Elaine Showalter (1941) is one of the most influential American scholars in the field of feminine studies.

A Literature of Their Own was a pioneering contribution to the rediscovery of 'forgotten' women writers
which was taking place across all periods in the late 1970s and early 1980s. her own interventionism has
played a major role in reshaping how we approach Victorian literature, both within and outside courses
specifically devoted to women's writing. The success of A Literature of Their Own has placed Showalter
in the privileged position of being able to revisit her own text, when Princeton University Press brought
out an expanded paperback edition in 1999 - and she does so both in relation to direct criticism of the
book, and, to some extent, to the various subsequent developments in feminist literary study. She
locates her position in relation to French feminism, reminding one of the tightly-drawn ideological
battlegrounds of the 1980s and early 1990s, when A Literature of Their Own stood as a paradigm
(whether for praise or vilification) of 'Anglo-American' criticism.

BI TEXTUALITY + ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE

“If there was a female literary tradition, I was sure it came from imitation, literary convention, the market-place,
and critical reception, not from biology or psychology” In the early 1970s, I found it important to write about
continuities between generations of women writers, and I deliberately foregrounded women critics as well. But
the emphasis on female literary lineage is partly rhetorical, for women's writing is always at least bi-textual; as I
wrote in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," it is a double-voiced discourse influenced by both the dominant
masculine literary tradition and the muted feminine one.

Some critics have argued that women's writing is always “bitextual', in dialogue with both masculine and feminine literary

traditions. That is to say, women's writing looks back to both a male and a female canon, while male writing need only to
concern itself with the dominant male canon.

In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar set out a compelling theory of female
literary history as a dialogue between women writers and a patriarchal tradition. Their own theory was a
revision of Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence," presenting the battle between the sexes as a linguistic and
literary struggle that generated new genres and forms. They define it as a radical fear undergone by female writers
that they cannot create. They can not be precursors and that the act of writing inevitably isolates her from male forefathers
and destroys her. This anxiety is further followed by other anxieties that the literary forefathers will subdue her voice and
identity as a writer, escape the dilemma she faces in defining her subjectivity and potentials. They argue that women writers
like Jane Austin, Emile Dickinson do not fit into Bloom’s theory, as there are no material precursors under the male literary
tradition. So the literary daughters have the anxiety of authorship imposed by the pervasive view of writings as only male
activity- the pen as a metaphorical phallus.

Beginning with the writers of the 80s and 90s, Showalter finds the disturbing signs of evasion, retreat and the
defensive maneuvers of denying the full truth of women’s experience. It is as if the lifting of repression left
women terrified by their own once-buried impulses and desires. While the Victorians could compose fiction
that explicitly affirmed the social order half-consciously, their successors responded to new freedom by
producing a literature of anxiety and flight

TITLE

changed my working title from "The Female Tradition in the English Novel" to A Literature of Their Own, a
phrase they took from a statement by John Stuart Mill, whom I quote on the first page in the third sentence of
the book: "If women lived in a different country from men, and had never read any of their writings, they would
have a literature of their own. because this sentence from Mill's The Subjection of Women was my departure-
point; it raised the issues of nationality, subculture, literary influence, and literary autonomy I had attempted to
theorize; and, in the word "their," rather than "our," it emphasized my own cultural distance, as an American,
from the English women I discussed.

Almost all reviewers of the book ignored my reference to Mill. They interpreted the title as a reference to
Virginia Woolf, whom, some thought, I had treated with insufficient reverence. Toril Moi perceived hidden
motives of appropriation and rejection: "A distinguished fem-inist critic like Elaine Showalter, for example,
signals her subtle swerve away from Virginia Woolf by taking over, yet changing, Woolf's title. Under
Showalter's pen, A Room of One's Own becomes A Literature of Their Own, as if she wished to indicate her
problematic distance from the tradition of women writers she lovingly uncovers in her book.”

TORIL MOI’S CRITIQUE

The source of the attack was an obscure young scholar of French literature named
Toril Moi, who in 1985 published Sexual/Textual Politics (Routledge), a terse,
opinionated survey of the state of feminist literary criticism in France and the United
States

“in feminist literary history and criticism, as in every other field, being first has its disadvantages, because you
become the launching-pad for subsequent work and the starting-point for everyone else's improvements and
corrections. For the past twenty years, I have been attacked from virtually every point on the feminist
hermeneutic circle, as separatist, careerist, theoretical, anti-theoretical, racist, homophobic, politically correct,
traditional, and non-canonical critic”

Toril Moi in Sexual/Textual Politics “exemplifies the inadequacies of "Anglo-American" feminist criticism”. Moi's
central argument is that my "theoretical framework is never made ex-plicit." my implicit theory was that "a text
should reflect the writer's experience, and that the more authentic the experience is felt to be by the reader, the
more valuable the text." "Implicitly," she maintains, my position "strongly favours the form of writing
commonly known as critical or bourgeois realism" Moi declares, "there is detectable within her literary criticism
a strong, unquestioned belief in the values, not of proletarian humanism, but of traditional bourgeois humanism
of a liberal-individualist kind" My dependence on "traditional aesthetic categories" (8, 17), I am unable to
appreciate the decentered writing of modernism and its feminist uses. Moi says, “Women writing and writing
about women," where she reiterates her view that its flaws lie in "its unstated theoretical assumptions about
the relation-ship between literature and reality and between feminist politics and literary evaluation" (56). In
contrast, she maintains, the poststructuralist theory of French feminism in general, and Julia Kristeva in
particular, is the most sophisticated and far-reaching form of feminist literary analysis. Rejecting biologism and
es-sentialism, it deconstructs the "the opposition between masculinity and feminin-ity"
What feminists such as Showalter...fail to grasp is that the traditional humanism they
represent is in effect part of patriarchal ideology. At its centre is the seamlessly
unified self–either individual or collective–which is commonly called "Man."...

Imperious and doctrinaire, Moi’s criticisms struck a nerve. From the vantage point of
a radical feminist steeped in French poststructuralism and psychoanalysis–now
considered minimal requirements for membership in women’s studies–Showalter’s
early feminist work looked distinctly old guard. Not only was her worldview
disturbingly bourgeois, her scholarship lacked even a token acknowledgment of the
intricate, indirect, and wholly vexed relationship between literary creations and lived
experience. The problem with Showalter’s approach, Moi complained, is that "all art
becomes autobiography, a mere window on to the self and the world, with no reality
of its own."
 Toril Moi, in her 1985 book Sexual/Textual Politics, described Showalter's as a limited, essentialist view of women. Moi
particularly criticized Showalter's ideas regarding the Female phase, and its notions of a woman's singular autonomy and
necessary search inward for a female identity. In a predominantly poststructuralist era that proposes that meaning is
contextual and historical, and that identity is socially and linguistically constructed, Moi claimed that there is no fundamental
female self.
According to Moi, the problem of equality in literary theory does not lie in the fact that the literary canon is fundamentally
male and unrepresentative of female tradition, rather the problem lies in the fact that a canon exists at all. Moi argues that a
feminine literary canon would be no less oppressive than the male canon because it would necessarily represent a particular
socio demographic class of woman; it could not possibly represent all women because female tradition is drastically different
depending on class, ethnicity, social values, sexuality, etc. A female consciousness cannot exist for the same reasons. Moi
objects to what she sees as an essentialist position – that is, she objects to any determination of identity based on gender.
Moi's criticism was influential as part of a larger debate between essentialist and postmodern feminist theorists at the tim

SHOWALTERS REPLY TO MOI

in her own immersion in French and Marxist criticism, Moi missed the real theoretical assumptions of A
Literature of Their Own, assumptions derived from a very different approach to literature, reality, gender, and
canon. In Moi's view, the most important theoretical questions were philosophical: "What is interpretation?
What does it mean to read? What is a text?" (77). My theoretical questions, however, were historical and
cultural. What is the relation-ship between a dominant and a muted culture? Can a minority criticism de-velop
its own methods and theories through wide and careful reading of its own literary texts? How does a literary
subculture evolve and change? The disciplines with answers for such questions were not philosophy and
linguistics, but cultural anthropology and social history

My theoretical assumptions came from the sociology and ethnography of literature. Looking at such literary
subcultures as African-American writing, Canadian writing, and Anglo-Indian writing, I attempted to define
women's writing as the product of a subculture, evolving with relation to a dominant mainstream. In its
evolution, I argued, women's writing moves "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" (A Literature
29). But a mature women's literature ceases to be part of a subculture and can move into "a seamless
participation in the literary mainstream" (A Literature 36).
If I were writing A Literature of Their Own today, I would certainly have a broader comparative base in literary
subcultures and in the theories that have emerged around postcolonial studies. I would also make a stronger
theoretical case for "realism" as a literary convention. Despite its intellectual vogue, French feminist theory has
still not come to terms with women's writing and literary history, and many of its leading figures have moved on
to other subjects

Toril Moi went further, arguing that work like mine aimed "to create a sepa-rate canon of women's writing, not
to abolish all canons" (78). Yet, as Moi herself declared when she was attacking another Anglo-American
feminist critic in a different context, claiming to "abolish" literary canons is a gesture of hollow rhetorical
grandiosity: "To be 'against' power is not to abolish it in a fine, post- 1968 libertarian gesture, but to hand it over
to somebody else"

Showalter says, “Thus each generation of women writers has found itself, in a sense, without a
history, forced to rediscover the past anew; forging again and again the consciousness of their sex.
Given this perpetual disruption and also self-hatred that has alienated women writers from a sense
of collective identity…”

The con-struction of a literary canon is not a conspiracy, but a process determined by a large cultural network.
Work by such critics as Richard Brodhead and John Guillory has shown that canon-formation, involving the
reclamation of devalued writers, is an important part of critical revolutions,

MORE CRITIQUE + SHOWALTERS RESPONSE

scholars have argued that the female literary tradition in the novel be-gins much earlier than 1840s and that I
neglect novelists of the eighteenth cen-tury. Marilyn Butler objects that "Showalter concludes that a continuous
wom-en's tradition can be spoken of only for writers born after 1800. Janet Todd, in Feminist Literary History,
protests that "Showalter can declare that women did not think of themselves as professional writers be-fore
1800, when there are in fact hosts of professional novelists in the eighteenth century.

But I continue to think that before the nineteenth century, as Ruth Perry points out in her splendid biography of
Mary Astell, no British "woman planned a ca-reer as a writer; there was no such concept as a woman of letters.
Moreover, the appearance of the male pseudonym among British and European women was a clear historical
marker of a new literary consciousness based on gender. I chose to be-gin in the 1840s in order to emphasize
professionalism, marketing, and group awareness.

GYNOCRITICISM

“helped create the new field of feminist literary history and gynocriticism” “A Literature of Their Own appeared
during the first wave of feminist literary criticism which focused on re-discovery” gynocriticism, as I named the
study of women's writing in 1979.
Showalter enumerated the liberatory aims of "gynocriticism," her alternative to
male-dominated literary theory. Indebted to French feminist discussions of écriture
feminine ( a term coined by French Feminist Helene Cixous)–writing that in its
grammar, logic, and silences was purely female–gynocriticism sought to elucidate
elements of an authentic female experience in writing by women, as opposed to the
less reliable, often sexist representations of female experience found in male fiction
and criticism

A vibrant interest in a “female literary tradition” is part of the second phase of feminist literary
criticism, which began in the nineteen seventies and has “gradually shifted its centre from
revisionary readings to a sustained investigation of literature by women.” Elaine Showalter talks
about two modes of feminist criticism: the woman as reader, which she calls as “the feminist
critique” and the woman as writer, which she calls as “gynocritics.
Elaine Showalter suggests, “the attempts of gynocritics should be to illuminate every aspect of
women’s writing in a male-dominated society”
It is the “study of women as writers and its subjects are the history, style, themes, genres ad
structures of writing by women, the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the
individual or collective female career and the evolution and laws of a female literary tradition

“ I would not defend A Literature of Their Own against attack, but rather that I would try to let go of the book
and allow intellectual debate in feminist criticism to follow its natural course”

She also performed a major revivalist campaign on behalf of many authors who had fallen out of
popularity and publication. Above all, she did so in a way which made their writings seem urgent to the
concerns of the 1970s, however superficially stuffy their plots and values might appear. a highly
influential critical insight, saw how the men in their fictions acted as surrogates for women's expression of
their sexualities, and of their desires for power

Showalter's book was extraordinarily infiuential on how one looked at more familiar texts. Her lucid
articulation of the pressures which women authors faced, and the degree to which they internalized them,
ensured that the very quotations which she employed from contemporary reviewers and commentators
came themselves to hold canonical status.

PHASES IN WOMENS WRITING

women's writing has moved through phases of subordination, protest, and autonomy, phases connected by
recurring images, metaphors, themes, and plots that emerge from women's social and literary ex-perience and
from reading both male and female precursors.

I still remain committed to the idea, even the metaphor, of progress in English women's writing, if only in terms
of range and freedom of expression. Moreover, I think it is necessary to evaluate the relative success and failure
of women's writing, and I cannot agree with critics like Ann Ardis, who insists that feminist critics should reject
all models of "literary hierar-chies" as patriarchal, in the interests of a "noncanonical theory of value. I continue
to believe that women's writing needs no apologies or special treatment and that it can sustain the most
rigorous tests of aesthetic judgment and literary quality.

My tripartite structure is feminine, feminist, female.

In its first phase, feminist criticism developed out of a dialogue with the Victorian patriarchs and with a textual
preference for Victorian women's novels. Moreover, Victorian studies was a field hospitable to a feminist
presence early on, in its interdisciplinarity, its acceptance of women writers, and its friendliness towards women
scholars and critics. it was the only literary period in which women were accepted as canonical writers.

for Showalter, the Victorian and Modernist period can be arranged into three more or less sequential
phases, which she termed 'Feminine, Feminist, and Female' characterized by subordination, protest, and
autonomy. Even if this continuum (with its inevitable overlaps) may convincingly be traced in general
terms, the more broadly one reads, the more exceptions and awkward, uncategorizable practitioners one
encounters:

Showalter contends that all literary subculture can be traced through three major phases:
1. first a phase of “imitation” and “internalization” in which the subculture largely adopts the values and
the literary forms of the dominant tradition—a phase which here extends from the widespread
appearance of the male pseudonym in the 1840s to the death of Gorge Eliot in 1880; she has
proposed that women tried to imitate the predominant male tradition, after having internalized its
values and literary standards. The ‘feminine’ phase is marked by characteristics wherein a
woman wished to be the Angel in The House, content in being second fiddle, basking in the
glory of her man, extremely submissive and devoted to her duties as a wife, mother, sister,
daughter-in-law, etc. even if she is an achiever, she projects herself to be lesser than her
man and invariably gives credit of all her achievements to him. Her projection of self is that
of a dependent and helpless feminine person who is desperate for protection and seemingly
secure in the realm of her house. Her man is her God. The feminine woman always
maximizes the ego of her man and projects herself as the weaker sex, happy to be on the
periphery in a state of submission. The ‘feminine’ phase is thus ‘imitative’ and the voices are
‘muted voices’.

2. next a phase of “advocacy” and “protest” in which the subculture rejects prevailing values and begins
to declare its autonomy—a stage which Showalter associates with the years between 1880 and the
winning of the vote in 1920; marked by protest emerging from the new political consciousness among
women. The women artist’s role began to be redefined in terms of responsibility to fellow women sufferers.
These women strongly reacted and revolted against the male tradition and saw men as their
primary oppressors. As Showalter (1977) points out, ‘The feminists challenged many of the
restrictions on woman’s self-expression, denounced the gospel of self-sacrifice, attacked
patriarchal religion, and constructed a theoretical model of female oppression.” (29) Their
anger and need for self-assertion and justification led them to Utopian fantasies and
unrealistic demands for changes in society which led to a conflict and War of Sexes and till
date negative connotations are associated with the word ‘feminist’. By rejecting the
traditional role-model, they are eloquent and aware of their rights and demand their own
unique space giving importance to education and their own individual needs, though most
of these women. reject the feminine roles, rejected the male canon and many rejected
 marriage and the social and cultural roles associated with the female sex. The ‘feminist’
phase is thus ‘eloquent’ and ‘reactive’ and aggressive in nature.

3. and finally a phase of “self-discovery”—a turning inward and a search for identity—which here
begins around 1920 and continues to the present. Having survived a culture’s equivalent of childhood
and adolescence, Showalter’s model implies that the female literature tradition now approaches its
maturity. The Female phase, which is ongoing since 1920, is characterized by a turning
inward, in the quest of self-discovery, and a search for identity. She suggests that the
Female phase has entered a new stage of self-awareness around 1960, with the advent of
women’s movement Women’s writing today are drafted along what Elaine Showalter
terms as the “Female Phase,” where women reject both imitation and protest – two forms
of dependency and turn instead of female experience as the source of autonomous art.
Women writers write with heightened awareness of themselves, their bodies and mind.
The themes of alienation, loss of identity and search for a “home” remain at the heart of
their writings. Quest for self-identity is a recurring theme in fiction of women. Another
important theme is focus on psychological exploration. It is a phase of ‘self-fulfilled’
individuals who are assertive without being threatening entities. They are confident achievers
and successfully create their own space in the male dominant culture. As Showalter (1977)
says, in the female phase, there was a shift from “feminism to a female phase of courageous
self-exploration, but it carried with it the double legacy of feminine self-hatred and feminist
withdrawal”. (35) The woman writers of the ‘Female’ transformed this self-hatred and
withdrawal into a dignified self-exploration, self-realization and a self-acceptance, thus
making a space for their own selves in the male bastion, comfortable with their success, sex
and femininity.

Showalter labels these stages of development the “feminine”, the “feminist”, and the “female”. Through such
categorization of women’s literary history, Elaine has cogently illustrated how these historical stages can help to
understand the complex interrelationship between women writers and their response to societal changes. Elaine has
clarified and illustrated that the three phases are not rigid categories and may overlap each other. There may be
feminist elements in feminine writers as well as the other way round and one may even find all three phases, in the
total career of a single writer

These problematic names have provoked a hot discussion among critics. Ruth Yeazell argues that “feminine is
a word difficult to associate with the massive achievement of the Brontës, Gorge Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell”

( EXTRA
Finally the fourth stage, “a seamless participation in the literary mainstream.”(2009, Showalter).
According to her the American women had reached this stage by the end of the Twentieth Century
and are equipped to take on any subject they want, in any form they choose in the Twenty First
Century. An appropriate terminology for women writers’ in these stages would be “Feminine”,
“Feminist”, “Female” and “free)

THE NEW WOMAN

the term "New Woman" made its debut in May 1894, in an exchange between Sarah Grand and Ouida in the
North American Review. 1894 was an annus mirabilis for New Woman writing as well. Yet the heyday of the
New Woman Novelist was pitifully brief. By 1895, the blaze of women's writing was reduced to sparks and
ashes, and the death of the New Woman novel was widely proclaimed. Moreover, the writers themselves did
not fare well. In A Literature of Their Own, I placed most of the blame for the New Woman writers' demise on
the women themselves. "In retrospect," I wrote then, "it looks as if all the feminists had but one story to tell,
and exhausted themselves in its narration…they ended ... with the dream that by with-drawing from the world
they would find a higher female truth”. I have since tried to soften this harsh judgment, If New Women novelists
withdrew in frus-tration from social engagement, they had good reason to do so and fought coura-geously
against the conventions of the time.

NOVEL

The novel was a problematic genre for fin-de-siecle (End of the Century) English women writers, as many of
them real-ized. In their hands it tended to be didactic, talky, episodic, and contrived. Following on the great
achievements and reputation of George Eliot, they suf-fered from the anxiety of influence; and they had
outgrown the plots of Victorian fiction without having entirely reinvented their own. John Kucich argues that
New Woman novelists had difficulties "accommodating the ambiguities of truth-telling within fiction itself to the
demands of feminism. because women writers could not negotiate the truth dilemmas of post-Victorian
literature, not because of their lack of talent or their ideological single-mindedness, that they made inevitable
their own exile from a canonical tradition that had begun to treat honesty as an issue that could only be
resolved through aesthetic rarefaction"

SHORT STORY

The best British women's writing of the 1890s is in the short story rather than in the novel. Women writers
found an appropriate form in the short story for the strong feminist themes of the decade: the rebellion of the
muse, the exploration of a new woman's language, and the protest against the appropriation, even theft, of
women's stories by men. New Women had to rewrite aestheticism and deca-dence in order to include female
creativity. They had to present female sexuality and reproduction as positive creative forces, rather than as
biological traps or the binary opposite of artistic creation. They had also to deal with the relationship between
aestheticism and commodification. Their short stories, more than their novels, describe the struggle for new
words and new forms

CONCLUSION

Then I warned that if "the room of one's own becomes the destination, a feminine secession from 'male' power,
logic, and violence, it is a tomb." Disturbingly, even in 1998, the room of one's own, as the locus for chronic
fatigue syndrome, female fantasy, or paralyzing anxiety, is still an iso-lated space in women's fiction. But there is
also hopeful evidence that "contact with a female tradition and a female culture" has been a center, inspiring
women writers to "take strength in their independence to act in the world.

Feminist criticism and women's literary history do not depend on the discovery of a great unique genius, but on
the establishment of the continuity and legiti-macy of women's writing as a form of art. With the globalization
of culture, moreover, the national boundaries of the novel are fading and disappearing. The distinctions of
nationality and culture I meant to imply in the title of A Literature of Their Own are no longer as sharp as they
were only twenty-five years ago. But if the distinctions of gender may also soon become matters of literary
history, it will be because feminist criticism has succeeded in its task