretical are mistaken. They are not without a
theory, I claim, they are in the grip of a theory they have failed to
recognize as such. If we (feminists) could become more theoretically
sophisticated, we would also become more politically astute, more
aware of the implications of our own positions. There is a psycho-
analytic undertone to this project: I assume that unacknowledged
theoretical allegiances are far more difficult to change than those we
are able to name and think about.
Sexual/Textual Politics, then, was not conceived as a survey of femi-
nist theory and criticism, but as a sustained argument in favor of
theory. Yet the book uses the word theory in two quite different
ways. (This was far from evident to me at the time.) Sometimes
‘theory’ means ‘literary theory’; sometimes it means ‘feminist,
poststructuralist and Marxist theory.’ At the time, I took the first
meaning to be quite self-evident. At the University of Bergen I had
received solid training in traditional literary theory. I had taken semi-
nars on narratology, new criticism, Russian and Czech formalism,
structuralism according to Greimas and Genette, and hermeneutics
according to Schleiermacher and Gadamer. In the late 1970s in
Bergen, to study psychoanalytic literary theory meant worrying about
psychoanalytic interpretations of texts, not about the general
176 afterword
development of subjectivity. In the same way, our seminars on Marxist
literary theory discussed realism and literary form, not ideology and
modes of production. In 1980, then, literary theory to me still meant
theories about the relations between text and reader, text and author,
text and society.
Together with all the other books on ‘theory’ published in the
1980s, Sexual/Textual Politics helped to change the meaning of the word.
As a result, Sexual/Textual Politics itself is somewhat torn between the old
and the new conception of theory. It starts with ‘literary theory,’ and
ends with a concept of ‘theory’ that is starting to mean what it means
today, namely something like Marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial,
psychoanalytical, queer, feminist or variously postmodern thoughts
about subjectivity, meaning, ideology and culture in their widest gen-
erality. ‘Literary theory’ in the traditional sense is the focal point of
the first part of the book. The title of that part, ‘Anglo-American Femi-
nist Criticism,’ was meant to indicate how much leading American
feminist critics owed to the critical tradition commonly referred to as
‘Anglo-American New Criticism.’ That allusion, I suspect, is lost
today. The only poststructuralist theory I use in the first part of the book
is poststructuralist textual theory, as when I draw on Roland Barthes’s
famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ to argue against the idea
that the author’s intention should be the sole determinant of literary
meaning (see p. 63).
‘Literary theory’ in the traditional sense had usually not been con-
sidered political. I wanted to show that such theory did have political
implications. My main point is that it is contradictory for anti-
authoritarian feminists to go in for theories that set up the (woman)
writer as a God-like authority. Feminists have to be free to question all
authority, including that of women. Sexual/Textual Politics consistently
favors the freedom of readers over the power of writers. The project of
the first half of the book, then, was to trace the relationship between
traditional literary theory (aesthetics) and feminist politics.
The second half of the book is entitled ‘French feminist theory.’ In
this half the meaning of ‘theory’ starts to shift. In the early 1980s the
shift from ‘literary theory’ to ‘theory’ was by no means easy to pin
down and define. For Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray could all be con-
sidered literary theorists in the traditional sense – they did, after all,
 afterword 177
write about female creativity, about writing, texts and language. Yet,
crucially, the works that seemed most exciting and significant for
feminists were not, or not exactly, works of literary criticism. Although
Cixous was clearly a very ‘literary’ thinker, and although Kristeva was,
among other things, a theorist of the novel, and a linguist, their appeal
to feminists lay in their explorations of femininity, subjectivity and
meaning in culture. Shifting from part I to part II, from Showalter and
Gilbert and Gubar to Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, the book shifts from
literary to philosophical and psychoanalytical questions. Although
theories of texts and meaning remain a focus of interest throughout
the book, by the end, the transition from ‘literary theory’ to ‘theory’
is pretty much complete.

A LOSS OF VOICE? WOMEN, SUBJECTIVITY

AND PERFORMATIVITY
Sexual/Textual Politics is highly critical of homogenous, non-
contradictory, non-conflictual models of subjectivity. Against Roman-
tic theories of intentionality, the book proposes a psychoanalytic
understanding of the subject. The Kristevan concept of the embodied
‘speaking subject’ is fundamental to the book. In my view (now as
then), there is always someone who speaks, acts, thinks, writes.5 That
someone does not have to be pictured as a wholly present, non-
contradictory intentionality. In Sexual/Textual Politics the subject is split,
decentred, fragile, always threatened by disintegration. At the same
time, this split and decentred subject has the capacity to act and make
choices. Such choices and acts, however, are always overdetermined,
that is to say deeply influenced by unconscious ideological allegiances
and unconscious emotional investments and fantasies as well as by
conscious motivations.
When I wrote Sexual/Textual Politics, then, it never occurred to me to
doubt that there are women in the world, that women have agency and
that they are responsible for their actions. To me, there was no contra-
diction between writing Sexual/Textual Politics and moving on to my next
book project, a study of Simone de Beauvoir as an intellectual woman.6
I did not (and still don’t) take women to be the mere effects of gender
discourses, or the mere victims of sexist circumstances, nor did I feel
178 afterword
any need to cast aspersions on the very word ‘woman’. To me, as to
Simone de Beauvoir and most other people, a woman is a human being
with the usual biological and anatomical sexual characteristics.7 The
point of arguing strongly against essentialism, is to stop sexist general-
izations about this class of people, it is not to deny that such a class of
people exists.
What I didn’t imagine back in 1985 was that a wave of new theorists
ready to criticize the very word ‘woman’ would shortly emerge. Already
in 1989, Diana Fuss claimed that the very word ‘woman,’ whether
used in the singular or the plural, imposed homogeneity and erased
women’s differences (see Essentially Speaking, particularly 3–4). And in
1990 Judith Butler published her immensely influential Gender Trouble,
which provocatively claimed that sex was as constructed as gender, and
that gender was ‘performative.’8 She followed up these claims in Bodies
That Matter (1993), by claiming that matter itself (the matter of which
the body is made) is nothing but the result of a ‘process of materializa-
tion that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity,
and surface we call matter’ (Bodies 9). I discuss these theories at some
length in What Is a Woman (particularly 30–59), and will not repeat that
analysis here. Let me just say that in much poststructuralist gender
theory, and certainly in Butler’s, the word ‘gender’ is substituted for the
word ‘woman’, or rather: the words ‘woman’ and ‘gender’ are taken
to be synonymous. At the same time ‘gender’ is opposed to ‘sex.’ The
result is that women are divorced from their bodies, and that ‘woman’
is turned into a discursive and performative effect. It is difficult to see
what the advantage of such a convoluted view might be.
To avoid essentialism and biological determinism all we need to do
is to deny that biology gives rise to social norms. We don’t have to
claim that there are no women, or that the category ‘woman’ in itself
is ideologically suspect. This is not to deny that sexists try to impose all
kinds of ideologies on the word ‘woman’. It is, however, to deny that
they always succeed. Although economic, social, political and ideo-
logical oppression exists, and although such oppression deprives
women of freedom, there is no reason to draw the conclusion that
women can’t work towards change, that our oppression is so com-
plete, so fully internalized by our female psyche that we can never
struggle free from the sexist blindfold. Nor is there any need to
 afterword 179
presume that our only possible strategy of resistance would be mimicry
or parody.9
The shift away from a psychoanalytic or phenomenological
theory of subjectivity to agentless notions of sex, gender, ‘regulatory
discourses’ and ‘performativity’ arrived as part of a general poststruc-
turalist critique of the subject. This critique was originally directed
against full-blown metaphysical Romantic theories of intentionality.10
But most poststructuralist gender theorists soon came to sound as if
they thought that any reference to agency, subjectivity and responsibil-
ity was proof positive of Romantic metaphysics. Needless to say, this
was an overreaction. The poststructuralist hatred of agency, the wish to
deny that there is a ‘doer behind the deed,’ imagines that speakers and
writers are nothing but cogs in a big discursive machinery. A specific
philosophical picture of what it is to speak and write is at work here: a
picture of a situation in which the speaker or writer feels that her
words are not hers; that someone else is speaking through her; that she
is unable to mean what she says, or to say what she means.11 Her words
are alien to her, and she to them. Such a speaker will feel isolated,
lonely, and misunderstood.
In his magisterial analysis of the various forms of modern skepti-
cism, Stanley Cavell speaks of a ‘fantasy, or fear, either of inexpressive-
ness, one in which I am not merely unknown, but in which I am
powerless to make myself known, or one in which what I express is
beyond my control’ (Claim 351). This fantasy is present in two cultural
locations that I have investigated: in poststructuralist theory and in
nineteenth century melodrama. It is a fantasy well known to feminists:
Madame de Staël’s Corinne suffers from it too.12 Yet the fantasy of not
being able to make oneself understood, of being powerless to show
others who one is, is at once bound to arise, not least in oppressed
women, and deeply unhelpful to feminism. Corinne dies unhappy and
alone, convinced that the world is not worthy of her. Feminist theory
needs to understand why we are all driven to melodrama from time to
time, but it also needs to know how to find its way back to the ordinary
and the everyday, where our political battles are actually fought. The
melodrama of poststructuralist theory is an inescapable part of our
feminist heritage; it should not be our only heritage.
180 afterword

THE ‘POLITICS OF THEORY’: MELODRAMA

AND THE ORDINARY
As we have seen, Sexual/Textual Politics participated in the revolution that
transformed ‘literary theory’ into ‘theory.’ It was written at a time
and in a place when to be doing theory, particularly feminist theory,
was perceived by all parties (theorists and antitheorists) to be sub-
versive of the academic institution. At the time, the phrase the ‘politics
of theory’ appeared to make obvious and automatic sense. Now that
‘theory’ has ensconced itself as the dominant academic doxa these
things no longer go without saying. It is no longer possible to believe
that theory simply is political, or to continue the search for the perfect
theory, the ‘theory that guarantees political radicalism and, ideally,
political effectiveness,’ to quote Jonathan Culler (218). In 2002 it is
time to take a new look at the relationship between politics and theory.
The question about the ‘politics of theory’ has in fact mostly been
raised by poststructuralists, whose theories have to do with language,
discourse and subjectivity. But to speak of the ‘politics of theory’ is to
speak in far too general terms. There are all kinds of theories, used by
all kinds of people in all kinds of contexts. A theory of truth and
discourse does not have the same relationship to politics as a theory of
global capitalism or women’s oppression. In the same way, the word
‘politics’ means different things at different times, in different situations.
In the 1930s a political play was likely to be about class, or fascism.
Now a political play may be about AIDS, or race or gender, or sexuality.
To the question ‘Is theory political?’ all one can reply is ‘It
depends.’13 What we cannot do is to provide a ‘guarantee.’ What pic-
ture of the relationship between politics and theory must one have to
make it look as if a ‘guarantee’ of radical effects (or should this be
radical intentions?) can be had? To me there is something meta-
physical, something melodramatic, about the idea of a guarantee,
something that reminds me of Stanley Cavell’s analysis of skepticism
and its ‘demand for absoluteness’.

We impose a demand for absoluteness [ . . . ] upon a concept, and

then, finding that our ordinary use of this concept does not meet our
demand, we accommodate this discrepancy as nearly as possible.
 afterword 181
Take these familiar patterns: we do not really see material objects, but
only see them indirectly; we cannot be certain of any empirical prop-
osition, but only practically certain; we cannot really know what
another person is feeling, but only infer it.
(‘Aesthetic Problems’ 77)

In short, to ask about the ‘politics of theory’ is to impose a demand for

absoluteness on a human activity that will yield no such thing. To such
a question, any answer we could give would either be metaphysical or
meaningless, or both.
To ask about the ‘politics of theory’ is not the only way to think
about the political value of intellectual work. Nor is the demand for
absoluteness confined to contemporary literary theorists. To show what
I mean, I shall turn to two statements by Sartre and Beauvoir. ‘Faced
with a dying child, Nausea isn’t worth much,’ Sartre said in 1964, the
year in which he published The Words.14 At roughly the same time, in
1963, Simone de Beauvoir wrote: ‘I am an intellectual, I take words
and the truth to be of value’ (Force of Circumstance 378).15 There are two
different attitudes towards politics and words at work in these state-
ments. I now want to show why I think of Sartre’s image as not just
metaphysical but melodramatic, in contrast to what I shall call Beauvoir’s
ordinary view of intellectual commitment. (My choice of words is
meant to indicate my debt to Stanley Cavell, and through him, to
Wittgenstein.16)
At the time, many took Sartre’s statement to mean that he thought
there was no justification for literature in a starving world. It is unclear
whether Sartre himself thought this, or whether he just meant to raise
the question of the political effects of writing by saying something
provocative. I shall ascribe the common, extreme interpretation to
‘Sartre,’ but it may well be that what I am describing is not Sartre, but
those who take his statement in this way, then and now.
In 1964 Sartre was 59, he was slowly going blind, and he suffered
from alarming levels of hypertension. He was also a world famous
intellectual, tirelessly campaigning for radical causes. Given his specific
circumstances, the most politically effective thing he could do, was
to continue to write. This is exactly what he did. Yet the image of
the dying child is immensely more powerful than any practical
182 afterword
considerations. However justified he may have been in his choices, that
image makes Sartre’s intellectual life appear insufficient, even callous.
The image tells us that regardless of what he does as an intellectual,
Sartre is painfully aware that it is not always enough.
The phrase ‘not always enough’ reveals what the problem is. Of
course writing is not always enough. How could it be? What human
activity is ‘always enough’? Enough for what? In the vague, unspecific
and generalized turn of phrase ‘not always enough,’ metaphysics—
Cavell’s ‘demand for absoluteness’—rears its head. For if we are faced
with a dying child, we tend to her. We feed her, care for her, hold her,
provide as much medicine and comfort as we possibly can. In such a
case tending to the child is simply what we do. Only a cold-blooded
murderer would turn her back on the child and return to her desk.
But if this is right, then Sartre’s image actually tells us nothing about
the political and ethical value of intellectual work. We all know that
novels or theory don’t feed the hungry or heal the sick. To whom was
he speaking? Who would feel illuminated by the thought that Nausea
will not save a dying child? The answer is clear: only someone who
once fervently hoped that it would. Sartre’s youthful faith in salvation
through literature, which happens to be a major preoccupation of
The Words, instantly comes to mind. But the same attitude can be found
in those present-day intellectuals who have excessive faith in the power
of theory to put everything politically right, as if every kind of
oppression would vanish if only we could elaborate the right theory of
subjectivity, or discourse, or truth.
In Sartre’s example of the dying child there is an immensely seduc-
tive fantasy of being able to produce writing powerful enough to save a
dying child. There is no middle ground here: either writing does it all,
or it does nothing. I don’t mean to overlook the fact that Sartre’s state-
ment has the form of a negation, that he is saying that Nausea can’t do
much for a dying child. On the contrary, the very form of the statement
carries out psychic work, for its task is to negate the fantasy of the
omnipotence of writing, a fantasy Sartre himself so masterly explored
in The Words. ‘Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is
repressed. [ . . . ] A negative judgment is the intellectual substitute for
repression,’ Freud writes (235–6). By saying that his writing is not
justified, Sartre keeps the dream of justification by literature alive, but
 afterword 183
the affect has shifted, from exuberant jubilation at the omnipotence of
writing to abject disappointment and guilt at the failure of writing.
The very intensity of the image reinforces and expresses the contrast-
ing affects contained in the negated fantasy. Juxtaposing a dying child
and an aging male intellectual, Sartre pits wronged innocence against
guilt and decay. Pressing the question of intellectual responsibility to
the extreme, he trades in the stark absolutes, the all-or-nothing logic of
melodrama.17 In this way he invites us to believe that politics is the only
possible raison d’être of writing, and that if writing doesn’t save a dying
child, it is of no use at all.
Among intellectuals today the tell-tale symptoms of Sartre’s anxiety-
inducing fantasy are excessive feelings of anguish and guilt about the
political failure or impotence of intellectuals. The inevitable flip side of
this is excessive optimism about the power of theory. Once we lose
faith in that, we are ripe for Sartre’s melodrama. Unless we can find an
alternative to see-sawing between these equally intense and affect-
laden positions, we will become embittered and lose all faith in the
value of intellectual work. The irony is that the more intensity we invest
in our quest for political justification, the more we court ultimate
political disaffection.
How do we get off the see-saw? Beauvoir’s ‘I take words and the
truth to be of value,’ rings truer to me than Sartre’s melodrama of the
intellectual and the dying child. It is significant, for example, that she
simply says ‘of value,’ and not ‘of absolute value,’ or ‘always of
political value.’ To my ears, Beauvoir invites us to consider what value
words and the truth have in a given situation, no more, but also no less.
Beauvoir’s approach enables us to discuss the relationship between
theory and politics in ordinary, everyday terms, and not in the empty
terms of metaphysics.
For her, then, the question of where, when and how the intellectual
should commit herself becomes a concrete, individual and practical (as
opposed to an abstract, general and metaphysical) one: Can I justify
doing what I do? How good am I at it? Do I have the talents and skill
required to do something else? Could I acquire them fairly effectively?
Is the cause I believe in better served by a mediocre guerrilla fighter or
a first rate writer? Let us say that I really want to know what intel-
lectuals can do to save dying children. I read in the paper that: ‘The
184 afterword
United Nations calculates that the world population’s basic needs for
food, drinking water, education and medical care could be covered by a
levy of less than 4% on the accumulated wealth of the 225 largest
fortunes [in the world]’ (Ramonet 1). It would seem that the people
who can do the most to help dying children are not intellectuals, but
the owners of those 225 fortunes.
As intellectuals we can work to spread this knowledge. But we also
need to acknowledge that unless we are economists or doctors, our
daily work is not going to be concretely concerned with the prevention
of famine and death. Thus intellectuals working in the humanities have
to ask not simply what intellectuals in general can do, but what we can
do that people from other disciplines can’t do better, and under what
circumstances we can do them. What is the point of working with
ideas, with culture, with writing, in a starving world? These questions
are important, and they do have answers. They just don’t have absolute
answers.
The advantage of Beauvoir’s attitude is that it enables us to acknow-
ledge the distress that fuels Sartre’s stark image, without having to give
up the thought that words and writing can have political significance.
The only alternative to political guilt and anguish is not complaisant
acquiescence in the death of children. It is part of intellectual life
constantly to ask what the political, ethical and existential value of
one’s work is. What I am trying to say here is that there doesn’t have to
be one answer to that, let alone one answer to be given once and for all,
on behalf of all intellectuals.
But the question of justification remains. Are we justified in speaking
about theory? Or about anything at all? Even if we don’t think that
children are dying because we are writing, we may feel vaguely guilty
about giving ourselves the right to speak and write when so many
millions cannot. Isn’t there an unbearable arrogance here? Since we are
no better and no worse than anyone else, what justifies our ‘arrogation
of voice’ (as Stanley Cavell calls it)?18
I’ll be blunt: the answer is nothing. Our speaking – even the most
passionate political call to arms – is never justified by anything but our
own wish to speak: ‘Who beside myself could give me the authority to
speak for us?’ Cavell writes (Pitch 9). To ask for general justification is to
ask for a metaphysical ground beneath our feet. There is something
 afterword 185
arrogant and something unjust about writing anything at all. How can I
write when millions of others cannot? How can I justify my arrogation
of voice? How can anyone? If we do decide to write, it is pointless to
consume ourselves in guilt about the ‘exclusionary’ effects of writing
per se. The question, therefore, is not how to justify writing anything at
all, but rather what one aims to do with one’s writing.
Beauvoir says that to write is to appeal to the freedom of the
other.19 If we follow the implications of that, we will realize that there
is no way to control the political effects of our own writing. Readers are
free to meet our appeals with anything from enthusiasm to indiffer-
ence, contempt and silence. To appeal to the freedom of others is to risk
their rebuff. If we want to be politically committed, all we can do is to
say what we have to say, and take responsibility for our words. In short,
we have to mean what we say.20
In the light of all this, does Sexual/Textual Politics itself count as a
political intervention? There is no doubt that I thought it did back in
1985. Although I didn’t always manage to say exactly what I meant, I
certainly meant what I said. My passionate advocacy for feminist anti-
essentialism was at once intellectual and political, and actually did
change some people’s minds. The book also helped to make feminism
more acceptable in academic circles. Sexual/Textual Politics was my first
book; it taught me that it is possible for anyone – me, for example – to
speak up, to have a say, to participate in the feminist project. In 2002
feminism needs new visions and new voices. I know that this book has
inspired many feminist students to speak up, to express their passionate
disagreement or agreement. In translation the book has mattered and
continues to matter to readers all over the world. If Sexual/Textual Politics
continues to inspire discussion for some years to come, it will still be a
useful book.
Durham, North Carolina
January 2002.
 NOTES

PREFACE
1 I wrote this sentence some months before the publication of Ken
Ruthven’s Feminist Literary Studies, which claims to be the ‘first broad
survey of both the dominant theories of feminist literary criticism and
the critical practices which result from those theories’. Although I am
delighted to be able to acknowledge his book as the first full-length
survey of the field, I also feel that I do not really need to change my
introductory sentence, not least because I never intended my own
book as a survey of practical feminist criticism. Feminist Literary
Studies discusses the field of feminist criticism as it appears to an
academic engaged in the study of English literature. This approach
seems to have prevented Ruthven from discussing French feminist
theory, and his book can therefore not be said to engage fully with the
problems of feminist theory today.
My major objection to Ruthven’s study is not primarily that it is
written by a man: while sharing his view that men in principle can be
feminist critics, I disagree with his far too rash dismissal of the polit-
ical reasons why they ought not to try for a leading role in this particu-
lar field today. I also object to the idea that men should enjoy certain
advantages over women when it comes to engaging in rational criti-
cism of feminist theory: ‘In some respects it is easier for men than for
women to object to the more ridiculous manifestations of feminist
 notes 187
criticism’, Ruthven argues, ‘simply because the intimidatory rhetoric
of radical feminism designates any woman who is sharply critical of
feminist discourse as a female equivalent of the “white arsed nigger”
of separatist black rhetoric’ (14). But surely feminists are perfectly
capable of intervening in their own debates without having to hire
male liberals to take the flak on their behalf?
The main problem with Feminist Literary Studies, however, is the way
in which it seeks to depoliticize feminist critical discourse. For
Ruthven, feminist criticism consists in ‘rendering visible the hitherto
invisible component of ‘gender’ in all discourses produced by the
humanities and the social sciences’ (24). This, pace Ruthven, is not
necessarily a feminist act: it might just as well be an example of patri-
archal aggression. His definition would make the sentence ‘You say
this because you are a woman’ unambiguously feminist. My point is
simply that only a political definition of feminist criticism and theory
will enable us to analyse the difference between feminist and sexist
uses of that and similar statements.

INTRODUCTION: WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

FEMINIST READINGS OF WOOLF
1 Anna Coombes’s reading of The Waves shows a true Lukácsian dis-
taste for the fragmented and subjective web of modernism, as when
she writes that ‘My problem in writing this paper has been to attempt
to politicize a discourse which obstinate [sic] seeks to exclude the
political and the historical, and, where this is no longer possible, then
tries to aestheticize glibly what it cannot “realistically” incorporate’
(238).
2 For further discussion of this point, see the section on Gilbert and
Gubar pp. 56–68.
3 The term ‘Anglo-American’ must be taken as an indication of a specific
approach to literature, not as an empirical description of the critic’s
nationality. The British critic Gillian Beer, in her essay ‘Beyond deter-
minism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’ raises the same kind of
objections to Showalter’s reading of Woolf as I have done in this paper.
In her 1984 essay, ‘Subject and object and the nature of reality: Hume
and elegy in To the Lighthouse’, Beer develops this approach in a more
philosophical context.
4 For an introduction to Derrida’s thought and to other forms of
deconstruction see Norris.
188 notes
5 My presentation of Kristeva’s position here is based on her La Révolu-
tion du langage poétique.
6 One feminist critic, Barbara Hill Rigney, has tried to show that in Mrs
Dalloway ‘madness becomes a kind of refuge for the self rather than its
loss’ (52). This argument in my view finds little support in the text and
seems to depend more on the critic’s desire to preserve her Laingian
categories than on a responsive reading of Woolf’s text.

1 TWO FEMINIST CLASSICS

1 The information here is based on Robin Morgan’s introduction to the
anthology Sisterhood is Powerful.
2 Quoted in Morgan, 35–6.
3 Ultimately one might even argue that all discourse is ironic, since it
rapidly becomes theoretically and practically impossible to distinguish
between ironic and non-ironic discourse. See Culler for a discussion of
this problem in relation to a literary text.
4 The Female Eunuch is not discussed in this book because it is not
primarily a work of literary criticism. In the chapter called ‘Romance’,
Greer does however try her hand at a reading of popular romantic
fiction.

2 ‘IMAGES OF WOMEN’ CRITICISM

1 I was unable to consult the 1972 original edition. My comments are
therefore based on the 1973 reprint.
2 See Ascher, 107–22.
3 Robinson and Vogel’s contribution.
4 Katz-Stoker’s essay.
5 Register is here quoting Martin.

3 WOMEN WRITING AND WRITING ABOUT WOMEN

1 As quoted by Register, 13–14.
2 Quoted on the flyleaf of the Women’s Press edition of Literary Women.
3 In Scandinavia, the Swedish critic Birgitta Holm has made creative use
of the central ideas in The Madwoman in the Attic for her influential
study of Fredrika Bremer, the creator of the Swedish realist novel. The
first Norwegian realist novel, Amtmandens døttre, was also written by a
woman, Camilla Collett, and Holm tries to locate the reasons why
 notes 189
precisely women writers were at the vanguard of Scandinavian real-
ism. Later women also became the leading naturalist novelists in
Scandinavia: in Norway Amalie Skram (Constance Ring, Lucie) and in
Sweden Victoria Benedictsson (Pengar – ‘Money’) wrote gripping
feminist novels about the battle between the sexes in the 1880s and
1890s.
4 Gilbert and Gubar’s italics. They are quoting Said, 162.
5 See chapter 1, pp. 28–9.
6 For a different account of Mary Shelley’s attitude towards femininity
see Jacobus, ‘Is there a woman in this text?’
7 See Part Two for further discussion of French feminist theory in gen-
eral, and pp. 103–6 for a presentation of some aspects of Derridean
theory.

4 THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS
1 For further discussion of the relationship between politics and aesthet-
ics, see the section on Jehlen, pp. 79–86.
2 Lukács, Brecht, Stalin, Trotsky, Benjamin, Gramsci and Althusser are
all considered Marxists, and psychoanalysis comprises names as
divergent as Freud, Adler, Jung, Reich, Horney, Fromm, Klein and
Lacan.
3 For further discussion of Showalter’s work, see the introductory
chapter on Woolf, pp. 1–18, and chapter 3, pp. 54–6.
4 Jehlen’s article can be found in Keohane, Rosaldo and Gelpi (eds) and
in Abel and Abel (eds). I am quoting from the original publication in
Signs.
5 In the second part of her article Jehlen puts her aesthetic theories to
practical use in an effort to elaborate a theory of the novel with special
emphasis on the sentimental novel.
6 For a first introduction to lesbian criticism see Zimmerman; for further
study see Rich, ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’
and On Lies, Secrets and Silence; also Fadermann, and Rule. For an
introduction to black feminist criticism see Smith.
7 See for instance Spivak.
8 One early exception is Lillian S. Robinson’s work, collected in her Sex,
Class and Culture.
9 See Kolodny, ‘Turning the lens on “The Panther Captivity” ’, 175.
190 notes
5 FROM SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR TO JACQUES LACAN
1 The politics of The Second Sex has been the object of much debate. For
an introduction to some of the issues raised see the articles by Felstiner,
Le Doeuff, Dijkstra and Fuchs in Feminist Studies, 6, 2, Summer 1980.
2 For an account of this and other developments in the new women’s
movement in Norway see Haukaa.
3 In Denmark Jette Lundboe Levy has furnished a superbly researched
study of the historical context of the great Swedish novelist Victoria
Benedictsson. In Norway Irene Engelstad and Janneken Øverland have
explored the representation of class and sexuality in the works of
Amalie Skram and Cora Sandel respectively (see the articles in their
joint collection Frihet til å skrive).
4 As examples of their more challenging work one could mention:
Coward and Ellis, Language and Materialism; Coward, Patriarchal
Precedents and Female Desire; Kuhn and Wolpe (eds), Feminism and
Materialism; Lovell, Pictures of Reality; Wolff, The Social Production of
Art; and Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today.
5 See pp. 21–4.
6 The French ‘femelle’, denoting a female animal, is only used
pejoratively about women.
7 The pioneering work was Herrmann’s Les Voleuses de langue. Due to
the fact that the author teaches in the US, it is more ‘American’ than
‘French’ in its outlook.
8 For American introductions to French feminism see Jones, ‘Writing the
body’, and the articles by Stanton, Féral, Makward, Gallop and Burke
in Eisenstein and Jardine (eds), 71–122. Several American reviews have
devoted special issues or sections to French feminism: Signs, 7, 1; Yale
French Studies, 62; Feminist Studies, 7, 2; Diacritics, Winter 1975 and
Summer 1982. A good general history and overview of the French
feminist scene can be found in the editors’ introductions to Marks and
Courtivron (eds).
9 This development parallels the American move towards a ‘woman-
centred’ analysis. For a full account of the politics of woman-centred
feminism see Eisenstein.
10 Questions féministes also runs an American edition entitled Feminist
Issues. Their manifesto is reprinted under the title ‘Variations on
common themes’ in Marks and Courtivron (eds), 212–30.
11 Other short introductions to Lacan are provided in Wright and in
Eagleton (1983). For a fuller presentation see Lemaire.
 notes 191
6 HÉLÈNE CIXOUS: AN IMAGINARY UTOPIA
1 All quotations from Cixous’s works are in English, principally from
published English translations, but when no such has been available, I
have supplied my own. In the case of a published translation, except
for the article ‘Castration or decapitation?’, where I have been unable
to consult the French original, page references refer first to the transla-
tion, then to the original French. The following abbreviations have
been used: JN – La Jeune Née, VE – La Venue à l’écriture and RSH –
interview in Revue des sciences humaines.
2 In Eperons (which translates as Spurs), Derrida would seem to be using
the word ‘feminist’ in the same, derogatory sense.
3 In her article ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’, in Rosaldo
and Lamphere (eds), Sherry Ortner’s analysis of the male/female and
culture/nature oppositions arrives at conclusions that are strikingly
similar to some of Cixous’s observations. Arguing that ‘everywhere, in
every known culture, women are considered in some degree inferior to
men’ (69), Ortner sees this ‘universal devaluation of women’ (71) as a
result of an all-pervasive binary logic in which male/female is pictured
as parallel to culture/nature, and where ‘nature’ always is seen as
representing a ‘lower order of existence’ (72).
4 Cixous here follows Derrida who labels the mainstream of Western
thinking logocentric, due to its consistent privileging of the Logos, the
Word as a metaphysical presence.
5 Phallocentrism denotes a system that privileges the phallus as the
symbol or source of power. The conjuncture of logocentrism and
phallocentrism is often called, after Derrida, phallogocentrism.
6 The argument illustrated on the level of phonemes would be the same
on the level of signifiers. For Saussure, the sign (‘word’) consists of two
terms: signifier and signified. The signifier is the material aspect of the
sign (sound or letters) whereas the signified is its ‘meaning’ or idea-
tional representation. The signified is not the ‘real thing’ in the world,
which Saussure labels the referent. For Saussure, signifier and signified
are inseparable, like the two sides of a sheet of paper, whereas post-
structuralism, in particular Lacanian theory, has questioned this
closure of the sign and shown how the signifier can ‘slide’ in relation
to the signified.
7 For a fascinating account of utopian thought in nineteenth-century
socialism and feminism see Barbara Taylor.
8 See the discussion of Millett in chapter 1, pp. 24–31.
192 notes
7 PATRIARCHAL REFLECTIONS: LUCE IRIGARAY’S LOOKING-GLASS
1 See Lemoine-Luccioni’s review in Esprit.
2 References to Spéculum will be abbreviated to S. ‘S, 130’ means Spécu-
lum, p. 130; ‘CS, 76’ means Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, p. 76. Two
articles from Ce sexe are translated in Marks and Courtivron (eds).
Quotations from these translations will be marked MC, followed by a
reference to the original French, i.e. ‘MC, 100, CS, 24’. All translations
except the ones marked MC are mine.
3 For other introductions to Irigaray, or some of the problems she raises,
see Burke, ‘Introduction to Luce Irigaray’s “When our lips speak
together” ’ and ‘Irigaray through the looking glass’; also Wenzel,
‘Introduction to Luce Irigaray’s “And the one doesn’t stir without the
other” ’ and Brown and Adams, ‘The feminine body and feminist
politics’.
4 See Gallop’s discussion of the implications of this title in her chapter
headed ‘The father’s seduction’ (Gallop, 56–79).
5 It is often difficult to tell exactly where Irigaray quotes from. In a post-
script to Spéculum she states that she often has preferred not to signal
quotations at all. Given that woman is excluded from theory, Irigaray
argues, she doesn’t need to relate to it in the way prescribed by the
same theory.
6 For a further discussion of the status of visual evidence in Freudian
theory see Heath.
7 For a succinct overview of theories of female sexuality from Freud until
today see Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s introduction to Chasseguet-
Smirgel (ed.), or (in French) Irigaray’s admirably lucid chapter entitled
‘Retour sur la théorie psychanalytique’, CS, 35–65. For a discussion of
possible feminist appropriations of these theories see Mitchell, Psy-
choanalysis and Feminism and Women: The Longest Revolution, Mitch-
ell’s and Rose’s introductions to Mitchell and Rose (eds) and also (in
French) the whole of Kofman’s fascinating re-reading of Freud, which
in many ways can be read as a critical reply to Irigaray. Lemoine-
Luccioni, in Partage des femmes, and Montrelay take the debate on to
more specifically Lacanian terrain.
8 Roughly summarized, Freud’s argument links the act of seeing to anal
activity, which he sees as expressing a desire for mastery or for the
exercise of power over one’s (libidinal) objects, a desire that underlies
later (phallic or Oedipal) fantasies about phallic (masculine) power.
Thus the gaze enacts the voyeur’s desire for sadistic power, in which
 notes 193
the object of the gaze is cast as its passive, masochistic, feminine
victim.
9 For further analysis of Freud’s anxiety in ‘Dora’ see Moi.
10 Translated by Claudia Reeder in Marks and Courtivron (eds), 99–106.
11 Rachel Bowlby has also criticized Irigaray (along with Montrelay and
Cixous) for her ‘lack of any coherent social theory’ (Bowlby, 67).

8 MARGINALITY AND SUBVERSION: JULIA KRISTEVA

1 The first part of this quotation is translated by Roudiez (1), the second
part by me.
2 Quoted by Barthes, 1970 (20). My translation.
3 For other English-language introductions to Kristeva see Coward and
Ellis, and Féral (1978).
4 For further discussion of this notion of the decentred subject see my
introduction to Lacan in chapter 5, pp. 97–9.
5 In her lecture ‘Sex differences in language: a psychological approach’
in the Oxford University Women’s Studies Committee’s lecture series
on ‘Women and language,’ 10 May 1983.
6 See the brief presentation of Derrida’s use of the word différance,
pp. 103–6.
7 See Ardener. For an exposition of feminist linguistics in relation to the
‘muted group’ theory see Kramarae, chapter 1, 1–32.
8 The name Vološinov is now generally considered to be a cover for the
leading Soviet literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.
9 In the chapter entitled ‘J’ai oublié mon parapluie’ in Eperons, 103–13.
10 As quoted by Wittgenstein, §1.
11 For an introduction to these concepts in Lacan see chapter 5,
pp. 97–9.
12 Throughout this chapter, when no English translation is listed in the
bibliography, all quotations from Kristeva’s work are translated by me.
13 For further discussion of the political implications of Kristeva’s theory
at this point, see my introductory chapter pp. 12–13.
14 See her article on dissidence, ‘Un nouveau type d’intellectuel’.
15 For a discussion of this problem from a somewhat different angle see
Pajaczkowska.
16 For Kristeva’s discovery of America see ‘Pourquoi les Etats-Unis?’
17 For an example of a disappointed and resentful feminist response to
Kristeva see Stone.
194 notes
NOTES TO THE AFTERWORD
1 Anyone interested in my recent analysis of questions in feminist theory
should look at What Is a Woman?, particularly chapters 1, 2 and 9. The
preface to What Is a Woman? also contains some reflections on
Sexual/Textual Politics.
2 The Sun, 4 May 1982, front page.
3 I want to thank Abigail Solomon, my research assistant, for finding
and checking dates and figures concerning the Falklands War and
Greenham Common.
4 For further discussion of the problems with generalizations about
femininity, see What Is a Woman?, particularly the section of the title
essay called ‘Against Femininity’ (99–112).
5 Today I would add that the Kristeva-inspired psychoanalytic under-
standing of subjectivity that dominates the book is broadly compatible
with the phenomenological approach of Simone de Beauvoir and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I try to show the affinities between Freud,
Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty in my essay ‘Is Anatomy Destiny?’ (What
is a Woman? 369–93). This essay should be read in conjunction with
‘What Is a Woman?’, particularly the section entitled ‘The Body as a
Situation’ (59–83). In Sexual/Textual Politics the main source for my
understanding of Kristeva is Revolution in Poetic Language (first pub-
lished in French in 1974; an excellent, but incomplete translation
appeared in English in 1984). I don’t mean to say that all of Kristeva’s
writings after 1984 are compatible with my own feminism, or indeed
with her own early writings. Many of the Kristeva texts referred to in
Sexual/Textual Politics are included in my edition of The Kristeva Reader.
6 See Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman
(1994).
7 One should not conclude that I think that there are no ambiguous or
difficult cases, no transsexuals, no intersexed people, no transvestites
and so on. My point is simply that the existence of intermediate cat-
egories does not invalidate the usual definition of the word ‘woman’. (I
discuss this claim, as well as the status of transsexuals and other
transgendered people at some length in the title essay of What Is a
Woman?)
8 See Butler, Gender Trouble 25, 141.
9 In keeping with these views I criticize Cixous for thinking of ideology
as an entirely self-consistent, non-contradictory membrane, which
leaves no space for women to come to critical consciousness of
that ideology (see 122), and I permit myself to doubt that Irigaray’s
 notes 195
‘mimicry’ is always the best oppositional strategy for women (see
139–42).
10 An excellent example of such a critique can be found in Derrida’s essay
on J. L. Austin, entitled ‘Signature Event Context,’ which happens to
be the very essay that furnishes Butler with her concept of ‘citational-
ity’ or ‘iteration.’ In my view Derrida entirely fails to encounter
Austin’s thought. A truly outstanding analysis of Derrida’s reading of
Austin is Stanley Cavell’s ‘Counter-Philosophy and the Pawn of Voice,’
in Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy 53–127.
11 The reference to a ‘philosophical picture’ is a reference to Wittgen-
stein’s ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it
lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’
(Philosophical Investigations, §115).
12 For my reading of this fantasy in a melodramatic text, see my essay on
Corinne, ‘A Woman’s Desire to Be Known,’ particularly 166–71.
13 Cora Diamond puts the phrase ‘it depends’ to good philosophical use
in her brilliant essay on feminist epistemology or ‘women’s ways of
knowing’ entitled ‘Knowing Tornadoes and Other Things.’ See also
my discussion of Diamond’s essay in Moi, What Is a Woman? 156–60.
14 ‘En face d’un enfant qui meurt, La Nausée ne fait pas le poids.’ Sartre
made this statement in an interview with Jacqueline Piatier entitled
‘Jean Paul Sartre s’explique sur Les Mots,’ published in Le Monde 18
April 1964. I am quoting from Contat and Rybalka 398.
15 ‘Je suis une intellectuelle, j’accorde du prix aux mots et à la vérité’ (La
Force des choses 2: 120).
16 That there is a strong relationship between melodramatic form and
the kind of metaphysics called skepticism is a point Cavell explores in
Contesting Tears, and that I make use of for feminist purposes in an
essay on Mme de Staël’s Corinne (‘A Woman’s Desire to Be Known’).
My most sustained attempt to explore the ways in which Beauvoir’s
existentialism and Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy illuminate
each other can be found in What Is a Woman? particularly 169–250.
17 In his influential study The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks
writes: ‘The connotations of the word [melodrama] include: the
indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schema-
tization; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy,
persecution of the good [. . .]’ (11).
18 The term ‘arrogation of voice’ stresses the unfounded moment of
arrogation contained in any theoretical or philosophical speech act, as
well as the inevitable arrogance of the act of claiming for oneself the
196 notes
right to appeal to the judgment of others. See Cavell, A Pitch of
Philosophy 1–51, and Moi, What Is a Woman? 233–5 and 249–50.
19 ‘Language is an appeal to the freedom of the other, because the sign
only becomes sign when it is grasped by a consciousness,’ Beauvoir
writes in Pyrrhus et Cinéas (104). ‘I can only appeal to the other’s
freedom, not constrain it,’ she adds (112). (My translation in both
cases.) For further discussion of the idea of the appeal to the other, see
Moi What Is a Woman? 226–37.
20 I develop the ideas outlined here in an essay called ‘Meaning What We
Say: The “Politics of Theory” and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,’
written for a collection of essays edited by Emily Grosholz.
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 INDEX

abolition: self 121 Anglo-American feminist criticism

About Chinese Women (Kristeva) 17
164 anti-egalitarianism 52
absoluteness 180, 181; demand 182 anti-essentialism 163
abstract objectivism 154 anti-essentialist argument 174
acrimony 102 anti-hierarchical ‘Neo-feminists’ 90
activists 21 anti-patriarchal discourse 80
Aesthetic Problems (Cavell) 181 Antony, S.B. 21
aesthetics 83; device 84; ideals 46; Archaos ou le jardin étincelant
judgements 72; value- (Rochefort) 120
judgements 84 Archimedes: image 80
ahistoricism: idealism 146–8 Archimedes and the paradox of
alternative context 79 feminist criticism (Jehlen) 79
ambiguity 80 Aristotle 130
America: capitalism 167; New art: politics 3
Criticism 24; New Critics 45 Aurora Leigh and Other Poems
analogy 140 (Kaplan) 92
analytical procedures 86 Austen, J. 35
anarchism 166–72 authenticity 46, 47; consciousness
androgyny 2, 7, 14 7
angel 59, 60, 63 authoritarian discourse 25
angelic resignation 60 authority 34, 62, 149
212 index
authors: centred empiricism 124; Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Irigaray)
identity 60; text 61 127, 128
authorship: anxiety 58 charm: strenuous 2
autobiography 42 Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. 28
avant-garde: artists 170; political child 97; dying 182, 183
importance 171; writer and chora: heterogeneity 161
women 169–70 Cixous, H. 8, 95, 100–25, 176
class 109, 156–7; struggle 90, 157
bad faith 90 classification 109
Bakhtin, M. 39 Cleaver, E. 22
Balzac, H. de 5 Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 115
Barrett Browning, E. 53 communication 150
Barrett, M. 16, 156 Communities of Women (Auerbach)
Bazin, N.T. 14 78
Beer, P. 51 community 156–7
beginning-middle-end 61, 67 conceptualization 109
Beginnings (Said) 61 conflict 24
Benjamin, W. 17 Conley, V.A. 118, 122, 124
Beyond the Pleasure Principle conscious thoughts and actions
(Freud) 99 10
biographical anecdotes 54 consciousness: authenticity 7;
biology 52 collective 7
bisexual: nature 107; writing 108 contradictions 120
bisexuality 106–8; new 118, 119; contradictory construct 26
other 107 Cornillon, S.K. 41
Bloomsbury: ideal 3 Cranford 79
Bodies That Matter (Fuss) 178 critical analysis 72
Bødtker, C. 34 critical appreciation 81, 83
body-sex organ 145 critical approaches: improper or
bourgeois-liberal heritage 123 dishonest 82
Brecht, B. 11, 171 Critical Inquiry 69
British feminism 91 critical methods: politicized 86; and
Brontë sisters 54 theories 86
Brown, C. 50 critical objectivity 82
crypto-Lukácsian perspective 9
Carmichael, S. 21 cultural reasons 26
castration 134 cyphers 56
Castration or decapitation (Cixous)
109, 110 Dahlerup, P. 34
categorization 109 daughter: mother 123, 127
 index 213
de Beauvoir, S. 43, 89–99, 178, 181, eternity 112, 113
184, 185 étrangère 150
Death of the Author (Barthes) 62 evasiveness 36
deconstruction 138, 171; criticism exaggeration 2
131 existentialist philosophy 90
defence-mechanisms 113 experience 4, 44, 78, 79, 84;
definitions 158 difference 71; human 78
Delphy, C. 96 explosive tendency 36
Derrida, J. 9, 102, 103, 104, 106, 171; expression: authentic 45
antiessentialism 108; expropriation 110
deconstruction 94 expulsion 169
Des Chinoises (Kristeva) 164 external reality 44
des femmes (publishing house) 94
Descartes, R. 130 Falklands War (1981) 174
différance 104, 105, 118 fascism 6
difference 103–6, 153 Felman, S. 137, 142
disadvantage 37 Female Eunuch (Greer) 40
disease 60 female (feminine) 55; creativity 64;
disponibilité 123 distinctive power 58; ego 7;
dissemination 105 elusiveness 38; emancipation
doctorat d’Etat 128 cause 51; enclave 81; eroticism
Doederlein, S.W. 82 143; libidinal economy 111;
domestic economy 146 literary criticism 58; literary frame
dried-up spinsters 37 transience 54; literary tradition
56; madness 12; masculine 171;
École freudienne (Lacan) 126 model 70; mysticism 131;
écriture féminine 95, 100, 106, 162 narcissism and masochism 28;
Eliot, G. 55 penis envy 132; period 55; phase
Ellman, M. 31–40 55; plural 114; rape fantasy 116;
emancipation 124 reality 47; role-models 46;
empiricism 146 schizophrenia of authorship 59;
energy: power 103 style 70; subculture 75;
English language 155 terminology 64, 104, 136; tradition
English lexicon 155 81; true voice 59; writing 112
Eperons (Derrida) 154 femaleness 63, 64, 148
equality 12, 96 Feminine Mystique (Friedan) 21, 52
equivalence 140 femininity 13, 14, 64, 81, 106–9, 117,
essentialism 142, 178; metaphysical 131–2, 142–3, 148; marginality
9 theory (Kristeva) 162–8;
Eternal Feminine 146 stereotypes 33; values 159
214 index
feminism 42, 82, 101, 147, 166–72, Freud, S. 10, 27, 131, 182; femininity
179; Anglo-American 66; British theory 128
91; French 93–6; humanist 79; Freudian and post-Freudian theory
liberal 12; paradox 80; radical 12; 27
revolutionary 22 Freudian psychoanalysis 28
Feminism and Art (Marder) 15 Friedan, B. 21
feminist 7, 41, 55, 73; aesthetic 7; fulcrum image 80
Anglo-American linguistics 150,
152; critic 18, 23, 75; critical theory Gallop, J. 133
60; critique 74, 76; gender 70, 95, 178, 179; discourse
deconstruction 129; First World 177; ideology 156
85; heritage 179; intrinsic value Gender Trouble (Fuss) 178
126; literary criticism 69, 95; generosity 111
literary studies 41; literary theory gift 109; and proper 108–12
74; Marxist or socialist 91; phase Gilbert, S.M.: and Gubar, S. 56–68
55; poetics 56; politics 9, 55, 68, God 136
83, 84, 176; struggle 12, 24; Greenham Common 174, 175
theory (French) 176 group 147; muted 153
Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Gubar, S.: and Gilbert, S.M. 56–68
Poetry and gynocritics 74, 75, 76, 77
Prose (Brown and Olson) 50
Feminist criticism in the wilderness Hardy, T. 91
(Showalter) 74, 76 health 60
feminist criticism 24, 31, 45, 69, 70, Hegel 128, 130
73, 74, 79; Anglo-American 50, 51, Heilbrun, C. 15
69, 77, 78, 85, 86, 176; American hermeneutical theory 43
46; limitations 77; Scandinavian heterogeneity: chora 161
91 heterogeneous multiplicity 118
Feminist Literary Studies (Ruthven) heterogeneous signifying process
186n, 187n 153
Feminist Studies (Kolodny) 72 heterosexuality 171
fiction 47; of fiction 41 hierarchical binary oppositions 101
First-World feminists 85 hierarchical structure 109
formalist criticism 46 hierarchy 50, 67
fragmentation 60 Histores d’amour (Kristeva) 167
Frankfurt School: theorists 120 historical background 24
freedom 185 history 53
French feminism 93–6 Hogarth Press 10
French feminist theory 94, 96, Holly, M. 7, 8
176 hom(m)osexualité 134
 index 215
homogeneity 178 interests 157
homogeneous category 85 internalization 55
homology 140 International Women’s Day 102
homosexuality 71 interpretation 140
horizon of understanding 43 intertextuality 155
hostility 102 inversion 70
Howe, F. 42 investigation 79
human experience 75, 78 Irigaray, L. 8, 95, 126–48, 176
humanism: traditional bourgeois 6 ironic discourse 40
humanist aesthetic 8 irony 36, 38, 39
humanist feminism 79
hypertension 181 Jacobus, M. 67
hysteria 134 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 59
Jehlen, M. 69, 79–86
idealism: ahistoricism 146–8 jouissance 119, 152, 166, 167, 169
identity 13 justification 184
ideology 119–25; allegiances 177;
Cixous’s image 122; King Lear (Shakespeare) 45
communication 156–7; Klein, M. 98
conditions 48; criticism 84; knowledge 76
legitimizing 63; sign 157 Kofman, S. 28
imagery: light/dark 131; oceanic Kolodny, A. 69–74
water 115 Kramarae, C. 158
images of women: false 43 Kristeva, J. 11–13, 95, 149, 150, 155,
‘Images of Women’ criticism 31, 40, 163–4, 166, 168, 171, 176
41–8 Kristevan semiotics 160
Images of Women in Fiction:
Feminist La Jeune Née (Cixous and Clément)
Perspectives 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 49 100, 108, 112
Imaginary 97, 98, 115, 118, 119, 120, La Langage des déments (Irigaray)
121 126
imaginary chaos 11, 12 La Révolution du langage poétique
imaginary contradictions 117–19 (Kristeva) 160, 167, 170
imitation 55 La Revue des sciences humaines 123
impersonation 142 La Venue à l’écriture (Cixous) 100,
inauthenticity 90 114, 116
incongruity 39 label 158
individual: unique 8 Lacan, J. 97–9, 166
intellectuals 184; responsibility 183 Lacanian Imaginary 115
intentionality 177, 179 Lacanian psychoanalysis 94
216 index
language 9, 53, 79, 150–1, 152, 156, Macherey, P. 92
159, 160–73; acquisition 160–2; Madonna 167
English 155; poetic 155; sexism Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and
150, 155–60 Gubar) 51, 56–68
language use: similarities 150, 152 maiden ladies 37
langue (Sausserian concept) 151 male: critical theory 76; dominant
L’approche (Cixous) 113 culture 79; literature 77;
Last Man (Shelley) 65 misogyny 26; passion 140;
Law of the Father 12, 97, 164 philosophers 130; pseudonyms
Le Rire de la Méduse (Cixous) 100 55; text 64, 75; theory 75
Leavis, Q.D. 4 male/female couple 103
lesbians: types 85 man 8, 172
Lessing, D. 7 Man Made Language (Spender) 155
l’étrangère 149–50 Mann ist Mann (Brecht) 159
liberals 51 Maoism 93
libertarianism 171 Maoists: anarchist influences 167;
libidinal economies 111 ‘Women’s Front’ 90
libido 111 Mao’s China 167
linguistics 151 Marcus, J. 16, 17
literariness of literature 47 marginality 163, 165, 166, 170
literary criticism: good 23; Marx, K.: phallocentric discourse 141
legitimate 72 Marxism 73, 91, 93, 166–72
literary evaluation 55 Marxism and Literary Criticism
literary reflection 24, 30 (Eagleton) 92
literary theory 69, 101, 176, 177, Marxism and the Philosophy of
180 Language (Vološinov) 154
literary tradition: female 51 Marxist criticism 61
Literary Women (Moers) 51, 52, 54 Marxist discourse 141
literature 42, 55; great 77; Marxist Feminist Literature
literariness 47; male 77 Collective 91, 92, 164, 169
Literature of Their Own (Showalter) Marxist literary theory 176
1, 4, 51, 54, 55, 77, 81 Marxist theory 90
Little Women 79 Marxist-feminist critic 16, 93
logical contradiction 119 Marxist-feminist work 91
logocentric ideology 103 masculine/feminine term 103
logocentrism 103 masculinity 12–14, 104, 106–9, 135,
love 166 145, 153, 159; interrogation 109;
Lukács, G. 4, 5, 6 libidinal economy 109; mode 70;
Lukácsian aesthetics 17 position 67; rationality 159
Lumpenproletariat (Brecht) 170 master discourse 128
 index 217
materiality 149 mysticism 135–6, 137
Medusa (Cixous) 111, 115 mythological archetypes 121
Meisel, P. 18
melodrama: and the ordinary naming 158, 159
180–5 narcissistic phallocentrism 130
men 153 nationalism 174
metaphysics 13, 138; of presence negative image 132
105, 110; Romantic 179 negativity 132, 169
methodology 86; and theoretical Neo-feminists: anti-hierarchical 90
problems 85 Neusüss, A. 120
militarism 174 New Criticism 48, 66; doctrines 83
Millett, K. 15, 24–31, 39, 46, 132 Nietzsche, F. 6, 127
mimeticism 139; specul(ariz)ation nomination 109
131–42 non-feminists 83; critic 18; works
mimicry 142 50
mirror: -image 132; /speculum 136; non-Imaginary 124
burning 136; concave 129 Norris, C. 105
Mirror Stage 98
misinterpreting 83 objectives 174
misreading 83 oceanic water imagery 115
Mitchell, J. 28 Oedipal complex 61
modernism 6, 45 Oedipal crisis 97, 132
modernist literature 46 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 118
modernist poem 11 old maids 37
modernist writing 6 Old Testament 114
Moers, E. 53 Olson, K. 50
monster 59, 60, 63 oppression 178
Morgan, R. 22 ordinary view 181
morphology 142, 145, 146 origin 117
mother 97, 112; body 112; country Orlando (Woolf) 2
66; daughter 123, 127; figure 113; Other 98
good 113, 115, 117; identification
164; text 117; voice 112, 116; paradox 37
womb 115 parler femme 143, 162
motherhood 167 parody 2
movement 54 Passions élémentaires (Irigaray) 127
Mrs Dalloway (Woolf) 12 paternity 67
multiplicity 62 patriarchal humanism: Western 75
mystic experience 137 patriarchal ideology: nature 63;
mystical imagery 135 ruling 38
218 index
patriarchy 51, 139; aesthetics 68; positive alternative 141
binary thought 102–3; discourse positive values 66
129, 135; feeling 26; ideology 8, 56, positivism 146
64, 90, 101, 146; logic 119, 144; post-structuralism: gender theory
oppression 13, 26, 61; monolithic 178; theory 16
147; power 126, 147; societies Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Kristeva) 167
140; status quo 65; strategies 147; power 26, 50, 111, 119–25, 146, 159,
symbolic order 165; thought 148; 163, 168; concept 147; distinctive
value system 102 female 58; energy 103; patriarchal
performativity 179 126, 147; relationship 156; sexual
phallacy 60 difference 112
phallic criticism 33 power structure: existing 147
phallocentrism 103, 159; Marx pre-Oedipality 164; attachment 132;
discourse 141 baby 112; child 119; mother 164;
phallocratism 144 mother-figure 11; penis image
phallus 66, 97 117; phase 163; space 113; stage
philosophy 118, 128; meta- 132
discourse 131; of the Other 82 pre-understanding 43
phoneme 104 Prénoms de personne (Cixous) 101
Plato 128, 130 presence 117
Plaza, M. 145, 146 pressure 161
Pleasure of the Text (Barthes) 119 procès de signifiance 160
Plotinus 141 Prokop, U. 28
pluralism 73; approach 73 proper 109, 110
poetry 118; language 155; property 110, 143, 144
monologue 127; status 122 prophet/disciple relationship 123
political approach 84 protest 55
political context 142 proximity 110
political effects 185 psychoanalytic perspective 118
political error 152 psycholinguistics 128
political ideologies 72 Psychanalyse et Politique 94
political intervention 185 psyche 112
political nature 48 psychoanalysis 10, 29, 43, 73, 128
political overtones: automatic 84 Psychoanalysis and Feminism
political reading 81, 83 (Mitchell) 29, 94
politics 83, 119–25; feminist 9; psychoanalysts 170; theory 27
separation from art 3; of theory psychodynamics 74
180, 181 psychology 142; of consistency 119
politique et psychanalyse 94, 101, 102 puissance féminine 113
positionality 145, 165 pure science 162
 index 219
Questions féministes (Journal) 96, ritualistic chanting 78
146 Robinson, L.S. 23
Rochefort, C. 120
radical comparativism 79, 80 Rogers, K.M. 26
radical contradiction 68 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf) 1, 2,
radical skepticism 80 3, 7, 16, 22
raging madwoman 60 Rose, J. 28
rape text 117 Rossetti, C. 66
rationalizers 151
Reader, I Married Him (Beer) 50 Sagan, F. 33
reader-interpretation 61 Said, E. 67
real experience 45, 47 Sand, G. 53
real life 44 Sartre, J.P. 90, 181; melodrama 183
real person 44 Saussure, F. 104
real woman 60 Scandinavian feminist criticism 91
real world 44, 46 schoolmarms 37
realism 8, 45; true great 5 Second Sex (de Beauvoir) 22, 89,
realist approach 120 90, 96
realist fiction 46 self 10
reality 44, 55, 71; external 44; self-contradiction 119
incorrect model 44 self-discovery 55
realm: of the Gift 110, 111, 116; of self-representation: pleasure 134
the Proper 110 semanalysis 161
reason: rationality 121; reality 121 Sémantique structurale (Greimas)
reflection: theoretical 56 103
reflectionism 44 Séméiotiké (Kristeva) 149
reflexive perception 70 semi-theoretical texts 127
regulatory discourses 179 semiotics 152, 154, 160, 165; chora
rejection 26, 169 16; Kristevan 160
relational entity 70 sentimental hyperbole 53
reorganization of the advantage 36 separation 110
repetition 2 sex 95, 106, 144, 178, 179; difference
repression 151 132, 150, 152
reproduction 44 sexism 6, 13, 51, 156, 159; language
responses 40 150, 155–60
return 110 sexual analogy 32, 39
revolution 160–73 sexual characteristics 27
revolutionary edge 60 sexual identity 13, 14; and difference
revolutionary subject 169 171
rhetorical approach 51 sexual ideology 28, 30
220 index
sexual mode of thought 32 Stanton, E.C. 21
sexual politics 86; definition 26; status quo 170
(Kaplan) 28–9 stereotype 40; femininity 33;
Sexual Politics (Millett) 22, 24, 25, mother 36, 37
29, 30, 79 Stubbs, P. 5, 6
sexual power-politics 24 style 144
sexual stereotypes: male 32 subculture 51
sexual violence: male 30 subject 168; /object 135; position
sexuality 39, 124, 166; language 18 12
Shakespeare, W. 45 subjectivist politics 168
Showalter, E. 1–9, 49, 54, 69, subjectivity 177, 179
74–9 subordinate sex 26
sign: meaning 157; productivity succession 67
157 sujet en procès 170
Sign of the Voice 113 surface design 61
signifiance 161 sweet heroine 60
signifying process 152, 160 symbolic order 97, 98, 99, 118, 166,
simultaneity 144 169
Sisterhood is Powerful 22 symbolism 78, 160
skepticism 180; modern 179 syncretism 119
social conditions: inhuman 6
social constructs 64 teacher/student 123
social revolution 11 text 11; male 75; meaning 61, 66;
socialism 91 semi-theoretical 127
society 52; oppressed classes textual identity 10
163 textual production 45
sociological perspective 47 textual strategies 12
song 112 textual theory 154
sources and the voice 112–17 textuality 117, 124
Spacks, P.M. 29, 36, 39 Thatcher, Prime Minister M. 142
spasmodic force 11 theology 136
speaking subject 151, 177 theory 76, 175, 176, 177, 180;
speaking/writing woman 112 revolution 173
specularization 136 Thinking About Women (Ellmann)
specul(ariz)ation: mimeticism 22, 25, 31, 32, 35, 38, 40
131–42 Three Guineas (Woolf) 3, 4, 6, 7, 14
Spéculum de l’autre femme Threepenny Opera (Brecht) 170
(Irigaray) 126, 127, 128–30, 135, Timaeus (Plato) 160
139, 140, 146, 147 To the Lighthouse (Woolf ) 13, 14
Spivak, G. 138 Tolstoy, L. 5
 index 221
tout court 168 water 115; imagery 127
Toward Androgyny (Heilbrun) 14 Waves (Woolf) 15
Towards a feminist poetics What is a Woman (Moi) 173, 178
(Showalter) 74 whimsy 2
transition 98 ‘white fathers’ 76
Tristram Shandy 46 whole person 6
Troublesome Helpmate (Rogers) 22 wholeness 60
type 5 witch-monster-madwoman 59
woman 108, 147, 148, 153, 162, 166,
Ulysses 46 172, 178; Irigaray’s image 162;
uncanny, The (Freud ) 133 mystery 131; notion 146;
unconscious 99; drives and desires oppression 146; oppression of
10 potential 6; pleasure 137; power
undeconstructed form 13 123; propriety 111; real 175;
unfeminine 159 repression 67; silence 137; text 31;
United States of America (USA): truthful picture 7; vote 21; writers
capitalism 167 49; writing 52, 108; see also
‘Ur-woman’ 66 female (feminine); feminism;
utopian project 121 feminist; feminity
utopian thought 120 woman-centred approach 50
utopias 121 womanspeak 144
Women, Power and Subversion
value-free exercise 85 (Newton) 92
value-free scholarship 50 women’s lib 51
verbal strategy 158 women’s sentence theory 154
viewpoint: multiple 2 Women’s Time (Kristeva) 112–13
Villette (Brontë) 29, 30 Women’s writing: Jane Eyre, Shirley,
Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing Villette, Aurora Leigh 91
(Barrett) 16 Woolf, V. 1–18, 25, 39, 66, 154
visibility 131 Words (Sartre) 181, 182
voice 117; inexhaustible milk 112; working class 170, 171
and writing 112 works: great 77
Vološinov, V.N. 154 writing 105; deconstructive form 9;
vulgarization 36 feminine 106; and voice 112