FEMINIST CRITICISM

FEMINIST CRITICISM

F
F
eminist criticism is not a uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon. It has
antecedents going all the way back to ancient Greece, in the work of Sappho and
arguably in Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, which depicts women as taking over
the treasury in the Acropolis, a female chorus as physically and intellectually superior
to the male chorus, and the use of sexuality as a weapon in an endeavor to put an end
to the distinctly masculine project of the Peloponnesian War. Feminism also surfaces
in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who blatantly values “experience” over authority and was
more than a match for each of her five husbands. In the Middle Ages, Christine de
Pisan had the courage to enter into a debate with the predominant male critics of her
day. During the Renaissance a number of women poets such as Catherine Des Roches
emerged in France and England. In the seventeenth century, writers such as Aphra
Behn and Anne Bradstreet were pioneers in gaining access to the literary profession.
After the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft argued that the ideals of the Revolution
and Enlightenment should be extended to women, primarily through access to
education. And the nineteenth century witnessed the flowering of numerous major
female literary figures in both Europe and America, ranging from Mme. de Staël, the
Brontës, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Margaret Fuller
and Emily Dickinson. Modernist female writers included Hilda Doolittle (H. D.),
Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.

For most of this long history women were not only deprived of education and
financial independence, they also had to struggle against a male ideology condemning
them to virtual silence and obedience, as well as a male literary establishment that
poured scorn on their literary endeavors. Indeed, the depiction of women in male
literature – as angels, goddesses, whores, obedient wives, and mother figures – was an
integral means of perpetuating these ideologies of gender. It was only with women’s
struggles in the twentieth century for political rights that feminist criticism arose in any
systematic way. Since the early twentieth century feminist criticism has grown to
encompass a vast series of concerns: a rewriting of literary history so as to include the
contributions of women; the tracing of a female literary tradition; theories of sexuality
and sexual difference, drawing on psychoanalysis, Marxism, and the social sciences; the


part viii: the twentieth century

representation of women in male literature; the role of gender in both literary creation
and literary criticism (as studied in so-called “gynocriticism”); the connection between
gender and various aspects of literary form, such as genre and meter (it is clear, for
example, that certain genres such as epic embody masculine values of heroism, war,
and adventure, while the lyric has sometimes been seen as feminine, expressing private
emotion); above all, feminist critics have displayed a persistent concern with both
experience and language: is there a specifically female experience that has been communicated
by women writers? And how do women confront the task of being historically
coerced into using a language dominated by male concepts and values? Some
feminists have urged the need for a female language, while others have advocated
appropriating and modifying the inherited language of the male oppressor.

The significance of language rests ultimately on its expression of male ways of thinking
that go all the way back to Aristotle: the laws of logic, beginning with the law of
identity, as well as the Aristotelian categories divide up the world into strictly demarcated
entities. These binary oppositions, as many modern theorists have argued, are
coercive: for example, according to Aristotle’s laws, either one is a man or one is a
woman; a person is either black or white, either master or slave. Feminists have often
rejected these divisive ways of viewing the world, stressing instead the various shades
between female and male, between black and white, and indeed urging a vision of
unity rather than opposition. In this process, such categories are recognized to be
founded on no essence or natural distinctions, but are viewed as cultural and ideological
constructions. Hence, another fundamental feminist concern has been the rejection
of “theory” as such, since in its very nature it houses these masculine presuppositions.
Feminism thus advocates a principled recalcitrance to definition, a conceptual fluidity
and openness which laughs in the face of tyrannizing attempts to fix it as just one more
category to be subsumed by the vast historical catalogue of male-generated concepts.

Indeed, one of the invaluable accomplishments of feminism has been utterly to
reject the notions of objectivity and neutrality; feminists have pioneered a new honesty
in acknowledging that they write from subjective positions informed by specific circumstances.
This position rests largely on feminists’ acknowledgment that thought is not
somehow a disembodied and abstract process, but is intimately governed by the nature
and situation of the body in place and time. The “body” has become a powerful
metaphor of such specificity and concreteness, which rejects the male Cartesian tradition
that thinking can somehow occur on a plane of disembodied universality. The
body that I inhabit will shape my thinking at the profoundest levels: if my body
happened to be born into a rich family with political ties, my political, religious, and
social affiliations will inevitably reflect this. Whether my body is male or female will
initially determine my thought and experience at a far deeper level than which books I
read. Notwithstanding these insights of feminism, the days are still not past in which
high school students are forbidden to use the word “I” in their compositions, effectively
perpetuating the pretense and self-delusion of objectivity.

It is clear, also, that feminism has potential areas of overlap with certain theories
such as deconstruction and Marxism, as well as with certain philosophers such as
Hegel, who opposed traditional logic, and Schopenhauer and Bergson, who recognized
the subjection of reason to bodily needs, and with poetic visions such as those enshrined


feminist criticism

in French symbolism and modernism (notwithstanding the often misogynistic leanings
of male figures in these movements). Having said all of this, it should be remembered
that feminism is not comprised of any one movement or set of values; it has
been broadly international in scope and its disposition is dictated by many local as well
as general factors. For example, writers from Arab traditions such as Fatima Mernissi
and Leila Ahmed have attempted to articulate a feminist vision distinctly marked by
their specific cultural concerns; the same is true of African-American feminists such as
Alice Walker and feminists of Asian heritage such as Gayatri Spivak. What follows is a
brief account of feminism in French, American, and British traditions. Two of the
landmark works of feminism in the early twentieth century, whose influence was disseminated
through all three of these traditions, were Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s
Own (1929) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), which will receive
detailed treatment below.

French Feminism

The impetus for much modern French feminism was drawn from the revolutionary
atmosphere of May 1968 which saw massive unrest on the part of students and workers.
In that atmosphere, an integral component of political revolution was seen as the
transformation of signifying practices and conceptions of subjectivity, based on a radical
understanding of the power of language. Drawing heavily on the ideas of Jacques
Lacan and Jacques Derrida (which they often modified against the grain of these
thinkers), feminists such as Annie Leclerc, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Luce
Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous variously participated in advancing a notion of l’écriture
féminine, a feminine writing that would issue from the unconscious, the body, from a
radically reconceived subjectivity, in an endeavor to circumvent what they held to be
phallocentric discourse.

For Kristeva, such language came from a pre-Oedipal state, from the realm of the
“semiotic,” prior to the process of cultural gender formation. She was aware, however,
that reliance solely on this “maternal” language would entail the risk of political
marginalization. Indeed, Luce Irigaray advocates undermining patriarchal discourse
from within, a strategy she pursues in her readings of several discourses from Plato
through Freud and Marx to Lacan. She does, however, indicate that a feminine language
would be more diffuse, like her sexuality, and less rigidly categorizing than male discourse.
Hélène Cixous also sees a “solidarity” between logocentrism and phallocentrism
(where the phallus is a signifier, a metaphor of male power and dominance), an alliance
that must be questioned and undermined. Women, she urged, must write their bodies,
to unfold the resources of the unconscious. All of these writers revaluate the significance
of the maternal, viewing this as empowering rather than as oppressed. Other
feminists, however, such as Christine Fauré, Catherine Clément, and Monique Wittig,
have challenged this emphasis on the body as biologically reductive, fetishistic, and
politically impotent. Monique Wittig wishes to do away with the linguistic categories
of sex and gender.


part viii: the twentieth century

American Feminism

Feminist criticism in America received a major stimulus from the civil rights movement
of the 1960s, and has differed somewhat in its concerns from its counterparts
in France and Britain, notwithstanding the undoubted impact of earlier figures such
as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. A seminal work, The Feminine Mystique
(1963), was authored by Betty Friedan, who subsequently founded the National
Organization of Women in 1966. This widely received book expressed the fundamental
grievance of middle-class American women, their entrapment within private, domestic
life, and their inability to pursue public careers. A number of other important feminist
texts were produced around this time: Mary Ellman’s Thinking About Women (1968),
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), and
Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), which used gender rather than class
as the prime category of historical analysis. Millett’s influential book concerned female
sexuality and the representation of women in literature. It argued that patriarchy was a
political institution which relied on subordinated roles for women. It also distinguished
between the concept of “sex,” which was rooted in biology, and that of “gender,”
which was culturally acquired. Other critics in this tradition of examining masculine
portrayals of women included Carolyn Heilbrun and Judith Fetterly.

A number of feminist texts have attempted to identify alternative and neglected
traditions of female writing. These have included Patricia Meyer Spacks’ The Female
Imagination (1975), Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976), and Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). The most influential work of
this kind was Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own (1977), which traced three
phases of women’s writing, a “feminine” phase (1840–1880) where women writers
imitated male models, a “feminist” phase (1880–1920) during which women challenged
those models and their values, and a “female” phase (from 1920) which saw
women advocating their own perspectives. Recent debates within American feminism,
conducted by figures such as Showalter, Lillian Robinson, Annette Kolodny, and
Jane Marcus, have concerned the relationship of female writers to male theories, the
need for feminist theory and a female language, the relation of feminism to poststructuralist
perspectives, as well as continuing problems of political and educational
activism.

Also hotly debated has been the possible connection of feminism and Marxism.
Michèle Barrett’s Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis
(1980) attempts to reconcile Marxist and feminist principles in analyzing the representation
of gender. Other works in this vein include Judith Newton and Deborah
Rosenfelt’s Feminist Criticism and Social Change (1985), which also argues for feminist
analysis that takes account of social and economic contexts. A notable recent development
has been the attempt to think through feminism from black and minority perspectives,
as in Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) and Barbara
Smith’s Toward a Black Feminist Criticism (1977). Finally, significant contributions by
lesbian critics include Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology (1978) and Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980). Judith Butler’s groundbreaking Gender
Trouble (1990) was a powerful critique of heterosexual assumptions in feminist theory,


feminist criticism

of the dualism of masculinity and femininity, in the contexts of Western metaphysics,
psychoanalysis, and power structures.

British Feminism

Twentieth-century British feminist criticism might be said to begin with Virginia Woolf,
whose work is considered in detail below. Much British feminist criticism has had a
political orientation, insisting on situating both feminist concerns and literary texts
within a material and ideological context. In her landmark work “Women: The Longest
Revolution,” later expanded and produced as Women’s Estate (1971), Juliet Mitchell
examined patriarchy in terms of Marxist categories of production and private property
as well as psychoanalytic theories of gender. Her later works such as Psychoanalysis and
Feminism (1974) continue to refine her attempt to integrate the insights of Marxism
and psychoanalysis. Another seminal text was Michèle Barrett’s Women’s Oppression
Today (1980), which attempted to formulate a materialist aesthetics and insisted on
integrating Marxist class analysis with feminism in analyzing and influencing gender
representation. Other important critics have included Jacqueline Rose and Rosalind
Coward, who have integrated certain insights of Jacques Lacan into a materialist
feminism, Catherine Belsey, who also has drawn upon Lacan in assessing Renaissance
drama from a materialist feminist perspective, and the Norwegian-born Toril Moi,
who has developed insights from Woolf and engaged in a critique of the humanism
and implicit essentialism of some American feminists. Also critical of the tendency of
American feminists to combat male stereotypes and to recover female traditions are
Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt. Finally, a number of critics such as Cora Kaplan,
Mary Jacobus, and Penny Boumelha have comprised the UK Marxist-Feminist Collective,
formed in 1976.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

Though her views have been criticized by some feminists, Virginia Woolf was in many
ways a pioneer of feminist literary criticism, raising issues – such as the social and
economic context of women’s writing, the gendered nature of language, the need to go
back through literary history and establish a female literary tradition, and the societal
construction of gender – that remain of central importance to feminist studies. Woolf ’s
most significant statements impinging on feminism are contained in two lectures presented
at women’s colleges at Cambridge University in 1928, subsequently published
as A Room of One’s Own (1929), and in Three Guineas (1938), an important statement
concerning women’s alienation from the related ethics of war and patriarchy. Woolf is
also known as one of the foremost modernist writers of the English-speaking world.
The most famous of her many novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse
(1927), and Orlando (1928). She also produced several collections of essays on a broad
range of literary topics and writers.


part viii: the twentieth century

As the daughter of the Victorian agnostic philosopher Leslie Stephen, Woolf had
access to his substantial library, and it was here that she received her education. After
her parents’ deaths, she settled, with her brothers and sisters, in Bloomsbury, a fashionable
area of London which later gave its name to the intellectual circle in which
Virginia and her sister Vanessa moved. The “Bloomsbury Group” included the economist
John Maynard Keynes, the historian and biographer Lytton Strachey, the art critic
Clive Bell, and the writer Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia was to marry in 1912. The
group was associated with certain other intellectuals from Cambridge, notably the
analytic philosopher G. E. Moore, who may have had some impact on Woolf ’s thinking
(an impact integrated into the influences of figures such as the French philosopher
Henri Bergson and the novelist Marcel Proust). This group was unconventional in its
outlooks and often in its sexuality. Woolf ’s own views of femininity and gender relations
must have been rooted partly in her own sexuality; she was engaged in a relationship
with the writer Vita Sackville-West, on whom Woolf ’s novel Orlando was based.

In 1917 Virginia and Leonard Woolf established the Hogarth Press. Though this
printing press was small, it became an important outlet for the work of many modernist
writers, including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Katherine Mansfield; Woolf ’s own
work was published there, as well as the translated works of Sigmund Freud. Woolf
suffered from nervous breakdowns and was acutely and sometimes debilitatingly conscious
of her status as a female writer in an intellectual milieu dominated by males and
masculine values. In 1941 she walked into a river, her pockets loaded with stones, and
drowned herself, suffering the same fate as her imaginative character Shakespeare’s
sister, who was driven to suicide on account of the overwhelming forces and institutions
thwarting her female genius.

Woolf ’s literary criticism is closely tied to the modernist nature of her fiction, and
expresses the broad philosophical and feminist dispositions underlying her novels. Her
work is modernist in its complexity of characterization, its use of multiple and shifting
narrative perspectives, its manipulation of time, its intricate conception of experience,
its accumulation of esoteric symbolism, its treatment of the connections between
human identity and its surroundings, and, above all, in its implicit acknowledgment
that language does not intrinsically refer to some “external” reality, but itself shapes
the realities that we experience. Indeed, the “reality” explored in Woolf ’s novels is
largely that of the “internal” psychology of given characters as this interacts with the
“external” world (the distinction between “internal” and “external” being blurred), as
well as the reality of their relationships with one another. In some ways, these modernist
features are made to overlap with Woolf ’s feminist concerns: the well-known portrait
of Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, for example, has been held to represent Woolf ’s
father, Leslie Stephen, or even the philosopher G. E. Moore; at the very least, this
character has been thought to embody a conventionally “male” academic perspective,
marked by dry rationality, self-indulgence, and emotional debility.

Hence, Woolf ’s literary criticism, like her fiction, can be approached from at least
two series of perspectives, those of modernism and feminism. The extent to which
the concerns and interests of modernism (which was often overarchingly conservative
in political terms) overlap with those of feminism is a complex issue that is still
being explored. Perhaps the most fundamental point on which feminism and modernism
overlap is their common rejection of the mainstream legacy of the bourgeois


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Enlightenment and what is often characterized as the Enlightenment view of the human
being as a free, rational agent, enabled through progressive knowledge to subjugate
the world of nature on many levels, intellectual, material, and economic. Like many
Romantics, modernists, and feminists, Woolf reacted against the primacy accorded by
the Enlightenment to the faculty of human reason, as well as the presumption that
reason could master the world and reduce it to total intelligibility.

At various points in her fiction and essays, Woolf expresses what has come to be
seen as a characteristically feminist distrust of theorizing, which is seen as imbued with
centuries of male values and strategies. Talking of Mary Wollstonecraft, for example,
Woolf remarks that this pioneer was “no cold-blooded theorist – something was born
in her that thrust aside her theories and forced her to model them afresh . . . Mary’s life
had been an experiment from the start.”1 In another essay, she asserts that to “know
the reason of things is a poor substitute for being able to feel them” (CR, 192). She
notes a tendency in modern writers that they “cannot generalize. They depend on their
senses and emotions, whose testimony is trustworthy, rather than on their intellects
whose message is obscure” (CR, 329–330). Indeed, in contrast with Enlightenment
views of the ultimate intelligibility of the world, and of the human self, Woolf states
that human nature is “infinitely mysterious” (CR, 95). Like most modernists, Woolf
questioned the idea of an external reality that somehow existed independently of our
minds. In an autobiographical sketch, Woolf voiced her sentiment that “reality” is
something deeper than the appearances that confront our senses, and that ultimately,
it is we ourselves who construct this reality:

the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer . . . a shock is a token of some real
thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words . . . From this I
reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind
the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected
with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.
Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But
there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no
God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have
a shock.2

Hence, for Woolf the world is a construction out of a primordial and undifferentiated
“vast mass,” and the deeper reality that we might discern beneath appearances is not
some unknowable thing in itself but our own operations, especially the operations of
art, which can see a pattern and a unity in phenomena such as are inaccessible to
reason or discursive thought. In her diary Woolf observes how “the creative power at
once brings the whole universe to order.”3 Other diary entries confirm her view of
reality as a construct. After noting another writer’s charge that her characters fail, she
writes: “I haven’t that ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to some extent, distrusting
reality – its cheapness” (WD, 57). In a later entry she muses over the thought that she
is “haunted by some semi-mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told
on one occasion; and time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom
out of the past. One incident – say the fall of a flower – might contain it. My theory
being that the actual event practically does not exist – nor time either” (WD, 102).


part viii: the twentieth century

Hence for Woolf, as for many modernists and feminists, “reality” is not somehow
already there but is the result of a complex interaction between human subjects and
the “external” world. Moreover, this reality is viewed not as stable but as inherently
changing and dynamic. Woolf says in an essay on Montaigne: “Movement and change
are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death” (CR, 94). These
attitudes which Woolf attributes to Montaigne also characterize much of her own
work. The emphasis on change, in particular, is profoundly symptomatic of a modernist
perspective, and in Woolf ’s case it may well have been inspired by Bergson and Proust.
Bergson’s emphasis on the primary reality of time challenged the “spatial” disposition
of mainstream Western philosophy from Plato through the Enlightenment. This mainstream
tradition had effectively ignored the reality of time in its viewing of the world as
laid out according to categories in space: the world had been classified and divided up
into enduring entities with stable identities.

The mainstream Enlightenment view of the external world as a categorizable inventory
of stable objects and events persisted into Woolf ’s time in the form of various
philosophies of realism and logical positivism. It is well known that Woolf studied and
admired the realist-analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore, as attested to by her close
friends and biographers. Quentin Bell, for example, records that Woolf read Moore’s
Principia Ethica “with some difficulty and great admiration.”4 In his seminal essay
of 1903, “The Refutation of Idealism,” Moore had characterized the central claim of
idealism as the assertion that “the object of experience is inconceivable apart from
the subject.” According to him, an idealist views the universe as spiritual, which he
interprets to mean that the universe is intelligent, purposive, and that it has many
properties which it doesn’t seem to possess on the surface. What bothers Moore is the
“vast difference” between these idealist positions and the “ordinary view of the world,”
as given by common sense.5 Moore’s pursuit of “common sense” led him, in his lecture
series published as Some Main Problems of Philosophy, to describe the purpose of
philosophy as an attempt to provide an inventory of the things we know and do not
know in the universe as well as to clarify our ways of knowing. Common sense suggests
that there are two different kinds of things in the universe, material objects and mental
acts or acts of consciousness.6 It also suggests that these two series of things are very
different in nature, that material objects are situated in space and time, and that their
existence is independent of acts of consciousness. Moore defines the views of “common
sense” as those which are “universally held.” While acknowledging that some
components of common sense may change over time, he suggests that others, such as
the belief in a plurality of material objects, have remained the same (MPP, 2–3).

These commonsense beliefs not only project a view of the world as something stable
and categorizable but are embodied in equally atomistic attitudes toward language and
the process of thought: thought can be refined and corrected by polishing its instrument
of expression, language. Hence a belief in analytical rigor, clear definition, and
precise use of language. In other words, these common sense beliefs are enshrined in a
certain conception of style.

It is important to understand that the “common sense” wisdom advocated by figures
such as G. E. Moore embodies certain central presuppositions of the Western philosophical
tradition – the distinction between mind and reality, the independent existence
of all entities, the equation of knowledge with various modes of classification of


feminist criticism

these entities – that were challenged by modernism, which insisted on reality as a
productive interaction between subject and object and which stressed the reality of
change and the profoundly temporal nature of all phenomena. Those same mainstream
presuppositions have also been characterized as “male”: the “wisdom” that
figures such as G. E. Moore or Edmund Burke have equated with consensually achieved
common sense has been characterized by feminists as a distinctly “male” wisdom,
based on male-generated categories through which the world has been seen. And while
some critics, notably Eric Auerbach and S. P. Rosenbaum, have seen Woolf as a realist,
perhaps influenced by Moore, it might be well to remember that Woolf ’s attitude
toward Moore and the entire “masculine” milieu of Cambridge was at best ambivalent.
It is true that, reminiscing over her Bloomsbury activities, Woolf herself describes with
some excitement how “Moore’s book had set us all discussing philosophy, art, religion”
(MB, 168). And yet she goes on to remark how she became “intolerably bored.”
Why, she asks, “were the most gifted of people also the most barren? . . . Why was it all
so negative?” (MB, 172). In the essay on Montaigne, she had lashed out against the
“virtues” of common sense and non-contradiction: “let us say what comes into our
heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense . . . without
caring what the world thinks or says” (CR, 94). At one level, it may well be “nonsense”
that Woolf wishes to fling in the face of Moore’s “common sense,” and that of the
entire male philosophical tradition. Whether this attitude makes her a realist or an
idealist is open to debate.

What is not in question is Woolf ’s defiant refusal to accept “reality” as anything
more than a convention, or set of conventions, which do not grasp what is most
private and authentic about our experience. In an autobiographical sketch she talks of
her “sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality”
(MB, 122). And in a diary entry of 1933 she states: “I will go on adventuring, opening
my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free
one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded” (WD, 213). In her essay on
Montaigne she observed that this deeper self or soul corresponds very “little to the
version which does duty for her in public.” She in fact warns that the “laws are mere
conventions, utterly unable to keep touch with the vast variety and turmoil of human
impulses; habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid
natures who dare not allow their souls free play. But we, who have a private life . . . hold
it infinitely the dearest of our possessions” (CR, 90–93).

Hence Woolf seems to reject both terms of the realist vision of the world, a vision
with its roots in Enlightenment thought: a stable subject perceiving a world of independent
and stable objects. If reality is actually a complex and ever-changing interaction
between subject and object, then the project of conventional realism is misguided

– not necessarily in its attempt to provide an accurate reflection or impression of
reality but in its very definition of reality as piecemeal and static. Modernism in general
did not react against the attempt to express reality but against the conception of reality
that underlay that endeavor. In her famous essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf takes issue
with the novelistic realism of writers such as Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy. She labels
these writers “materialists” because they imitate only surface phenomena, “making the
trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.” These writers are in thrall
to the methods of conventional realism: “to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy,

part viii: the twentieth century

love, interest, and an air of probability.” But, Woolf asks: “Is life like this?” (CR, 210–
212). What she questions is the assumption that we somehow experience reality in a
neatly ordered manner; actual experience is much less tidy and more complex:

The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with

the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable

atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the

accent falls differently from of old . . . if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he

could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own

feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love

interest or catastrophe in the accepted style . . . Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetri


cally arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the

beginning of consciousness to the end.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us

trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight

or incident scores upon the consciousness. (CR, 212–213)

Woolf ’s language, urging the novelist to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind,”
implies a call for a refined realism, one that is not constrained by frigid imperatives
pertaining to plot, character, and probability. When Woolf rejects these imperatives,
she does so on the grounds that they cannot generate a “likeness to life” (CR, 211–212).
In reacting against the realism of her literary predecessors, Woolf seeks a more complex
and deeper vision of reality and experience as the basis of fiction. Reviewing
Dorothy Richardson’s The Tunnel, Woolf insists that: “We want to be rid of realism, to
penetrate without its help into the regions beneath it, and further require that Miss
Richardson shall fashion this new material into something which has the shapeliness of
the old accepted forms.”7

But, although Woolf clearly wishes to shift novelistic attention away from the “actual
event” and time-frame of conventional realism, she seems to advocate a more refined
realism. It seems that Woolf does wish the novelist to engage with “reality,” but this
reality itself is reconceived: it is no longer an atomistic reality of independent objects
but something beneath these surface appearances, something which binds them in a
farther-reaching totality. On a philosophical plane, it will be recalled that this attempt
to characterize the world as “other than what it seems,” to penetrate beyond appearances
to an underlying reality, was regarded by Moore as the supreme claim of idealism.
If Virginia Woolf is a realist, her realism seems to comprise a call for viewing
things in their relatedness rather than in isolation, a fact which places her in the
deepest opposition to philosophical realism. Whatever label we place on her philosophical
disposition, that disposition was shared by both modernism and feminism,
though it sprang from differing motivations: in the case of modernism, reality was seen
as a complex and dynamic construction; in the case of feminism, the tradition of
realism embodied a static and hierarchical vision of the world according to male
categories founded on the notion – on the philosophy and logic – of stable identity.

In A Room of One’s Own Woolf raised a number of issues that would remain of
central concern to feminists. This book comprises two lectures, delivered by Woolf in
1928 at two women’s colleges in Cambridge, on the topic of women and fiction. The
“room” of the book’s title is a skillfully used metaphor around which the entire text


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is woven: Woolf ’s central claim is that “a woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write fiction.”8 The most obvious meaning of this claim is
that women need financial and psychological independence in order to exercise their
creative potential. But the claim itself is complex and the rest of Woolf ’s text effectively
elaborates the metaphorical significance of “room.”

At the most fundamental level, Woolf ’s claim situates literature within a material
(economic, social, political) context. She compares fiction, for example, to a spider’s
web: this web is not spun in midair (literature does not arise in a vacuum) but is
“attached to life at all four corners.” Indeed, it is “attached to grossly material things”
(Room, 43–44). Hence, literature cannot be produced without economic independence
or backing: our “mothers,” Woolf notes (talking to a female audience), were never
given the chance to learn the art of making money, and it is this economic poverty that
has underlain the intellectual impoverishment of women (Room, 21). Woolf notes of
her own circumstances that when she began to receive a fixed income through inheritance,
this initiated a change of temper in her entire outlook toward men, moving from
fear and bitterness to pity and toleration, and finally to a calmer state of mind in which
she felt the “freedom to think of things in themselves” (Room, 38–39). Hence, intellectual
freedom, the “power to think for oneself,” rests on financial freedom (Room, 106).

Historically, this “freedom of the mind” for women was pioneered by Aphra Behn,
the first female writer to earn her living by writing. It was she who earned for women
“the right to speak their minds” (Room, 64, 66). It was the “solid fact” of this economic
basis that enabled the relative profusion of middle-class female writers in the later
eighteenth century (Room, 65). It is also this fact which explains women’s apparent
silence through most of history. Even up until the beginning of the nineteenth century,
Woolf notes, it would have been out of the question for a woman “to have a room of
her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room . . . unless her parents were
exceptionally rich or very noble.” Women were debarred from any “separate lodging”
which might shelter them “from the claims and tyrannies of their families” (Room, 52).

But beyond the material circumstances forestalling her independence, the immaterial
difficulties were much worse. Woolf relates her famous anecdote of “Shakespeare’s
sister” Judith, who, being “wonderfully gifted,” attempts to seek her fortune in the
theater like her brother. The opposition to her endeavors ranges from her father’s
violent anger to the laughter and exploitation of men in the theater company; such is
her frustration and fragility that she kills herself (Room, 46–48). Woolf’s point is that
“genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people.”
And if a woman had been born with potential for genius, she “would certainly have
gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage” (Room, 48–49).
While Shakespeare’s sister is fictional, her parable is extrapolated from actual circumstances:
Woolf cites the examples of women such as Lady Winchilsea who were mocked
for their attempts to write; many women – including Currer Bell, George Eliot, and
George Sand – sought the refuge of anonymous authorship (Room, 50).

The metaphor of one’s own “room,” as embodying the ability to think independently,
takes another level of significance from its resistance to the appropriation of
language, history, and tradition by men. Woolf notes that most of the books on women
have been written by men, defining women so as to protect men’s image of their own
superiority (Room, 27, 34). She observes a deep ambivalence and irony in male attitudes


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toward women: “women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets.” In
literature, woman has been treated as full of character and importance; in reality, “she
was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.” Hence, in poetry, in the imagination
of man, woman has occupied a position “of the highest importance.” In practical life,
however, she “is completely insignificant” and “is all but absent from history” (Room, 43).
Conventionally, woman “never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary.” What is
needed, according to Woolf, is a rewriting of history by women so as to present a more
accurate account of the conditions in which women have lived (Room, 45).

A related task for women, as they look back through history, is to seek out the
hitherto neglected and blurred outlines of a female literary tradition. “Poetry,” affirms
Woolf, “ought to have a mother as well as a father” (Room, 103). The work of the great
female writers in the English tradition – including Jane Austen, the Brontës, George
Eliot – was made possible by predecessors such as Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, and
others. For literary masterpieces are not, says Woolf, “single and solitary births; they
are the outcome of many years of thinking in common” (Room, 65). Woolf points
out that “books continue each other,” and we must read newer women authors as
descendents of previous female writers (Room, 80). However, when we think back
through the great female writers, we find that, in addition to the material and psychological
impediments to their creativity, they were faced with an even greater obstacle:
“they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little
help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the
great men writers for help” (Room, 76). Implied in these statements is the need to
establish a tradition of women’s writing which, however closely it might be related to
the male tradition, has its own emblems of distinctness in terms of both content and
style. In this broader sense, the “room” might encompass a female tradition and female
perspectives toward history.

A room of one’s own might also represent the possibility, or ideal, of writing in a
female language or at least appropriating language for female use. Woolf holds that
women should not write in the same way as men do, notwithstanding the fact that
many female authors have felt under enormous pressure to think and write like men.
This pressure has stemmed partly from the unsuitability of language as hitherto developed
to express the experience of women. Some writers, such as Jane Austen and Emily
Brontë, succeeded in ignoring the persistent domineering male voice invading their
consciousness, and managed to write as women, as able to reflect upon things in
themselves rather than answering (perhaps unconsciously) to the voice of external
authority (Room, 75). But most women writers, including George Eliot and Charlotte
Brontë, failed to transcend or ignore the imposing conventions of external authority;
debilitated by the lack of a female tradition, they found in the language no “common
sentence” ready for their use; the “weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind” was
too unlike their own to be of use; these female writers succumbed to anger, irritation,
the need to prove themselves and other such obstacles to their clarity of vision, a clarity
that would allow them to view things in themselves rather than things as they ought
to be seen from male perspectives (Room, 74). The “male” language they inherited
could not express their female experience; this language, habituated to showing women
exclusively in their relationship to men, could not express, for example, the liking of
one woman for another (Room, 82). Encountering the sentence “Chloe liked Olivia” in


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a novel by Mary Carmichael, Woolf observes that such a sentiment – the liking of one
woman for another – is expressed here perhaps for the first time in literature, and,
were it to find adequate expression, it might “light a torch in that vast chamber where
nobody has yet been” (Room, 82, 84). This novel experience requires a specifically
female creativity and female appropriation of language in order to be articulated.
Woolf notes how woman has been at the “centre of some different order and system of
life,” contrasting sharply with the world inhabited by men (Room, 86).

Indeed, so much of the literary tradition was a repository of male values – for
example, the form of the epic – that, when women did begin to write in relative
profusion, they expressed themselves largely in the form of the novel, which “alone was
young enough to be soft” in their hands (Room, 77). Moreover, the domestic situation
of middle-class women, obliging them to write in the common sitting room, was more
conducive to novel writing than poetry; and the only literary training that such women
had “was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion” (Room,
67). Not only must women craft a sentence, a language that will grasp the rhythms of
their own experience, but also a literary form that is “adapted to the body . . . women’s
books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that
they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work” (Room, 78). Broad
shifts in economic conditions since Woolf ’s day may undermine her particular formula
here for women’s writing; but her general point – that language and thought are
ultimately and irreversibly grounded in the rhythms of the body, of one’s particular
situation in place and time – is one that has been richly pursued by a variety of
feminisms. What Woolf might have meant by a “female” use of language can perhaps
be clarified by her characterization of male language: a man’s writing, she said, appeared
“so direct, so straightforward . . . It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of
person, such confidence in himself.” But all of these virtues – if such self-certainty and
pretense to objectivity can be deemed virtues – fall, according to Woolf, under the
shadow of a mighty male egotism, the shadow of the “I” that aridly dominates the male
text, permeating it with an emotion incomprehensible to a woman, an emotion which
lacks “suggestive power” and which Woolf associates with certain transcendental
signifieds of the male world, such as “Work” and the “Flag” as found in authors such
as Galsworthy and Kipling (Room, 99–102).

Ultimately, however, Woolf is calling on women to write as women but without
consciousness of their sex occluding their creative vision. She states that Mary Carmichael
“mastered the first great lesson; she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has
forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality
which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself ” (Room, 93). Indeed, the mental
state that Woolf sees as most creative is what she calls “unity of the mind,” a unity in
which the sexes are not viewed as distinct (Room, 97). Her advocacy of this notion of
“androgyny” is also impelled by her instinct that the greatest human happiness results
from the natural cooperation of the sexes. She characterizes this “theory” of androgyny
(a Greek term fusing the words for “man” and “woman”; the term is taken over from
Coleridge, and ultimately from Plato) as follows: “in each of us two powers preside,
one male, one female; and in the man’s brain, the man predominates over the woman,
and in the woman’s brain, the woman predominates over the man. The normal and
comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually


part viii: the twentieth century

co-operating... Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is
androgynous” (Room, 98). Without this mixture, suggests Woolf, “the intellect seems
to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren.” If
we are to be creative, our minds must engage in this collaboration between male
and female elements, and some “marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The
whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is
communicating his experience with perfect fullness” (Room, 104).

It is significant that Woolf alludes to Romantic notions of unity, as in Coleridge’s
view of androgyny and Blake’s marriage of opposites. What her allusion brings out
clearly is that the primacy of reason, advocated by the mainstream Enlightenment,
against which the Romantics reacted on account of the abstractness and one-sidedness
of such reason, was also a profound index and culmination of a long tradition of male
thought and male categorization of the world. What the Romantics saw as an indeterminate
deficiency of reason becomes in much feminism precisely a deficiency of male
perspectives. In other words, the Romantics’ perception of reason’s deficiency or incompleteness
was itself somewhat abstract; feminism, like Marxism, sees it as a political
deficiency, ingrained in the social and economic fabric of gender relations.

A room of one’s own is imbued with a further intensity of metaphorical significance:
Woolf equates having such a room with living “in the presence of reality.” The writer,
she says, lives more than others in the presence of reality and attempts to convey it to
the rest of us. What this means for women is that, when they have a room of their own
(a tradition, a language, economic and intellectual independence), they will be free to
be themselves, to see reality as it is, without their relation to the male sex weighing
down their judgment; they will be able to “[t]hink of things in themselves” (Room,
110–111). And “reality,” according to Woolf, comprises the “common life” we lead,
not “the little separate lives which we live as individuals.” She stresses that our essential
relation is not to the world of men and women but to the “world of reality.” Women
need to see “human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to
reality” (Room, 113–114). Ultimately, then, Woolf’s call is for women to redefine their
relationship to reality independently of prior definitions by men; their relation to men
is but one element in this newly broadened vision of reality.

Woolf ’s other major “feminist” text, Three Guineas (1938), is written as a response
to three requests for money (for an English guinea) for certain causes: the rebuilding of
a woman’s college, the promotion of women’s entry into the professions, and the
prevention of war together with the protection of culture and intellectual liberty. Woolf ’s
response to these requests takes the form of a public meditation on issues at the heart
of a modern liberal-democratic bourgeois state: the nature of education, the ethics
underlying the professions, and the attributes of both spheres – grounded on an unequal
distribution of property and wealth – that foster a mentality leading to war and imperialism.
Woolf is in no doubt that the ruling values of such a state are male values: the
entire ethos of war, she points out, is exclusively male. The splendid military uniforms,
the distinctions of rank, the rosettes and medals which are invested by men with so
much significance, appear “ridiculous” to women.9 And the truth about war would
reveal its horror, beneath its long-vaunted glory (TG, 97). Interestingly, Woolf sees the
impulse to war and the conquest of other peoples as inhering in the very machinery
of the liberal-democratic state. Traditional education, she urges, has not fostered freedom


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or peace; on the contrary, it has taught the arts of competition, domination, killing,
and the acquiring of land and capital (TG, 29, 33–34). The professions, too, are
infested with these same tendencies: founded on the acquisition of property and wealth,
they foster – in the name of God, Nature, Law, and Empire – possessiveness, jealousy,
and combativeness, qualities that cannot but lead to war (TG, 63, 66).

What of the position of women in such a political state founded on a male-oriented
matrix of economic and cultural values? Should women be educated? Should they be
encouraged to enter the professions? Can they exert any influence in the direction of
peace? Woolf calls for “new words” and “new methods” (TG, 143). Women are in a
historical position – having been excluded for so long – to take a more disinterested
view of culture than men, and to initiate new schemes of education that will not breed
fruitless individualism and competition, and new methods of participating in public
life based on common interests rather than self-interest (TG, 100). An example of such
disinterestedness lies in woman’s justified indifference to patriotism. The notion of
the “nation,” enshrined at the heart of bourgeois culture and economy, engenders a
patriotism that is all too often harmful and divisive. What meaning, asks Woolf, does
patriotism have for a woman? Does she have the same reasons for loving, and being
proud of, her country? Woolf points out – as World War II looms over the horizon –
that dictatorship is not limited to the Nazis and fascists: as far as the oppression of
women is concerned, dictatorship is universal. And how can we “trumpet our ideals
of freedom and justice to other countries” when these ideals are far from being realized
at home (TG, 53)? A woman, Woolf points out, will be justified in exclaiming to her
patriotic brothers:

Our country . . . throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has
denied me education or any share in its possessions . . . Therefore if you insist upon
fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let be understood, soberly and rationally between
us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits
which I have not shared and probably will not share . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no
country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
(TG, 108–109)

Though Woolf has sometimes been criticized for the insufficient stridency of her
feminism, few feminist statements could be more far-reachingly subversive than this
effective rejection of the entire apparatus and logic of patriotism. This rejection, for
reasons given above, is equally a rejection of the entire infrastructure of the modern
nation, an infrastructure which disposes the nation toward a perpetual posture of
war. Women, says Woolf, should have no share in the displays and trimmings of
patriotism and all ceremonies that “encourage the desire to impose ‘our’ civilization
or ‘our’ dominion upon other people” (TG, 109). Woolf calls upon women to reject
the unbridled pursuit of wealth and profit, the prostituting of professions (whatever
these might be) for money, and the external emblems of rank and status. She
also urges them to dissociate themselves from “unreal” loyalties: “you must rid yourself
of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, school
pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them”
(TG, 80).


part viii: the twentieth century

Woolf ’s feminism has sometimes been viewed as problematic. Feminists have criticized
her support of androgyny and her advice to the woman writer. Some feminists
have been shocked by Woolf’s apparently premature claim that the word “feminist”
could be expunged from the language. The definition of “feminist” that Woolf had in
mind in Three Guineas is “one who champions the rights of women,” and since “the
only right, the right to earn a living, has been won, the word no longer has a meaning.
And a word without meaning is a dead word . . . Let us therefore celebrate this occasion
by cremating the corpse” (TG, 80). Feminists would argue, with much justification,
that the struggle for women’s rights on a worldwide basis is far from over. Nonetheless,
Three Guineas is a powerful statement of the fact that women’s rights cannot simply be
included as an additive element in bourgeois society, and that for women’s rights to be
realized, the very infrastructure of that society, as well as its fundamental values, need
to be transformed. The importance of Woolf ’s work for feminism cannot be overestimated:
the issues she raises, such as female tradition and language, the need for a broad
critique of education and the professions, the core values of the modern nation, and
the reflection of gendered dispositions in the very definition of reality and history, are
still very much alive and still mark the sites of fierce political, economic, and intellectual
debate.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986)

Another classic feminist statement, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; translated as The Second
Sex, 1952), was produced by Simone de Beauvoir, a leading intellectual of her time,
whose existentialist vision was forged partly in her relationship, as companion and
colleague, with the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. De Beauvoir’s text laid
the foundations for much of the feminist theory and political activism that emerged
during the 1960s in western Europe and America. Since then, its impact, if anything,
has broadened and deepened: its basic thesis and premises continue to underlie the
broad spectrum of feminist concerns. The book’s central argument is that, throughout
history, woman has always occupied a secondary role in relation to man, being relegated
to the position of the “other,” i.e., that which is adjectival upon the substantial
subjectivity and existential activity of man. Whereas man has been enabled to transcend
and control his environment, always furthering the domain of his physical and
intellectual conquests, woman has remained imprisoned within “immanence,” remaining
a slave within the circle of duties imposed by her maternal and reproductive functions.
In highlighting this subordination, the book explains in characteristic existentialist
fashion how the so-called “essence” of woman was in fact created – at many levels,
economic, political, religious – by historical developments representing the interests
of men.

De Beauvoir was born in Paris; while studying at the Sorbonne, she made the acquaintance
of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; with these two philosophers,
she founded a literary and political journal. She belonged to a feminist collective and
was politically active in feminist causes. She wrote several novels and a number of
philosophical works, the most notable of which was The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947),


feminist criticism

articulating an existentialist ethics. Her existentialism, while influenced by Sartre, was
also influenced by Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Hegel. Her view of freedom is distinguished
from Sartre’s view by its Hegelian emphasis on mutual recognition: it is through
acknowledging another person’s humanity that I confirm my own humanity and freedom.
Another moment in Hegel’s philosophy that underlies de Beauvoir’s analyses of
male–female relations through history and ideology is the master–slave relationship.
According to Hegel, human consciousness strives for recognition and mastery, placing
itself initially in a posture of hostility toward every other consciousness; a crucial phase
in this endeavor for mastery is the willingness of one consciousness to risk everything
in a life and death struggle. The consciousness that takes this risk becomes the “master,”
reducing its opponent to the status of a slave. Because of the nature of his duties,
however, the slave is actually more attuned to the world than the master and it is the
slave who gains mastery of his environment. Ultimately, the master is forced to recognize
his own dependence on the slave, to see that his own human worth is gained in a
relationship of reciprocity, of mutual recognition between himself and the slave: if he
is to be recognized as human, he must acknowledge the slave’s own humanity, else the
latter’s recognition of the master will be meaningless. In other words, humanity cannot
arise in one person or in one group of people unilaterally: it is something born only of
mutual recognition. This master–slave dialectic represents an important stage in Hegel’s
account of the development of human consciousness, and de Beauvoir skillfully bases
the entire argument of her book on this intersubjective model of human consciousness
and humanity. She views Hegel’s master–slave dialectic as peculiarly applicable to the
evolution of the male–female relationship.10

In her renowned introduction to The Second Sex, de Beauvoir points out the fundamental
asymmetry of the terms “masculine” and “feminine.” Masculinity is considered
to be the “absolute human type,” the norm or standard of humanity. A man does not
typically preface his opinions with the statement “I am a man,” whereas a woman’s
views are often held to be grounded in her femininity rather than in any objective
perception of things. A man “thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection
with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the
body of woman as a hindrance, a prison . . . Woman has ovaries, a uterus; these peculiarities
imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own
nature” (SS, xv). De Beauvoir quotes Aristotle as saying that the “female is a female by
virtue of a certain lack of qualities,” and St. Thomas as stating that the female nature is
“afflicted with a natural defectiveness” (SS, xvi). Summarizing these long traditions
of thought, de Beauvoir states: “Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not
in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being . . . she is
the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the
Absolute – she is the Other” (SS, xvi). De Beauvoir’s Hegelian terminology highlights
the fact that man’s relegation of woman to the status of “other” violates the principle
of mutual recognition, thereby threatening the very status that man has for so long
jealously accorded to himself, to his own subjectivity. And yet, as de Beauvoir points
out (drawing on both Hegel and Lévi-Strauss), “otherness” is a “fundamental category
of human thought,” as primordial as consciousness itself. Consciousness always entails
positing a duality of Self and Other: indeed, no group “ever sets itself up as the One
without at once setting up the Other over against itself ” (SS, xvi–xvii). Our very


part viii: the twentieth century

conception of our identity entails consciousness of what we are not, of what stands
beyond us and perhaps opposed to us.

The problem with demoting another consciousness or group to the status of “other”
is that this other consciousness or ego “sets up a reciprocal claim”: from its perspective,
we are the stranger, the other. Interaction with other individuals, peoples, nations, and
classes forces us to acknowledge the relativity of the notion of otherness. But this
relativity and reciprocity, in the case of women, has not been recognized (SS, xvii).
Woman’s otherness seems to be absolute because, unlike the subordination of other
oppressed groups such as Jews and black Americans, her subordination was not the
result of a historical event or social change but is partly rooted in her anatomy and
physiology. Also in contrast with these other groups, women have never formed a
minority and they have never achieved cohesion as a group, since they have always
lived dispersed among males: if they belong to the middle class, they identify with the
males of that class rather than with working-class women; white women feel allegiance
to white men rather than to black women (SS, xviii–xix). The “division of the sexes,”
de Beauvoir points out, “is a biological fact, not an event in human history . . . she is
the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another.”
Indeed, woman has no autonomous history (SS, xix). Another contributing factor to
women’s subordination is her own reluctance to forego the traditional advantages
conferred on them by their protective male superiors: if man supports woman financially
and assumes responsibility for defining her existence and purpose, then she can evade
both economic risk and the metaphysical “risk” of a freedom in which she must work
out her own purposes (SS, xxi).

Men, of course, have had their own reasons for perpetuating such a duality of Self
and Other: “Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to
show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on
earth” (SS, xxii). A long line of thinkers, stretching from Plato and Aristotle through
Augustine and Aquinas into modern bourgeois philosophers, has insisted on stabilizing
woman as an object, on dooming her to immanence, to a life of subjection to given
conditions, on barring her from property rights, education, and the professions (SS,
xviii). As well as procuring the obvious economic and political benefits of such subordination,
men have reaped enormous psychological reassurance: their hostility toward
women conceals a fundamental desire for self-justification, as well as a fundamental
insecurity (SS, xxii). While de Beauvoir acknowledges that by the eighteenth century
certain male thinkers such as Diderot and John Stuart Mill began to champion the
cause of women, she also notes that, in contradiction of its ostensible disposition
toward democracy, the bourgeois class “clung to the old morality that found the guarantee
of private property in the solidity of the family.” Woman’s liberation was thwarted
all the more harshly as her entry into the industrial workforce furnished an economic
basis for her claims to equality (SS, xxii–xxiii).

From her own perspective of “existentialist ethics,” as informed by Heidegger,
Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir rejects all attempts to stabilize the condition
of women under the pretext that happiness consists in stagnation and stasis. Every
human subject, she insists, must engage in exploits or projects that serve as a mode
of transcendence, as a means of rising above and controlling the conditions into
which one is born (SS, xxvii). In the first part of her book, de Beauvoir examines the


feminist criticism

views of women advanced by biology, psychology, and historical materialism, in an
endeavor to show how the concept of the feminine has been fashioned and to consider
why woman has been defined as the other. Regarding the data afforded by biology, she
acknowledges that a physiological burden is imposed on woman by her reproductive
function. She points out, however – anticipating the manifold importance subsequently
placed on the concept of the “body” by feminists – that the body is not a thing but a
situation (SS, 30–31). Human beings achieve self-definition only as part of a larger,
social framework, and the so-called facts of biology must be viewed in the light of
economic, social, and moral circumstances: the benefits or disadvantages attaching to
these facts are dependent upon the arbitration of social norms. For example, if violence
is morally or legally forbidden, man’s superior physical strength is not an intrinsic asset
(SS, 32–33).

In her account of psychoanalytic views of woman, de Beauvoir objects that Freud,
Adler, and other psychoanalysts “allot the same destiny to woman,” namely, an internal
conflict between her “viriloid” and “feminine” tendencies, arising from her inferiority
complex. De Beauvoir’s critique of psychoanalysis spans a number of points.
Firstly, male sexual and emotional development is taken as the norm, and Freud
assumes that the woman feels herself to be a “mutilated man,” suffering from penis
envy; Adler sees her envy as based on her “total situation” of disadvantage (SS, 36–39).
This asymmetry is expressed in the significance attached to the phallus, which is the
“incarnation of transcendence” for the male, on account of its being at the same time
a part of the male and a foreign object, at once self and other (SS, 43). Hence the
phallus comes to symbolize a dominance that is exercised in all domains, not just that
of sexuality. In viewing the phallus as a symbol of male transcendence of his environment,
de Beauvoir here anticipates much that has been written about phallocentrism
by Lacan and other psychoanalysts.

A further problem with psychoanalysis, in de Beauvoir’s eyes, is its exclusive focus
on sexuality, taken as an irreducible and primordial datum. But from an existential
perspective, there is a more original and more fundamental “quest of being,” of which
sexuality is only one aspect: man interacts not only with other bodies but also with the
entire world of nature, finding important modes of being in work, war, play, and art.
These modes of existing cannot be reduced to sexuality, and indeed, the significance of
sexuality must be brought into relation with these other human endeavors (SS, 41, 45).
A related problem is that psychoanalysis assumes that “the drama of the individual
unfolds within him,” overlooking the fact that the truths of psychoanalysis must be
situated in a social and historical context (SS, 44). Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
psychoanalysis reduces human behavior to determinism, to determined patterns
and fixed causal connections, thereby rejecting the concept of choice (SS, 42). Psychoanalysis
ignores the possibility that human behavior might be “motivated by purposes
freely envisaged.” De Beauvoir defines the situation of woman in contradistinction
from the views of psychoanalysis: “I shall place woman in a world of values and give
her behavior a dimension of liberty. I believe that she has the power to choose between
the assertion of her transcendence and her alienation as object; she is not the plaything
of contradictory drives” (SS, 45–46).

De Beauvoir next considers the perspective of historical materialism, as expressed by
Friedrich Engels in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.


part viii: the twentieth century

She acknowledges that Engels offers some important truths: humanity is not an animal
species but a historical reality; and woman’s self-awareness far exceeds her sexuality,
reflecting the economic organization of society (SS, 47). Engels’ central argument was
that the history of woman depended essentially on the history of technological progress:
before the discovery of bronze and iron, women played a significant role in economic
life, complementing the hunting and fishing of men with their own domestic productive
labor, making pottery, weaving, and gardening. With the invention of new tools,
however, the scope of agriculture was enlarged and intensive labor was called for; as a
result, women’s domestic work sank into relative insignificance. This was the point at
which private property appeared, in turn giving rise to the patriarchal family. Engels
argued that, just as women’s economic and social oppression was brought about by
technology, so her emancipation would arise in virtue of technological progress, when
she could “take part on a large social scale in production” (SS, 49).

While de Beauvoir sees this socialist perspective as an advance over the previously
considered viewpoints, she regards it as deficient. To begin with, Engels nowhere
explains how the “turning point of history,” the passage from communal to private
ownership, could have come about. Nor does he show how the oppression of women
is a necessary outcome of private property (SS, 50–51). Again, mere technological
changes alone cannot explain the economic fortunes of women: it was not simply the
discovery of bronze that transformed gender roles but rather the innate “imperialism
of the human consciousness,” the very nature of consciousness which, forever seeking
to exercise its sovereignty, includes the original category of the other and a desire to
dominate this other (SS, 52). Finally, Engels reduces the antagonism of the sexes to
class conflict; but the analogy, thinks de Beauvoir, is unjustified since there is no
biological basis for the separation of classes (SS, 52). While de Beauvoir accepts that
the contributions of biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism are valuable,
they must be situated within a broader context of social life and values that only an
existentialist outlook can furnish. The “body, the sexual life, and the resources of
technology exist concretely for man” only within the “total perspective” of his existence
(SS, 55).

De Beauvoir proceeds to offer her own existentialist overview of women’s history, an
account that challenges certain male-generated myths about women. From earliest
nomadic times, women have suffered the “bondage of reproduction,” a function which
must be viewed as natural and not as comprising a deliberate project through which
she might affirm her existence (SS, 57). Man, on the other hand, was able to transcend
his animal nature through invention, risk-taking, and refashioning the earth. While
woman’s activity was “immanent,” remaining closely bound to her body, man’s activity
created values, and “prevailed over the confused forces of life,” subduing both
nature and woman (SS, 59–60). In the earliest agricultural communities, woman’s
status was enlarged: it was recognized that the life of the clan was propagated through
her, and maternity was held to be a “sacred function.” The children often belonged to
the mother’s clan and communal property was handed down through women. This
matrilineal regime was characterized by an assimilation of woman to the earth: to
man, all nature seemed “like a mother.” Man felt himself to be at the mercy of natural
forces, and in “woman was summed up the whole of alien Nature.” Woman’s otherness,
her alien power, was projected into powerful female deities associated with life


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and fertility, as well as death: she was the Great Goddess, the Great Mother, the queen
of heaven, the empress of hell, variously called Ishtar in Babylonia, Astarte among
the Semitic peoples, Gaea, Rhea, or Cybele by the Greeks, and Isis in Egypt. These
goddesses were elevated above male divinities (SS, 61–64).

And yet de Beauvoir disputes the view of Engels and others that there was ever a
matriarchy in history, a reign of women. Such a golden age of woman, she insists, is a
myth. Even in the era just described, woman’s power was viewed as alien, as other, as
always beyond the human realm. The female goddesses were projections of the male
mind, and actual political power “has always been in the hands of men” (SS, 65).
Indeed, as agriculture was refined and expanded through technological invention based
on the discovery of bronze and iron, man was able to master the soil: instead of
passively relying on the produce of mother earth, he could now apply rational techniques
to agriculture. Hence man’s mastery of the soil was concomitant with his mastery
of himself: the religion of woman, based on magic and mystery, was overthrown
by the male principle of rationality, intellect, and self-creation (SS, 69–71). The Great
Mother was dethroned in favor of Ra, Zeus, and Jupiter; woman lost the economic role
she had enjoyed in the tribe and patrilineal descent replaced inheritance through the
mother. Hence, de Beauvoir agrees with Engels that woman was dethroned by the
advent of private property; she herself was property, first of her father and then of her
husband (SS, 72–75). Woman came to embody otherness: “she is passivity confronting
activity, diversity that destroys unity, matter as opposed to form, disorder against
order.” Hence woman becomes chaos, darkness, and evil (SS, 74).

Tracing the history of women through patriarchal times and classical antiquity, de
Beauvoir observes woman’s subservience among the Hebrews: Ecclesiastes speaks of
her as “more bitter than death” (SS, 78). Throughout the Oriental world, women had
little prestige and few rights, notable exceptions being Babylon, where the laws of
Hammurabi gave her rights to part of the paternal estate, and Egypt, where goddess
mothers retained their prestige and women had similar rights to men (SS, 78–79). In
classical Greece, woman was reduced to a state of semi-slavery, being “firmly shut away
in the gynecaeum,” the women’s apartments in a house, and expected to be a prudent
and watchful mistress of the home (SS, 84). In Rome, after the death of Tarquin,
patriarchal authority was established, and agricultural property in the form of the
private estate – and, therefore, the family – became the basis of society. Woman “lived
a life of legal incapacity and servitude,” being excluded from public affairs and treated
as a minor in civil life. The father’s authority was unlimited and he was “absolute ruler
of wife and children.” Though women’s situation improved during the later years of
the empire, their relative emancipation (in such matters as inheritance and divorce)
did not bring them any increase in political power. De Beauvoir calls this a “negative”
emancipation (SS, 84–88).

During the Middle Ages, Christian ideology “contributed no little to the oppression
of woman” (SS, 89). De Beauvoir remarks that the anti-feminist Hebrew tradition was
affirmed through St. Paul, who based the wife’s subordination to husband on both Old
and New Testaments. Christianity’s holding of the body in low esteem lowered the
rank of woman further, imposing on her the status of a temptress. The Church Fathers
were almost unanimous in viewing woman as an agent of the devil’s temptation.
De Beauvoir’s quotations are worth reproducing: “Woman, you are the devil’s doorway,”


part viii: the twentieth century

scolded Tertullian. St. Ambrose pronounced that “it is just and right that woman
accept as lord and master him whom she led to sin.” And St. John Chrysostom averred
that “Among all savage beasts none is found so harmful as woman.” St. Jerome saw
marriage as a “fruitless tree,” and from the time of Gregory VI celibacy was imposed
on the priesthood, thereby highlighting further the dangerous nature of woman.
St. Thomas declared that woman was a kind of incomplete man and that man “is
above woman, as Christ is above man” (SS, 90). Woman was treated as legally incompetent
and powerless by canon law; the masculine occupations were closed to her and
she was forbidden to make depositions in court. The state laws throughout the Holy
Roman Empire also held woman subservient to her functions of wife and mother.
These laws came into contact with Germanic traditions, in which woman was in a state
of absolute dependence on father and husband (SS, 91). Like Engels, De Beauvoir sees
courtly love as a “compensation for the barbarism of the official mores”: the wife
sought an extramarital lover to compensate for the tyranny and guardianship of her
feudal husband (SS, 93).

All the European legal codes were based on canon law, Roman law, and Germanic
law, all of which were unfavorable to women. In fact, women’s legal status remained
almost unchanged from the beginning of the fifteenth century until the nineteenth (SS,
97). The essential institutions that demanded such subordination were private property
and the family (SS, 94). As the bourgeois class rose to power, it continued the
basic patterns of subordination, allowing rights to widows and unmarried girls but not
to married women. The rigorous monogamy required of the bourgeois family, and
woman’s continued enslavement to the family, gave rise to prostitution throughout
Europe (SS, 94–95). While the rising middle class imposed a strict morality on wives,
women of leisure since the sixteenth century had been enjoying greater freedom and
license. During the Renaissance, a few women were powerful sovereigns, artists, and
writers. Their role in culture expanded in the seventeenth century and they played an
important part in the salons. Women’s advocates since the Renaissance included
Erasmus, Marguerite de Navarre, Molière, and Poulain de la Barre, whose De l’égalité des
deux sexes was published in 1673. In the eighteenth century, women’s champions included
Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Mercier, and Condorcet (SS, 98–100).

Notwithstanding these endeavors of prominent individuals, the French Revolution
did very little to change the lot of women; there was a certain amount of feminist
agitation which proposed, for example, a “Declaration of the Rights of Woman” in
1789, to match the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” actually adopted by the French
National Assembly. The Revolution was essentially a middle-class revolution, respectful
of middle-class values and institutions, and was accomplished almost exclusively by
men (SS, 100). Though some rights were granted to women, the post-revolutionary
Napoleonic Code greatly retarded women’s emancipation, perpetuating their dependency
in marriage; and various middle-class spokesmen, including Auguste Comte and
Balzac, reaffirmed the vision of the anti-feminist bourgeoisie, which wished to exclude
women from labor and public life (SS, 100–102).

Paradoxically, however, some of the historical forces through which the bourgeoisie
drove to power themselves furthered the emancipation of women. The liberal-
democratic ideas of the Enlightenment and the Revolution initiated at least a theoretical
basis for women’s claims; even more importantly, the technological and industrial


feminist criticism

revolutions destroyed landed property and concretely furthered the emancipation of
woman. She regained an economic importance through her productive role in the
factory: it is this that de Beauvoir calls “the grand revolution of the nineteenth century,
which transformed the lot of woman and opened for her a new era” (SS, 104). A number
of regulations over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries improved women’s
working conditions throughout Europe. Women achieved a degree of political organization
in the nineteenth century; the Socialist Congress of 1879 proclaimed the equality
of the sexes; and the first feminist congress – which gave its name to the movement

– was held in 1892. As a result of various suffragette movements, women received the
vote in England and Germany in 1918, and in America in 1920 (SS, 113–116).
Two essential factors paved the way for women’s prospective equality: one was her
ability (conferred by technology, which abrogated any innate male advantages of
strength) to share in productive labor; and the second was her recently acquired freedom
from the slavery of reproduction through contraception, adopted by many of the
middle and then the working classes from the eighteenth century onward (SS, 109).
Woman could now make her reproductive function, her pregnancies and child-rearing
duties, a rationally integral part of her life, instead of being enslaved by her generative
function (SS, 108, 111). Woman was now almost in a position to assume a role of
economic independence (SS, 112). And yet, a major factor retarding her freedom was
the continued existence of the family, sanctioned by the various ideologies – political
and religious – which aimed to detain her in her traditional roles. De Beauvoir’s
formulation of the central problem of woman is as pertinent today as in her own era:
woman’s obstinate dilemma is the reconciliation of her productive and reproductive
roles. De Beauvoir regards the present as a period of transition, in which woman’s
desire for transcendence is still constrained by her perpetuated subjugation and the
defining of her choices by men (SS, 123–124, 128).

Not least among the factors inhibiting woman’s social and economic freedom is the
perpetuation of certain obstinate myths of woman, in the realms of art and literature
as well as in daily life. De Beauvoir examines the literary presentation of the feminine
by writers such as Montherlant, D. H. Lawrence, Claudel, Breton, and Stendhal, authors
whose attitudes toward women she takes to be “typical” (SS, 188). Montherlant,
like Aristotle and St. Thomas, believes in “that vague and basic essence, femininity,”
defining it negatively (SS, 188). These writers, says de Beauvoir, reflect the “great
collective myths” of woman: woman as flesh, as first womb then lover to the male;
woman as the incarnation of nature and the door to the supernatural; woman as
poetry, as the mediatrix between this world and the beyond. She appears as the “privileged
Other, through whom the subject fulfills himself: one of the measures of man, his
counterbalance, his salvation, his adventure, his happiness” (SS, 233). But these myths
are orchestrated very differently by each author: the Other is defined according to the
terms in which the One sets himself up. And for each of them the ideal woman is “she
who incarnates most exactly the Other capable of revealing him to himself.”

De Beauvoir notes that all of these writers – notwithstanding the affection and
sympathy for women displayed by some of them – require woman to “forget self and
to love.” Montherlant seeks “pure animality” in her; Lawrence sees her as summing up
the feminine sex in general; Claudel, as a soul-sister, Breton, as a woman-child, and
Stendhal, as an “equal.” With varying degrees of insistence, they express a need for


part viii: the twentieth century

feminine devotion and altruism (SS, 236). De Beauvoir’s point is that, no matter how
exalted or debased woman is in the works of these writers, she fulfills the role of
otherness, being always an integral aspect of man’s self-definition, of the fulfillment
of his being, rather than enjoying true autonomy. Another way of saying this is that
her “existence” is always attenuated, always adjectival, ever mired in the mode of
objectivity, never blossoming into true subjectivity, true humanity. De Beauvoir notes,
however, that Stendhal views woman not merely as object but as a subject in her own
right. As de Beauvoir puts it: he rejects “the mystifications of the serious, as he rejects
the false poetry of the myths. Human reality suffices him. Woman according to him is
simply a human being” (SS, 233).

In an important chapter entitled “Myth and Reality,” de Beauvoir observes that the
myth of woman exerts an important influence not only in the world of literature but
equally in everyday life. She points out that the myth of woman is a static myth: it
“projects into the realm of Platonic ideas a reality that is directly experienced.” In other
words, the myth substitutes for actual experience a transcendent idea which is timeless
and unchangeable; because this idea is beyond or above the realm of actual experience,
it is endowed with absolute truth. Hence mythical thought opposes this fixed, universal,
and unitary idea of the “Eternal Feminine” to the “dispersed, contingent, and multiple
existences of actual women.” If we say, for example, that “woman is flesh” or that she
is “Night” or “Death” or “Nature,” we are effectively abandoning terrestrial and empirical
truth and soaring “into an empty sky” (SS, 239). And the myth is unassailable:
if the behavior of a real woman contradicts the mythical idea, she is told that she is not
feminine; the “contrary facts of experience are impotent against the myth” (SS, 237).
In short, what the mythical treatment of woman does is to pose woman as “the absolute
Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a
fellow human being” (SS, 238).

Of all these myths, the one most deeply “anchored in masculine hearts” is that of the
feminine “mystery.” This myth allows man the luxury of “legitimately” not understanding
woman, and, above all, it enables man to remain alone by living in the
company of an enigma: such an experience is more attractive for many than “an
authentic relation with a human being” (SS, 240). De Beauvoir argues that such feminine
mystery is an illusion: in truth, there is mystery on both sides, male and female. But
the male perspective is elevated into an absolute and normal perspective, and from that
vantage point, woman appears essentially mysterious. What underlies the feminine
mystery is an “economic substructure” of subordination: mystery always belongs to the
vassal, the colonized, the slave (SS, 242–243).

In the conclusion to her book, de Beauvoir argues that the age-old conflict between
the sexes no longer takes the form of woman attempting to hold back man in her
own prison of immanence, but rather in her own effort to emerge into the light of
transcendence. Woman’s situation will be transformed primarily by a change in her
economic condition; but this change must also generate moral, social, cultural, and
psychological transformations. If girls were brought up to expect the same free and
assured future as boys, even the meanings of the Oedipus and castration complexes
would be modified, and the “child would perceive around her an androgynous world
and not a masculine world” (SS, 683). Moreover, if she were brought up to understand,
rather than inhibit, her own sexuality, eroticism and love would take on the nature of


feminist criticism

free transcendence rather than resignation: the notions of dominance and submission,
victory and defeat, in sexual relations might give way before the idea of exchange
(SS, 685). De Beauvoir is confident that women will arrive at “complete economic and
social equality, which will bring about an inner metamorphosis” (SS, 686). And both
man and woman will exist both for self and for the other: “mutually recognizing each
other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.” In this recognition, in this
reciprocity, will “the slavery of half of humanity” be abolished (SS, 688).

Elaine Showalter (b. 1941)

An influential American feminist critic has been Elaine Showalter, who developed
“gynocriticism,” a criticism concerned with the specificity of women’s experience and
women’s writing. Showalter’s most influential book has been A Literature of their Own
(1977), whose title reflects Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Indeed, Showalter here takes
up the issue initially posed by Woolf, that of a female literary tradition. Her book’s
title, however, derives not from Woolf but from the philosopher John Stuart Mill, one
of the few males to have championed the rights of women. In his polemical text The
Subjection of Women (1869), Mill had observed how difficult it would be for women to
free themselves from the constraints and influences of the male literary tradition; had
they been able to live apart from men, they “would have a literature of their own.”11
Ironically, then, Showalter’s book sets out to contradict Mill’s well-intended statement,
to show that, if we re-read literary history carefully, we can in fact discern a female
literary heritage.

The most fundamental undertaking and achievement of Showalter’s book is her
formulation of the female literary tradition as an evolution through three phases. She
observes that literary subcultures (such as black, Jewish, Anglo-Indian) tend to pass
through three stages. First, there is a phase of imitation of the modes of the dominant
tradition; the artistic standards of that tradition, as well as the social roles it implies,
are internalized. The second is a stage of protest against these standards and values, and
a call for autonomy. The final stage is one of self-discovery, a “turning inward freed
from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity” (LTO, 13). Viewing
the women’s literary tradition in terms of these phases, Showalter suggests that the first
phase might be called the feminine phase, spanning the period from the appearance of
the male pseudonym in the 1840s to the death of George Eliot in 1880. The feminist
period extends from 1880 until the year 1920 when women won the vote. And the
third, or female, phase runs from 1920 until around 1960, at which point women’s
writing enters “a new stage of self-awareness” (LTO, 13).

While Showalter acknowledges that the female subculture was “uniquely divided
against itself by ties to the dominant culture,” she points out that women writers “were
united by their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers; by the internalized doctrines of
evangelicalism, with its suspicion of the imagination and its emphasis on duty; and by
legal and economic constraints on their mobility.” And from the beginning, she says,
the woman novelist shared a “covert solidarity” with other women writers and with her
female audience, which would “read the messages between her lines” (LTO, 14–15).


part viii: the twentieth century

Moreover, from about 1750, women made steady inroads into the literary profession.
Notwithstanding these rudiments of solidarity, women writers exhibit almost no sense
of “communality and self-awareness” before the 1840s, the decade in which the novel,
according to some critics, became the dominant form. In this first phase of feminine
writing, women did not see their writing as an expression of their female experience.
That their vocation to write stood in conflict with their status as women was indicated
by the use of the male pseudonym.

Yet the repressive circumstances imposed on it forced the feminine novel to find
“innovative and covert ways to dramatize the inner life, and led to a fiction that was
intense, compact, symbolic, and profound.” We are presented with figures such as the
mad wife locked in the attic, the crippled artist, and the murderous wife. And many
female novels offer fantasies of money and power, often projecting the ideology of
success, and the elements of success in the author’s own experience, onto male characters.
Another set of strategies was embodied in protest fiction, which championed the
rights not only of women but also of workers, child laborers, and prostitutes. Despite
its restrictions, the woman’s novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot had moved “in
the direction of an all-inclusive female realism, a broad, socially informed exploration of
the daily lives and values of women within the family and the community” (LTO, 29).

Indeed, with the death of George Eliot, the woman’s novel moved into a “feminist”
phase that confronted male society and sexual stereotypes. The feminists challenged
the restrictions of women’s language, denounced the ethic of self-sacrifice, and used
their fictional dramatization of oppression to urge changes in the social and political
system. While the writers of the feminist period were not important as artists, they
embodied a crucial stage, “a declaration of independence,” in the female tradition.
They explored and defined womanhood, they rejected the ideal of self-sacrifice and
stood up to the male establishment in an outspoken manner. They insisted on the right
to use male sexual vocabulary, and most importantly, challenged the monopoly of the
male press; feminist journals challenged the judgments of men of letters and some, like
Virginia Woolf, controlled their own presses (LTO, 31). Feminists such as Mona Caird,
Elizabeth Robins, and Olive Schreiner were producing theories of women’s relationship
to labor, to the class structure, and to the family. The vote was won in 1918.
Showalter points out that the death of many male writers during World War I “left
English women writers with a poignant sense of carrying on a national literary tradition”
(LTO, 32).

The last generation of women Victorian writers moved beyond feminism to a
“female” phase “of courageous self-exploration, but it carried with it the double legacy
of feminine self-hatred and feminist withdrawal” (LTO, 33). The withdrawal by feminist
writers from male society and culture had been symbolized by the “enclosed and secret
room,” which was identified with the womb and female conflict. As Showalter puts it,
“the secret room, the attic hideaway, the suffragette cell came to stand for a separate
world, a flight from men and from adult sexuality” (LTO, 33). As for the “feminine
self-hatred,” this was projected into narrative form. The fiction of writers such as
Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield “created a deliberate female aesthetic, which
transformed the feminine code of self-sacrifice into an annihilation of the narrative
self, and applied the cultural analysis of the feminists to words, sentences, and structures
of language in the novel. Their version of modernism was a determined response


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to the material culture of male Edwardian novelists like Arnold Bennett and H. G.
Wells, but, like D. H. Lawrence, the female aestheticists saw the world as mystically and
totally polarized by sex” (LTO, 33). This female aesthetic, however, paradoxically repressed
sexuality and treatment of the female body to the periphery of its concerns,
taking flight in androgyny, the sexual ethic of the Bloomsbury group. A favorite image,
as in the title of Woolf ’s book, was that of “a room of one’s own,” implying both
artistic autonomy and, according to Showalter, “disengagement from social and sexual
involvement” (LTO, 34). Showalter insists that this aesthetic was a “form of self-
annihilation,” marked by retreat: “retreat from the ego, retreat from the physical
experience of women, retreat from the material world, retreat into separate rooms and
separate cities” (LTO, 240). The stream of consciousness technique, she claims, was in
part an attempt to transcend the dilemma of expressing female transcendence of the
given world in language and in categories of thought that had been developed by men
(LTO, 260).

Later women writers reacted against female aestheticism and the strategy of disengagement,
returning to more realistic modes of expression untouched by modernism.
But it was not until the 1960s that the female novel entered a “new and dynamic”
phase, fueled by the international women’s movement. Writers such as Iris Murdoch,
Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Margaret Drabble undertook an authentic expression
of female experience, using a new range of language, accepting anger and sexuality as
sources of creative power, while reasserting their continuity with women of the past
(LTO, 302). There is “a new frankness about the body” (LTO, 299). Showalter’s book
examines the developments outlined above in detail, concluding with a discussion of
the dilemmas faced by contemporary women novelists, such as being torn between
commitment to feminist revolution and individual exploration, expression of female
experience and sexuality and addressing the dominant culture’s definition of what
constitute the most important issues (LTO, 318).

Michèle Barrett: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter

In her seminal text Women’s Oppression Today (1980), Michèle Barrett outlines some
of the central problems facing any attempt to forge a coalition of Marxist and feminist
perspectives. How can a Marxist analysis, conceived on the basis of “a primary contradiction
between labour and capital,” be reconciled with a feminist approach, which
must begin with the relations of gender?12 In general terms, suggests Barrett, the object
of Marxist feminism must be to “identify the operation of gender relations” as they
relate to the “processes of production and reproduction understood by historical
materialism.” Marxist feminism must “explore the relations between the organization
of sexuality, domestic production . . . and historical changes in the mode of production
and systems of appropriation and exploitation.” Such an approach will stress the
“relations between capitalism and the oppression of women” (WT, 9).

Barrett focuses on three concepts that have been central to the Marxist feminist
dialogue: patriarchy, reproduction, and ideology. She begins by noting the enormous
problems inhering in the concept of patriarchy: radical feminists such as Kate Millett


part viii: the twentieth century

have used this concept as “an over-arching category of male dominance.” Millett sees
patriarchy as a system of domination that is analytically independent of the capitalist
or any other mode of production; its apparent mediation by class is merely tangential.
Shulamith Firestone goes even further and aims to ground the analysis of class in the
“biological division of the sexes,” her aim being “to substitute sex for class as the prime
motor in a materialist account of history” (WT, 11). Barrett objects to these uses of
patriarchy as a “universal and trans-historical category of male dominance,” grounded
in biological determinants (WT, 12). Such uses are reactionary (treating social arrangements
as somehow naturally given) and regressive since they overlook “one of the early
triumphs” of feminist analysis, namely, a “distinction between sex as a biological category
and gender as a social one” (WT, 13).

Other feminists such as Christine Delphy, however, have formulated a materialist
analysis of patriarchy, stressing social rather than biological relations. Delphy argues
that the material basis of women’s oppression “lies not in capitalist but in patriarchal
relations of production” (WT, 14). But most recent theorists, says Barrett, attempt to
represent contemporary capitalism as patriarchy. Such an endeavor not only poses
patriarchy as a universal and transhistorical mode, but also reveals a confusion between
two meanings of patriarchy, between “patriarchy as the rule of the father and patriarchy
as the domination of women by men” (WT, 17). This is the case, according to
Barrett, with Annette Kuhn’s theory that the crucial site of women’s oppression is the
family, which has a relative autonomy from capitalist relations. Kuhn argues that patriarchy
unites psychic and property relations (WT, 18–19).

Another concept used by recent theorists to relate women’s oppression to the organization
of production in society is “reproduction.” Interest in this concept derives from
Engels’ formulation that the “determining factor in history is . . . the production and
reproduction of immediate life.” Engels is referring here both to “the production of
the means of subsistence” and “the production of human beings themselves, the
propagation of the species” (WT, 20). Also important is Louis Althusser’s treatment of
social production in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Again,
part of the problem with this concept is its range of definition: women’s role in biological
reproduction can have only a highly refracted relationship with their role in economic
and social production. In fact, the “fundamental problem” faced by Marxist feminism
is “to combine an analysis of social reproduction with an analysis of patriarchal human
reproduction” (WT, 29).

The third important but problematic notion in Marxist feminism is that of ideology.
As Barrett points out, feminists have insisted that Marxism take account of the sexual
division of labor and the familial ideology that sustain women’s oppression; this insistence
has coincided with a “revolution” in the Marxist theory of ideology. This shift
in Marxist theory was largely occasioned by Louis Althusser’s rejection of ideology “as
a distortion or manipulation of reality by the ruling class,” as well as of the vulgar
Marxist view that “ideology is simply a mechanical reflection (in ideas) of a determining
economic base.” While Althusser accepts the basic Marxist premise that the economic
substructure determines the ideological superstructure “in the last instance,” he
nonetheless sees ideology as having a “relative autonomy,” and stresses its experiential
character as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence” (WT, 29–30).


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Althusser’s attempt to rethink the Marxist notion of ideology is part of a widespread
challenge to the economism – the insistence on the determining power of the economic
base – that has prevailed within Marxism. Feminists have participated in this challenge,
prioritizing ideology such that questions of gender division can be accommodated.
Feminists have emphasized the ideological construction of gendered subjects and familial
relations, seeking to rethink psychoanalytic theory from a Marxist feminist perspective
(WT, 31). In short, some feminists, such as Rosalind Coward, have rejected traditional
Marxism’s implicit location of women’s oppression as merely an ideological effect,
secondary to the primary economic contradiction of labor and capital. Coward sees the
primacy of the economic level over the ideological as no longer necessary, and based
on an outdated model of scientific realism (WT, 33–34). Barrett points out that this
rejection of the “real” represents a radical break not only with the Marxism of Althusser
but also with Marxism per se since it abandons any materialist analysis of history
(WT, 36). While such feminists have rightly affirmed the importance of gender in the
construction of individual subjects, they are misguided in rejecting “all determinate
relations,” a position that is not at all Marxist (WT, 38).

Barrett’s own general position is that the oppression of women in capitalist society
must be situated within the oppression of women throughout the world, and that
male domination stretches far beyond this context, hence socialist revolution will
not of itself achieve women’s liberation. Barrett stresses also the intimate connections
between economic oppression and the “role of familial and domestic ideology,” as well
as the changing form of the family organization during and since the transition from
feudalism to capitalism. The most significant elements, then, of the oppression of
women under capitalism are “the economic organization of households and its accompanying
familial ideology, the division of labor and relations of production, the educational
system and the operations of the state,” as well as the processes of creation and
recreation of gendered subjects (WT, 40–41).

Indeed, this last element is taken up in an important chapter called “Ideology and
the Cultural Production of Gender,” where Barrett addresses the function of literature
and of culture generally in the social construction of gender and female subjectivity.
She begins by noting that recent feminist theorists have challenged the classical Marxist
theory of representation, which views ideology and discourse in general as a reflection
of given historical conditions: for example, a work of literature in the twentieth century
might be seen as an ideological reflection or representation of economic conditions in
late capitalism. Such a view is based on a classical Marxist model of economic base and
ideological superstructure, the latter somehow “reflecting” the former. As Barrett points
out, the attempt by recent feminists to undermine this model is rooted in a more
general challenge to classical models of representation or discourse generally, models
which held that language or discourse (or representation) somehow corresponds with
a reality which is already there. Much modern theory in several fields has of course
impugned this assumption, saying that there is no reality prior to language and discourse,
and that language is in fact instrumental in creating what we call reality. Such
feminists, says Barrett, deny, for example, that there is any such phenomenon as “sexual
difference” that precedes discourse: the difference itself, they claim, is created by discourse;
in other words, the difference is located in the realm of ideology, the realm
of conflicting discourses, rather than as a reflection of economic conditions. Such


part viii: the twentieth century

feminists reject the distinction between ideology and material conditions; they see
ideology itself as material and as largely autonomous in respect of those material
conditions (WT, 89–90). A literary text, for example, would not necessarily represent
social and economic relations.

In Marxist fashion, Barrett rejects these views: she rejects the claim that ideology
itself is either material or autonomous. She also rejects the view that reality is merely
constructed by language or discourse. To insist on a “non-correspondence” of language
and reality, she affirms, is to slide into the very dogmatism one is purporting to
condemn; and language or representation is linked to actual and specific historical
conditions that cannot be reduced to discourse (WT, 91–94). Nor can the connection
between women’s oppression and the conditions of economic production be reduced
to discourse (WT, 97). Recent feminists see discourse itself as the site of political
struggle; but such struggle, says Barrett, is merely ideological, and will not of itself
produce any type of social revolution (WT, 95). Barrett’s own view is that we need not
accept a mechanical model of reflection or representation; but this does not mean that
we abandon the model altogether; we can specify the limits to the autonomous operation
of ideology. She also insists that there is an integral connection between ideology
and the relations of production, a connection all the more important in the case of
gender: the ideology of gender plays an important role in the capitalist division of
labor as well as in the reproduction of labor power (WT, 98). The term “relations
of production,” she insists, comprehends differences not only of class but also of race
and forms of labor. We can make a useful distinction, she says, between these relations
of production, in which ideology plays a crucial role, and the means and forces of
production which lie beyond (and beneath) the sphere of ideology (WT, 99).

Hence, Barrett accepts the claim of Marxists such as Terry Eagleton that literature
might be a “paradigm case” for the examination of ideology; but she warns that such
an analysis will give us insight into the production of meaning and discourse, not into
the social formation itself (WT, 97). She suggests that if we are to analyze the production
of gender ideology, for example, in literature, we cannot merely focus on literary
texts; as Eagleton points out, these texts have internalized their material conditions of
production and express these albeit in highly refracted ways (WT, 100–101). Our
analysis must take account of the material conditions in which men and women produce
literary works; it must be informed by a theory of reading which acknowledges
that aesthetic judgment is grounded in social contexts, that meaning is not intrinsic to
any text but is a social construction, and the representation of women in literature is
often a complex and oblique process (WT, 104–107). She stresses that literature has a
fictional status which makes it facile, for example, to condemn male authors (as Kate
Millett does) for presenting images of women in negative terms. Such images may be
motivated by ambivalence and are necessarily constrained and dictated by historical
conditions (WT, 107). In short, Barrett argues that while cultural practice is an essential
site of revolutionary struggle, and that literature can play an important role in the
transformation of subjectivity, culture alone cannot liberate women: a more fundamental
revolution in means and forces of production is required (WT, 112–113).

In the conclusion to her book, Barrett revisits the three essential components of
Marxist feminist analysis with which she began. She urges that arguments concerning
the “reproduction” thesis – that capital supports the reproduction of labor power


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through domestic labor – should be historicized (WT, 249). And, while the concept of
patriarchy should not be jettisoned, its use might be restricted to contexts where male
domination is “expressed through the power of the father over women” (WT, 250). As
for ideology, our recognition of its role in gender construction must move to deeper
analysis of subjectivity and identity, effectively continuing the work of earlier feminists
such as Simone de Beauvoir (WT, 251). In general, Barrett stresses that there is no
“programmatic answer” to the question of whether women’s liberation can be achieved
under capitalism. She does affirm, however, that such liberation would require: first, a
redivision of labor and the responsibilities of childcare; second, the extrication of
women from dependence on a male wage or capital; lastly, the ideology of gender
would need to be transformed. None of these changes, she observes, is compatible with
capitalism as it exists at present. Hence, although the women’s movement needs to be
autonomously organized, it can profitably collude with socialism on the basis of overlapping
political objectives. These might include the need to improve women’s wages
and working conditions, and to abolish the use of female labor as a means of keeping
general wages down (WT, 257–258). Since women’s oppression is “entrenched in the
structure of capitalism,” the struggle for women’s liberation and the struggle for socialism
cannot be disengaged (WT, 258–259).

Julia Kristeva (b. 1941)

Aptly characterizing herself as a “female intellectual,” Julia Kristeva has been a powerful
influence on literary theory. She integrates insights from linguistics, psychoanalysis,
and philosophy into her theories, the most important of which concern the development
of subjectivity in relation to both language and the play of drives and impulses
anterior to language. Born in Bulgaria, Kristeva studied in France from 1965; her
teachers in Paris included Roland Barthes, Lucien Goldmann, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
In the late 1960s, she was appointed to the editorial board of Tel Quel, an outlet for
structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives. Her work exhibits the profound impact
of Hegel and Freud, as well as the influences of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, and
the psychologist Melanie Klein. Kristeva’s first book, Semeiotike: Recherches pour une
Semanalyse (1969), advances a theory of the sign. Her later publications are psychoanalytic
in their approach and emphasis. Her best-known and most influential work
is Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), some of the central ideas of which will be
examined here.

Kristeva starts out by observing that modern linguistic theories treat language as a
formal object which is marked by arbitrary relations between signifiers and signifieds,
the substitution of the sign for the extra-linguistic (or reality outside of language), the
discreteness of its elements, and finitude.13 However, language considered as such a
formal object lacks a subject of enunciation; and it merely passes over the question of
“externality” or the possible existence of the subject beyond language. Two recent
trends have addressed this issue of externality. The first attempts to examine signifying
systems in which the arbitrary connection of signifier and signified is seen as “motivated”
by unconscious processes: the externality to which linguistic relations are here connected


part viii: the twentieth century

is the psychosomatic realm, the “body divided into erogenous zones.” These theories
rehabilitate the notion of the pre-Oedipal fragmented body, but fail to explain this
body’s link to the post-Oedipal subject and his symbolic language (RPL, 22). The other
trend begins from the subject of enunciation or transcendental ego and, purveying the
necessary connections that linguistics bears with semantics and logic, views signification
as an ideological and historical process (RPL, 23). Kristeva calls the first trend “the
semiotic,” and the second “the symbolic.” These two modes, she says, “are inseparable
within the signifying process that constitutes language, and the dialectic between them
determines the type of discourse (narrative, metalanguage, theory, poetry, etc.) involved.”
And this necessary dialectic between the two modes of the signifying process, she says,
is also “constitutive of the subject,” a subject which is thus both semiotic and symbolic
(RPL, 24).

Kristeva adopts from Plato’s Timaeus the term chora, which refers to the space that
is occupied by a thing; it can also refer to place or position or station, and, in Kristeva’s
extension, receptacle or womb. Adapting this term, she suggests that the chora is “a
nonexpressive totality” formed by the bodily drives and what Freud calls the primary
processes of the unconscious (such as displacement and condensation); it stresses the
mobile and provisional nature of the way these drives are articulated, as characterizing
the semiotic process (RPL, 25). The chora has no fixed unity or identity; it precedes
“evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality and temporality.” Indeed, the chora is not yet a
signifier: it precedes the linguistic sign, which articulates (as Lacan claims) both the
absence of the object itself and the distinction between real and symbolic (RPL, 26).
This chora which regulates the drives is to be distinguished from the realm of the
symbolic, which is the realm of spatial intuition and of language. Following some
comments of Plato, as well as insights of Freud, Lacan, and Melanie Klein, Kristeva
associates the prelinguistic semiotic process with the mother: the mother’s body, as the
site around which the oral and anal drives are structured, is the “ordering principle” of
the semiotic chora and is also “what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations”
(RPL, 27). Following Freud’s observation that the most instinctual drive is the
death drive, she suggests that the semiotic chora is “no more than the place where the
subject is both generated and negated” by a process of “charges and stases.” Kristeva
assigns the term negativity to this dual process of generation and negation (RPL, 28).
The semiotic is organized not only by the primary processes such as condensation and
displacement but also by the connections among bodily zones and between these and
what will later be formed as external subjects and objects. Hence the semiotic is “a
psychosomatic modality of the signifying process” (RPL, 28). The realm of the symbolic
is a “social effect” of the natural or sociohistorical constraints (such as biological
difference or family structure) which ultimately organize the chora (RPL, 27, 29). The
French poet Mallarmé, according to Kristeva, speaks of the semiotic as a rhythm or space
which is feminine, enigmatic and indifferent to language; it underlies what is written
and is irreducible to verbal translation; it is, however, constrained by one factor: syntax
(RPL, 29). Kristeva sees her notion of the semiotic as positing a post-Freudian subject
which decenters the transcendental ego of conventional Western thought (RPL, 30).

While Kristeva diverges from a Cartesian notion of language and consciousness
which sees thought as preconditioned by “natural” facts, she builds on a central insight
of Husserlian phenomenology, namely, the positing of “an ego as the single, unique


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constraint which is constitutive of all linguistic acts as well as all trans-linguistic practice”
(RPL, 31–32). She distinguishes the semiotic realm from the Husserlian notion of
meaning as intentionality, as constituted by a bracketing of the real object so as to
highlight the “intentional experience” and “intentional object” (RPL, 33). She states
that the semiotic is “pre-thetic,” i.e., prior to the positing of the subject (understood as
possessing thetic or positing or naming or propositional functions). Hence no meaning
as such exists within the semiotic, but there do exist “articulations heterogeneous to
signification and to the sign: the semiotic chora” (RPL, 36). For Kristeva, the ego is a
“speaking subject,” which she differentiates not only from the Cartesian ego but also
ultimately from the phenomenological transcendental ego: it is a subject in process/on
trial [sujet en procès], as in the “practice of the text ” (RPL, 37).

Hence, Kristeva sees the semiotic as part of a larger signifying process, which includes
the symbolic realm, and which is ultimately “the process of the subject. The
semiotic is thus a modality of the signifying process with an eye to the subject posited
(but posited as absent) by the symbolic” (RPL, 41). If the semiotic is the realm of
drives and their articulations, the symbolic is the realm of signification, the realm of
proposition or judgment, a realm of positions. And this positionality, says Kristeva, is
“structured as a break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the
subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality.” This break, which produces
the positing of signification, she calls a “thetic phase.” Even a child’s first enunciations,
including gesture and noises, are “thetic” insofar as they separate an object from the
subject and attribute to the object (either metaphorically or metonymically) a signifying
function (RPL, 43). Given that this thetic phase is the “deepest structure” of signification
and the proposition, Kristeva is concerned to move beyond the mere phenomenological
tracing of this phase to the ego, to showing, with the help of Freud and Lacan, the
process whereby this phase is produced (RPL, 44).

Kristeva points out that we can view the semiotic chora as preceding the symbolic
order only for purposes of theoretical analysis. In practice, the semiotic functions
within the symbolic, as a transgression of it. Though semiotic functioning is discernible
before the mirror stage, it is the semiotic that functions within the signifying practices
of the symbolic realm, i.e., after the symbolic break, that can be analyzed in both
psychoanalytic discourse and artistic practice (RPL, 68). Hence, the semiotic is produced
“recursively” on the basis of the thetic break, and represents a second “return
of instinctual functioning within the symbolic, as a negativity introduced into the
symbolic order, and as the transgression of that order” (RPL, 69). However, this
“return” is not analogous with the movement of the Hegelian dialectic whereby one
phase sublates (transcends and preserves in a higher synthesis) another: the eruption
of the semiotic within the symbolic does not lead to the restoration, on a higher plane,
of some primordial presymbolic unity or synthesis; rather, this negativity tends to
“de-syn-thesize” and disrupt the thetic phase. Hence textual practice, as in art and
literature, embodies a risk for the subject, threatening to sweep away entirely the
symbolic: negativity is checked, and the semiotic regulated, by the operation of language
(RPL, 69–70).

Kristeva suggests that in all known ancient societies, this founding break of the
symbolic order, as theorized by Freud in his account of the death drive, was represented
by sacrifice, a thetic event that has long been central to the discourses of religion


part viii: the twentieth century

(RPL, 70). Kristeva explains that the act of sacrifice focuses violence on a victim,
thereby displacing this violence “onto the symbolic order at the very moment this order
is being founded. Sacrifice sets up the symbol and the symbolic order at the same time,
and this ‘first’ symbol, the victim of a murder, merely represents the structural violence
of language’s irruption as the murder of soma, the transformation of the body, the
captation of drives” (RPL, 75). In other words, sacrifice represents the point at which
the social order and the symbolic order of language are simultaneously created, both
orders being based on representation (as in the body being withheld and made to
signify).

If sacrifice represents one aspect of the thetic function – the prohibition of jouissance
or play by language – art, having its roots in the representative ritual accompanying
sacrifice, expresses a different aspect, the “introduction of jouissance into and through
language” (RPL, 80). Religion controls the first aspect in instituting the symbolic order,
an institution justified first by myth and then by science. On the other hand, poetry,
music, dance, and theater enact trans-symbolic jouissance which threatens “the unity
of the social realm and the subject” (RPL, 80). Poetry becomes, in fact, “an explicit
confrontation between jouissance and the thetic . . . a permanent struggle to show the
facilitation of drives within the linguistic order itself.” It is the “eternal function” of
poetry to introduce through the symbolic that which threatens it (RPL, 81).

Hence the subject herself is marked by this irreconcilable contradiction. Kristeva
sees literature as the “most explicit realization of the signifying subject’s condition,”
and this “dialectical condition” of the subject in language was expressed especially by
Lautréamont and Mallarmé (RPL, 82). Kristeva views this as a revolution in poetic
language at the end of the nineteenth century, and continuing into the practice of
writers such as Bataille and Joyce. In her view, poetry since the Renaissance through
the French Revolution and Romanticism has become “mere rhetoric, linguistic formalism,
a fetishization, a surrogate for the thetic,” reduced to “a decorative uselessness”
with no subversive power (RPL, 83). The nineteenth-century “revolution” moved
beyond both madness and realism, in a leap that maintained both delirium and logic
(RPL, 82). In confronting the world of discourse, poetry, which represents a “semiotization
of the symbolic,” splits open the socio-symbolic order, “changing vocabulary,
syntax, the word itself, and releasing from beneath them the drives borne by vocalic or
kinetic differences” (RPL, 79–80). It was, however, only with Freud’s designation of
sexuality as “the nexus between language and society, drives and the socio-symbolic
order” that the radical practice of Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and Joyce could be
adequately assessed (RPL, 84–85).

In summary, the semiotic process includes “drives, their disposition, and their division
of the body, plus the ecological and social system surrounding the body, such as
objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents.” The realm of the symbolic encompasses
the emergence of subject and object as well as the constitution of meaning
structured according to categories tied to the social order (RPL, 86). Kristeva makes a
distinction between two aspects of a text: genotext refers to the “underlying foundation”
of language, the underlying play of energies and drives which give rise to a text
and which can be discerned through various linguistic devices (such as rhyme, melody,
intonation, and rhythm) but which is itself not linguistic. The term phenotext, on the
other hand, denotes communicative language; it is a structure which obeys the rules of


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communication and “presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee.” The
genotext is not a structure but a process that is not restricted to “the two poles of
univocal information between two full-fledged subjects” (RPL, 86–87). This process is
potentially infinite, encompassing “the flow of drives, material discontinuity, political
struggle, and the pulverization of language.” The phenotext represents the constraints
on this infinite, plural, and heterogeneous signifying process; these constraints are
ultimately “sociopolitical” (RPL, 88).

Hence, the revolutionary poetic language of which Kristeva speaks has a subversive
potential inasmuch as it threatens to reach back into the semiotic chora, to release
energies and drives that have been thwarted by the conventional structure of the symbolic,
disrupting the symbolic from within and reconceiving its notions of subject,
object, and their connections. In the signifying practices of late capitalism, according
to Kristeva, only certain avant-garde literary texts, such as those of Mallarmé and
Joyce, have the ability to transgress the boundaries between semiotic and symbolic,
genotext and phenotext; such texts can open up new possibilities of meaning, new
modes of signification. The text, therefore, is instrumental in social and political change:
it is the site where the explosive force of the semiotic chora expresses itself (RPL, 103).
Reading such a text is to subject one’s subjectivity to “impossible dangers” and risks,
such as leaving behind one’s identity, family, state, and religion, as well as the very
notions of continuity and constancy (RPL, 104). This “infinite” process can occur
through various modalities, through art or revolutionary processes of labor and political
practice. The radical transformation of linguistic and signifying practices is “logically
(if not chronologically) contemporaneous” with transformations in the social, political,
and economic order (RPL, 104). Quoting Marx’s comment that freedom can arise
only when the notion of labor is transformed, Kristeva urges that the signifying process
as practiced by “free” texts “transforms the opaque and impenetrable subject of social
relations and struggles into a subject in process/on trial.” She thus draws attention to
the “social function of texts: the production of a different kind of subject, one capable
of bringing about new social relations, and thus joining in the process of capitalism’s
subversion” (RPL, 105).

Hélène Cixous (b. 1937)

The radical nature and impact of Hélène Cixous’ work is rooted in the political and
social protests and upheavals of the 1960s, a period when leading French intellectuals
such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva were
reexamining some of the basic categories and assumptions of Western thought,
especially as these were embodied in the structure of language. All of these thinkers
challenged conventional representational or idealist views of language; they variously
explored the implications of Saussure’s observation of the discrepancy and distance
between signifier and signified; and they variously promoted conceptions of writing or
écriture which emphasized the relational, sensuous, material, and cultural-historical
dimensions of language, and the “textuality” of discourse. Cixous’ peculiar contribution
to this radical project was to promote écriture féminine or feminine writing, as


part viii: the twentieth century

expressed in her powerful and outspoken manifesto “Le Rire de la Méduse” (1975),
translated as “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976).

Like Derrida, Cixous was born to an Algerian Jewish family and suffered the experience
of imperialism. During the Algerian uprising against the French she went to study
in Paris; her doctoral dissertation, translated as The Exile of James Joyce, was published
in 1976. Assuming both teaching and administrative responsibilities at the University
of Paris, she made the acquaintance of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and Luce Irigaray.
She was, along with Tzvetan Todorov and Gerard Genette, one of the founders of the
journal Poétique, as well as the originator of France’s first PhD program in women’s
studies. Her subsequent literary theoretical writings have been collected in two volumes.

“The Laugh of the Medusa” might be seen as structured like a poem in its implicit
refusal to engage with the conventional rhetorical formats of argumentation and
expository prose. While its themes – the need for a female writing, the nature of such
writing, and its momentous implications at both personal and societal levels – are
clear, these themes surface into prominence in Cixous’ text through an almost poetic
refrain, through patterns of recurrence and reiteration in altering contexts. What is
more, the “argument” of this text relies heavily on the materiality of language, the
texture of words, the effect of word combinations and wordplay, as well as on an
overtness of metaphor that peripheralizes the possibility of attributing literal meaning

– grounded as this spurious notion is on centuries-old traditions of masculine categorizations
of concepts – to any portion of the text. The text attempts to move beyond
even poetic stratagems inasmuch as its “parts” resist assimilation into unity or into any
preceding literary-critical tradition or into any reductive hierarchy that might assign a
status of centrality to any of its claims.
Given its deliberated fluidity, it would be difficult to claim that Cixous’ text revolves
around any central metaphor: the very notion of centrality is treated as tentative and
transitory, one set of concerns sliding into centrality, then receding as they are continually
displaced by other notions. It may be worth beginning, however, by looking at
the metaphor that issues from the text’s title: the laugh of the Medusa. This metaphor
is not taken up until the middle of Cixous’ text, where, addressing women (as she does
throughout the text), she charges that men have “riveted us between two horrifying
myths: between the Medusa and the abyss.”14 The “abyss” refers to the connotations
and implications of Freud’s designation of woman as a “dark continent,” pregnant
with a mystery recalcitrant to analysis and understanding, and signifying lack, castration,
negativity, and dependence (on the positive identity of the male). Cixous of
course resists this view, this myth, of woman as unexplorable. And, countering the
other myth, that of woman as Medusa, she affirms: “You only have to look at the
Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing”
(“LM,” 289). Why beautiful? And why laughing? For Cixous, as for symbolist
poets like Laforgue and heterological thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Bergson,
laughter is a symbolic mode of refusing the history of (male) conceptuality, of truth as
defined by masculine traditions of thought. It is not that laughter opposes truth with
some other truth in the same conceptual mold. Rather, laughter is a way of exceeding
the very notion of truth, of refusing to engage in the thought processes and categorizations
of the world that have generated this notion. Another way of putting this would
be to say that laughter exceeds or transcends “theory,” which, by its very (historically


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determined) nature, is “male.” Cixous states that a “feminine text” is “more than
subversive,” designed to “smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to
blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter” (“LM,” 292). And it is the Medusa,
in her newly envisaged beauty, who wears this laughing countenance, beyond the assaulting
reach of her own reflectedness in the male shield of self-protective truth. In her
demythified and remythified status, she cannot be destroyed like the Medusa of myth.

The myth of Medusa: in classical mythology, the Medusa was one of three sisters
known as Gorgons, daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. The first two sisters, Stheno and
Euryale, were immortal, but Medusa was mortal. Serpents were entwined in their hair,
their bodies were covered with armor-like scales, and their hands were made of brass.
Their gaze turned any onlooker to stone. Perseus, the son of Zeus and Danae, was sent
to bring back the head of the Medusa. Armed by Pluto with a helmet that made him
invisible, by Athena with a shield of brilliant bronze that would serve as a mirror, and
by Hermes with winged feet, he was able to avoid the gaze of the Gorgons by viewing
their reflection in his shield, and he cut off the Medusa’s head, which nonetheless
retained its power. Eventually, Perseus placed the Medusa’s head on the shield of
Athena, where (or on her breastplate) it was conventionally represented. In his Metamorphoses,
Ovid has Perseus explain to his in-laws why the Medusa had snakes twining
in her hair. The Medusa, he says, “was once renowned for her loveliness, and roused
jealous hopes in the hearts of many suitors. Of all the beauties she possessed, none was
more striking than her lovely hair.” But Poseidon, he continues, “robbed her of her
virginity” in the temple of Athena, who punished her “immodesty” by changing her
hair into revolting snakes: “To this day, in order to terrify her enemies and numb them
with fear, the goddess wears as a breastplate the snakes that were her own creation.”15

If the Medusa represents one of the archetypal myths into which men have molded
the image of woman, this myth expresses the repression of female sexuality and beauty:
the very symbol of this sexuality, the Medusa’s hair, becomes a symbol of terror in its
draconian transformation. And although the agent of this repression and punishment
was a female goddess, Athena, this happens to be a goddess with very “masculine”
attributes, as expressed in her conventionally represented fierce countenance, and her
powerful frame, robed in the attire of war. What Cixous effectively does is to redeem
that part of the Medusa myth which has been repressed: the Medusa as she was prior to
the repression of her sexuality, prior to the disfigurement of her beauty, and prior to
her metamorphosis into a monster. To focus on the “laugh” of the Medusa, then, is
to redeem woman, to liberate her from her degraded status in the history of male
mythology. It is also to undermine the entire conceptual apparatus that has perpetuated
the myths of woman. The Medusa’s laugh returns woman to a premythical state,
to the state of actuality behind the myth, to the reality that has been repressed: it does
not oppose theory but laughs in its face, creating through its laughter a mode of
engagement with theory that cannot be reduced to simple opposition but gestures
toward a reformulation of the very grounds of communication between the system of
language on which conventional notions of truth are grounded, and an alternative,
female language. This new language will subsist in the relation of laughter (not opposition)
to conventional male language.

Indeed, what recurs throughout this text is a poetic exhortation to women to bring
into being a female language: “Woman must write her self . . . Woman must put herself


part viii: the twentieth century

into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement” (“LM,”
279). These broad categories – text, world, history – underlie the movement of Cixous’
account of the significance and implications of female writing. First and foremost,
feminine writing acknowledges its rootedness in the body: “Write your self. Your body
must be heard” (“LM,” 284). The significance of “body” in this context, as in many of
the texts of feminism, is complex and far-reaching, since it is the body, the female
body, that has been repressed historically by the apparatus of male theology and philosophy,
social systems, and even psychoanalysis. Male visions of the world have achieved
the status of “theory” precisely by abstracting from the data of actual experience, by
withdrawing from the world of the senses and the unconscious into an ideal world,
whether of pure forms, substance, the absolute idea, the transcendental ego, or the
soul. The most blatant cases of such repression of the body occur in theologies which
advocate negation or denial of one’s body and its drives and desires, and in particular
the female body, which is regarded as a source of temptation and often as unclean; the
most explicit examples in philosophy occur in Plato, who denies the status of reality to
the world of the body, the physical world of sensation, and also in Descartes’ dualism
between mind and matter, between the human self identified as a disembodied thinking
substance and its body which occupies the world of matter and extension, and is
external to the human self as such.

Historically, then, to write without the body, to refuse to accommodate the claims of
the body in a given view of the world, has been the norm, from Plato to the movements
in modern philosophy commencing with Descartes. To write with the body
implies facilitating a return of the repressed, a resurrection of that which has been
subordinated and treated as secondary, as dirty, as weighing us down and preventing
us from rising to the perception of higher truths. It is to reinstate the claims of the
body as legitimate in the overall constitution of humanity, a restitution that is initially
most visible in the constitution of femininity and its expression in feminine writing.
Cixous suggests that, more “than men who are coaxed toward social success, toward
sublimation, women are body” (“LM,” 290). Whereas Simone de Beauvoir had viewed
the rootedness of woman’s experience in bodily functions as a kind of imprisonment
within immanence, Cixous regards woman’s greater attunement to bodily needs and
drives as potentially liberating.

For it is indeed, in a sense, the body that resists pure theory: the latter, if not
constrained, can ascend through infinite orbits of speculation and can envelop us, as
Kant showed, in a spiraling regression of contradiction. We can use pure theory to
prove almost anything: that God exists and that he doesn’t exist: in either case, our
conclusion is not rooted in the world of actual experience. The body is a name, a
metaphor for many things: the uniqueness of experience which refuses to be subsumed
under a general category or to be reduced to exemplificatory status; and, as Cixous
reminds us, it can express the individuality of the self, inhabiting a determinate position
in place, time, class, color, race, and religion. To write with the body is to refuse to
annul these differences. If I am a black woman, born into a certain economic class and
raised in a specific ideological and cultural climate, all of these factors will of course
influence my reading of any given situation. I cannot, as the male tradition would have
me do, simply dismiss these factors to arrive at some neutral perspective, which is somehow
based on “pure” reason or pure thought and which thereby pretends to objectivity.


feminist criticism

One of the great achievements of feminism as a whole has been to remind us on
many levels that we all – not just women – speak from a perspective that is overdetermined,
that is highly conditioned by numerous factors beyond our control. For
me to be aware of my body when I write, then, is to recognize the profundity of its
contribution to, and determination of, my thought processes; we do not think in some
Cartesian vacuum, in some pure mind abstracted from all of the concrete circumstances
in which it is embodied. It has become conventional for us, in the process of
understanding anything, to see how a number of particular entities or events can be
brought under universals or general concepts: this attempt to see patterns of unity or
similarity in the vast diversity of phenomena is one of the fundamental ways in which
we have tried to make sense of the world. But feminism has shown that individuality
cannot be wholly abrogated, its richness and uniqueness cannot be wholly left behind,
in the process of thinking through general concepts. As Cixous insists, “there is . . . no
general woman.” One can talk of what women have in common, but the “infinite
richness of their individual constitutions” prevents us from talking about “a female
sexuality” that might be “uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes” (“LM,” 280).

If the body represents resistant particularity, particularity that is recalcitrant to the
generalization of its nature, this is because it harbors an irreducible and unique richness.
Indeed, it is a “unique empire” which “knows unheard-of songs,” an empire built
on acknowledgment of the “fantastic tumult of her drives,” and on a “precise interrogation
of her erotogeneity” (“LM,” 280). Each body is unique inasmuch as it distributes
desires in its own special way (“LM,” 295). And when this body is “heard,” when it is
expressed through writing, then “will the immense resources of the unconscious spring
forth,” the unconscious being the place where the repressed survives (“LM,” 284). This
new writing, expressing the “new woman,” and based on the “empire” of the body, will
resist the “analytic empire” built up in the language and categories of men (“LM,”
296): “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable
language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes . . . A
woman’s body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor – once, by smashing
yokes and censors, she lets it articulate the profusion of meanings that run through it
in every direction – will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with
more than one language” (“LM,” 289–290).

Noting that writing has so far has been run by a masculine economy, as “a locus
where the repression of women has been perpetuated,” Cixous equates the history of
writing with the history of reason; and this history “has been one with the phallocentric
tradition,” an “enormous machine that has been operating and turning out its ‘truth’
for centuries” (“LM,” 283). Hence the implications of a “new,” feminine, writing will
be momentous: “writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can
serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation
of social and cultural structures” (“LM,” 283). This new, “insurgent writing”
will cause a “rupture” in the history of women, at two levels: it will effect a “return” of
woman to her body, whereby she can realize a “decensored” relation to her sexuality;
and it will tear her away from the “superegoized structure in which she has always
occupied the place reserved for the guilty.” Writing will emancipate “the marvelous
text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak.” Secondly, when woman thus
seizes the occasion to speak, this will mark her “shattering entry into history,” her use


part viii: the twentieth century

of writing as “the antilogos weapon” (“LM,” 284). Woman’s writing will confirm a
place for her other than that reserved by the symbolic order, the order established by
male institutions and history. In contrast with the writing that structures the symbolic
order, woman’s writing is closest to the drives; woman “dares and wishes to know
from within . . . She lets the other language speak . . . which knows neither enclosure
nor death . . . Her language does not contain, it carries” (“LM,” 293). A woman’s
language is never abstract, never loses touch with the presymbolic and with the resources
of the unconscious: “it’s with her body that she vitally supports the ‘logic’ of
her speech . . . Her speech, even when ‘theoretical’ or political, is never simple or linear
or ‘objectified,’ generalized: she draws her story into history.” Since no woman “stockpiles”
defenses for countering the drives, “a woman is never far from ‘mother’ . . . There
is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink”
(“LM,” 285).

It is time, says Cixous, to “liberate the New Woman from the Old,” to break with
male-written history, and to write a new history (“LM,” 279, 282). As subject for
history, woman “un-thinks [spends] the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes
and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield. In woman, personal
history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and
world history” (“LM,” 286). Cixous insists that one cannot “define a feminine practice
of writing . . . this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded . . . it will always
surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system” (“LM,” 287). The “New
Women” will “dare to create outside the theoretical,” even at the risk of being “called
in by the cops of the signifier” who will try to reassign them their “precise place in the
chain that’s always formed for the benefit of a privileged signifier,” who would use a
privileged signifier to take them back to the “authority of a signified” (“LM,” 296).

The body, then, is an emblem of drives, the resistant particularity of experience, the
uniqueness of individuals that cannot be subsumed under coercive classifications, the
impossibility of abstracting the historical and the national from the personal. And
the writing that writes the body refuses codification and closure, resists obeisance to
the throne of reason, and insists on its living connections with the materiality of the
body, its drives, the unconscious, the libido. For a brief period in her text, Cixous even
addresses the “defenders of ‘theory,’ the sacrosanct yes-men of Concept, enthroners of
the phallus,” denying their potential charges of idealism and mysticism (“LM,” 295).
In fact, she stresses that to escape her imprisonment within the discourse of man, she
cannot merely appropriate male concepts and instruments: she must, rather, “fly” and
“steal” (“LM,” 291). She must, that is, “take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in
disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking
them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down” (“LM,” 291).
She must, with her body, puncture the “system of couples and opposition . . .
successiveness, connection, the wall of circumfusion” (“LM,” 291–292). She treads
outside of the history governed by the phallocentric values of “[o]pposition, hierarchizing
exchange, the struggle for mastery which can end only in at least one death (one
master – one slave . . . )” (“LM,” 297).

In terms somewhat reminiscent of de Beauvoir’s, Cixous suggests that the new woman
will embody “risk,” the danger of being a self-creating woman; woman’s oppressed
history gives her a better knowledge “about the relation between the economy of the


feminist criticism

drives and the management of the ego than any man.” Moreover, unlike man, “who
holds so dearly to his title and his titles,” woman is a “giver,” who seeks not herself but
the other in the other, who attempts to “unhoard,” who thrills in endless change and
becoming (“LM,” 297), and who “stands up against separation” (“LM,” 286). She is
“an integral part of all liberations,” carrying on the class struggle into “a much vaster
movement” (“LM,” 286). She will bring about “a mutation in human relations,”
embodying a new, “other bisexuality,” that designates “each one’s location is self . . . of
the presence . . . of both sexes,” a bisexuality that will supersede man’s “glorious phallic
monosexuality” (“LM,” 288). If there is a “propriety of woman,” urges Cixous, it is her
“capacity to depropriate unselfishly: body without end . . . If she is a whole, it’s a whole
composed of parts that are wholes,” as distinguished from masculine sexuality comprised
of a phallic centrality “under the dictatorship of its parts” (“LM,” 293). When we write,
“everything we will be calls us to the unlagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for
love. In one another we will never be lacking” (“LM,” 297).

Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: First and Second Series (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1948), p. 172. Hereafter cited as CR.
2 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. J. Schulkind
(New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1976), p. 72. Hereafter cited as MB.
3 A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf

(London: Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 220. Hereafter cited as WD.
4 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (New York, 1972), p. 145.
5 Moore, “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903), in Philosophical Studies (London, 1922),

pp. 1–2. Hereafter cited as “RI.”
6 Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London and New York, 1953), p. 4. Hereafter cited
as MPP.
7 Virginia Woolf, Contemporary Writers (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1965), p. 122. Hereafter cited as CW.
8 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; rpt. San Diego, New York, London: Harvest/
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 4. Hereafter cited as Room.
9 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938; rpt. New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1966),
pp. 19–21. Hereafter cited as TG.
10 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Bantam/Alfred A.
Knopf, 1961), p. 59. Hereafter cited as SS.
11 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 3. Hereafter cited as LTO.
12 Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (New
York and London: Verso, 1980), p. 8. Hereafter cited as WT.
13 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), p. 21. Hereafter cited as RPL.

14
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in
The Signs Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship, ed. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 289. Hereafter cited as “LM.”

15
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), IV.774–803.