How Not to Do Things with Metaphors We Live by

Author(s): Meryl Altman

Source: College English , Sep., 1990, Vol. 52, No. 5, Women and Writing Continued (Sep.,
1990), pp. 495-506
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/377538

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 Meryl Altman

How Not To Do Things With

Metaphors We Live By

The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in
recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized
in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the
dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all
act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the
word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then
was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you were: inside,
safe, or outside, lost.
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; emphasis added.

Feminist criticism, and feminism more generally, have both feared and loved
metaphor. On the one hand, critics and writers have resisted traditional uses of
metaphor to exert power and mastery, to restrict and reduce Woman by turning
her into a trope. I think for example of Adrienne Rich's lines of refusal, in
"From An Old House in America":

I am not the wheatfield

nor the virgin forest
I never chose this place
yet I am of it now

These four lines encapsulate Annette Kolodny's well-known argument in The

Lay of the Land, where she explores the real-world damage certain metaphorical
uses of Woman can do, tracing the tragic destructiveness of American culture to
the metaphorization of North American land as virgin mother eternally awaiting
rape (the "fresh green breast of the New World" syndrome). Feminist hostility
toward metaphor rests on the more general insistence of feminist criticism,
reacting against the apolitical implications of what used to be called the New
Criticism, that the woman in the text is in some sense a real woman and that tex-
tual assaults on her autonomy and integrity should not be protected from politi-
cal scrutiny by their status within any high cultural "safe" space of literature
(see also Kappeler).

Meryl Altman wrote this article while teaching at the College of William and Mary. She is currently
coordinator of Women's Studies at DePauw. Her book, Interlocutions: Men, Women and Modernisms
in American Poetry, will be published by Northeastern University Press.

College English, Volume 52, Number 5, September 1990

495

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496 College English

On the other hand, certain undeniably metaphorical formulations have had

tremendous power within feminist discourse: "pornography is the theory, ra
is the practice" (suggesting a powerful relationship, while eliding the issue of
empirically discernable causality); Rich's own "the dream of a common lan-
guage" (which uses "language" in a fairly indeterminate, a-linguistic way); "the
madwoman in the attic" (applied by Gilbert and Gubar as a figural relationship
to attic-less texts). All of us resent Norman Mailer's assertion in Advertisements
for Myself that a real writer writes with "his balls" (435), but some of us have
found it satisfying to ponder H61ene Cixous's formulation that woman "writes
with white ink," in "The Laugh of the Medusa"-an entirely figural text which
explicitly sets itself outside the realm of verifiability, in a utopian space, liberat-
ing, artistic. No one actually believes this text to be true on a literal level, but
nearly everybody teaches and quotes it. Thus metaphor has been seen both as a
key aspect of what Rich has called "the oppressor's language" ("The Burning of
Paper" 117) and as a potentially liberating strategy for evading the confines of
that language. How can these things be? And how should a feminist poetics the-
orize metaphor?
It's already clear, I'm sure, that for the purpose of this essay I'm defining
metaphor less as a specific formal figure and more as a rhetorical strategy, a cer-
tain class of utterance that is literally neither true nor false, that uses substitu-
tion and/or catechresis to establish a kind of ontological third space or free zone.
Metaphors are things which feel or sound true, which you can get people to
agree are true, but which make no literal sense when dissected by a skeptic: i.e.,
"my love is a little white lamb" doesn't imply that the speaker engages in bes-
tiality. Metaphors, in other words, have truth effects without having actual truth
value narrowly defined. What interests me is not the distinction between a meta-
phor and a simile, but rather the way this distinction in practice always becomes
blurred: what begins as an interesting analogy spills over into a proposition
about how something "is." This blurring is the source of a tremendous discur-
sive power. Metaphorical speech gains both authority and protection from its
special generic status. It is posited as true, but its truth or falsehood is not debat-
able. (For some background on this point, see the essays in Sacks and in John-
son. Perhaps all of deconstruction, too, creates such a metaphorical safe space
for itself, a space within which Derrida can assert that he is a woman, an asser-
tion that cannot be challenged politically without going outside his discursive
system and leaving oneself vulnerable to the charge of having improperly under-
stood it. A similar statement might be made about Freud's use of analogical rea-
soning to discuss the "as if" of the unconscious.)
The feminist confusion about whether metaphor is a good thing or a bad thing
has its parallel in the history of theory of metaphor in a confusion about whether
metaphor, figural language, is a marker of femininity or a marker of its opposite.
On the one hand, where metaphor is devalued as opposed to some sort of objec-
tive or logical or positivistic discourse, it will be associated with the feminine.
Take for example the following passage from Locke, quoted by Ted Cohen in his
brief history of philosophers' disregard for figurative language:

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 How Not To Do Things 497

[I]f we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rh
besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of word
quence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, mov
passions, and thereby mislead the judgement, and so indeed are perfect chea
and, therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in
rangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that prete
inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided. . . . It is evident how much men lo
deceive and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error an
ceit, has its established professors, is publically taught, and has always been h
great reputation: and, I doubt not, but it will be thought great boldness, if no
tality in me, to have said thus much against it. Eloquence, like the fair sex, h
prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. (qtd. in Sack

Locke assumes, relies upon, the cultural asymmetry which values masculi
over femininity when he uses the metaphor (figurative rhetoric is a woma
shortcut to demonstrate that figuration is trivial and/or tainted. What's am
about this example is that in order to make this point he must himself ma
of the tainted and debased rhetorical strategy of metaphor.
The case of Nietzsche is, as usual, more complicated but equally interest
Take the famous opening of Beyond Good and Evil:
Supposing truth is a woman-what then? Are there not grounds for the susp
that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexp
about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness wit
which they have usually approached truth so far have been very awkward and
improper methods for winning a woman's heart? What is certain is that she h
allowed herself to be won-and today every kind of dogmatism is left dispirite
discouraged. If it is left standing at all! (2)

Now from a philosopher who is capable of observing later in the same tex
"good and bad women want a stick" (89), we may assume that the anal
not intended as a compliment; true, Lockean empiricism and disdain for th
ural or ambiguous have not gotten men very far in Nietzsche's view, but in
to show this, he enacts the same move as Locke, tuining Woman into a tr
figure and then associating her with the irreducibly and frighteningly inacc
aspects of life. He says elsewhere that "truth is a mobile army of metaph
perhaps we may read "mobile" as mobile, in Don Giovanni's sense-women a
fickle, changeable, fascinatingly unmanageable. The difference, of course, i
Nietzsche's method will in some sense embrace or take on the figural mob
he associates with women, at least on the level of style and method-thoug
uses it to remain an advocate of a strong or "virile" philosophy. I will obs
though I cannot discuss it fully here, that a fair portion of deconstruction t
can in fact be extrapolated from this passage, which may help us make se
why Derrida wants to assert that he is a woman.
On the other hand, a culture or a writer that values metaphor and figur
may deny that women ever use these strategies or are competent to do so.
garet Homans, in Bearing the Word, persuasively traces the identification
women with the literal and men with the figurative or symbolic from W
worth through Lacan. She explains that

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498 College English

[W]hat is most problematic for women writers about these myths of culture is the
way they position women, or "the feminine," in language. For the same reason
women are identified with nature and matter in any traditional thematics of gender
(as when Milton calls the planet earth "great Mother"), women are also identified
with the literal, the absent referent in our predominant myth of language. From the
point of view of this myth, the literal both makes possible and endangers the figur-
ative structures of literature. That we might have access to some original ground of
meaning is the necessary illusion that empowers the acts of figuration that consti-
tute literature. ... At the same time, literal meaning would hypothetically destroy
any text it actually entered by making superfluous those very figures-and even,
some would argue, all language acts. ... This possibility is always, but never more
than, a threat, since literal meaning cannot be present in a text: it is always else-
where. This positioning of the literal poses special problems for women readers and
writers because literal language, together with nature and matter to which it is epis-
temologically linked, is traditionally classified as feminine, and the feminine is,
from the point of view of a predominantly androcentric culture, always elsewhere
too. (4)

Homans' book discusses the choice of some women writers to embrace the con-
nection between women and the literal, largely through attempting to elaborate a
poetics of the maternal body; sometimes, she argues, this is an empowering
choice, enabling women to overcome cultural taboos about writing as women.
But Homans admits that "the literal is ambiguous for women because women's
potentially more positive view of it coincides with its devaluation by our culture
." (4-5). What I want to stress here is that an extremely persuasive argument
has been constructed on a 180-degree reversal of the Lockean (and Nietzschean)
opposition above: instead of being a figure for a dangerous figuration, woman is
now for Wordsworth et al. a figure for a dangerous literalness which might
render male figuration irrelevant. When Homans extends her critique to the
twentieth century and Lacan, we discover that (as with Locke) an inconsistency
hinges on his own use of figurative language to discuss figuration:
In the Lacanian myth, language and gender are constructed in such a way as to
privilege implicitly the masculine and the figurative. . . . It is, by this logic, because
of the lack of the phallus, not its possession, that the child enters with such enthusi-
asm into the Law of the Father, for it is symbolic language alone that can approxi-
mate the bridging of the gap between child and mother opened up by the simul-
taneous arousal and prohibition of incest. ... [B]ased on the son's experience ...
[this] search . . . will constitute, not a universal human condition, but a specifically
male desire, the desire of the son who must renounce his mother.
That Lacan's narrative originates in male experience shouldn't necessarily inval-
idate it as a description of a daughter's relation to sexuality and language. But his
narrative depends on a disingenuous confusion of trope and material condition. On
the one hand, "phallus," "masculine" and "feminine" are all argued to be tropes
or positions in language, which anyone, male or female, can occupy. On the other
hand, he himself applies what he has said about the trope "woman" to actual
women, in a remark in which gender has obviously become a material condition:
"There is no woman who is not excluded by the nature of things, which is the
nature of words, and it must be said that, if there is something they complain a lot
about at the moment, that is what it is-except that they don't know what they are
saying, that is the difference between them and me." While Lacanian language as-
sumes the lack of the phallus, it is only those who lack it-those who might once
have had it, as sons believe their fathers have-who are privileged to substitute for

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 How Not To Do Things 499

it symbolic language; daughters lack this lack. Lacan's narrative of the origin of fig-
uration authorizes itself by telling the story in such a way as apparently to privilege
figuration as a mode, and yet it depends on the literal difference between sex
organs. (6-9)

In other words, Lacan's foot slips into the literal just as Locke's slipped into the
figurative. These stylistic gender polarities seem to be as difficult to maintain in
practice as they are persistent in theory. Or rather, the simple fact of polarity
persists; the content of the polarity seems to be endlessly mutable.
This odd situation within theories about language is not unique to metaphor.
As linguist Deborah Cameron has observed:
At any time, prevailing views about language tend to identify whatever is thought
vital and healthy with men and whatever is thought sickly and degenerate with
women. This can lead to shifts and contradictions over time. For example, the
eighteenth century considered linguistic innovation a bad thing and attributed
"ephemeral" coinages to "the ladies." The late nineteenth and twentieth century,
influenced by Darwin, considered innovation one mark of a successful, adaptive
language-and identified men as "the chief renovators" of vocabulary. (7)

We may partly be dealing here with a wider problem, that is, the tendency of
male writers to reach for the gender polarity as a convenient metaphor for any
hierarchy of value, the tendency to feminize anything pejorative. It is exactly
this history that has led to the feminist hostility toward metaphor.
However, the above cases may lead us in another direction instead-toward
the realization that any rigid separation between literal and figurative is naive,
that it arises from an ideological presupposition or wish that it might be so.
This is the argument made by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their influ-
ential little book, Metaphors We Live By. They argue that, far from being a spe-
cial category of language proper to poets and rhetoricians, "metaphor is per-
vasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our
ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is funda-
mentally metaphorical in nature" (3).
This book demonstrates persuasively, not just that "everyday language" is
dense with figuration, but that metaphors behave systematically-that certain
pervasive "conceptual metaphors" (for example, "argument is war," "happy is
up," "time is money," "communication is sending") entail other metaphors and
concepts and thus structure human experience. Metaphors, they say, are "direc-
tional," that is, they define unfamiliar or abstract experience with reference to
familiar, concrete experience; metaphors can "create social realities" (156) as
well as naming situations that already exist: "the fundamental values in a culture
will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental con-
cepts in the culture" (22); and "people in power get to impose their metaphors"
(157). One large category of metaphor, "spatial" or "orientational" metaphor, is
so basic it can be traced to "direct physical experience," "interaction with the
physical environment," "motor functions," and so on (57).
The advantage of this approach is not just that it is true, as you will discover
if you try to write or say something without using any metaphors, but also that it
enables us to observe the political operation of a particular metaphor on many

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500 College English

levels at once, from the most elevated literary discourse to the most banal con-
versation, thus underlining the social importance of this inquiry.
However, to recognize the pervasiveness of metaphor is not, alas, to be
magically placed outside its potential for doing political damage. As Lakoff and
Johnson themselves observe, "the very systematicity that allows us to com-
prehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another ... will necessarily hide
other parts of the concept" (10). The way their own focus on the physical bases
of metaphor has led them to assume a universality of both physical and concep-
tual experience and to ignore the factor of gender entirely, ironically demon-
strates the truth of this observation. The most blatant example is their derivation
of "happy is up" from such physiological and experiential facts as "drooping
posture typically goes with sadness and depression . . serious illness forces us
to lie down . . . the victor in a fight is typically on top . . . if you add more of a
substance or of physical objects to a container or pile, the level goes up," and so
on--leading to such "metaphorical entailments" as "high status is up ... virtue
is up . . . rational is up, emotional is down," and so on. All this is true enough,
but it obscures the fact that one component of male "physiological experience"
has the unique ability to go up and down in ways associated with "happiness"-
and that those who have this metaphor-generating experience have had the cul-
tural power to impose it on those of us whose physiological experience of sexu-
ality is different. ("Important is big" may be another version of this.) This blind
spot may well be related to another fact: the book is full of wonderful, compel-
ling examples for their theory, examples in which the subject pronoun is over-
whelmingly likely to be an explicit or implicit "he," unless there is a special rea-
son for using "she," for instance if the sample sentence deals with sexuality, or
domesticity, or neurosis. Male experience is assumed to be the norm. So, for ex-
ample, in the discussion of "ontological metaphors" (metaphors which "turn ab-
stractions into entities and substances") we find:
He went to New York to seekfame and fortune.
We are working toward peace.
I can't keep up with the pace of modern life.
Pete Rose has a lot of hustle and baseball knowledge.
She saw getting married as the solution to her problems. (26-27)

This bias is of course unconscious-which is precisely Lakoff and Johnson's

point about how metaphor operates.
Now feminists, attempting to use metaphor as a strategy of conceptual and
cultural power, have of course not been immune to the problem that metaphor
operates to highlight certain aspects of reality and hide others. The most famous
example of this is "women are the niggers of the world." Women are oppressed,
yes, and this shocking formulation points to that truth. But as women of color
have been quick to point out, women are not the niggers of the world. Black
people are the niggers of the world; and the metaphorical appropriation of that
oppression is a form of cultural imperialism, another example of the oppression
of those who have less access to powerful cultural discourse by those who have
more (though they may not have much). Another example: I found myself enam-

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 How Not To Do Things 501

oured of a new metaphor, "teaching composition is the housework of the Eng-

lish department." To unpack this:
composition is repetitive, boring, intrinsically unrewarding;
it carries low professional status; in many places, it doesn't really count as profes-
sional work at all (it is done by adjunct faculty and graduate students);
it is absolutely necessary to the functioning of everyone in the department and the
university, but those who do it get no recognition for this;
because of the low pay and low status, it is a task overwhelmingly performed by
women; this is a national fact and problem, which no one in power talks about very
much.

I began to fall in love with this metaphor because it named certain aspects of my
experience. I'd rather scrub out the toilet than lead one more discussion of com-
ma splices, and if some senior male colleagues would share this work more
equally, I/we could spend more of our time on more interesting things. I then re-
alized, though, that the selectivity of the metaphor had rendered invisible the
people who actually do clean the toilets in the English department-in my in-
stitution, as in most others, these people are almost all women, almost all black,
and almost always underpaid, and "professional" women in English depart-
ments and elsewhere are not as fully in solidarity with them as we might ideally
be. So much for the politics of this particular metaphor.
What follows from this, I think, is a rather urgent necessity for feminist crit-
ical theorists to examine the status of metaphor within our own discourse. A few
years ago I argued in another paper that metaphors of maternity and mothering
and nurturing had acquired a disturbing centrality to discussions of female crea-
tivity and "women's culture" and that as a result other sorts of creativity and
other sorts of women were being pushed to the margins: differences within
"woman"-race, class, age, sexual preference-took a secondary role if any. I
attributed this partly to the influence of Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow and
to mainstream anthologies of feminist criticism such as Elaine Showalter's. At
that time I argued that lesbianism in particular had been rendered invisible, or
unmentionable, or, as for example in Toril Moi's discussion, simply irrelevant
by the prevalence of the maternal metaphor. More recently, however, it has
come to seem that lesbians too are everywhere, particularly in critical texts
about modernist literary practice written by women and men who are not les-
bians about women who may or may not have been. Lesbianism, however, has
been present in a curiously metaphorized way-as a stand-in for certain kinds of
purely formal, purely textual "subversiveness." In the way that "the Laugh of
the Medusa" has served as a key legitimating text for the maternal metaphor,
"When Our Two Lips Speak" by Luce Irigaray has served as template for many
of these ways of understanding lesbianism as essentially a textual and thus ideo-
logical disruption.
Moreover, since it is now no longer possible to discuss such women writers
as Virginia Woolf, H.D., and Gertrude Stein without acknowledging the cen-
trality of lesbianism to their lives and works, key texts about modernism by, for
example, Marianne DeKoven, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Gilbert and Gubar,
have recently attempted to discuss this-motivated basically I think out of a de-

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502 College English

sire to be as politically sensitive, inclusive, and honest as possible. And yet, as if

inevitably, lesbianism on the level of text seems to get metaphorized; which
leads to a situation similar to the one discussed above under "woman as nig-
ger": if the name of a despised identity group is appropriated metaphorically to
help us understand another oppression, or another kind of resistance to oppres-
sion, how can the members of that original group powerfully name their own op-
pression and be understood?
I would argue, by the way, that this unfortunate trend results less from any
intrinsic bias on the part of scholars toward more traditional narratives of how
women live and [re]produce, and more from the inescapable drag of our history
as English majors, in two ways. First, we're impressed by social scientists like
Gilligan and Chodorow-their work is empirical and thus seems "real"-er than
ours, so we tend not to notice the metaphorical or text-bound nature of much of
their discourse. And second, we are in love with metaphor, easily seduced by
our own metaphors or those of others. We have a tendency to believe that the
beautiful is the true. We strive in our own writing toward a perfect synchrony of
form and content, ultimately toward the epigram: the formulation so compelling
in the way it sounds that undergraduates will remember and quote it forever, for-
getting to examine its content, its truth value (see also Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde,
H61ene Cixous). Privileging the political, we have tried to repress our socializa-
tion as upholders of high culture: but the repressed returns.
My final example will continue to suggest that even feminist investigations of
the politics of metaphor need to be subjected to scrutiny along these lines. Jane
Gallop, in a chapter titled "The Attraction of Matrimonial Metaphor," has
noticed the tendency of what she calls "liberal feminist criticism" to follow a
certain narrative: to set up a polarity, then work toward its resolution under cov-
er of the metaphor of marriage. Gallop notes that "this narrative trajectory is
disturbingly familiar. . . . [S]uch grand resolutions of difference tend to crop up
at the end of feminist books, in the very position of marriage as the happy nar-
rative resolution of another genre which women have written and read with like
verve and pleasure" (2)-that is to say, the romance novel, from Jane Eyre to
the supermarket Harlequin.
Among many other examples Gallop cites Carol Gilligan's In A Different
Voice, which, as she points out, ends by calling for a "marriage" of women's
and mainstream developmental theories, which "would lead to a more gener-
ative view of human life" [Gallop's emphasis]. Gallop comments,
The different voice ends up saying something uncannily familiar. Is there any rela-
tion between this closing image and the popularity of the book? Is the image being
generated by the narrative drive for an upbeat ending? How does the insistence
upon difference look when it is finally inscribed into a model of heterosexual com-
plementarity? Is this the difference feminists want to make? (4)

Gallop reads the problematic ending of Woolf's A Room of One's Own, with its
confusing call for "androgyny," as a similar triumph of "internalized heterosex-
uality," based on overcoming the uneasy energy generated by the coded lesbian
passages. And she notes in other feminist texts marriages-brought about be-
tween, for example, socialism and liberal feminism, between feminism and the

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 How Not To Do Things 503

anti-racist movement, and so on-as gestures toward harmonious ending in texts

that began by sharpening conflicts and problematizing differences. She finds the
pervasiveness of this metaphor odd, since, as all these writers know, marriage is
an economic relation with a particular and damaging history for women. It is as
though these feminists have forgotten the central point about the function of clo-
sure in the conventional romance novel-that the social reason for the novelistic
ideology of romantic love is precisely to advertise on behalf of the unequal ar-
rangement of marriage, to entrap women into this unsatisfactory economic rela-
tionship which has served male power so well and continues to do so. (For ex-
amples of this well-accepted view, see Miller and Poovey. See also Abraham's
description of Gilbert and Gubar's No Man's Land as a nineteenth-century ro-
mance novel about twentieth-century literature, complete with "heterosexual
plot," imposed over the reality of both sexual and textual difference, and happy
heterosexual ending.)
I find this line of inquiry extremely useful (I almost wrote, fruitful). However,
in her deconstruction of the marriage metaphor, Gallop uses another which
could be opened up in a similar way-and which is I believe no less pervasive on
the scene of American feminist criticism at the moment. This is the use of the
term "lesbian" to refer metaphorically to a certain subversive kind of reading/
writing/ representation, a metaphorical use often though not always divorced
from intentionality or content.
Thus Gallop takes Sydney Janet Kaplan's "Varieties of Feminist Criticism,"
an example of what Elaine Showalter has called "gynocritics," as "an ex-
tremely affirmative version of lesbian literary criticism" because it resists the
marriage metaphor and deals with the "passion and preference" of a feminist lit-
erary critic for the works of women writers; because it is "not criticism of les-
bian literature, but criticism that is itself lesbian, that expresses a woman's pas-
sion for women." She says later that "At stake here is not sexual but textual
preference" (2-3). She explores quite insightfully the repression of this "textual
preference" by the insistence of the institutions of literary study on re-
socializing us all to love the "beauty" of the male canonized texts. But just as
Gallop was troubled by the way marriage was stripped of its economic and social
reality connotations-ideologically neutralized? naturalized?-so that it might
serve as a metaphor for happy endings, I am troubled by the way that the social,
the historical, what I can only call the "real" lesbian vaporizes when "lesbian"
becomes a metaphor for subversive reading.
One might hypothesize that the metaphorical lesbian arose as a response to
the frustrating difficulties of naming or even describing the real one. But it soon
proves impossible-even in the limited case of twentieth-century writing-to
give any textual content to the idea of lesbian-as-subversive. When we consider
that two lesbian writers of the same class and race writing about lesbian rela-
tionships in the same country in the same year produced The Well of Loneliness
and Orlando, it seems a bit ahistorical to employ "lesbian" as shorthand for tex-
tual subversion, which is central to Orlando and utterly absent from The Well.
(In fact, the reception history of that pair of texts could serve as a paradigm for
the way lesbian writing has been accused of opposite faults, like women's lan-

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504 College English

guage generally, as we saw above, and like feminist criticism with a lesbian
slant. Lesbian writing is too out of touch and metaphorical, as many criticisms
of Irigaray and Rich attest; but it can also be too literal-minded, as Toril Moi's
Sexual/Textual Politics demonstrates by dismissing in three sentences any possi-
ble contribution of "lesbian feminist criticism," or for that matter black feminist
criticism, to literary theory.) The Lesbian could be a dangerously ahistorical and
universalizing construction-just like Woman.
What, then, do I have to suggest instead? I would like to propose what might
be termed a therapeutic investigation of the way that metaphors, like jokes, are
part of a power structure (or struggle), part of the way in-groups of various sorts
delineate their discursive boundaries, name and expel the Other, express and
reinforce their bonds, their sense of being "at home" with each other. (Think,
banally, of the use of baseball metaphors to describe business deals-or sexual
activity-and of the disadvantage foreigners, or most women, experience infil-
trating those power discourses. Or think of the way certain metaphors, like cer-
tain jokes, mark ethnic boundaries: "he wanted twenty dollars, but she jewed
him down.")
But such an investigation might raise a new set of problems. Is ideological
evaluation of metaphor then only possible on an extra-textual dimension, by an
investigation of who is speaking? If Jews have the right to tell Jewish jokes, how
do we feel when a heterosexual feminist refers to blues singer Ma Rainey as a
"dyke," a "butch" (which Hazel Carby did in a recent talk about black women
and commodification)? Whose interests does such usage serve, and how? Is the
difference between porn and erotica-impossible to establish by simply reading
texts-only discussable in terms of intentionality and/or reader-response: who
made it, who uses it, for what purpose? This would seem to limit us to fairly un-
fashionable reading strategies: some would criticize dependence on the "in-
tentional fallacy," others accuse us of ignoring newer critical methods such as
deconstruction. Given our training, it's hard not to be bothered by these twin
objections, though one might respond that the old New Criticism and the new
new criticism between them have been primary constructors of that ideological
"safe" (and thus dangerous) cultural space.
I can only suggest in conclusion that we locate a feminist approach to repre-
sentation in a vigilant awareness of the powers and the limits of metaphor, an
awareness to be achieved by relentless attention to metaphor's historical and
non-universal dimension-to the power to exclude that lies implicit in the power
to name.

Many of the ideas in this paper were first worked out in a faculty seminar led b
hen (College of William and Mary, 1987); thanks are due to him and to the othe
pants, especially Colleen Kennedy and Lily Knezevich, and to Deborah Cameron
made helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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