489763

American Gynocriticism Author(s): Elaine Showalter Reviewed work(s): Source: American Literary History, Vol. 5, No.
1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 111-128 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489763 . Accessed: 04/02/2013 06:13
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American
Elaine Showalter
Gynocriticism
This trio of books marks the coming-of-age of American gynocriticism. Raising questions not only about periodization and professionalization, but also about genre, narrative form, racial and ethnic difference, literary influence, and aesthetic judgment, they join with the work of such critics as Nina Baym, Hazel Carby, Cathy Davidson, Josephine Donovan, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Mary Kelley, Annette Kolodny, Sharon O'Brien, David Reynolds, Sarah Way Sherman, Candace Waid, and Jean Fagan Yellin to set out the historiography and narratology of women's fiction in the US from 1850 to 1920. To have reached this stage represents a collective research enterprise of major dimensions. As Elizabeth Ammons notes, "American women writers have systematically been dismissed, scattered, ignored" (ix). Unlike Victorian literature, in which the outstanding canonical figures have always included a number of familiar and importantwomen, nineteenth-century American gynocriticism is not a field in which one can rehash a few well-known texts with a dash of Derrida and hope for a nouvelle critical cuisine. In the introduction to her anthology Provisions, Judith Fetterley describes her discovery as a graduate student of an "extraordinarily rich, diverse, and interesting body of prose literature written in the nineteenth century by American women" (1). She was eager to write about it but had to postpone criticism, for without good editions of the primary texts "there could be no community of readers, and without such a community there could be, as I saw it, no finally intelligent criticism" (1). By now, thanks to the dedication of Fetterley and such others as Joanne Dobson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Lawrence Buell, Carol Kessler, Jane Tompkins, and Sandra Zagarell, the good editions are available, and the work of interpretation and synthesis can be advanced. Indeed, these new critical books are all based on demanding primary reading and archival research. Ammons goes well beyond the usual canonical figures (Chopin, Cather, Wharton, Stein) to include little-known writers and
Conflicting Stories: American Women Writersat the Turn into the Twentieth Century By Elizabeth Ammons Oxford University Press, 1991. Doing Literary Business: American WomenWriters in the Nineteenth Century By Susan Coultrap-McQuin University of North Carolina Press, 1990. 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies By Susan K. Harris Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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texts-Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, Mary Austin, Edith Summers Kelley-in her project of "telling the story of women of color and white women together" (vii). Susan K. Harris has surveyed the comments on reading contained in nineteenth-century women's diaries, letters, andjournals; Susan Coultrap-McQuinhas examined women authors' correspondence with their publishers in 32 library collections. Together they demonstrate that, as Harris concludes, "American women's fiction has a shape, a history, a process of evolution that can be traced over time" (199). But much more than research has gone into the evolution of an American women's literary history. Thinking about women's writing in the US demands reconsideration not only of the reigning paradigms of American literature but also the dominant categories of feminist criticism. First of all, it demands attention to the specific historical and cultural contexts in which American women's writing developed, including its multiracial, regional, and ethnic elements. The American tradition of women's writing is quite different from its English and European counterparts, and we cannot simply transfer theories of "anxiety of authorship" or ecriturefeminine across national boundaries. In this country, women's writing and women's rights have always been strongly connected. The first great wave of American women's writing coincides with the beginning of the American women's movement in 1848 at Seneca Falls; the second takes place with the rise of the New Woman and the black woman intellectual during the Progressive Era. Indeed, as Ammons asserts, American "women artists as a group do not thrive when feminist political activism is in decline or nonexistent" (vii). In the twentieth century too, we see that a period of major innovation in women's literature accompanied the women's liberation movement and the feminist critical revolution. Second, while early American women writers express discomfort with fame and often stress spiritual or maternal motives for their work, conditions of the marketplace and cultural stereotypes may actually have been favorable to the woman writer. Fetterley hypothesizes that American men, rather than women, suffered from anxiety of authorship: "Mid-nineteenth-century American women writers were more comfortable with the idea of writing than were their male counterparts" (5). Not Hamilton, Stowe, and Cooke, but rather Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville saw writ-
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ing as incompatible with their sexual identities: "The American male who picked up the pen may well have felt contaminated by an instrument peculiarly female and consequently engaged in an act both eccentric and illegitimate" (6). A close study of the relationships between publishers and authors, and consideration of the economics of the literary marketplace, must be taken into account in any theoretical overview of women's literary attitudes. Third, serious consideration of women's writing alters the fundamental critical and historical paradigms of American literature. In view of women's fiction of domestic manners and social realism, the tradition can no longer be seen as "antisocial and antirealistic" (Ammons ix). Furthermore, as Fetterley notes, women writers' "commitment to realism is closely connected to the commitment to social change" (11). Feminism and abolitionism were often linked in nineteenth-century literary texts and served as motives for writing. Although, as Fetterley points out, women writers "produced no literary expression of feminism comparable to Uncle Tom's Cabin" (12), I would argue that the sense of American female entitlement and obligation to democratic ideals comes out strongly in works from Louisa May Alcott's Work (1872), which begins with its heroine's announcement of a new Declaration of Independence, to Joyce Carol Oates's A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), a postmodernist revision of both Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance and Alcott's Little Womenthat ends with a woman's campaign for the presidency. Overall, the reality of American women's writing is so dramatically different from the simplistic stereotypes with which it has been represented in literary history that unusually forceful and daring critical statements need to be made on its behalf. 1. Melville's Sister In particular, American gynocriticism has been haunted by the specter of canonical standing and aesthetic standards. Tompkins recalls that although she once lived a few blocks away from Stowe's house in Hartford, she never went to see it: "Neither I nor anyone I knew regarded Stowe as a serious writer"(Sensational 122). Fetterley writes movingly of her struggle to overcome a "long history of denigration and contempt" in carrying out research on nineteenth-
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century women's fiction. "Each day when I sat down to write," she recalls, "I had to summon up the energy and the strength to believe in the literatureof these women" (35). In her classic essay, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood," Baym argues that critical declarations about the essential "Americanness" of American literature have worked to exclude women from the canon. If the American hero is Adamic, alienated, antisocial, beset, conflicted, democratic, et cetera, then the woman author has no place in the scheme. "Her roles in the drama of creation are those allotted to her in a male melodrama:either she is to be silent, like nature,or she is the creator of conventional works, the spokesperson of society" (77). In short, Baym concludes in a famous phrase, the American woman writer "enteredliterary history as the enemy" (69). In American literary history, the symbolic place occupied by Shakespeare in the generic put-down of women's literary inadequacy (e.g., "Where is the female Shakespeare?") is usually occupied by Melville and specifically by Moby-Dick, often cited as the touchstone for women's failure in craft and scope. Considering that Melville was something of a critical late bloomer himself, the charge might seem ironic; on the other hand, from Margaret Fuller's plea in Woman in the Nineteenth Century ("Let women be sea captains if they will!") to Hemingway to Jaws, catching the big fish has always had patriarchal cachet. Feminist critics have worked through several stages in responding to these assumptions. Initially, Fetterley explains, she herself accepted the truism of women's inferiority to Melville but gave it a cultural amendment: "[N]o woman wrote Moby Dick because, since women in the nineteenth century did not go whaling, no woman had the experience necessary to write such a book" (28). Feminist historians, however, have been able to demonstrate that New England women did indeed often accompany their husbands on whaling voyages, and Fetterley thus revised her view in terms of feminist aesthetics: "[H]ad a woman gone whaling and decided to write about it, she would not in fact have written Moby Dick; she would have written a book about the experience of women on whalers and about what whaling meant from a woman's point of view" (28). Finally, there is the argument of mythic masculine identity: since women writers did not see themselves as "representative,universal, symbolic," or their bodies as capable of mythic metaphor, even if they had gone whaling, "they would not have seen
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themselves in the whale nor would they have imagined themselves as whale" (29). In general, American gynocriticism has moved away from the romantic feminism that calls for the coming of Melville's sister to a more complex engagement with the symbolic, linguistic, and professional aspects of American women's literature. Writers from Fuller to Alice Walker and Ursula K. Le Guin have envisaged the American Eve, torn between the Edenic mother's garden, the sanctuary of women's culture, and the authoritarianfather's library, the sanctuary of patriarchal learning and art. As Le Guin suggests in her parable of Adam and Eve, "She Unnames Them," women's writing should be rule breaking, playful, sensuous, anarchic; women should remake language and write in the Mother Tongue. Yet if women choose a literary career, they cannot afford to renounce tradition, the formal resources of language, the rules of the marketplace, the test of aesthetic standards.The metaphors of the matriarchaltradition, which were necessary to inspire scholars and critics working against the critical tide, can now be historicized themselves as the literaturebecomes established. 2. The "Scribbling Women" d mob Hawthorne's famous words regarding the "d of scribbling women," as Baym has observed, "constitute the threshold which all of us who work on women writers of the nineteenth century have been forced to cross in order to get to our subject" ("Rewriting"4). The threshold of damnation was first breached in the early 1970s, when Ann Douglas published two pioneering essays. Douglas was among the first feminist critics to bring high academic standardsto a field previously marked by shoddy scholarship, condescension, and stereotypical thinking. In these bold and elegant essays, she lays out the basic conceptual and historical frame for thinking about nineteenth-century American women's writing: that antebellum literature is marked by its public resistance to the category of art, while post-Civil War writing is much more aesthetically serious. In "The 'Scribbling Women' and Fanny Fern," Douglas argues that mid-nineteenth-century women writers protected themselves against charges of unwomanliness by claiming to write artlessly, as in Caroline Lee Hentz's declaration in Ernest Linwood (1856): "Book! Am I writing a book? No,
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indeed! This is only a record of my heart's life, written at random and carelessly thrown aside, sheet after sheet, sibylline leaves from the great book of fate" (7). Douglas analyzes the subterfuges of the sentimentalists who, through public statements about their literary motives, attempted to strip women's writing of its "aggressive content, until the woman writer seems practically anesthetized, or ratherhypnotized, responding only to the calls home and God, calls so close to her instinctive womanly nature that she hardly needs consciously to hear them" (8). To exemplify an exception to this rule, Douglas singles out the novelist Sara Willis Parton (Fanny Fern). Not only in her novel Ruth Hall but also in her dealings with her publishers and her public, Fern spoke of writing as a form of resistance for women imprisoned by their social and sexual roles. In language that anticipated the manifestos of Helene Cixous a century later, Fern urged her readers to seize the pen themselves: Look around, and see innumerable women, to whose barren and loveless lives this would be improvement be a safe outlet for thoughts and feelings that maybe the nearest friend you have has never dreamed had place in your heart and brain.... [I]t is not safe for the women of 1867 to shut down so much that cries out for sympathy and expression, because life is such a maelstrom of business or folly or both, that those to whom they have bound themselves, body and soul, recognize only the diary is found, when the hand that penned it shall be dust, with what amazement and remorse will many a husband, or father, exclaim, I never knew my wife, or my child, till this moment. (qtd. in Douglas, "Scribbling" 24) "The Literatureof Impoverishment"compares 10 antebellum sentimental writers to 10 local colorists of the post-Civil Warperiod and offers several importanthypotheses about the difference between their careers and their fiction. Douglas notes that the sentimentalists were actually much more professionalized and feminist than their public masks would suggest. Despite their "outwardly decorous lives and fairly conservative political stands," the mid-nineneeds of the former .... One of these days, when that and solace, and I say to them, write! . .. write! it will
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teenth-century writers were covertly ambitious and even entrepreneurial. Furthermore, their work was often realistic and sometimes "spoke directly to current social problems." Indeed, "the image of the sentimental heroine that dominated the works of the female writers of the first half of the nineteenth century became the facade, the armor under which the woman activist of the second half of the century was to battle for her rights" (10). The local colorists, however, "wanted recognition as writers because they were ... artists" (13). To Douglas, they seem alienated and embittered, unable and unwilling to find a place in their society. In this respect, she shares the thinking of her Harvardclassmate Gail Parker, whose important anthology of American women writers, The Oven Birds: American Womenon Womanhood, 1820-1920, argues that American feminism lost momentum in the 1890s, when it narrowed its focus to the vote. Women writers of the period, she maintains, were "suffering for want of heroines" (4). Similarly, Douglas foregrounds the thematic elements in post-Civil War women's fiction that stressed decline and despair. While Douglas's negative view of the post-Civil War artists has been challenged and substantially revised by other critics, her periodization and overall account of generational differences has been widely accepted. In her influential Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Womenin America, 1820-1870, Baym, an established critic of Hawthorne, also turns her lens on "the scribbling women" Hawthorne disdained, offering the neutral term "woman's fiction" instead of "sentimentalism" to describe their work. Baym set herself to reading a wide range of novels of the period. In an often-cited passage, she argues that "[w]omen authors tended not to think of themselves as artists or justify themselves in their language of art until the 1870s and after .... [Their work] did not make the sorts of claims on its readers that 'art' does-the dimensions of formal self-consciousness, attachment to or quarrel with a grand tradition, aesthetic seriousness, all are missing" (32). On the other hand, women novelists' repudiation of art reflected cultural attitudes toward woman as art. In antebellum thought, Tompkins points out in her edition of Susan Warner's best-seller The Wide, Wide World, women "were seen as instruments of spiritual and moral refinement, existing to ennoble and spiritualize men. Thus, they share with
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works of art the status of vehicle of inspiration, existing not as ends in themselves, but as elevating influences" (607). As we have had more access to the letters and journals of nineteenth-century women writers, however, and have been able to document the evolution of aesthetic consciousness, this view has been challenged and revised. In the texts she assembled for Provisions, Fetterley finds "a considerable degree of self-consciousness about writing and a serious, sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, engagement with the issues raised by the conjunction of woman and writer" (2). Through parody and satire of the feminine literary stereotype, for example, women writers like Caroline Kirklanddisplayed their ironic consciousness of the role assigned to them. "We shall take care to deal with the subject after a desultory, unsystematic, and feminine manner," writes Kirkland in "LiteraryWomen." "We repudiate learning; we disdain accuracy, we abjurelogic. We shall aim only at the pretty prattle which is conceded to our sex as a right, and admired as a charm" (qtd. in Fetterley 4). Elizabeth Stoddard, writing in 1854, complains about the low quality of American women's writing and laments that "[w]e have no Elizabeth Browning, Bronte, George Sand or Miss Bremer to offer to our enemies, the critics" (Buell and Zagarell 314). Moreover, research on the American literary marketplace has revealed a much more complex picture of women's literary professionalism than even Douglas could
have anticipated. Kelley's Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (1984)
is a rich composite study of the careers of several of the writers she calls "the literary domestics," including Warner, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Augusta Evans Wilson, Hentz, Mary Virginia Terhune, Stowe, Mary Jane Holmes, Maria
Cummins, and Parton. In Doing Literary Business, Coul-
trap-McQuin focuses on Stowe, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Mary Abigail Dodge, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, showing how midcentury author-publisher relationships were relatively congenial to women. As women writers were "ladies," so too their publishers regarded themselves as "gentlemen." Publishers valued "personal relationships, noncommercial aims, and moral guardianship," and thus the entrepreneurialside of women's writing was facilitated by business styles that did not require new or "unfeminine" skills (28).
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3. The Other Civil War d mob" In one sense it is clear that Hawthorne's "d a major force on the American literary scene. represented Yet for most of this century critics have labeled nineteenthcentury American women's writing "sentimental,"a term as derogatory in the context of critical evaluation as "scribbling" in the sphere of the marketplace. Along with the denigrating label has gone a sweeping account of the fiction as conformist, pious, conservative, and genteel. Before it could receive serious critical attention, this fiction needed a new and neutral terminology and a more useful and appropriate contextualization than the "American Renaissance" model of contestational masculine genius. Feminist efforts began by exposing the gender biases in the term "sentimental" and by making a strong case for sentimentalist strategies within nineteenth-century women's culture. Sentimentalism, Fetterley maintains, may well be "a code word for female subject and woman's point of view, and particularly for the expression of women's feelings" (25). Most powerfully, Tompkins celebrates Uncle Tom's Cabin as "the most dazzling exemplar" of the popular domestic novel, a genre that represented "a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view," a genre "remarkablefor its intellectual complexity, ambition, and resourcefulness," offering in some cases "a critique of American society far more devastating than any delivered by ... Hawthorne and Melville" (Sensational 124). In her analysis of Stowe, Tompkins argues that "the work of the sentimental writers is complex and significant in ways other than those that characterize the established masterpieces." Readers, she suggests, could learn to see the sentimental novel "as a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory, that both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time" (Sensational 126). With the ambition and resourcefulness of her own essay, Tompkins cleared the decks of much that had been tentative, apologetic, defensive, or ironic in feminist criticism of the American women's novel. Her confident stance enabled other critics to take a positive approach to the texts and to analyze them from a number of theoretical angles. American gynocriticism also received an impetus from New Historicism, especially from its emphasis on internal conflict and contradiction. American New Historicism,
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Philip Fisher notes, "has its basis in the representational situation ... of civil war. To see the central episode of American history as the Civil Waris to bring to the fore the power of rhetoric, incomplete dominance of representation, and the borrowing or fusing of successful formulas of representation" (xv). Studies of the rise of the American novel by scholars like Davidson and Reynolds emphasize the diversity of fictional modes, the range of heroines produced by nineteenth-century women writers, and their parallels in novels by men. Reynolds suggests that we speak not of sentimentalism but rather of an antebellum literature in which women worked in a number of literary genres. Harris also wants to establish a sophisticated narrative terminology for antebellum American women's fiction. In a recent essay, she sets out nine evaluative questions critics might address to nineteenth-century women's writing, questions ranging from the political to the linguistic and intertextual. Her book applies these questions to a group of texts ranging from "the early didactic novel" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the fiction of the 1870s and 1880s. Didactic novels like Charlotte Temple,she explains, celebrate "obedience to legitimate external authority, female passivity, and self-denial" and share formal properties: "engaging narrators, exemplary characters, a high incidence of doubling and other repetitions, a consistently admonitory tone, and a reluctance to venture into skeptical inquiry" (59). At midcentury, the "exploratory novel" "valorized women's experience, encouraged readers to consider alternative possibilities, and ultimately altered the social framework within which women's ambitions could be received" (210). While these novels often feature sentimental prefaces and conventional endings, Harris sees subversive and disruptive elements in their middles, which "establish an area of female independence, competence, emotional complexity, and intellectual acumen that sets the stage, whether the authorintended it or not, for other women to 'read' a far different message than the one the novels overtly profess" (10). In close readings of St. Elmo, Queechy, Ruth Hall, The Deserted Wife, and The Morgesons, Harris examines the longing for education, interest in linguistic experimentation, and use of symbolic domestic architecture that she sees as characteristics of exploratory fiction between 1850 and 1870. Critics agree that the Civil Warwas a pivotal episode in the history of American women's writing. Fetterley notes
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that half the fictional material in her anthology comes from the period 1860 to 1865; Reynolds finds the Civil Warperiod so rich in important work by women that he calls the 10 years between 1855 and 1865 "the American Women's Renaissance." Major changes took place in the literary marketplace in the 1870s and 1880s. After the Civil War,CoultrapMcQuin explains, the "Gentlemen Publishers" were driven out by businessmen, indifferent to "feminine" values and more interested in impersonal profits. In the realm of fiction, what Harris calls "later didactic novels" like Phelps's The Story of Avis (1872) used some of the earlier techniques to present feminist messages about self-fulfillment and work. These were transitional years, during which short story writers and local colorists were experimenting with the techniques that came to full flower at the turn of the century; the ethnographic distancing of local color, Sandra Gilbert has suggested, may indeed have provided women writers with a strategy for dealing with hitherto forbidden subject matter. In Conflicting Stories, Ammons takes up the gynocritical narrativefrom 1890 to 1920, the most self-conscious period in the formation of an American feminine aesthetic. Again, a resurgence in feminist activism and a liberal political climate led to an explosive phase in women's writing. A dominant thesis of Ammons's book is "the enabling relationship between politics and art-the connection between social and political struggle and the emergence of a sophisticated body of literature, much of it consciously political, by a group of people historically assigned inferior status in the culture" (vii). Ammons writes about 17 women whose literary coming-of-age took place during the Progressive Era, the suffrage period, and what Carby calls "the woman's era" of black literature. While the previous generation solved the conflict between art and the domestic ideal by rejecting the role of artist, the New Woman chose art over maternity and domesticity. This choice, Ammons points out, left them members neither of their mothers' world, at the one extreme, nor of that of the privileged white male artist" (10). In another sense, identifying with the artist often meant alienation from the woman. Many women in this generation did not wish to be identified as woman writers, for "ironically[,] being a successful, serious woman writer often meant saying that one was not a woman writer or a woman writer
"emotionally stranded between worlds .... They were full
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of color-that gender or gender and race (even as one wrote almost obsessively about nothing else) did not operate as partof the definition of who one was" (11). As Catherwrites in 1897, "I have not a great deal of faith in women in literature. As a rule if I see the announcement of a new book by a woman, I-well, I take one by a man instead" (qtd. in Ammons 127). The ambition to create high art is the defining feature of this period, and the woman artist-painter, writer, musician, singer, actress, dancer, sculptor-frequently appears as heroine and protagonist. Overt concerns with narrativeform come into the picture as well as an interest in feminist aesthetics. Sarah Orne Jewett is one of the many writers who expresses dismay about her inability to handle conventional plot: "It seems to me I can furnish the theatre, and show you the actors, and the scenery, and the audience, but there never is any play!" she writes in 1873 (qtd. in Ammons 51). The problem of plotting is frequently inscribed in late-nineteenth-century women's stories such as Constance Fenimore Woolson's "Miss Grief' and Chopin's "Elizabeth Stock's One Story," where male editors revise, appropriate, and normalize women's eccentric texts. Conventional Western narrative structures, Ammons maintains, are not gender free; they privilege linear, climactic, asymmetric stories that nection or interdependence"(51). While traditional narrative dynamics led to problems for women writers, they were also developing their own modes. Ammons describes the shape of Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs as nuclear rather than linear, a concentric rather than a climactic work. Women writers often chose to construct narratives, she suggests, that were weblike, circular and expanding, emphasizing process and repetition, oscillation and resolution. These are the structural qualities that make the quilt metaphor such a useful trope for understanding American women's narrative forms.1 Ammons stresses the aesthetic ratherthan the biological or essentialist motives of these narrative decisions. Fetterley too maintains that nineteenth-century women writers did their best work in fictional genres other than the novel, such as short stories, essays, and sketches. As the "big" form, the novel carried the psychic and aesthetic freight of the male literary tradition. It forced women to come up with conventional plots and endings that violated their personal experience
emphasize "separation and aggression . . . rather than con-
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and demanded a commitment of time many could not manage. Problems of narrative form and genre were even more acute for black women writers, who began to publish in substantial numbers in the 1890s, and who had to deal with literary as well as social racism. Frances E. W. Harper's lola Leroy (1892) incorporates elements of the sentimental novel along with several other forms: melodrama, the slave narrative, journalism, realism. Dunbar-Nelson had difficulties with conventional plot but used the open-ended figure of Carnival to connect her stories of New Orleans. As Audre Lorde first pointed out, the privacy and financial security implied by Virginia Woolf's metaphor for women's writing-a room of one's own-has represented exceptional privilege to the black woman writer. African-American women have written more poetry than fiction because there are "enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working-class, and colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of
time" (421).2
4. American Persephones Ammons sees the end of the nineteenth century as a symbolic moment of rupture with the mother for American women writers and a moment of tentative, experimental alliance with the masculine world of twentieth-century modernist aesthetics. In the Demeter-Persephone myth that American gynocriticism has found pervasive in post-Civil War writing, the daughter's identity is split between the world of the mother and the dark underworld ruled by a sexually powerful male. As Marianne Hirsch observes, "Persephone literally enacts the 'bi-sexual oscillation' of the Freudian female plot" (103). The myth has many versions, as Ammons notes: Some versions ... stress masculine violence and brutality as the cause of the daughter's separation from the mother. They show Persephone raped and forcibly dragged off to the male-dominant world where she spends the winter of each year. Others emphasize the
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erotic appeal of the world to which she goes. Persephone falls in love with Pluto and comes within only a few pomegranate seeds of total and permanent exile from Demeter before realizing how profoundly she needs to stay connected to her mother. (44) The split can be seen as a division between the homosocial and heterosexual; the matriarchal linguistic wild zone and the patriarchal symbolic; the amateur and the professional; the scribbling woman and the female author. To merge, reconcile, and connect these two opposing zones was the task of the fin de siecle American woman writer. Sherman describes the quest for the goddess that influenced Annie Fields's poem "The Return of Persephone" (1880) and the stories of Jewett. Waid describes Wharton's "identification with the daughter who chooses to leave the world of the mother and dwell in the underworld of experience" (3). Writing in her unpublished autobiography,Wharton used the myth of Persephone to explain her fascination with writing. Words, she recalled, were "almost tangible presences.... And, like the Erlk6nig's daughters, they sang to me so bewitchingly that they almost lured me from the wholesome noonday air of childhood into some strange supernatural region, where the normal pleasures of my age seemed as insipid as the fruits of the earth to Persephone after she had eaten of the pomegranate seed" (qtd. in Waid 198-99). For Wharton, "eat[ing] of the pomegranate seed" represented not only tasting forbidden fruit but also an exile from the Mother Country and an initiation into a masculine world of art, experience, language, and literary traditionthat separated her from her mother and from her American female literary precursors. According to Waid, Persephone is Wharton's "figure for the woman writer who dwells in the underworld among the supernatural fruit of letters and books. In Wharton's view of the myth, Persephone consciously chooses this world over the noonday fertility and nameless repetition of her mother's world, the pastoral earth of Demeter" (199). The choice made by Wharton and Cather, Donovan concludes, signaled the end of a matriarchalphase in American women's writing and the move into a new technological century; but these writers then returned to reintegrate the myth of Demeter into their vision. Donovan sees the message of fin de siecle women's texts as synthesis:
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Insofar as language and literature are products of a patriarchalcivilization, all women writers are to a greater or lesser extent Persephones who must consume the pomegranate seed in order to engage in literary production .... [T]o be successful writers they must learn to negotiate ... between two realms; they must learn two languages. If they remain in the preliterate world of silence, their production is absent, nonexistent, inaudible, and invisible. But if they lose touch with their mothers' gardens, they risk losing the emotional integrity that is the source of artistic inspiration. (165-66) Where do we go from here? One area that remains fragmented and implicit is British literary influence. Baym argues that woman's fiction "developed indigenously in America, and showed itself relatively impermeable to the influence of the major women writers in England during the Victorian age. . . . Signs of George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte can be discerned in writing of the 1860s, but not before" (Woman'sFiction 29-30). I think this view now needs to be revised. Clearly not only the novels but the biographies of the Brontes, Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning have played a central role in the formation of a literary identity for American women. Harris quotes an 1848 letter from Lydia Maria Child about Jane Eyre-"I sat up all night long to finish it" (19th 18). The Alcott sisters thought of themselves as American versions of the Brontes, and Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte was avidly read by Americans like Celia Thaxter, who responds to a friend: "To think of your asking such a question as 'Do I care about Charlotte Bronte' ! As if I did not care everything I am capable of caring for anything! As if Levi and I hadn't read her books with rapture,and hadn't looked forward to the publishing of Mrs. Gaskell's book about her as one of the most interesting things that could happen! As if we didn't lament her loss to the world every year of our lives!" (qtd. in Harris, 19th 26). Mary Virginia Terhune spoke for many American women writers when she declared that "since my early childhood, [Charlotte] Bronte has been more to me than any other writer, living or dead" (qtd. in Kelley 121). Aurora Leigh and Middlemarch are the pre-texts of The Story of Avis, and there are many tributes to Eliot like Constance Fenimore Woolson's: "A myriad women light have seen, / And
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It may be that the large historical projects in American literature, which have attempted to integrate women's writing into the story, have superseded the effort to write women's literary history on its own terms, but until we have attempted to work out the large internal patterns, their integration into a larger fabric seems premature.
courage taken, because thou hast been!" ("To George Eliot"). Discussions of the web structurein nineteenth-century American women's writing would gain from comparison to Eliot's metaphors of the communal web in Middlemarch. Furthermore, the influence of male British and European writers on nineteenth-century American women is still dismally neglected. We need studies of the influence of Bunyan and Dickens on Alcott; of Maupassant on Chopin; of Flaubert on Jewett. Beyond all, we need a comprehensive history of American women's writing from the colonial period to the present. No one has written such a study, not even a bad one; and, following the model Ammons and Baym have provided, it is surely time for a full synthesis. It may be that the large historical projects in American literature, which have attempted to integrate women's writing into the story, have superseded the effort to write women's literary history on its own terms, but until we have attemptedto work out the large internal patterns, their integration into a larger fabric seems premature. Yet all who have engaged in the enterprise thus far can take pride not only in the success of American gynocriticism but in its process. Leaders in this field have been exemplary in their understandingthat scholarly progress is cumulative; that new insights are often the result of new paradigms, unavailable to even the most brilliant and dedicated thinkers of previous decades; and that it is more productive to look at what work contributes, and what it leaves open, than to pounce triumphantly on where it has "failed"-that is, neglected to endorse the reviewer's own pet theory. In a remarkable act of self-criticism in her book West of Everything, Tompkins has even analyzed the competitive pleasure she took a decade ago in writing an essay that contained a withering "frontal attack" on another feminist scholar, an essay grounded in the self-righteous violence that permeates contemporary academic conferences and the pages of professional journals. Despite its pious rhetoric of tolerance, feminist criticism has been no better than any other critical mode in this regard. Tompkins describes a paradigmatic conference at which the audience laughed knowingly as one woman gave a witty paper demolishing another woman's book, "pulling with the speaker, seeing her victim in the same way she does, as the enemy, as someone whose example should be held up to scorn because her work is pernicious and damaging to the cause" (229-30). Such make-my-
127
day gunslinging has been spuriously legitimated within feminist criticism as healthy intellectual debate, but its effects have ratherbeen to debase and corruptthe intellectual ideals of generosity, collaboration, and constructiveness with which the feminist enterprise began. Now that feminist criticism once again has real and vicious enemies savaging it from the outside, there may be a temporary truce within. However, as the title of its major journal, Legacy, implies, the critical conventions of American gynocriticism have tended to reinforce acknowledgment and connection ratherthan sniping, condemnation, and matricidal acting out. In reviewing the learned and provocative books the field has produced, one should also acknowledge that it has both fulfilled its promise and kept its faith. Notes
1. See, for example, "Common Threads,"in Showalter.
2. Hortense Spillers and Barbara Christian, among others, have repeated this metaphor.See Spillers 250; and Christian 44.
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Baym, Nina. "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors." American Quarterly 33 (1981): 123-39. Rpt. in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 63-80. ."Rewriting the Scribbling Women." Legacy 2 (1985): 3-12. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978. Buell, Lawrence, and Sandra Zagarell, eds. The Morgesons and Other Writings, Published and Unpublished. By Elizabeth Stoddard. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1984. Christian, Barbara. "The Highs and the Lows of Black Feminist Criticism." Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. 44-51. Donovan, Josephine. After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989. Douglas, Ann. "The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local Colorists in America 18651914." Women'sStudies 1 (1972): 3-45.
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American Gynocriticism Author(s): Elaine Showalter Reviewed work(s): Source: American Literary History, Vol. 5, No.

. "The 'Scribbling Women' and Fanny Fern: Why Women

(1971): 3-24. Fetterley, Judith, ed. Provisions: A

can Women.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Knopf, 1988. Sherman, Sarah Way. Sarah Orne

sentations. RepresentationsBooks 5. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

Hanover: UP of New England, 1989.

(1991): 43-61. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/

ington: Indiana UP, 1989.

New York: Oxford UP, 1984. Kirkland, Caroline. "Literary

York:Oxford UP, 1985.

Oxford UP, 1992.

Le Guin, Ursula K. "She Unnames Them." New Yorker21 Jan. 1985.

World. By Susan Warner. New York:Feminist, 1987.

manburg,NY: Crossing, 1984.

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