This was composed in 2016.
FEMINISM
Elaine Showalter
Toril Moi's critique of 'A Literature Of Their Own' and Showalter's response to this critique.
-Venus Anand
Elaine Showalter is an American feminist, literary critic and a person who also writes on social and cultural issues. She is one of the founders of Gynocritics and feminist literary criticism in United States academia. She is famous for her book named A Literature of their Own. Whereas, Toril Moi is an English Literature and Philosophy professor at Duke University. She also had been a lecturer at Oxford University. [I intend to show the] critique made by Toril Moi on ' A Literature of their own ' and Showalter's response to the critique. For this, I'll also provide a short summary of Showalter's work and then give a detailed conclusion at the end.
In 'A Literature of Their Own', first published in 1978, Elaine Showalter shows how women's literature has evolved, starting from the Victorian period to modern writing. She breaks down the movement into three stages - First, The Feminine - a period beginning with the use of the male pseudonym in the 1840s until 1880 with George Eliot's death; Second, The Feminist - from 1880 till the winning of the vote in 1920; and Third, The Female - from 1920 till the present-day.
Toril Moi attacked Showalter's 'A literature of their own' in her famous book Textual/Sexual Politics in 1985. She accused Showalter of having a limited, essentialist view of women. Moi particularly criticized Showalter's ideas regarding the Female phase, and its notions of a woman's singular autonomy and necessary search inward for a female identity. In a predominantly poststructuralist era which proposes that meaning is contextual and historical, and that identity is socially and linguistically constructed, Moi claimed that there is no fundamental female self. According to Moi, the problem of equality in literary theory does not lie in the fact that the literary canon is fundamentally male and unrepresentative of female tradition, rather the problem lies in the fact that a canon exists at all. Moi argues that a feminine literary canon would be no less oppressive than the male canon because it would necessarily represent a particular socio demographic class of woman; it could not possibly represent all women because female tradition is drastically different depending on class, ethnicity, social values, sexuality, etc. A female consciousness cannot exist for the same reasons. Moi objects to what she sees as an essentialist position – that is, she objects to any determination of identity based on gender.
Though Moi's basic attack is on the alleged theoretical incoherence in Showalter's work. In her book, Moi uses Showalter's work to show how inadequate is the Anglo-American feminist criticism. The central issue of Moi's argument against Showalter is that her theoretical framework is never made explicit. However the implicit theoretical stream that can be sensed in Showalter's work is that "a text reflects a writer's experience and that the more genuine the experience is felt by the reader the more worth the text". Moi also feels that in Showalter's book there is a belief that though implicitly but strongly favors the kind of a writing that is commonly known as bourgeoisie realism. It is important to comprehend that realism was a literary trend in the Victorian period and was replaced by more decentered kind of writing that became prevalent during twentieth century modernism. Feminist form of writing that developed in the twentieth century therefore used the modernist decentered of kind writing and not the Victorian reclaims. Now if Showalter indeed prefers realism of nineteenth century over modernistic kind of writing the by default she becomes a critic of modern feminist writings and that is what Moi's charge against Showalter is. Moi says "there is detectable within her literary criticism a strong unquestionable belief in values not of proletarian humanism but of traditional bourgeois humanism of liberalistic kind". Moi being influenced by French theory and criticism does not believe in the traditional form of aestheticism and sense of unity that was shattered and replaced in the post modernistic literary scene. Toril Moi, in her book, reiterates that the main flaw of Showalter's book lies in the fact that it implicitly assumes a relationship between reality and literature; literary evaluation and feminist criticism; theory and politics. For Moi, the most sophisticated and far reaching for, of feminist analysis is that of the poststructuralist theory of French feminism. For it does not rely on biological essentialism and therefore tries to deconstruct the accepted notion of opposition between masculinity and femininity. Showalter in her essay, Twenty years on, claims that for Moi the most important theoretical questions are philosophical in nature. According to Showalter, Moi could not get the real theoretical assumptions of her text. She maintains that real theoretical assumptions of her text were derived from a very different approach to literature, gender, canon, and reality. The approach that she took and still takes towards literature and canon and gender was that of historical and cultural in nature.
Moi attacks Showalter on the basis of her notion of literary canon and history. She accused that work like Showalter's attempt "to create separate canon of women's writing, not to abolish all canons." Moi does not favors a literary canon of women's writing for she believes that a canon of women's work will be no less oppressive than a male literary canon. Yet, Showalter quotes Moi claiming that an attempt to abolish literary canon is a gesture of hollow rhetorical grandiosity - “to be against power is not to abolish it in a fine, post-1968 libertarian gesture but to hand it over to somebody else.” Though she clarifies that Moi says this in a different context. Showalter does not believe that literary canon to be a conspiracy against the minority instead she thinks it is a process that is controlled and determined by a large cultural network.
In conclusion, It appears that the point of conflict between the two critics and theorist resides in the fact that they perceive women's writing from two different perspectives. Moi looks at it from the poststructuralist ideas of feminism while Showalter looks at the women's writing from the historical and cultural perspective. Showalter is searching for new models based on the woman's experiences. She suggests that we should look at the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women, the psychodynamics of female creativity and other such aspects. She analyses two major problems faced by women writers in the nineteenth century. One, the male literary establishments decided the themes for their writings. These themes were usually related to love and domesticity. Two, and then the same establishments criticised women for writing about only such things and called their work inconsequential. They saw the writers first as women and then as artists.
REVIEW-
"Ought to be required reading for anyone who cares about women or the history of the novel. [This book] is a rare thing: a book of literary criticism that illuminates our lives."--Erica Jong, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
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