Feminism by Elaine Showalter:

[Elaine Showalter (b. 1941). Along with Nina Bayms, Womans Fiction, (1978), Showalters The
New Feminist Criticism, (1985) and Speaking of Gender (1989) have argued for, a specifically,
female framework for the analysis of womens literature. Her book, A Literature of Their Own
(1977), quickly established itself as an authoritative study of its subject and a standard text book in
the rapidly burgeoning field of womens studies. Showalters work has pioneered frame work on
creating a woman-centered literary history as well.]

Introduction:
Feminist literary criticism is essentially linked to the political movement for the sexes and an
end to discrimination against women. Feminist criticism seeks to uncover the ideology of
patriarchal society in works of art. It pleads for the representations of women and argues that
these representations mask socio-political oppression of the category of women, by justifying
these oppressions and naturalizing them. For feminist, the text is a battle ground where actual
power relations between men and women are played out.
Origins and Historical Background:
Writers like Marry Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, (1792), male
authors like J. S. Mill in The Subjection of Women, (1869), and Friedrich Engels in The Origin
of the Family, (1884), wrote of the need to rethink the role of women and social oppression
against them.
In the early 20th century, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf and later Simone de Beauvoir have
written on the gender questions from the perspective of women and oriented women towards
issues like education, marriage, economics, sex and morals.
With 1960s the womens movement became a major political force, while the movement took
various issues for the gender debate, including science, politics, economics, cultures, and
epistemology. Literary critics influenced by the movement undertook a whole new project. This
included re-reading the cannons on English literature to expose the patriarchal ideology that
informed the construction of the cannon in the first place, and which made male centered writing
possible. The influences were many; philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, Marxists and
others. Feminist thinkers borrowed and adapted numerous, modes of critical thoughts to frame
new theoretical positions.

Feminist Criticism in Wilderness:

In Feminist Criticism in Wilderness, first published in Critical Inquiry, in 1981, she finds
feminist criticism no more unified, but more adventurous in assimilating and engaging with
theory;
it now appears that what looked like a
theoretical impasse was actually an evolutionary

phase.
She sub-divides her essay into six sub-divisions, and each division has subtitles also. In these,
six divisions she discussed, at length, the various aspects of women writing. They are as follows:

Pluralism and the Feminist Critique:

Showalter begins with quoting Louise Bogans Women, which suggests the very title of the
essay; lines read thus,
Women have no wilderness in them, they are
provident instead, content in the tight hot cell of
their hearts, to eat dusty bread.
Further she says, referring to Arnold that literary critics might perish in the wilderness before
they reached the promised land of disinterestedness. According to her, feminist literary critics are
still wandering in the wilderness. Here, she mentions Geoffrey Hartmans, Criticism in the
Wilderness, (1980), where no women critics are discussed, but Hartman does describe a
feminine spirit called, the muse of criticism. Moreover, she suggests that the wilderness of
theory lies between feminist ideology and the liberal ideal of disinterestedness. Until very
recently she says:
feminist criticism has not had a theoretical
basis; it has been an empirical orphan in the
theoretical storm.
Showalter argues with Koloduys point of view that feminist criticism must altogether abandon
its hope
of establishing some basic conceptual
model.
Showalter avers that if women critics see their critical job as interpretation and reinterpretation,
they must be content with pluralism as their critical stance. But if they wish to ask questions
about the process and the contexts of writing, if they genuinely wish to define themselves to the
uninitiated, they cannot rule out the prospect of theoretical consensus at this early stage.
She concludes the first portion with assumption that, feminist criticism must find its own
subject, its own system and its own voice.
Defining the Feminine Gyno-critics:

Showalter believes that Feminist Criticism has gradually shifted its centre from revisionary
reading to a sustained investigation of literature by women. Here, calling for new models based
on the womens experience rather than a blind addiction to and adaptation of masculine theories
and models. Showalter launched the search for gynocritics. Gyno-criticism should, in
Showalters descriptions, look at
the history, style, themes, genres, and
structures of writing by women; the
psychodynamics of female creativity
She argues that it is this kind of criticism that reinforces patriarchal structures of powers. The
1970s have been marked by a shift of critical attention from such evidently patriarchal and
androtexts to gynotexts (i.e. text by women).
Womens Writing and Womens Body:
more body, hence, more writing.

Cixous.

Showalter asserts that feminist criticism which itself tries to be biological to write from the
critics body has been intimate, confessional, often innovative in style and form.
Further, she states that the process of literary creation is analogically much more similar to
gestation, labour and delivery that it is to insemination. Here, Showalter radically asks:
If to write is metaphorically to give birth from
what organ can males generate texts?
However, she concludes this portion of the essay by quoting Millers words, who sought the
difference of womens literary practice in,
the body of her writing and not in the writing
of her body

Womens Language:
Showalter, here puts linguistic and textual theories of womans writing asking, whether man and
women use language differently? Whether sex differences in language use can be theorized in
terms of biology, socialization or culture? Whether women can create new language of their own,
and whether speaking, reading and writing are all gender marked?
On the one hand, Nelly Furman explains that:
It is through the medium of language that we
define and categorize areas of difference and

similarity.
On the other hand, Annie Leclere in Parole de Femme, calls on women,
to invent a language that is not oppressive, a
language that doesnt leave speechless but that
loosens the tongue.
Rather than wishing to limit womens linguistic range Showalter says that feminist critics must
fight to open and extend it. She concludes with saying that womens literature is still haunted by
ghosts of repressed language and until those ghosts would be exorcised it ought not to be the
language on which feminist critics base their theory of difference.
Womens Psyche:
Psychoanalytically oriented feminist criticism locketed the difference of womens writing in the
authors psyche and in the relation of gender to the creative process.
She suggests that in psychoanalytic terms lack has traditionally been associated with the
feminine, although Lac(k)nian critics can now make their statements linguistically. In Gilberts
and Gubars view, the nature and difference of womens writing lies in its troubled and even
tormented relationship to female identity; this woman writer experiences her own gender as,
a painful obstacle or even a debilitating
inadequacy.
On the one hand, Freud maintained that the unsatisfied dreams and desires of womens are
chiefly erotic; these are the desires that shape the plots of womens fictions in the contrast, the
dominant fantasies behind mens plots are egoistic as well as erotic.
On the other hand, referring to Nancy Chodorow, Showalter says that child develops core
gender identity concomitantly with differentiation but the process is not the same for boys and
girls. A boy must learn his gender identity negatively as being not female, and this difference
requires continual reinforcement. In contrast, a girl is core gender identity is positive and built
upon sameness, continuity and identification with the mother.
Showalter suggests that to consider all these issues, feminist critic must go beyond
psychoanalysis to a more flexible and comprehensive model of women writing, which places it
in the maximum contexts of culture.

Womens Culture:
I consider womens literature as a specific
category, not because of biology, but because it
is, in a sense, the literature of the colonized.
- Christiane Rocheford.

A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers;
class, race, nationality and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless,
womens culture forms a collective experience within a cultural whole: an experience that binds
women writers to each other over time and space. It is in the emphasis on the binding force of
womens culture that this approach defers from Marxists theories of cultural hegemony.
Gerda Lerner explains the importance of examining womens experiences in its own terms:
Women have been left of history not because of
the evil conspiracies of man in general or male
historians in particular but because we have
considered history only in male centered terms.
Further, Lerner raises the central question what would history be like if it was seen through
the eyes of women and which Showalter redefines womens:
activities and goals from a woman centered
point of view The term implies an assertation
of quality and an awareness of sisterhood, the
communality of women.

Summing Up:
Showalter sums up her essay with humble confession that the Promised Land that a few years
ago feminist critics were finding in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would
be sexless and equal, like angels; feminist critics may never reach the Promised Land at all. It is
because feminist critics misperceived their destination, she realizes that the land promised to
them is
not the serenely undifferentiated,
universality of texts, but tumultuous and
intriguing wilderness of difference itself.