ELAINE SHOWALTER

Part I

Elaine Showalter is one of the foremost feminist theorists and literary critics. “Towards a Feminist
Poetics” was originally lecture delivered in 1978. She clarifies in it many crucial points about feminist
stand and prepares a blueprint about what a ‘feminist poetics’ would be, as it were.

In developing an independent feminist theoretical framework, this essay is a significant document.

In today’s scenario, feminism appears to face severe challenges from different directions. Some come
from its own diversified and somewhat scattered nature which indicates lack of homogeneity and
cohesion. Elaine Showalter feels that there needs to give it a definite direction and cohesive form in
order to make it an effective instrument of women’s expression.

Therefore, one of the first steps taken by the author is to lay down the twin points of feminist literary
criticism --- WOMEN AS READER and WOMEN AS WRITER. In the former type, woman is
considered as the reader of “male-produced literature ” and her consequent reaction to it. This kind
of analysis can be termed ‘feminist critique’ . At the center of such a critique are images and
stereotypes of women in literature as well as the wrong beliefs and ideas regarding women. In the latter
type, the woman is a creator of meaning. This is done when women take upon themselves the
responsibility of writing texts. The establishment of this vision would liberate from dungeons of history
language, psychodynamics of female creativity, course of female literary careers, etc. Elaine Showalter
devised a term ‘gynocritique’ derived from the French “la gynocritique”.

It somehow demarcates itself from the conventional feminist critique which had “theoretical
affiliation” with Phallocentrism. The entire history is strewn with stereotypes of women and genderist
attitudes, and “what men have thought women should be.” Moreover, conventional feminist critique
also has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it routine topic of discussion ---
celebration of the “seduction of betrayal”.

As against such male-oriented critique (angry or loving fixation on male literature), Showalter poses the
programme for GYNOCRITICS to construct a FEMALE FRAMEWORK for the analysis of women’s
literature which will totally disown any ties with and dependence on male theories. It is necessary to
create fresh feminist models and approaches. She stresses heavily the need to free “ourselves from the
linear absolutes of male literary history”, that is, to stop trying to fit women between the lines of the
male tradition.

Besides, we have to put the past/history in correct perspective. The first task of gynocritics is to
“reconstruct” the literary past by bringing to the fore all those women writers who have remained
neglected and marginalized, and establish a continuity in their tradition.

She makes a pertinent point when she says that studying women writers in isolation will not solve the
problem. It is necessary to go beyond Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters and sweep together all those 150
or more women writers for us to be able to create a pattern and establish periodicity in the growth of
female tradition.

Part II

Referring to her book, ‘A Literature of Their Own’, Showalter says that the tradition of English female
can be classified into three phases of growth: Feminine, Feminist, and Female.

The first Feminine phase ranges from approximately 1840 to 1880. It is marked by a desire and
effort on the part of women writers to measure up to male writers. The social-moral compulsions forced
them to write under male pseudonyms. The names of George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, etc. can be cited
as an example. There are, of course, notes of simmering discontent and discomfort, but these are
obliquely indicated and are latent and muffed. There is pervasive melancholic tone and a sense of
resignation as in the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, and others.

The second phase Feminist phase follows from 1880 to 1920. It showed that “women are historically
enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use literature to dramatize the
ordeals of wronged womanhood.” This phase was characterized by women’s writing that protested
against male standards and values, and advocated women’s rights and values, included a demand for
autonomy.

The Female Phase (1920--) is one of self-discovery. It is the final realization that if woman is to have
“a room of her own”, she must reject both imitating the male literary tradition and perpetual note of
protest, because in both cases she has to depend on male tradition. The early pioneers are Dorothy
Richardson and Virginia Woolf. The emphasis is upon “female experience as the source of an
autonomous art.”

Elaine Showalter makes acid remarks about the emergence of a new intellectual culture with its
proliferation of various ideologies and methodological theories like Structuralism and Marxism.
Showalter sarcastically calls it a “literary science” where the emphasis is on more and more obscure
formulation of abstractions. These new sciences of text are as aggressive and demonstrative as certain
scientific disciplines.

She notices a two-tier class system among such intellectuals --- a new ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ criticism.
The higher criticism is concerned with the scientific problems of form and structure, and the lower is
concerned with the humanistic problems of content and interpretation.

The possibility of synthesis between Marxist-Structuralist approach and feminism is fraught with
difficulties because scientific criticism tends to purge the subjective factor, whereas feminist criticism is
based on the subjective experience. (It wants to assert THE AUTHORITY OF EXPERIENCE.) There is a
danger of woman getting “mute, invalid and invisible, lost in the debates of structuralists or the class
conflict of the Marxists.”