A.
Rich: When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, 1972
Reading is seen as a complex
interaction between the writer, the
text and the reader in which the
gender of the reader is not
necessarily irrelevant.
The notion of Re-vision:
When We Dead Awaken: Writing as
Re-Vision (A. Rich, 1971).
Alternative and Resisting
Reader/Reading:
Judith Fetterly, The Resisting
Reader: A Feminist Approach to
American Fiction, 1978
It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening
consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and
painful. This awakening of dead or sleeping consciousness has
already affected the lives of millions of women, even those who
don't know it yet. It is also affecting the lives of men, even those
who deny its claims upon them. The argument will go on
whether an oppressive economic class system is responsible for
the oppressive nature of male/female relations, or whether, in
fact, the sexual class system is the original model on which all
the others are based. But in the last few years connections have
been drawn between our sexual lives and our political
institutions, which are inescapable and illuminating. The
sleepwalkers are coming awake, and for the first time this
awakening has a collective reality; it is no longer such a lonely
thing to open one’s eyes.
Re-vision-the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text
from a new critical direction-is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an
act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched
we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than
a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-
dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take
the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have
been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us;
and how we can begin to see-and therefore live-afresh. A change in the concept of
sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order re-assert
itself in every new revolution.
We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have
ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.
 For writers, […], there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be
explored. But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find
language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past
to support us. […]
Historically man and women have played very different parts in each others’ lives. Where woman
has been a luxury for man, and has served as the painter’s model and the poet’s muse, but also as
comforter, nurse, cook, bearer of his seed, secretarial assistant and copyist of manuscripts, man
has played a quite different role for female artist.
When we dead
awaken. Writing She refers to women writers
as Revision. […] the specter of this kind of male judgment, along with the active discouragement and
thwarting of her needs by a culture controlled by males, has created problems for the
woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style,
problems of energy and survival. […]
No male writer has written primarily or even largely for women, or with the sense of
women’s criticism as a consideration when he chooses his materials, his theme, his
language. But to a lesser or greater extent, every woman writer has written for men even
when, like Virginia Woolf, she was supposed to be addressing women. If we have come
to the point when this balance might begin to change, when women can stop being haunted,
not only by “convention and propriety” but by internalized fears of being and saying
themselves, then it is an extraordinary moment for the woman writer-and reader.
We seem to be special women here, we have liked to think of ourselves as
special, and we have known that men would tolerate, even romanticize us as
special, as long as our words and actions didn’t threaten their privilege of
tolerating or rejecting us according to their ideas of what a special woman
ought to be.
An important insight of the radical women's movement, for me, has been
how divisive and how ultimately destructive is this myth of the special
woman, who is also the token woman. Every one of us here in this room
has had great luck – we are teachers, writers, academicians; our own gifts
could not have been enough, for we know women whose gifts are buried or
aborted. Our struggles can have meaning and our privilege – however
precarious under patriarchy- can be justified only if they can help to change
the lives of women whose gifts -and whose very being-continue to be
thwarted.
My own luck was being born white and middle-class into a house full of books,
with a father who encouraged me to read and write. So for about twenty years
I wrote for a particular man, who criticized and praised me and made me feel I
was indeed special. […] And there were all those poems about women, written by
men: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently
inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with
the loss of beauty, the loss of youth-the fate worse than death.
She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she
too has been putting words and images together, […] but precisely what she does
not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself,
who sits at a desk trying to put words together. So what does she? What did I do?
I read the older women poets with their peculiar keenness and ambivalence. [...]
But even in reading these women I was looking in them for the same things I had
found in the poetry of men, because I wanted women poets to be equals of men,
and to be equal was still confused with sounding the same. I know my style was
formed first by male poets: by the men I was reading as an undergraduate.
 Judith Fetterly: The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, 1978.

This book began in the classroom, during the fall 1971 I taught a course in the University of
Pennsylvania entitled “Images of Women in American Literature”, I asked the students of the
course to keep a journal in which they had to record the responses to the literature we were reading
and to our discussion in the class.[…] Thus I see my book as a self-defence survival manual for the
woman reader lost in the masculine wilderness on the American novels…
Feminist criticism is a growing, changing, constantly self-transforming phenomenon characterize
by a resistance to codification and refusal to be rigidly defined or to have its parameters
prematurely set.
Notion of Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it
resisting reading by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read.
As readers, as teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identified with a male
point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose
central principle is misogyny.
To be excluded from Literature that claims to define one’s identity is to experience a peculiar form
of powerlessness- not simply the powerlessness which derives from not seeing one’s
experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly, the
powerlessness which results from the endless division of self, the consequences of the invocation
to identity as male while being reminded that to be male – to be universal, to be American – is to
be not female. […]
I hope my book will be suggestive -- that it will stimulate dialogue, discussion, debate, re-reading,
and finally re-vision.
 A resisting reader will
“… detect the way in which the text’s constructions of its world reflect assumptions about gender
itself, as well as reproduction, marriage, careers, and many other things in a culture that may be
identified by the gender of their participants”
In so doing it will exorcize the male mind that has been implanted in women.
According to Fetterly…
women become psychologically ‘immasculated’- not ‘emasculated’, in the sense of having ‘maleness’
taken away from them, but rather they learn to think and read and write like men.” […] Intellectually
male, sexually female, one is in effect no one. Clearly then the first act of the feminist critic must be to
become a resisting rather than assenting reader, and by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of
exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us.

BUT IN ORDER TO LEARN HOW TO READ

WOMEN HAD TO DELINEATE SPECIFIC STANDARDS

 

The rise of Feminist Criticism: its
definition and aims.
Is it possible to find a real and stable
definition of feminist criticism?
What makes it distinctive from other
forms of criticism?
Should it have defined aims?
Annette Kolodny: 1975, Critical Inquiry
“Some notes on defining a Feminist
Literary Criticism”
As yet, no one has formulated any
exacting definition of the term “feminist
criticism”. When applied to the study of
literature, it is used in a variety of
contexts to cover a variety of activities,
including (1) any criticism written by a
woman, no matter what the subject; (2)
any criticism written by a woman about a
man’s book which treats that book from a
“political” or “feminist” perspective; and
(3) any criticism written by a woman
about a woman’s book or about female
authors in general. […]
Is then possible to find something unique about women’s writing?
“women are beginning to explore their own sex, to write of women as women have never
been written of before; for of course, until very lately, women in literature were the creation of
men” (V. Woolf, Women and Fiction and A Room of One’s Own)

The major assumption behind this kind of criticism (Feminist Literary Criticism), of course, is
the assumption that there is something unique about women’s writing. But just wherein that
alleged uniqueness lies has, to date, been only crudely approximated, labelled variously as the
product of woman’s unique biology, her “feminine consciousness”, or her peculiar relationship
to a social order in the face of which she is always something ‘alien’ or ‘other’; sometimes
the three are compounded, in unclear and often confusing ways. As a result, those studies
which purport to label a unique “mode” or “style” and to suggest, also, some deep underlying
source, often fail to clarify precisely what that source might be. […]

…She therefore points out that there are differences among women themselves:
I think we need to make clear that what women have so far expressed in literature is what they have been able to
express, as a result of the complex interplay between innate biological determinants, personal and individual talents
and opportunities, and the larger effects of socialization, which, in some cases, may govern the limits of
expression or even of perception and experience itself. What is permitted now may not have been in the past.
[…] Whatever the biological potentials, then, they are always mediated by and given expression through cultural
overly, with the two (biology and culture) acting as mutually interdependent systems, each affecting the other.
… And also …

[…] for, if we insist on discovering something we can clearly label as a “feminine mode”, then we are honour-bound,
also, to delineate its counterpart, the “masculine mode” […]
-In other words, before we can ask how women’s writing is different or unique, we must first ask: is it?

…And the different experience?

That women often write out of that different and sometimes "other" perspective of experience (of the world)
has by now become virtually a truism in feminist critical circles. What we have not fully acknowledged is
that the variations among individual women may be as great as those between women and men and, in some
cases perhaps, the variations may be greater within the same sex than that between two particular
writers of different sexes.

There are specific patterns
that characterise texts
written by women…but
Kolodny asks…
…are these strategies peculiarly feminine?
A man's sense of entrapment on the job and a woman’s in the home
may both finally share the same psychiatric label, but the language
of literature, if it is honest, will reveal to us the building blocks, the
minute-by-minute experience of what it feels like to be trapped in
those very different settings. One more example, and I think my
point will be made: the struggle to create a form, a means of
articulation, is a struggle shared by every artist, male or
female, in every medium. […]
A good feminist criticism therefore must first acknowledge that
men’s and women’s writing in our culture will inevitably share
some common ground. Acknowledging that, the feminist critic
may then go on to explore the ways in which this common ground
is differently imaged in women’s writing and also note the turf
which they do not share. And after appreciating the variety and
variance of women’s experience – as we have done with men –
we must then begin exploring the variety of literary devices
through which different women are finding effective voices.
 “Dancing through the minefield: some observations of the theory, Practice and Politics of Feminist
Literary Criticism”, 1980
In rereading with our students these previously lost works, we inevitably raised perplexing questions as
Process of
unearthing… to the reasons for their disappearance from the canons of "major works," and we worried over the
aesthetic and critical criteria by which they had been accorded diminished status.
1) Literary History (and with that, the historicity of Literature) is a fiction: the historical canon is
Ten years later … what has
rooted not so much in any definitive understanding of the past, as it is in our need to call up and utilize
been achieved? the past on behalf of the better understanding of the present. The choices we make in the present
And demonstrated? inevitably alter our sense of the past that led to them.
But what distinguishes feminists is their desire to alter and extend what we take as historically
relevant from out of that vast storehouse of our literary inheritance and, further, feminist’s recognition
of the storehouse for what it really is: a resource for remodelling our literary history, past, present,
and future.
2) Insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms: We appropriate
meaning from a text according to the critical assumptions or predispositions that we bring to it. We
appropriate different meanings, or reports different gleanings, at different times, even from the same
text, according to our changed assumptions, circumstances, and requirements. For insofar as literature is
a social institution, so too, reading is a highly socialized – or learned – activity.
We are guided by interpretative models, which implies that we are unable to distinguish as primary the
importance of what we read as opposed to how we have learned to read it: we read well, and with
pleasure, what we already know how to read; and what we already know how to read is to a large
extent dependent upon what we have already read.
To conclude: where those authors have dropped out of sight, the reason may be due not to any
lack of merit in the work but, instead, to an incapacity of predominantly male readers to properly
interpret and appreciate women’s texts.
3) Since the grounds upon which we assign aesthetic value to texts are never infallible,
unchangeable, or universal, we must re-examine not only our aesthetics but, as well, the inherent
biases and assumptions informing the critical methods which (in part) shape our aesthetic .
Feminist literary critics are essentially seeking to discover how aesthetic value is assigned in the
first place, where it resides (in the text or in the reader), and, most importantly, what validity may
really be claimed by our aesthetic judgement. What ends do those judgments serve, the feminist
asks; and what conceptions of the world or ideological stances do they (even if unwittingly) help
to perpetuate?
• What is then Kolodny’s purpose?
It is not and should not be the formulation of any single reading method or potentiality
procrustean set of critical procedures nor, even less, the generation of prescriptive categories for
some dreamed-of non-sexist literary canon. Our task is to initiate nothing less than a playful
pluralism, responsive to the possibilities of multiple critical schools and methods, but captive of
none, recognizing that the many tools needed for our analysis will necessarily be largely inherited
and only partly of our own making. Only by employing a plurality of methods will we protect
ourselves from the temptation of so oversimplifying any text.
 How to re-read Shakespearean plays?
Revision, Resisting Reading and … a plurality of methods and possible meanings
Shakespeare the Elizabethan, or Shakespeare our Contemporary? In a
way we have no choice. The Text from the past roots itself in history
through its unfamiliar allusions, its archaic references, the
conventions of its period. Paradoxically, however, these features have
the effect of reminding us that we are not Elizabethans, cannot
experience the text as they experienced it, but can only use the text as
a basis for the reconstruction of an ideology which is the source of its
silences. Meanings circulate between text, ideology and reader, and
the work of criticism is to release possible meanings. (Belsey,
Critical Practice 1980)
-The aim of feminist literary criticism: Asking different questions
about the Shakespearean texts and using those texts to interrogate
‘women’s place in culture, history, religion, society, the family’.
Ann Thompson:
It seems to me that these questions are now inescapably on the agenda
of academic enquiry, and that they have moved from the margin to the
centre. The growth and variety of feminist approaches in Shakespeare
studies has been complemented and supported by work in feminist
theory, women’s history, the study of women’s relationship to
language and the study of women’s writing.
The problem with meanings that we learn – and learn to
produce – is that they seem to define and delimit what is
thinkable, imaginable, possible. To fix meaning, to arrest its
process and deny its plurality, is in affect to confine what is
possible to what is. Conversely, to disrupt this fixity is to
glimpse alternative possibilities.
A conservative criticism reads in quest for familiar, obvious,
common-sense meanings, and thus reaffirms what we already
know. A radical criticism, however, is concerned to produce
readings which challenge the knowledge by revealing
alternative meanings, disruptive the system of differences
which legitimates the perpetuation of things as they are.
The project of such criticism is not to replace one
authoritative interpretation of a text with another, but to
suggest a plurality of ways in which texts might be read in
interests of extending the reach of what is thinkable,
imaginable or possible. (Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy.
Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama, 1985)
 FROM ANDROTEXTS TO GYNOTEXTS…
Virago Press: 1973-1975, independently run publishing company (UK).
Elaine Showalter: A Literature of Their own. From Charlotte Bronte to
Doris Lessing, Virago Press, 1977.
The founding of feminist Journals:
1972: Feminist Studies (University of Maryland and Columbia)
1973: Women’ s Studies Quarterly published by the Feminist press
1975: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Chicago Press)
Editorial: “the journal is committed to publish the new scholarship about women. […] This new scholarship
exhibited a charged, restless consciousness that questioned the social, political, economic, cultural, and
psychological arrangements that have […] defined femininity and masculinity”

NB: “We really need to do something about publishing” (African American critic, poetess and writer
Audre Lorde, 1980, to Barbara Smith)
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press born in New York “is the only publisher in North America
committed to publishing and distributing the writing of the Third World women of all racial/cultural
heritages, sexualities, and classes” (Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith)
 A literature of their Own: Towards a feminist poetics
“In the Atlas of the English novel, women’s territory is usually depicted as
desert bounded by mountains on four sides: the Austen peaks, the Bronte
cliffs, the Eliot range, and the Woolf hills. This book is an attempt to fill in
the terrain between these literary landmarks and to construct a more reliable
map from which to explore the achievements of English women novelists.”
(Elaine Showalter, from A Literature of their own, 1978)
Is the literature of women different and special?
We need to reconstruct its past.
Aim of the book…
-To show how much of a tradition of women’s writing there has been in the
past which has been consistently ignored in histories of British and
American Literature. […] To show the ways in which self-awareness of the
woman writer has translated itself into a literary form in a specific place and
time-span, how this self-awareness has changed and developed, and where it
might lead.

But why this provocative title … to whom she refers?


"Statue of John Stuart Mill in
the Temple Gardens, decorated
by Women's Suffrage Societies
in honor of the 104th
anniversary of his birth"
Daily Graphic, London,
England, [May 1910?]
John Stuart Mill: The Subjection of Women, 1869
Section “Women in the art and sciences”
The object of this Essay is to explain [...] That the principle
which regulates the existing social relations between the two
sexes — the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is
wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human
improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of
perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side,
nor disability on the other. […]
If we turn from pure theory-building to literature in the narrow
sense of the term and the fine arts, there is a very obvious reason
why women’s literature is broadly....an imitation of men’s. All
women who write are pupils of the great male writers. If
women lived in a different country from men […] had never
read any of their writings, they would have a literature of
their own. […] If women’s literature is destined to have
different collective character from that of men, much longer time
is necessary than has yet elapsed before it can emancipate itself
from the influence of accepted models, and guide itself by its
own impulses.
Showalter:
In contradiction to Mill and in the absence, until
very recently, of any feminist literary manifestoes,
many readers of the novel over the past two
centuries have nonetheless had the indistinct but
persistent impression of a unifying voice in
women’s literature.
NB: ‘subculture’… an essential resource for
the expression of a minority’s concern
What happens with literary subcultures in
search of their own expression?
Imitation and Internalization
Protest
Self-Discovery
Rather than literary women being isolated exceptions, they
formed, instead communities of women writers, corresponding,
exchanging manuscripts, reacting against and consciously
referring to each other’s work → There must be a ‘subculture’
shared by many women, that has to be found and analysed.
Showalter raises crucial questions to delineate a possible female tradition
which was product of the subculture shared by women.
What was women’s professional self-image?
What was their understanding of womanhood?
How was their work received and what effects did criticism have upon
them?
What were their relationship to other women, to men, and to their readers?
How did change in women’s status change their lives and careers?
 Women wrote mainly in imitation of masculine models but
with distinctively feminine concerns. The distinguishing sign
of this period is the male pseudonym, which was introduced in
England in the 1840, it was a characteristic of English women
writers.
They internalized the assumptions of male culture:

Feminine from 1840 to 1880 Ex: Charlotte Bronte

(Death of George Eliot): “Victorian feminine novelists thus found themselves in a
double bind. They felt humiliated by the condescension of
male critics and spoke intensely of their desire to avoid special
treatment and achieve genuine excellence, but they were
deeply anxious about the possibility of appearing unwomanly.
[…] Vocation, the will to write, nonetheless required a genuine
transcendence of female identity. Victorian women were not
accustomed to choosing a vocation; womanhood was a
vocation in itself”
 Till 1920, women formulated specifically feminist protests and demands.
The winning of the vote (the feminist protests and the political literature of the suffragettes)
Women are historically enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use
Feminist 1890-1920: literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood.
Very emblematic of this phase are the Amazon utopias of the 1890, fantasies of perfected female
societies set in an England or an America of the future.
“Women writers found themselves confronted through the suffrage movement by a number of
challenges and threats: by the spectre of violence, by the ruthlessness of female authoritarianism,
by the elimination of class boundaries, by a politics of action rather than influence, by
collectivism, and by the loss of the secure privacy in which they had been cultivating their special
moral qualities. […] In a reaction against it many women writers of this generation seem to have
retreated from social involvement.”

Female 1920:
From 1920 to the present women reject both imitation and protest, and turn instead to female
experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the
forms and techniques of literature.
Women’ s writing moves increasingly towards self-discovery, the exploration of an inner space of
female experience.