The Feminist Movement
Introductory Considerations on Feminist Criticism
General Presentation
An elaborate definition of feminist criticism is provided by Linda H. Peterson who asserts that feminist analysts are interested in: discovering the neglected works of women writers throughout centuries, analysing the literary creations of male authors from a ‘feminist’ viewpoint and studying the psychological and linguistic development of women in a patriarchal system.
Linda H. Peterson discusses the dominant strains of feminist criticism that have appeared since the early 1970’s. According to her, these strains are categorised as French, British and American and (although they share common points) French, British and American feminists have carried out their studies from rather different perspectives.
Linda H. Peterson offers a brief presentation of the French feminist perspective. According to her, French feminists focus on the linguistic development of women and employ the theories of the psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan in their studies, stating that the language developed and learned throughout centuries is characterized as phallocentric. In the French feminists’ opinion, the ‘masculine’ language reflects ‘a binary logic that opposes such terms as active/passive’ and associates masculinity with values appreciated by the patriarchal society. As a result, it is these feminists’ belief that, for many centuries, language and literature reflected the world from the male point of view, giving women writers only two options: to share the male viewpoint or to remain ‘silent’, repressed, without the right to express themselves (especially through literature). However, French feminists such as Annie Leclerc, Xavière Gauthier, Julia Kristeva and Marguerite Duras have pointed out the possibility of women developing their own language: a feminine language – ‘l’écriture féminine’ which is ‘rhythmic and unifying’, ‘semiotic’ rather than ‘symbolic’ and ‘associated with the maternal’. Feminine language is also associated with the female body and women’s repressed sexuality by a number of French feminists (Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, etc.) who, in their studies, oppose the unitary phallic pleasure to the diffuse feminine one. In addition, the feminine language appears as threatening to the male-dominated culture, but it may also risk ‘being politically marginalised by men if it does not participate in “masculine” discourse.
Linda H. Peterson also achieves a presentation of American feminism, touching upon its dominant models. In her view of the American feminist perspective, the analysts are interested in the ‘French’ subject of feminine mode or style, but they tend to focus on recurring ‘feminine’ themes (clothing, madness, disease, the demonic, etc.) and on rereading the masculine-dominated literature (to the purpose of ‘exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in such works’). However, this model (named ‘feminist critique’ by Elaine Showalter) is not the only one created by American feminists. Sandra Gilbert, Patricia Meyer Spacks and Elaine Showalter developed a different model (called ‘gynocriticism’) which is a study of great women authors from a feminist viewpoint. A third American feminist approach to literature is the one illustrated by Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) in which the female analyst begins to ‘discover neglected or forgotten women writers and, thus, forge an alternative literary tradition’. In her study, Showalter identifies three stages in the evolution of women’s literature: the ‘Feminine, Feminist and Female’ phases during which ‘women first imitated a masculine tradition (1840 to 1880), then protested against its standards and values (1880 to 1920) and finally advocated their own autonomous, female perspective (1920 to the present)’. At the end of her presentation, Linda H. Peterson mentions two negative aspects of American feminism. One of the problems with American feminist criticism is that it relies on methods and theories ‘borrowed’ from other ‘fields’ and, therefore, created by men. Another issue is the variety of American feminist approaches which may become a hindrance in terms of educational organisation and, consequently, political activism.
Towards the end of the subchapter ‘What is Feminist Criticism?’, Linda H. Peterson underlines the differences between American and British feminist criticism. Whereas British feminists favour a political type of critical practice, American feminists focus on ‘universal feminine attributes (the feminine imagination, feminine writing)’ and overemphasise the importance of ‘texts linking women across boundaries and decades’, while ignoring ‘differences of race, class and culture among women’ , disregarding the social factors that condition women’s works and placing little emphasis on historical detail. As a result, British feminists (who are mostly interested in the different political conditions that influence different women writers) often criticise the idea that ‘powerful individuals may be immune to repressive conditions’ (which the American feminist perspective seems to suggest).
Feminist critical perspective, although characterised by a wide range of approaches, is given some unity (some coherence) by the efforts of a number of female literary critics who have tried to organise the variety of feminist critical approaches. However, other such literary critics have insisted on the importance of the diversity of methods and concepts which is specific of feminist criticism. In order to understand these two opposite perspectives and the essence of feminist literary criticism, one has to become familiar with the most important critical essays of some of the greatest feminist literary critics.
Another elaborate definition of Feminist Literary Criticism is provided by Ligia Doina Constantinescu (Feminist Explorations in 19th and 20th Centuries British and American Literature, Iasi : Universitas XXI, 2005 : 6-8). According to Constantinescu, this type of criticism is ‘targeted to […] one aesthetic agenda: a feminist one’. Constantinescu adds that feminist criticism is an alternative, oppositional critical perspective which aims at ‘laying bare the prevailing discursive structures, encoded in the patriarchal system of gender discrimination’ and ‘fostering interpretive procedures’ that ‘redefine gender identities and socio-cultural practices that lay the grounds for these constructs’.
Ligia Doina Constantinescu describes the theoretical investigation of feminist criticism as an eclectic one which ‘works out its theoretical and interpretive tools by appropriating concepts and methods from different fields’ such as: psychoanalytic, deconstructive, Marxist, liberal, or of the Cultural Studies type. She also mentions that feminist criticism redirects those concepts and methods in a subversive way in relation to the above mentioned ‘fields’.
The author of Feminist Explorations in 19th and 20th Centuries British and American Literature tackles upon six aspects which feminist interpretive framework focuses. Firstly, feminist criticism has been systematically dismantling the literary traditional canon in order to point to (to make obvious) ‘the exclusion mechanism’ on which the literary canon was founded. The feminist type of reading is meant to challenge, to question the official (generally accepted) interpretations of literary texts and, also, to identify their gaps , contradictions and fissures. This new reading of texts is obviously carried out within the already mentioned feminist agenda. Secondly, Feminist Literary Criticism has set out to achieve an alternative literary tradition that can offer legitimacy to women writers’ literary creations. The elections of the works included within the alternative (literary) canon is based on their power to redefine ‘the feminity – the feminine self – the woman distinctiveness’. Furthermore, the feminist ‘trend’ which is favoured nowadays is that of ‘setting great store on difference, on plural feminine identity, constructions, as engendered by criteria of race, ethnicity, class’. Therefore, there is a great focus on the works of women writers from marginal cultural spaces, such as former colonies, or native Americans. The literary critics are mostly interested in ‘the resistance strategies […] as registred by such writings’ – strategies which reflect the effect of the patriarchal system on women writers belonging to peripheral cultures and women in general. As a result, feminist practitioners have ‘borrowed’ methods and concepts from old – ‘new’ critical perspectives such as post-colonial or multicultural. In relation to this new feminist ‘trend’, another source of new methods of achieving feminist readings is ‘that of “joint agendas with cultural studies’ , which supposes giving priority to contextualization and ‘socio – cultural engendering “identitary” projections’.
As characteristics of the feminist interpretive framework, Constantinescu also mentions ‘the responsiveness to the notions of, or the theoretical insights of the French analysts Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous on “écriture féminine”’ and the poststructuralist theories according to which ‘“feminine identity” is rather to be regarded as a text, with the contradictions […] inherent to textuality; or else, as a potentially subversive, oppositional “voice” […] within the official discourse on gender’ and, therefore, there should be a deconstruction of ‘the feminine construct of self – literary, encoded – as envisaged by feminist analysts’.
In conclusion, feminist critics favour ‘cross – disciplinary frameworks of research and interpretation’. They employ a variety of interpretive procedures of reading, as for example, the use of ‘intercultural poststructuralist interpretations of Victorian literature’ and the ‘exploration of the interplay of gender and genre with the Brontë sisters’. Constantinescu also briefly mentions the extension of the feminist framework – Gender Studies (which deal with the construction of the male self as well).
Simone de Beauvoir’s Feminist Theory
The fragment from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is followed by a presentation of Simone de Beauvoir’s writings and feminist views. According to Hazard Adams, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was both a feminist and an existentialist, which is reflected in her book The Second Sex which first appeared in 1949 and was a classic of post–World War II feminism. The Second Sex is ‘encyclopedic in its coverage’ and touches upon female love and sexuality and ‘patriarchal myths about women’. In his book, Hazard Adams includes two selections from the section of The Second Sex entitled ‘Myth’ (translated by H.M. Parshley).
A Presentation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Essay The Second Sex
The feminist literary critic achieves a summary of chapter Ten entitled ‘Of Woman in Five Authors’ – the authors being: Henri de Montherlant, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel, André Breton and Sthendal (Marie Henri Beyle) who, in Beauvoir’s view, is the only one able to see women as they really are and understand and love them, although he also expects them to always be altruistic in their relationship with men.According to Beauvoir, the works of all five authors reflect myths about women: woman as flesh, as nature and material beauty, woman as inspiration for poetry, as the magical being that opens the doors to the supernatural, woman as source of harmony and woman as the ‘Other’ that is supposed help men achieve self-fulfilment.
Montherlant likes including war in his works because it excludes women (it requires the absence of women). He is afraid of women because they oppose a threat to his solitude. Montherlant’s writings reflect his inferiority complex: he scorns women and projects onto them what he hates most about himself – his inner demons; he never allows women to produce proof of his er book The Second Sex which first appeared in 1949 and was a classic of post–World War II feminism. The Second Sex is ‘encyclopedic in its coverage’ and touches upon female love and sexuality and ‘patriarchal myths about women’. In his book, Hazard Adams includes two selections from the section of The Second Sex entitled ‘Myth’ (translated by H.M. Parshley).
A Presentation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Essay The Second Sex
The feminist literary critic achieves a summary of chapter Ten entitled ‘Of Woman in Five Authors’ – the authors being: Henri de Montherlant, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Claudel, André Breton and Sthendal (Marie Henri Beyle) who, in Beauvoir’s view, is the only one able to see women as they really are and understand and love them, although he also expects them to always be altruistic in their relationship with men.According to Beauvoir, the works of all five authors reflect myths about women: woman as flesh, as nature and material beauty, woman as inspiration for poetry, as the magical being that opens the doors to the supernatural, woman as source of harmony and woman as the ‘Other’ that is supposed help men achieve self-fulfilment.
Montherlant likes including war in his works because it excludes women (it requires the absence of women). He is afraid of women because they oppose a threat to his solitude. Montherlant’s writings reflect his inferiority complex: he scorns women and projects onto them what he hates most about himself – his inner demons; he never allows women to produce proof of his insufficiency and tolerates them only if they reassure him of his superiority. In his works, ‘he is transcendent, he soars in the sky of heroes; woman crouches on earth, beneath his feet’.
In his writings, Lawrence demands peace, faith and self–sacrifice from women. He suffered from a sexual complex, which is why, in his work, he exalts a virility he did not possess in reality. In his fiction, Lawrence ‘places transcendence in the phallus; the phallus is life and power only by grace of woman’, but woman has no right to transcendence as she should be devoted to ‘furthering that of her male’.
Claudel is the Catholic author who believes man should always participate in action and his woman should dedicate her life to serving him. In his writings, he ‘exalts the handmaid, the female servant, the devotee who submits to God in submitting to the male’ and also sees woman ‘as a soul – sister’.
Breton rejects war (unlike Montherlant) and ‘venerates woman because she brings peace’. In his works, woman ‘is revelation because she tears him of his subjectivity’ and he expects salvation from the ‘woman – child’ because ‘she is capable of total love for her child or for her lover’.
Stendhal sees woman as his equal, as a transcendent just like himself. In their relations, man and woman are supposed to fulfil each other. However, in Stendhal’s writings, women still help men fulfil their destinies and are able of giving themselves ‘to their passion with a more distraught violence’. He believes that woman is the only one who can truly love him and, although he is at peace with himself and does not suffer from any complex (unlike Lawrence and Montherlant), he still thinks he needs a woman’s presence and love in order to reach manhood.
To sum up, woman ‘is required in every case to forget self and love’. Except for Claudel, the authors mentioned expect women to love even the monstrous side of their personalities. ‘Feminine devotion is demanded as a duty by Montherlant and Lawrence; less arrogant, Claudel, Breton and Stendhal admire it as a generous free choice; they wish for it without claiming to deserve it; but […] show that they expect from woman that altruism …’. Moreover, except for Stendhal, the male authors ‘pose as transcendents, but feel themselves prisoners’.
The second selection included in Hazard Adams’ Critical Theory Since Plato is chapter Eleven of The Second Sex. Simone de Beauvoir challenges the myths of woman, ‘the myth of this mysterious otherness’ which has always justified man’s abuses. According to the feminist literary analyst, ‘the myth of woman plays a considerable part in literature’ and, therefore, ‘one should also wonder about its importance in daily life’. The first myth de Beauvoir mentions in this chapter is ‘the Eternal Feminine, unique and changeless’. She asserts that, when this myth (created by men) is contradicted by real women, men blame those women for not being truly feminine, instead of realising that Feminity (as a myth) is a false entity.
In de Beauvoir’s view, another misconception that men are guilty of is the belief that ‘Woman is Flesh’. This can be regarded only as another prejudice since, in de Beauvoir’s opinion, woman is not a carnal object. She has human attributes just like men do and, just like them, she also, sometimes, reveals her instinctual side.
Simone de Beauvoir also touches upon the duality of women (the confusion their personalities give rise to). Women are often depicted as ‘the Mandrake, the Demon’ and, ‘then, it is most confusing to find in woman also the Muse, the Goddess Mother …’. ‘Ambivalence will seem to be an intrinsic quality of the Eternal Feminine’. Therefore, the feminist literary critic states that woman can be a good mother, or a cruel stepmother, an angelic virgin, or a perverse woman whose flesh is dedicated to the devil himself.
De Beauvoir underlines the significance of the myth of the feminine ‘mystery’ in daily life asserting that the man–created illusion allows the male individual to explain what he does not understand about his loved one by means of the belief that women’s thoughts and point of view cannot be comprehended because women are mysterious by nature. The feminist literary critic argues that ‘the “other” is always a mystery’, which means that men are mysterious to women just as women are always ‘in ignorance of the male’s erotic feeling’. But, ‘the categories in which men think of the world are established, from their point of view, as absolute: they misconceive reciprocity …’. ‘Since discrimination between the imaginary and the real can be made through behaviour’, men should have learnt how to understand and come to know women by analysing their actions, their behaviour. Unfortunately, throughout centuries, men have been the privileged ones who have been able to show their feelings actively, whereas women have been forced to remain passive. Man has shown his love by financially supporting his woman, by giving her a social status, due to his independent economic position, but ‘a woman hardly has means for sounding her own heart’. In those rare cases when women were the ones enjoying the independent economic position, ‘the mystery was reversed, showing that it does not pertain to one sex rather than the other, but to the situation’. Moreover, in the past, women were taught to lie to men, to be hypocritical, to dissimulate and to scheme. Simone de Beauvoir adds that they also learned (like all the oppressed – servants and slaves) to never reveal their real feelings.
De Beauvoir concludes by stating that all the myths about women have a utilitarian purpose. They are advantageous to men because they justify their abuses and permit them to deny women’s right to sexual pleasure and make ‘her work like a beast of burden’.
At the end of the chapter, Simone de Beauvoir adds that, nowadays, men ‘show a certain duplicity of attitude’. ‘They are willing on the whole to accept woman as a fellow being, an equal’, but, at the same time, they believe that ‘woman’s independent successes are in contradiction with her femininity’. This is why, nowadays, women lack equilibrium and have to deal with a ‘break between public and private life’. However, Simone de Beauvoir also affirms that men and women are continuously making progress regarding this aspect. For instance, ‘the overopulent ideal of the past centuries’, the ideal according to which ‘Woman is Flesh’ is being replaced by the idea that the feminine body is supposed to be slender and muscular instead of loaded with fat. Furthermore, women’s clothes are becoming more practical and female individuals who hold a man’s position are not considered unattractive on account of it.
Elaine Showalter’s Feminist Theory
The following literary critic that Hazard Adams presents in his Critical Theory Since Plato is Elaine Showalter. Adams discusses the essential aspects of her work. He explains that, in her critical essays, Elaine Showalter responds to attacks at the address of feminist critics and tries to confer unity and coherence to the feminist critical perspective by proposing a certain organisation of the diverse feminist critical approaches. ‘First, she divided feminist criticism into two types, that which is concerned with woman as reader and that which is concerned with woman as writer’. She names the first type, ‘feminist critique’, and the second, ‘gynocritics’. In her critical essays, Showalter also sets out to ‘reconstruct the literary past’ and identify what she calls the phases of that literary past: ‘Feminine, Feminist and Female’. In order to assert these feminist views and concepts, Elaine Showalter has written and edited many works of feminist criticism, including the famous A Literature of Their Own : British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977) and Female Malady : Women Madness and Culture 1830 – 1980 (1985) and The New Feminist Criticism (1985). The first fragment from Showalter’s work included in Critical Theory Since Plato is the one entitled ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’.
A Presentation of Elaine Showalter’s Essay
Toward a Feminist Poetics
Showalter underlines the fact that feminist criticism is isolated and misunderstood by male literary critics. In order to support her statement, she presents the opinions of two male analysts: Robert Partlow and Robert Boyers. Partlow believed that feminist criticism is obsessed with the phallus and expressed his point of view in his introduction to Nina Auerbach’s feminist analysis of ‘Dombey and Son’ (entitled ‘Dickens and Dombey : A Daughter After All’) in the ‘Dickens Studies Annual’ :
At first glance, Nina Auerbach’s essay … might seem to be a case of special pleading […] but it is not quite that … such an essay could have been … ludicrous … it could have seen phallic significance in […] upright church pews – but it does not.
Robert Boyers also overemphasised (what he thought) were the negative aspects of the feminist critical perspective. He accused feminist analysts of attempting to destroy great male writers and he claimed that feminist criticism lacked ‘rigor’ and insisted on the same issues when analysing completely different works. Furthermore, in some of his writings, Boyers attacked feminist criticism, basically, for not being (in his opinion) a viable critical perspective:
Though I do not think anyone has made a credible case for feminist criticism as a viable alternative to any other mode, no one can seriously object to feminists continuing to try. We ought to demand […] intellectual candour and some degree of precision. This I have failed to discover in most feminist criticism.
Showalter believes that the reason for these attacks against feminist literary criticism is ‘the absence of a clearly articulated theory’. However, Elaine Showalter also states that ‘the academic demand for theory can only be heard as a threat for the feminist need for authenticity’ because ‘ too many literary abstractions which claim to be universal have, in fact, described only male perceptions, experiences and options …’ and, as a result, ‘for some radical feminists, methodology itself is an intellectual instrument of patriarchy’.
In her attempt to reduce the vulnerability of feminist criticism to fierce attacks initiated by male critics, Showalter organises the feminist literary perspective in two types of criticism: the one concerned with women as readers (‘feminist critique’) and the one concerned with women as writers (‘gynocritics’). According to Elaine Showalter, the first type deals with the identification and analysis of ‘the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criticism’. It also focuses on exposing the ‘exploration and manipulation of the female audience, especially, in popular culture and film’. The second type of criticism Showalter mentions is the one dedicated to the study of themes and genres of literature by women. Moreover, it is also concerned with ‘female creativity’, ‘the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works’. At the end of the chapter, Elaine Showalter adds that ‘feminist critique’ is ‘political and polemical’. She is less interested in this type of criticism, but she states that the two critical types mentioned are both necessary and of equal importance.
The following selection from Showalter’s work is the part entitled ‘The Feminist Critique: Hardy’. Elaine Showalter attempts to point out the drawbacks of the ‘feminist critique’: ‘one of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male–oriented. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men have thought women should be’. In order to show that the ‘feminist critique’ overemphasises ‘women’s victimization’ and turns it into an ‘obsessive topic of discussion’, Showalter analyses Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. She focuses on the ‘scene of the drunken Michael Henchard selling his wife and infant daughter for five guineas at a country fair’ and quotes Irving Howe to point out that the subjectivity, the sexism of a male critic may distort the message of a literary work:
To shake loose from one’s life; to discard that drooping ray of a woman with her mute complaints and maddening passivity;
Showalter asserts that, despite Howe’s enthusiastic affirmations, ‘Hardy tells us very little about the relationship of Michael and Susan Henchard and what we see in the early scenes does not suggest that she is drooping, complaining, or passive’. Therefore, Irving Howe’s interpretation of the scene reflects the literary critic’s fantasies instead of Hardy’s message to its readers. In Elaine Showalter’s view, Hardy’s true message is that, in the first scene of the novel, ‘Henchard is symbolically selling his entire share in the world of women’ and chooses ‘to live in the male community, to define his human relationships by the male code of paternity’, but ends up ‘realizing the inadequacy of this system’ and learns to appreciate his bonds, his relationships with women, which is suggested by Henchard’s ‘slow appreciation of the strength and dignity of his wife’s daughter, Elizabeth Jane’.
The selection of the ‘feminist critique’ is, naturally, followed by a fragment on ‘gynocritics’, entitled ‘Gynocritics and Female Culture’. Showalter defines ‘gynocritics’, stating that it disregards the male literary tradition and focuses on the analysis of women’s literature in which feminine values prevail over the masculine ones. To this, Elaine Showalter adds that ‘Gynocritics’ also deals with the development of new models that replace the male models in women’s literary creations. This type of feminist criticism even extends to the study of the ‘female subculture’ which is mainly characterised by female solidarity, a feature that appears in women’s literature in the form of ‘myths of the Amazons and fantasies of a separate female society’. Regarding the study of the female subculture, Showalter even mentions Nancy Cott’s The Bonds of Womanhood : Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780 – 1835 which is about the loyalty of women towards one another – loyalty generated by their shared pain, experiences and role in the patriarchal system.
Another selection on ‘gynocritics’ is the one entitled ‘Gynocritics: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Muriel Spark’. In this chapter, Elaine Showalter explains that ‘gynocritics must also take into account […] personal histories in determining women’s literary choices and careers …’. In order to support her statement, the feminist analyst shows how Elizabeth Barrett’s husband, Robert Browning, influenced her (Elizabeth’s) work as an artist. Showalter affirms that it is known ‘how susceptible women writers have always been to the aesthetic standards and values of the male tradition, and to male approval and validation’, which is why ‘we can appreciate the complexity of a marriage between artists’. Showalter adds that ‘such a union has almost invariably meant internal conflicts, […] and, finally, obliteration for the woman’. In Elaine Showalter’s opinion, Elizabeth Barrett Browning experienced ‘a painful […] struggle between her womanly love and […] commitment to her work’ as ‘there is a sense in which she wants him to be the better artist’.
Gynocritics also deals with the recurring themes in women’s literature and Showalter states that in ‘women’s novels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries […] female suffering […] becomes a kind of literary commodity’. Moreover, twentieth century fiction by English women ‘is strewn with dead female bodies’. Showalter offers the example of Muriel Spark’s short novel of 1970, The Driver’s Seat, in which ‘another half–dead and desperate heroine gathers all her force to hunt down a woman–hating psychopath and persuade him to murder her’. The feminist literary critic underlines a significant detail regarding the heroine of the novel: ‘she is dressed in a purposely bought outfit of clashing purple, green and white – the colours of the suffragettes’ . Regarding the message of the novel, Showalter affirms that, in the protagonist’s ‘careful selection of her death–dress, her patient pursuit of her assassin, Spark has given us the devastated postulates of feminine wisdom: that a woman creates her identity by choosing her clothes, that she creates her history by choosing her man’. Therefore, ‘the power to choose one’s destroyer is women’s only form of self–assertion’.
Another characteristic of women’s literature (in the past) which ‘gynocritics’ focuses on is ‘matrophobia’ (term coined by Lynn Sukenick) or ‘the fear of becoming one’s mother’. Showalter mentions Adrienne Rich’s book – Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience, and Institution (which deals with the daughters’ rejection of the mothers born, educated, exploited and manipulated in a patriarchal society). She adds that ‘hating one’s mother was the feminist enlightenment of the fifties and sixties; but it is only a metaphor for hating oneself’. However, ‘female literature of the 1970’s goes beyond matrophobia to a courageously sustained quest for the mother’.
Elaine Showalter, just like Virginia Woolf, touches upon woman’s special ‘relationship’ with the novel (in a chapter entitled ‘Women and the Novel: “The Precious Speciality” ’). Showalter presents the thoughts of the popular American novelist Fanny Fern on women’s preference of the novel as a literary form. According to Fern, women wrote in order to channel the frustrations and drives they had to hide from their families and from the entire community. They also used the novel as a means of rebellion against men’s attitude towards them:
One of these days, when that diary is found, when the hand that penned it shall be dust, with what amazement and remorse will many a husband or father exclaim, I never knew my wife or my child until this moment.
Therefore, Fern believes that, for a period of time, writing novels was women’s way of obtaining men’s reaction to the feelings and ideas they expressed in their literary creations, to the unsuspected sides of their personalities which they revealed in their works. As a result of women’s special ‘relationship’ with the novel (as a literary form), the Women Writers Suffrage League (an organisation of English novelists and journalists) ‘began to explore the psychological bondage of women’s literature and its relationships to a male–dominated publishing industry’. Elizabeth Robins, the first president of the league, argued in 1908:
… To say in print what she thinks is the last thing the woman–novelist or journalist is […] to attempt […]. Her publishers are not women.
At the end of the chapter, Showalter writes that, as a consequence of this commercial monopoly, nineteenth–century women organised their own publishing houses.
As mentioned in Hazard Adams’ presentation of Elaine Showalter’s work as a feminist literary critic, she attempts to reconstruct the literary past and identify the phases of that literary past. In relation to this, Hazard Adams provides his readers with a selection from Showalter’s work, entitled ‘Feminine, Feminist, Female’. In this chapter, Showalter expresses her wish to reconstruct the past of women’s literature by discussing ‘scores of women novelists, poets and dramatists whose work has been obscured by time’ and by establishing ‘the continuity of the female tradition from decade to decade, rather than from Great Woman to Great Woman’. She states that, by focusing on a great number of female novelists, she has noticed ‘patterns and phases in the evolution of a female tradition’. To this Showalter adds: ‘in my book on English women writers, A Literature of Their Own I have called these the Feminine, Feminist and Female Stages’. Showalter then analyses each phase, beginning with the Feminine one (dating from 1840 to 1880) during which ‘women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture’ and used male pseudonyms. Moreover, according to Showalter, the masculine disguise affected the tone, diction, structure and characterisation of the literary creations. However, ‘American women during the same period adopted superfeminine, little–me pseudonyms (Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Fanny Forester)’ instead of male pseudonyms and disguised ‘behind those nominal bouquets their boundless energy, powerful economic motives, and keen professional skills’. ‘In the Feminist phase, from about 1880 to 1920, or the winning of the vote, women […] use literature to dramatise the ordeals of wronged womanhood’. Therefore, during this stage, women writers express the personal sense of injustice in their novels and redefine ‘the woman artist’s role in terms of responsibility to suffering sisters’. As examples of this phase, Showalter mentions ‘the Amazon utopias of the 1890’s, fantasies of perfected female societies set in an England or an America of the future, which were also protests against male government, male laws and male medicine’.
‘In the female phase, ongoing since 1920, women reject both imitation and protest – two forms of dependency’ and assert the independence of their art. ‘In this sense,’ (Showalter adds) ‘the Room of One’s Own becomes a kind of Amazon utopia’ .
The last selection from Elaine Showalter’s work, reprinted in Hazard Adams’ Critical Theory Since Plato is the one entitled ‘Feminist Criticism, Marxism, and Structuralism’. In this chapter, Showalter argues that feminist criticism has tried ‘the revision and the subversion of related ideologies, especially Marxist aesthetics and structuralism, altering their vocabularies and methods to include the variable of gender’. However, Showalter adds that this attempt to ‘borrow’ concepts and methods is unsatisfactory, which is why ‘gynocritics’ deals with the development of new models (for feminist criticism) that are supposed to replace the ‘models’ borrowed from male literary criticism. Showalter presents the main characteristics of Marxism and structuralism and explains why their ‘tools’ are not fit for analysing women’s literature from a feminist point of view. According to Elaine Showalter, both Marxism and structuralism ‘claim to be sciences of literature, and repudiate the personal fallible, interpretive reading’. Marxist literary critics assert that the components of a text are historically and economically determined and structuralism focuses on mastering the theory instead of reading the books, disregarding problems of content and interpretation. In Showalter’s opinion, feminist criticism is supposed to deal with the experience of women, with their repressed messages and neither Marxist aesthetics nor structuralism can provide feminist analysts with the suitable terminology or theories, which is why feminist literary criticism should ‘craft’ its own ‘tools’, its own theoretical approaches.
2. Introductory Considerations on Feminist Criticism
2.1. General Presentation
An elaborate definition of feminist criticism is provided by Linda H. Peterson who asserts that feminist analysts are interested in: discovering the neglected works of women writers throughout centuries, analysing the literary creations of male authors from a ‘feminist’ viewpoint and studying the psychological and linguistic development of women in a patriarchal system.
Linda H. Peterson discusses the dominant strains of feminist criticism that have appeared since the early 1970’s. According to her, these strains are categorised as French, British and American and (although they share common points) French, British and American feminists have carried out their studies from rather different perspectives.
Linda H. Peterson offers a brief presentation of the French feminist perspective. According to her, French feminists focus on the linguistic development of women and employ the theories of the psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan in their studies, stating that the language developed and learned throughout centuries is characterized as phallocentric. In the French feminists’ opinion, the ‘masculine’ language reflects ‘a binary logic that opposes such terms as active/passive’ and associates masculinity with values appreciated by the patriarchal society. As a result, it is these feminists’ belief that, for many centuries, language and literature reflected the world from the male point of view, giving women writers only two options: to share the male viewpoint or to remain ‘silent’, repressed, without the right to express themselves (especially through literature). However, French feminists such as Annie Leclerc, Xavière Gauthier, Julia Kristeva and Marguerite Duras have pointed out the possibility of women developing their own language: a feminine language – ‘l’écriture féminine’ which is ‘rhythmic and unifying’, ‘semiotic’ rather than ‘symbolic’ and ‘associated with the maternal’. Feminine language is also associated with the female body and women’s repressed sexuality by a number of French feminists (Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, etc.) who, in their studies, oppose the unitary phallic pleasure to the diffuse feminine one. In addition, the feminine language appears as threatening to the male-dominated culture, but it may also risk ‘being politically marginalised by men if it does not participate in “masculine” discourse.
Linda H. Peterson also achieves a presentation of American feminism, touching upon its dominant models. In her view of the American feminist perspective, the analysts are interested in the ‘French’ subject of feminine mode or style, but they tend to focus on recurring ‘feminine’ themes (clothing, madness, disease, the demonic, etc.) and on rereading the masculine-dominated literature (to the purpose of ‘exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in such works’). However, this model (named ‘feminist critique’ by Elaine Showalter) is not the only one created by American feminists. Sandra Gilbert, Patricia Meyer Spacks and Elaine Showalter developed a different model (called ‘gynocriticism’) which is a study of great women authors from a feminist viewpoint. A third American feminist approach to literature is the one illustrated by Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) in which the female analyst begins to ‘discover neglected or forgotten women writers and, thus, forge an alternative literary tradition’. In her study, Showalter identifies three stages in the evolution of women’s literature: the ‘Feminine, Feminist and Female’ phases during which ‘women first imitated a masculine tradition (1840 to 1880), then protested against its standards and values (1880 to 1920) and finally advocated their own autonomous, female perspective (1920 to the present)’. At the end of her presentation, Linda H. Peterson mentions two negative aspects of American feminism. One of the problems with American feminist criticism is that it relies on methods and theories ‘borrowed’ from other ‘fields’ and, therefore, created by men. Another issue is the variety of American feminist approaches which may become a hindrance in terms of educational organisation and, consequently, political activism.
Towards the end of the subchapter ‘What is Feminist Criticism?’, Linda H. Peterson underlines the differences between American and British feminist criticism. Whereas British feminists favour a political type of critical practice, American feminists focus on ‘universal feminine attributes (the feminine imagination, feminine writing)’ and overemphasise the importance of ‘texts linking women across boundaries and decades’, while ignoring ‘differences of race, class and culture among women’ , disregarding the social factors that condition women’s works and placing little emphasis on historical detail. As a result, British feminists (who are mostly interested in the different political conditions that influence different women writers) often criticise the idea that ‘powerful individuals may be immune to repressive conditions’ (which the American feminist perspective seems to suggest).
Feminist critical perspective, although characterised by a wide range of approaches, is given some unity (some coherence) by the efforts of a number of female literary critics who have tried to organise the variety of feminist critical approaches. However, other such literary critics have insisted on the importance of the diversity of methods and concepts which is specific of feminist criticism. In order to understand these two opposite perspectives and the essence of feminist literary criticism, one has to become familiar with the most important critical essays of some of the greatest feminist literary critics.
Editor Hazard Adams introduces his readers to the feminist writings of Virginia Woolf, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar by briefly presenting their roles as feminist literary critics and key–fragments of their works as critical essayists. In collaboration with Leroy Searle, he also introduces his readers to the critical writings of other four renowned feminist analysts: Hélène Cixous, Sandra M. Gilbert (this time with her individual work and not in collaboration with Susan Gubar), Alice A. Jardine and Julia Kristeva.
2.2. Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Theory
Editor Hazard Adams touches upon the work and feminist views of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) in a brief (one–page) presentation. According to him, Virginia Woolf is best known for the feminist writings A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Virginia Woolf’s feminist perspective is an independent one as she always disliked the word ‘feminism’, emphasised the importance of the differences between the two sexes, opposed absolute equality with men, favoured the theme of androgyny in her work and voiced feminist beliefs regarding only her own upper middle class. As a result, she was attacked by feminists in later generations who accused her of many ‘faults’ and, especially, of not expressing her anger (related to feminist issues) in her writings. Virginia Woolf refused to release anger and bitterness by means of her works and, instead, chose as rhetorical strength of her art, an ironic tone. As a novelist, Virginia Woolf’s main concerns were: ‘men’s anger at women, misunderstandings between the sexes, the psychological pressure under which women – and men – were brought up’. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf deals with these concerns and also focuses on the famous idea that ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ (who stands for women writers throughout centuries) did not have the same conditions, the same opportunities as ‘Shakespeare’ did in order to put her talent to use.
2.3. A Presentation of Virginia Woolf’s Essay A Room of One’s Own
Hazard Adams provides his readers with a fragment from Chapter 4 of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. He does so in order to allow them to become familiar with the main concepts of the feminist literary critic who points out the gloomy atmosphere of the Elizabethan period which, in her opinion, prevented women (‘Shakespeare’s sister’) from writing. In the same fragment, Virginia Woolf also mentions a few upper–class ladies – Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), English poet and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-1674), English author – who had the necessary comfort and time to write. They wrote poetry, but also met with obstacles such as prejudices regarding women’s duties, nature and ability to write. For instance, Virginia Woolf admires Lady Winchilsea’s talent, stating that she could have written pure poetry, but, at the same time, she notices that her literary creations are full of anger, bitterness, resentment, fear and hatred towards men who prevented her from becoming the writer that she wanted to be:
Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire,
Would cloud our beauty and exhaust our time.
Because she saw the human race as being split into two parties, Anne Finch focused on expressing her indignation against the position of women in society (‘How we are fallen! Fallen by mistaken rules, / And Education’s more than Nature’s fools;’) and her sorrow caused by the inability to publish her work (‘To some friends, and to thy sorrows sing / For groves of laurel thous wert never meant’) instead of focusing on the themes which, in Virginia Woolf’s opinion, would have turned her into the great writer that she was meant to be. The second example that Virginia Woolf provides her readers with is that of Margaret of Newcastle who, in her own poetry, expresses the ‘same outburst of rage’ as Anne Finch:
Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts and die like Worms …
Just as Lady Winchilsea, Margaret Cavendish often complained about her untutored intelligence and the professors who refused to teach her as they taught men. Margaret of Newcastle was often mocked (because of her writings) even by women such as Dorothy Osborne who, in her letters to her husband–to–be, Sir William Temple (1627-1695), ridiculed Margaret Cavendish’s wish to write a book: ‘if I should not sleep a fortnight I should not come to that’. In Dorothy Osborne’s opinion, a woman of sense and modesty would never consider writing a book. However, by analysing Osborne’s letters, Virginia Woolf states that ‘she had the makings of a writer in her’ and ‘a gift […] for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene’. But, despite her talent, Dorothy Osborne wrote only letters, which was generally permitted to women because letters were not considered literature.
In this chapter of A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf also mentions the case of Mrs. Aphra Behn, a middle–class woman who made ‘her living by her wits’. With Aphra Behn, women started earning money by writing novels and translations (in the later 18th century). Therefore, women’s writings were gaining practical importance and were regarded as less trivial. However, the success of female novelists in the 19th century and the later 18th century determines Virginia Woolf to raise an important question: why great women writers such as George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen are known for writing novels and not poetry or plays. Virginia Woolf answers the question herself: in the 19th century, women had to write in sitting–rooms where they were constantly interrupted and had to hide their writings from servants or visitors. As a result, they preferred writing prose because it required less focus than writing poetry or plays did and not because they were ‘by nature novelists’. Towards the end of the chapter, Virginia Woolf mentions another reason for women’s preference of the novel as a literary form (in the 19th century): ‘all the older forms of literature were hardened and set by the time she’ (the woman) ‘became a writer. The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands’.
In the second part of chapter 4, Virginia Woolf underlines a number of aspects that influenced the quality of women’s novels in a negative way. In chapter 12 of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë voices (by means of her character Jane Eyre) what Virginia Woolf believes are the faults of 19th century women writers :
I desired more of a practical experience than I possessed.
Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise `for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow – creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
Therefore, Virginia Woolf believes that 19th century women novelists lacked the experience and intercourse they needed in order to be able to write like the great male writers did. She also affirms that Tolstoi would not have written War and Peace had he experienced the same seclusion George Eliot experienced (because she was living in sin with a married man). To this, Virginia Woolf adds that a great novel should have ‘integrity’: ‘what one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he [the author] gives one [the reader] that this [the novel] is the truth’. Unfortunately, (in Woolf’s view) the insight of the female novelist is confused. The reason for this confusion is the fact that 19th century women could not write about what they wanted to write because the masculine values prevailed:
Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in drawing–room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop.
As a result, in most cases ‘she [the female novelist] had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others’. Not many women writers were able to keep their ‘integrity’ as novelists in a ‘purely patriarchal society’. ‘Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë […]. They wrote as women write not as men write’ .
Virginia Woolf underlines another difficulty that 19th century female novelists faced: the fact that their female literary tradition was short and partial. In Woolf’s view, they could not be successful by resorting to men’s literary tradition because, for instance, men’s ‘sentence’ was ‘unsuited for a woman’s use’. The feminist literary critic states that Charlotte Brontë failed in employing the ‘sentence’ created by and for men, whereas Jane Austen who ‘devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proner for her own use and never departed from it […] got infinitely more said’. Therefore, ‘the lack of tradition’ and ‘such a scarcity of tools, must have told enormously upon the writings of women’.
In the end, Virginia Woolf adds that 19th century women writers should have found an appropriate way of organising their writing activity. Such an activity should have suited their body and nerves, but there was no elaborate study of psychology of women written by a woman in order to establish how and what a woman should write. This, again, took its toll on women’s writings.
2.4. Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s Feminist Theory
Another great feminist achievement that Hazard Adams touches upon is the collaboration of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Hazard Adams mentions their well-known work, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) which introduces a new concept (‘anxiety of authorship’) among the already established feminist concepts. He also mentions their Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985) and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1988) which are anthologies of female writers that have been excluded from male-dominated anthologies. In the rest of his presentation, the editor of Critical Theory Since Plato discusses the content and the importance of The Madwoman in the Attic. In the first chapter of the book, Gilbert and Gubar argue that the concept of literary creativity has been identified with male writers. In the second chapter, they present Harold Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’, claiming that women do not fit into Bloom’s patriarchal model and that women’s anxiety (which they name ‘anxiety of authorship’) is more pronounced then that of men. Gilbert and Gubar also offer examples of the consequences of ‘women’s socialised anxieties’: certain physical and mental illnesses such as anorexia, agoraphobia and claustrophobia.
2.5. A Presentation of Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s Essay Infection in the Sentence
The first part of the second chapter of The Madwoman in the Attic (entitled ‘Infection in the Sentence’) is reprinted in Critical Theory Since Plato. In the beginning of this fragment, Gilbert and Gubar provide the readers with illustrative quotations of women’s socialised anxieties effect:
The man who does not know sick women, does not know women
This living of mine had been done under a heavy handicap…
Gilbert and Gubar proceed to explain Harold Bloom’s theory of ‘the anxiety of influence’: ‘…that writers assimilate and then consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of their predecessors, is of course a central fact of literary history’. Thus, writers are confronted with anxiety when forced to acknowledge the achievements of their forefathers’ which they inevitably inherit. Furthermore, Gilbert and Gubar underline Harold Bloom’s idea that the ‘anxiety of influence’ is what generates the evolution of literature because ‘ “a strong poet” must engage in heroic warfare with his “predecessor” ’ and ‘become a poet by somewhat invalidating his poetic father’. Therefore, ‘Bloom’s paradigm of the sequential relationship between literary artists is the relationship of father and son’. Gilbert and Gubar believe that this theory is a sexist one because it is ‘an analysis of the patriarchal poetics’, describing ‘literary history as the crucial warfare of fathers and sons’ and defining ‘the poetic process as a sexual encounter between a male poet and his female muse’.
Furthermore, according to Gilbert and Gubar, a woman writer does not ‘fit in’ the male literary history that Bloom describes. ‘The female poet does not experience the “anxiety of influence” in the same way that her male counterpart would, for the simple reason that she must confront predecessors who are almost exclusively male and, therefore, significantly different from her’. ‘The masculine authority with which they construct their literary personality, as well as the fierce power struggles in which they engage in their efforts of self-creation, seem to the woman writer directly to contradict the terms of her own gender definition’. Thus, the equivalent of the male writer’s anxiety of influence is the woman writer’s anxiety of authorship – ‘a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a “predecessor”, the act of writing will isolate or destroy her’. Moreover, this anxiety is exacerbated by the fear that ‘she cannot “beget” art upon the (female) body of the muse’ the way her male counterpart can. Besides, having to struggle ‘against the effects of a socialisation which makes conflict with the will of her (male) precursors, seem […] absurd, […] self-annihilating’, the female artist must also struggle against men’s aggressive reading of her (of her literature), against the ‘antagonism of male readers’.
As a result of the different types of tension and anxiety that women must deal with (as opposed to their male counterparts), female artists tend to search for female precursors who have already proven that ‘a revolt against patriarchal literary authority is possible’, and can, therefore, provide women writers with the necessary confidence in their abilities to rebel against male-dominated art.
Whereas the male writer – ‘the son of many fathers’ has to repeatedly resort to revisionism, the female artist – ‘the daughter of too few mothers’ assumes the role of pioneer of female literary tradition. As Gilbert and Gubar have already pointed out, ‘the anxiety of authorship’ has a unique effect (compared to the effects of the ‘anxiety of influence’) because it forms a bond that links women in ‘the secret sisterhood of their literary subculture’. However, ‘the anxiety of authorship’ also has negative (even devastating) effects on women writers. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female artists ‘struggled in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness, obscurity that felt like paralysis to overcome the “anxiety of authorship” ’.
In a patriarchal culture, women who engaged in intellectual activities such as writing were considered ill. ‘In 1645 John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, noted in his journal’ that Anne Hopkins had become mentally ill because of having written too many books. Another example is that of the notes of Wendy Martin who stated that:
In the nineteenth century this fear of the intellectual woman became so intense that the phenomenon
[…] was recorded in medical annals […]. A Harvard doctor reported during his autopsy on a Radcliffe
graduate he discovered that her uterus shrivelled to the size of a pea!
In a patriarchal society, it was generally thought that it was sick or ‘neurotic’ for a woman to write. Even talented women writers of those times believed it was unnatural for them to have writing skills and to wish to use them. For instance, in her passionate poem, ‘The Spleen’, Anne Finch expressed the fear that she suffered from an illness which ruled her art (and the disturbing thought that it is insane, neurotic and splenetic for a woman to want to be a writer).
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, women writers were expected to be modest and present their works as trifles that were meant to be read for relaxation in moments of illness, not deep meditation. This is why women such as Margaret Cavendish (the Duchess of Newcastle) had to express their modesty as artists and apologise for their endeavours by explicitly stating they could never write as well as men did.
The already mentioned social factors (of the 18th and 19th centuries) determined women to publish their works pseudonymously or anonymously and ‘concentrate on the “lesser” subjects reserved for ladies such as becoming to their inferior powers’. Female artists who refused to do so and rebelled, had to accept social isolation and even ostracism.
As a result of their artistic struggles, the foremothers conveyed their fear and tension to the female descendants who, ‘seeking motherly precursors […] may find only infection, debilitation’. In order to illustrate this heritage, Gilbert and Gubar refer to the anxiety expressed by the American poet and essayist Annie Gottlieb (in her work):
When I began to enjoy my powers as a writer, I dreamt that my mother had me sterilised! […] I went after the mother-figure in my dream, brandishing a large knife […] I cried, […] ‘You are destroying my femaleness, my female power, which is important to me, because of you!’
Another example is a poem by Anne Sexton (which expresses ‘the anxiety of authorship’). In several passages of this poem, Sexton suggests that ‘the red shoes passed furtively down from woman to woman are the shoes of art’:
All those girls
Who wore red shoes,
…………………………
They store off their ears like safety pins.
Their arms fell off them and became hats.
Their hands rolled off and sang down the street.
And their feet – oh God, their feet in the marketplace-
… the feet went on.
The feet could not stop.
………………………
What they did was the death dance!
The metaphor of the red shoes is not uncommon in women’s writings. The same type of imagery is employed by Margaret Atwood in Lady Oracle. A certain passage from this literary creation indicates the ‘anxiety of authorship’ and the conflict between literary creativity and ‘feminity’:
The real red shoes, […]
You could dance or you could have the love of, good man. But you were afraid to dance, because you had this unnatural fear that if you danced, they’d cut your feet off so you wouldn’t be able to dance… Finally, you overcome your fear and danced, and they cut your feet off. The good man went away too, because you want to dance!
According to Gilbert and Gubar, social scientists and social historians have even concluded that patriarchal socialisation makes women physically and mentally ill. Among such illnesses are: hysteria (by definition, a ‘female disease’), anorexia (which affects young girls who, wishing to be frail and, therefore, beautiful, begin to hate their flesh and do anything to become slim), agoraphobia (common, among middle-aged housewives), claustrophobia, eye troubles etc. These diseases are the direct result of women’s being trained to be submissive and self-less. In Victorian times, women were even taught that it was ‘feminine’ and natural for a woman to fall ill and become tense under any type of strain. These ‘female diseases’ are often depicted in women writers’ works: Charlotte and Emily Brontë portray ‘starved or starving anorexic heroines’: agoraphobia, claustrophobia and eye ‘troubles’ often appear in women’s writings throughout the nineteenth century; and finally, ‘aphasia and amnesia – two illnesses which symbolically represent (and parody) the sort of intellectual incapacity patriarchal culture has traditionally required of women – appear and reappear in women’s writings in frankly stated or disguised forms’.
2.6. Sandra M. Gilbert’s Feminist Theory
Hazard Adams not only touches upon the collaboration of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, but also emphasises the significance (importance) of Gilbert’s individual work. According to Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, Sandra M. Gilbert tried to prove that ‘the exclusion of women is part of an entire system and no mere coincidence’.
2.7. A Presentation of Sandra M. Gilbert’s Essay Literary Paternity
Sandra M. Gilbert points out that, in spite of this systematic exclusion, women constantly attempted to assert their creative power. In her critical essay, the feminist analyst argues that men writers have often thought of the ‘pen’ as ‘a metaphorical penis’. According to Sandra M. Gilbert, a central concept was ‘the notion that the writer “fathers” his text just as God fathered the world’. For instance, in a letter to his friend (R.W. Dixon), Gerard Manley Hopkins confessed his belief that creative power is one of the things/attributes that differentiate men from women.
Gilbert states that, throughout centuries, many other men writers and scholars have expressed the same type of view: Aristotle compared the poet to a god who creates a poetic ‘universe’ that mirrors reality; Coleridge saw writing as an act of creation and the poet as a male ruler of his fictive world; Shelby called men writers ‘legislators’; the Earl of Rochester and Auguste Renoir directly associated art with male sexuality; John Irexin envisioned the page as a virgin space that must be worked on by a phallic pen; poet Robert Southey considered writing, reading and thinking as exclusively male activities and believed women should accept their status as literary and sensual objects; and, finally, Harold Bloom viewed literary history as a father-son relationship, as a ‘battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads…’. Therefore, Western men writers have seen the literary creation’s author as a father whose pen may be compared to a penis as it can create (fictive) life and posterity. This belief is even embedded in the very meanings of the words ‘author’ and ‘authority’ as Edward W. Said pointed out in ‘Beginnings: Intention and Method’. According to him, the OED tells us that ‘authority’ means (among others): ‘a power to enforce obedience’, ‘a power to influence action’, ‘a power to inspire belief’, ‘a person whose opinion is accepted’.
Said adds that the word ‘author’ designates a person who originates or gives existence to something, a begetter, a father, a founder, someone who maintains certainty. Said concludes that ‘taken together, these meanings are all grounded in the following notions: (1) that of the power of an individual to […] institute, establish, […] to begin; (2) that this power and its product are an increase over what had been there previously; (3) that the individual wilding this power controls its issue […] (4) that authority maintains the continuity of its course’.
In Sandra M. Gilbert’s view, as a result of the general opinion that the pen should be considered a metaphorical penis, an exclusively male instrument, many women avoided ever attempting to write and those who dared do such a thing suffered from great anxiety because of the prejudices. The protest/revolt against such injustice is reflected in some of the Western women writers’ works:
To write, or read, or think, or enquire
Wond’d cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,
…………………………..
Whilst the dull manage, of a servile house
Is held by some, our outmost art and use.
[…] happy the Race of Men!
Born to inform or to correct the Ren
To profits pleasures freedom ands command
……………………………
And sadly are by this distinction taught
That since the Fall (by our seducement wrought),
Ours is the greater losse as ours the greater fault.
In the last poem, Anne Finch expresses her indignation towards the belief that women (Eve’s descendants) should exist only to please men.
Gilbert adds that, for a long time, women’s creative power was seen by men as ‘unfeminine’, unnatural. Moreover, men writers who dealt with problems related to their writing skills were often compared to women (who were thought to lack literary power). In order to illustrate this mentality, the feminist literary critic mentions nineteenth-century editor-critic Rufus Griswold who edited an anthology entitled ‘The Female Poets of America’ and criticised women’s attempt to imitate men’s writing abilities:
We are in danger, therefore, of mistaking for efflorescent energy of creative intelligence that which is only
the exuberance of personal ‘feelings unemployed’.
Sandra M. Gilbert asserts that:
Women in patriarchal; societies have historically been reduced to properties, to characters and images
imprisoned in male texts […]. From Eve, Minerva […] and Galatea onward […] patriarchal mythology
defines women as created by, from and for men!
Therefore, men have seen women as proprieties of literary texts. In relation to this imprisonment of women as characters in literary texts, Gilbert analyses men’s wish to figuratively ‘kill’ women by trying to turn them into art. In order to support her statement, Sandra M. Gilbert quotes Albert Gelpi:
The artist kills experience into art, […]. The fixity of ‘life’ in art and the fluidity of ‘life’ in nature are
incompatible.
Moreover, Gilbert tackles upon Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion according to which woman tries to change her appearance in order to hide her signs of age and death that remind men of life, of nature: by using make-up, woman makes efforts to become a perfect image, a piece of art so as to be more appealing to man.
Sandra M. Gilbert also mentions women writers’ rebellion against men’s wish to associate art exclusively with male sexuality:
Against the traditional generative authority of the pen/penis the literary woman can set the conceptual energy
of her own female sexuality […] women writers have […] struggled to associate their own life-giving sexual
energy with their art.
In order to illustrate women writers’ rebellion, Gilbert comments on Mary Shelley’s fictionalised Author’s Introduction to The Last Man which is based on a myth of female sexual energy. In her introduction, Mary Shelley tells the story of her fictive visit to the cavern of the Cumalan Sibyl, the primordial prophetess, who mythically conceived all women artists. There, she finds leaves traced with written characters and starts deciphering them. Sandra M. Gilbert offers the readers an interpretation of the story. According to the female analyst, the cave is a female space and a male poet, Percy Shelley, guides the woman writer to this place, but she alone must reconstruct the body of Sibyl’s art. The way to the cave may even seem to be remembered by accident, but the meaning inscribed in the Sibylline leaves can only be remembered through a lot of work and effort. In conclusion, by recreating the art of Sibyl, Mary Shelley (who stands for women writers in general) actually attempts to discover her own artistic power.
2.8. Hélène Cixous’ Feminist Theory
Another feminist literary critic that Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle wrote about is Hélène Cixous. According to the editors of ‘Critical Theory Since 1965’, the French feminist introduces the concept of ‘libidinal feminist’ writing which is generated by woman’s attempt to ‘write herself’ and is characterized by the disappearance of syntax. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle underline the fact that Cixous argues in favour of freedom, separation and tolerance of otherness. To this, the editors add that the feminist analyst believes women should not desire to be equal to men and, instead, should try to save what defines them and sets them apart from men, what is more positive, more archaic and more pleasurable about them as females.
2.9. A Presentation of Hélène Cixous’ Essay
The Laugh of The Medusa
Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle include in their Critical Theory Since 1965 a critical essay written by Hélène Cixous, entitled The Laugh of the Medusa. Hélène Cixous states that, throughout centuries, women have been driven away from writing as they have been driven away from their bodies, but she also asserts that, although she acknowledges the still present consequences of women’s past, she refuses to analyse that past because she does not want to strengthen its effects. Cixous also adds that she prefers to foresee the future rather than insist on the difficulties women have endured.
Cixous believes that the end of the 20th century is a time of renewal for women and their social status. She goes on to underline the richness of women’s imagination and feelings and emphasises the importance of the individuality of each woman. However, she also affirms that woman has never reached the great potential she mentions, because she was made to feel ashamed and insane when she tried to assert her individuality. Furthermore, woman herself was surprised and terrified of her own natural drives and wishes because of the mentality imposed on her. As a result, woman has become filled with self-disdain and often accuses herself of being a monster.
In the following part of her essay, Cixous focuses on men’s faults and the injustice against women. She starts by mentioning Freud’s belief that man is consumed by the fear of being castrated, of being a woman. Then, she continues by stating that men want to play ‘the old fool’s game: each one will love the other sex. I’ll give you your body and you’ll give me mine’. But, they always fail to live up to their promises, whereas women have seldom disappointed men in this. Another injustice that the feminist analyst underlines is what men teach women about themselves: that their bodies, their selves are like a dark continent which is dangerous and should be feared. Hélène Cixous also points out men’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of a completely different mode of writing (with no syntax) that belongs only to women and finally, she discusses men’s selfish desire to rule the literary territory in which ‘woman has never her turn to speak’.
The feminist critic asserts that there have been exceptions to the rule: a few male poets (such as Henrich von Kleist [1777-1881], German dramatic poet) who have been able to imagine woman as a beautiful, equal subject who possesses the strength to endure oppression. However, only poets have this ability, not novelists, because poetry supposes exploring the unconscious, which can bring men closer to women and help them understand the opposite sex.
Cixous continues her essay by suggesting what women should do in order to break away from the past, from their old image and status. The feminist analyst first points out that woman cannot write if she censors her body. Therefore, woman must become familiar with her own body and reflect inhibitions: she must ‘write herself’ (‘Write your self. Your body must be heard.’).
According to Hélène Cixous, only then can woman access the resources of her unconscious and write as well as men do, but in a different way. The discovery of one’s body can lead to the ability to write but it goes both ways as writing can also help woman gain back her sexuality (which has been confiscated by men) and escape the almost permanent feeling of guilt (since women feel ‘guilty of everything, guilty of every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being “too hot”; for not being both at once; for having children and for not having any’). Cixous adds that woman should not only be entitled to use the written language, but also the oral one. She affirms that, in the past, women were not often allowed to speak in public and, when they did, they experienced a great transgression and felt disappointed because their words fell upon ‘the deaf male ear’.
According to Hélène Cixous, woman enjoys a privileged relationship with her voice, but man has prevented her from benefiting from this unique relationship, which is why the feminist literary critic encourages women to escape the past by making themselves heard.
Another aspect of women’s ability to oppose men that Cixous brings under discussion is the fact that women are giving, generous by nature, capable of female solidarity and can, thus, make one another strong when dealing with oppression, with men’s prejudices. Furthermore, due to their kind, generous nature, women can ‘bring about a mutation in human relations, in thought’ by refusing to use the same ‘weapons’ of repression and manipulation that men use.
In the last part of The Laugh of Medusa, Hélène Cixous presents the main characteristics and differences of men and women. According to the feminist literary critic, women do not wish to appropriate men’s tools (instruments), concepts and methods, they do not envy men’s position in society and do not have the same desire to manipulate and control. Women do not struggle for mastery, power (which are phallocentric values) and do not wish to live in a society divided into masters and slaves. Instead, women have their own unique features: they bring disorder, chaos (by dislocating and destroying phallocentric values, by annihilating the motion of property). Therefore, Cixous claims that feminine texts are subversive, ‘volcanic’ and are meant to destroy the law established by men.
The feminist analyst insists on the fact that the superiority of women is obvious due to their past experiences. The oppression (blackmail, unhappy marriages etc.) they have endured has helped them evolve on a spiritual level:
Those who have known the ignominy of persecution derive from it an obstinate future desire for grandeur;
those who are locked up know better than their jailers the taste of fresh air.
Hélène Cixous adds that women are givers and men who like to take everything (and resent giving) do not value women’s gifts, claiming that the opposite sex gives only in order to take. Men have created the absurd concept of ‘gift-that-takes’ and do not realise that women have no regard for the notion of ‘property’ and are used to offering unselfishly.
Towards the end of her critical essay, the feminist analyst affirms that ‘masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis’, ‘whereas woman does not bring about the same regionalisation which serves the couple head/genitals’. Instead, ‘her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide’. ‘Woman is dispersible […], desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn’t, of him’ – which means that woman is able to accept and understand otherness/the other. According to Cixous, pregnancy is one of the ways women learn to comprehend otherness because they ‘bring the other to life’. Cixous adds that the taboo of the pregnant woman appears in the classic (male) texts because men fear this state which is empowering to women:
It has always been suspected that, when pregnant, the woman not only doubles her market value, but –
what’s more important – takes on intrinsic value as a woman in her own eyes and, undeniably, acquires body
and sex.
In conclusion, women can learn to love the other, they offer with no assurance that they will ever receive anything in return and they can run risks. However, at the end of her critical essay, Cixous expresses her disappointment by stating that, even at the end of the 20th century, some women still feel threatened by ‘the phallic stance’. They are submitted to the ‘same old handcuffs, baubles and chains’ and their drives can still be censored:
We are placed back to the string which leads back, if not to the Name-of-the-Father, then, for a now
twist, to the place of the phallic-mother.
2.10. Alice Jardine’s Feminist Theory
Another feminist literary critic that Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle present (in Critical Theory Since 1965) is Alice A. Jardine. The editors of Critical Theory Since 1965 explain Jardine’s (well-known term) ‘gynesis’ as a process of putting into discourse of woman – ‘a process which she declares is beyond the subject, representation and man’s truth’. To this explanation, Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle add that, in Alice A. Jardine’s view, ‘woman is […] a metaphor of writing and of reading the poststructuralist sense, the process that disrupts Western symbolic structures and logics’.
2.11. A Presentation of Alice Jardine’s Essay Gynesis
The editors of Critical Theory Since 1965 provide their readers with one of Alice A. Jardine’s critical essays: the one entitled ‘Gynesis’. In her essay, the feminist analyst discusses the theories developed in France (more precisely, in Paris) during the 1960’s and the 1970’s. She starts by mentioning that, in early 1960 and late 1970, the French Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) suffered several splits and changes and ended up belonging to a French group named ‘Psychoanalysis and Politics’ which was uploaded to feminism. To this, Jardine adds that feminist criticism does not exist as a genre in France and many French women theorists (who are quite influential as literary critics and, at one level or another, write about women) do not call themselves ‘feminists’ (two such literary critics are Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva).
Moreover, directions (of 1960’s and 1970’s) in French theory are anti-feminist and qualified as ‘modern’. Jardine believes that, in this context, she (as a feminist literary critic) must analyse the definition of feminist criticism and then attempt to redefine feminism in relation to ‘modernity’, to French ‘modern’ theory. She begins by stating that she agrees with Annette Kolodny who affirms that feminist criticism is an analysis of female characters in men’s and women’s writings. She then adds that male writers and male literary critics employ dualistic typologies in their works: ‘mother and/or angel, she (the woman) is condemned to death (or sexual mutilation or disappearance) and/or to happy-ever-after marriage’. Feminist readers criticise these patterns and produce their own interpretations of men’s literary creations – interpretations which are, inevitably, ignored by male critics. As a result, women (feminist) readers always turn enthusiastically to female authors and become interested in ‘the sex of the author, narrative destinies, images of women and gender stereotypes’.
However, Alice A. Jardine asserts that these feminist concerns, these touchstones of feminist literary criticism are no longer valid in France in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Jardine explains that this change is caused by a renewal of the fictional texts which is brought about by ‘modernity’:
The author […] has disappeared; characters are little more than proper name functions, ‘the image’ as icon must be rendered unrecognizable; and the framework of sexual identity […] is to be dismantled.
Furthermore, ‘the assurance of the author’s sex […] is problematized’. Hence the indifference towards the sex of the author of a literary text:
The question whether a ‘man’ or ‘woman’ wrote a text (feminists know well at the level of literary history) becomes nonsensical.
Another issue that Alice A. Jardine brings under discussion is the fact that ‘the feminist critic is concerned with the relationship between “fiction” and “reality” (truth) – with how the two interact, mime each other and reinforce cultural patterns’, whereas an essential problem for modernity (in France) is the rethinking of the status of reality and fiction.
The crises mentioned by Jardine are crises experienced by Western literature (and produced by men) and they impose a careful analysis of the narratives written by male authors. In France, especially, this analysis focuses on what seems to have eluded the Western texts and their male authors: a space characterised as feminine. Alice A. Jardine names the process of analysing this space: ‘gynesis’ (‘the putting into discourse of “woman” ’). ‘The object produced by this process is neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon […], a “gynema” ’. According to Jardine, its presence in a literary text is noticed by women (feminist) readers who notice inconsistencies regarding the ‘feminine space’ and, implicitly, the treatment of women in literary texts: ‘the […] existent slippages in signification among feminine/woman/women that we are calling “gynesis” and “phenomena” ’ produce the female readers’ distrust and lead to her criticism of the text in question.
The feminist analyst continues her essay by arguing that, ‘in the writings of those French theorists participating in “gynesis”, “woman” may become intrinsic to entire conceptual systems, without being “about” women – much less “about” feminism’. ‘First, this is the case, literally, insofar as contemporary thought in France is based almost entirely on men’s writing, […] on fiction written by men’.
Therefore, there are few references to women writers in modern French thought and ‘“gynesis” is not necessarily about “women” ’. Alice A. Jardine offers as an example the work of Julia Kristeva, a French woman theorist (who does not consider herself a feminist, although she is often referred to as one) interested in analysing the male tradition (the works of Freud, different philosophers etc.).
Jardine states that, in the rest of her essay, she wishes to focus on the ‘sources of gynesis’ and on the main reconceptualizations of narratives invented by men. She starts her analysis with a subchapter entitled ‘The Speaking Subject: The Positivities of Alienation’ in which she states that the ‘other’ is a major preoccupation of modern French thought. In the same subchapter, she affirms that ‘the space “outside of” the conscious subject has always connoted the feminine in the history of Western thought – and any movement into authority is a movement into that female space’.
The second subchapter of the critical essay (‘Gynesis’) is entitled ‘Thinking the Unrepresentable: The Displacement of Difference’. In this subchapter, the feminist literary critic argues that: ‘Lacan was the first to displace, slightly, the mediator in patriarchal culture – the father – from “reality” to the “symbolic” ’ and ‘the philosophers – after Lacan […] were to displace meditation even further’. She then adds that ‘those philosophers will, therefore, in their radical displacement of meditation, set about a total reconceptualization of difference’ and establish that what is ‘beyond the father’ of which Lacan spoke first (what is unrepresentable) ‘will be gendered as feminine’.
The last subchapter of ‘Gynesis’ is entitled ‘The Demise of Experience: Fiction as Stranger than Truth?’. In this part of her critical essay, Alice A. Jardine underlines the fact that, throughout centuries, men have experienced ‘the illusion that there exists a universal truth’. Therefore, the notion of ‘universal truth’ is an illusion; it is not equivalent to ‘experience’ or ‘reality’, even though men have created (and believe in) this concept. To them, ‘truth’ is ‘that which can never be seen, which never presents itself as such but rather captures, points, withdraws, hides itself in its veils’.
‘Truth’, in Jardine’s opinion, is associated (by men) with ‘woman’:
This ‘she-truth’ has been put into discourse in new ways in France – hence the ‘gynesis’ whose potential
spaces I have had to outline so schematically.
Alice A. Jardine adds that ‘Lacan is one of the best known explorers of the spatial contours of “gynesis” ’.
As a result, Alice A. Jardine asserts that ‘woman’ in Lacan’s thought designates that which subverts the subject (subverts representation). She chooses to write about this/Lacan’s view on women. According to Jardine, Lacan believes that, ‘as opposed to universal Man (the self of humanist thought), woman may be seen as the anti-universal excellence’. The author of ‘Gynesis’ also states that, in Lacan’s opinion, the unconscious is gendered as being feminine and woman is perceived as ‘other’. Jardine concludes by commenting on Lacan’s view:
Feminine jouissance will be posted as the ultimate limit to any discourse articulated by Man. It is, however,
only the first of a series of such limits which, through metonymy, will all be gendered as feminine. For
example, the limit of any discourse for Lacan is also the ‘true’. Truth (capital T) can/could only exist as long
as there is/was a belief in Universal Woman. […] And this ‘true’ […] provides an access to what is perhaps
the most important discursive limit for Lacan: the Real. […] The Real designates that which is categorically
unrepresentable, non-human, at the limits of the known; it is emptiness, the scream, the ‘zero-point’ of death,
the proximity of feminine jouissance.
After analysing Lacan’s view, the author of ‘Gynesis’ touches upon Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni’s idea (expressed in Partage des femmes) that woman is divided, partitioned and narcissistic (which is why, in Lemoine-Luccioni’s opinion, she cannot be creative or logical and can never be called an artist, a thinker, a philosopher). Alice A. Jardine also states that (in L’Ombre et le nom) Michèle Montrelay expresses a point of view that contradicts Lemoine-Luccioni’s belief: woman is not divided, she is the focus of a ‘primary imaginary’ to which men (as, for example, male poets) also have access.
At the end of her critical essay, Jardine affirms that, for French women theorists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, ‘feminism is hopelessly anachronistic, grounded in a (male) metaphysical logic which modernity has already begun to overthrow’. Therefore, the author of ‘Gynesis’ claims that the ‘new directions’ of modern French thought cannot be qualified as feminist even when developed by women. However, ‘modernity represents a new kind of discursivity on/about/as woman (and women), a valorization and/or speaking of “woman” ’.
2.11. Julia Kristeva’s Feminist Theory
Besides Hélène Cixous, Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle bring to their readers’ attention another French feminist whose essays may be considered antifeminist: Julia Kristeva. According to Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, in her critical essay, ‘Women’s Time’, Julia Kristeva arguers that, in their efforts to gain the power they have been denied in the past, women may resort to: terrorism, inverted sexism or exclusion of man in a purely feminine countersociety. Moreover, in some cases, women who reach important positions in a male-dominated system may even forget their past/their background and become defenders of the system which is opposed to women. Therefore, Julia Kristeva believes that the desire for power may become the cause for women’s reprehensible actions and behaviour.
2.12. A Presentation of Julia Kristeva’s Essay Women’s Time
‘Women’s Time’ is reprinted by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle in Critical Theory Since 1965 in order to provide the readers with a sample of Julia Kristeva’s seemingly antifeminist writing.
Kristeva begins this essay by stating that the concept of ‘nation’ (as defined in the 19th century) was destroyed by World War II, the 1929 crash and the National-Socialist radical changes (when the importance of economic homogeneity, historical tradition and linguistic unity was dramatically diminished). The (already mentioned) ‘pillars’ of any nation were replaced by economic interdependence (or submission to states considered superpowers) and by a symbolic denominator which comprises art, philosophy and religion and is the response of a number of nations to problems such as: reproduction, survival of the species, life, death etc. The feminist analyst offers the example of the European socio-cultural ensemble which is: superior to the nation and based on this type of ‘symbolic denominator’. Europe often even compares itself to other super-national socio-cultural ensembles such as North America (with which Europe is linked historically) or India and China. According to Julia Kristeva, these conditions often raise the problem of identity or loss of identity.
Another aspect that the feminist literary critic touches upon is that of the smaller socio-cultural groups (defined as age groups, sexual divisions etc). In Kristeva’s view, these groups are the ones that make the connections between Europe and India (or China) possible.
This introduction is followed by another interesting aspect brought under discussion by Julia Kristeva: the two phases or two generations of women. The first one is ‘more determined by the implication of a national problematic […] while the second – more determined by its place within the “symbolic denominator” – is European and trans-European’.
In the subchapter entitled ‘Which time?’, the feminist analyst associates men with ‘time’ and women with ‘space’ by using various arguments. She first mentions Freud’s belief (expressed in Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s Correspondence) that hysteria (a disease typical of women) is linked to place. To this, she adds R. Spitz’s view:
The permanence and quality of maternal love condition the appearance of the first spatial references which
induce the child’s laugh.
Furthermore, Kristeva writes that psychoanalysts treat psychoses by arranging new places which are meant to be substitutes that repair deficiencies in the maternal space. In relation to the already mentioned concepts of ‘time’ and ‘space’, the feminist literary critic brings under discussion two conceptions of time. According to her, ‘female subjectivity’ is associated with repetition and eternity because of gestation and recurrence of biological rhythms that are inevitably linked to women. The other conception of time is opposed to the first one: the time of history or time as oppression (linear, civilizational, obsessional time).
Julia Kristeva adds that the difference between these two conceptions of time point to the difference between men and women (already identified by feminism): a difference ‘productive of surprises and of symbolic life in a civilisation which, outside the stock exchange and wars, is bored to death’.
Kristeva ends the subchapter stating that, in the 19th century, female sensibility introduced its own notion of time, seeking its trans-European temporality. She then continues her essay by discussing the three attitudes of European feminism towards the concept of masculine linear time.
In the second subchapter, entitled ‘Two Generations’, Kristeva analyses the beginning of women’s movement. According to her, the suffragettes fought to gain their place in the time of history, on the socio-political stage. They made demands regarding work and pay, professional recognition, abortion, contraception etc. Therefore, this generation and its demands were universalist, transcending ages and civilisations and other types of differences among women.
Julia Kristeva moves on to the second generation of feminists (the second phase which included young women who became feminists after May 1968 and women who had an aesthetic or psychoanalytic experience). According to the author of ‘Women’s Time’, this generation of feminists was not interested in being a part of linear time. Instead, they analysed female psychology and sought to recover the repressed past experiences of women. Kristeva adds that it was no coincidence that the European and trans-European problematic was posited at the same time as the second phase of feminism. Moreover, in Julia Kristeva’s opinion, this new generation of feminists involves a mixture of two attitudes: ‘insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by history “time” ’.
In the next subchapter, entitled ‘Socialism and Freudianism’, Kristeva discusses the socio-political processes and events that led to changes in the feminist movement(s). According to her, the new generation of feminists appeared due to a split in social relations and mentalities – a split produced by socialism and Freudianism. Julia Kristeva defines socialism as the egalitarian doctrine and the social practice adopted by governments that favoured an even distribution of goods and opportunities to gain access to culture. Due to socialism, many demands of the feminists were met in Eastern European countries (and, by extension, also in West European states): economic, political and professional equality. The only demand ignored was the one for sexual equality (which implies permissiveness in sexual relations, abortion and contraception).
Therefore, obtaining this last equality became essential during the new/second phase of feminism:
As a consequence of these socialist accomplishments […], the struggle is no longer concerned with the quest
for equality but, rather, with difference and specificity.
Thus, the new generation of feminists attempted ‘to discover, first, the specificity of the female, and then, in the end, that of each individual woman’. After the climax of socialist ideology, Freudianism was the next to cause a split in social relations and mentalities and, in the subchapter entitled ‘Castrated and/or Subject to Language’, Julia Kristeva goes on to explain Freud’s perspective on women and his notion of castration. The feminist analyst mentions a few texts written by Freud (‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ and ‘Metapsychology’) in which he presents his concept of ‘castration’ as a separation from a state of nature, of pleasure – a separation which may constitute meaning. The operation of separation is common to both men and women. Certain conditions and relationships may cause/determine women (especially those who become hysterics) to deny this separation and its effect (which is ‘language’). Men (notably obsessionals) may also develop certain conditions when dealing with separation: they may tend to magnify and gain absolute control over the separation and language. According to Kristeva, Freud also sees the penis as the essential referent in the operation of separation – a referent that gives meaning to ‘lack’ or ‘desire’ when a man or a woman enters the order of language. Furthermore, Freud believes that the process of separation ends in privation of fulfilment, of pleasure. Not convinced by Freud’s vision, Julia Kristeva comments on the fact that Freud defined the notions of penis envy and fear of castration while analysing the discourse of neurotics of both sexes.
In the next subchapter (entitled ‘Living the Sacrifice’), Kristeva states that women’s role in society is one of sacrifice imposed by the differences among sexes (which men use to their advantage, claiming that those differences make them superior to the opposite sex). She, then, poses a question, wondering what women’s place in the symbolic contract may be (in the order of the language) if their social role is such an unpleasant one. The author of ‘Women’s Time’ adds that feminists are dissatisfied with the role women were given by men in the past: to perpetuate the socio-symbolic contract as mothers, wives, nurses, teachers etc. She also affirms that this dissatisfaction is the reason why some of the feminists attempt to gain control over the contract and subvert it, whereas others do not reject the contract and choose to analyse it from a personal point of view.
In Julia Kristeva’s view, there are also feminists who try to transform and adapt language to women’s bodies and emotional states ignored by the socio-symbolic contract. Thus, most feminists claim that the socio-symbolic contract is a sacrificial one because it is established by men against women’s will and (as Kristeva describes it) against their bodies.
In the subchapter entitled ‘The Terror of Power or the Power of Terrorism’, Julia Kristeva explains how women can try to change their role of sacrifice (and subvert sacrificial socio-symbolic contract), as well as gain access to power. In Europe, women promoted to leadership positions obtain the same advantages that men benefit from and have been denied to opposite sex for a long period of time. Most women in decision–making positions become defenders of the order established by men (of the male order). The women in chief position who reject conformism (and refuse to submit to power structures that are oppressive towards the female sex) are immediately prevented from protesting or taking innovative initiatives. This is the reason why a number of feminists wish to create a counter-society opposed to the frustrating male-dominated one. The ‘female society’ is often imagined as free of prohibitions, a type of promised-land for women. In women’s society, the man is the one excluded (at which point feminism turns into inverted sexism).
Therefore, women can gain power and control by either becoming leaders in men’s society (in which case they have to, once again, endure repression) or by creating a society/an order of their own. In the latter case, women attempt to deny the male order so as to protect their own identity. By doing so, they often resort to drastic measures (such as becoming members of terrorist groups). They contrainvest the violence they have endured and try to combat the frustration caused by the discriminatory order they were subject to. This refusal of the social orders may lead to terrorism. Moreover, the author of ‘Women’s Time’ argues that women are more apt than other exploited social categories to invest in terrorism. In Kristeva’s opinion, the cause of this tendency is the fact that a woman is more vulnerable within the symbolic order and, as a consequence, more aggressive when having to protect herself from it. The feminist analyst explains that the woman is more fragile than the man because her separation from her mother is more damaging than that of the male individual who can rediscover the lost connection in another relationship with the opposite sex. The woman does not have this opportunity. She can only compensate for her loss through a child (by becoming a mother herself) or through lesbianism which is condemned by society. This disadvantage that the woman has to deal with is another source of her need/desire to create utopias that do not impose separation or break-producing symbolism.
In the next subchapter (entitled ‘Creatures and Creatresses’), Kristeva focuses on two ways of fulfilling women’s desire to create. These are the ones acknowledged by the feminist generation contemporary to Julia Kristeva. The first one (rejected by the preceding generation) is giving birth. The author of ‘Women’s Time’ argues that Freud’s explanation for woman’s wish to become a mother is only partially accurate. Freud believed that the desire to have a child is a substitute for phallic dominion, but Kristeva adds that pregnancy offers woman a chance to love an other – chance she would, otherwise, rarely encounter. Moreover, she can love (her child) without being forced to sacrifice her intellectual, professional or even personal aspirations.
The other type of literary creation that Julia Kristeva writes about is the literary one. According to her, women aspire to create literature because it is a means of exploring and uncovering the repressed, the unconscious side of their personalities. It also generates pleasure and provides women with refuge from the oppressive social order. Moreover, women wish to create their own language that can help them express their feelings more accurately. Unfortunately, women writers encounter obstacles/hindrances, such as the ‘models’ offered by men’s literature (which impose certain restrictions upon women’s literature) and the poor quality of books that wear (unjustly) the feminist label.
In the next subchapter (entitled ‘In the Name of the Father, the Son … and the Woman?’), Kristeva states that the code of Christianity contributed to the frustrations imposed on women and that ‘the women’s movement […] is situated within the very framework of the religious crisis of our civilisation’. She also adds that, in modern times, people tend to live without religious beliefs and feminism may appear as an attempt at total liberation (even beyond faith).
In the last subchapter (entitled ‘Another Generation is Another Space’), Julia Kristeva discusses the existence of a third feminist generation which is present at least in Europe. According to her, this generation is characterised by a third type of attitude: the dichotomy man/woman is understood as belonging to metaphysics, the difference operating in personal and sexual identity. She adds that the third generation of feminists ignores the goals of the other feminist generations and disregards social problems, while placing emphasis on spiritual ones. At the end of her essay, Kristeva affirms that the various changes that the world is experiencing at different levels (wars, new types of addiction, a new attitude towards sexuality, women’s movement etc.) pose the demand for a new ethics that should replace the old one imposed by men.
3.1. The Interpretation of Jane Eyre’s/Charlotte Brontë’s Dreams
Tracy Lemaster argues that feminist criticism lacks a reading of Jane as a woman who fears pregnancy and motherhood, although the protagonist’s conflicts with maternity are evident in: her nightmares of children, her ‘cool’ relationship with Adèle, her critique of Victorian sentimentalization of the mother/child connection, her infantilized treatment by Rochester and her care-giving as a pseudo-mother to her maimed husband. Lemaster attempts to present a feminist analysis of Jane’s struggles with maternity and show that this essential aspect (in the novel) has been disregarded on account of the cultural assumption of the Victorian woman’s self-fulfilment through marriage and mothering.
‘Jane’s subconscious fear of pregnancy and motherhood manifests [itself] most directly in recurrent nightmares of children she struggles to carry, comfort, and control. Jane’s dreams refigure a single child in different distressing scenes, a repetition Jane equates less to an identifiable baby but more so to an inevitable “idea” ’. Tracy Lemaster believes that this idea is the fear of motherhood, the unidentifiable infants symbolising the burden of maternity to self-actualisation. According to the literary critic, this idea is reinforced by the fact that even the dreams of children that are not in danger seem disturbing: Jane remembers (with great fear) Bessie’s interpretation of dreams of children, according to which infants are a sign of trouble.
At first, Jane dreams of children playing, crying, seeking her affection and (at the same time) running away from her:
It was a wailing child this night and a laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; … for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber.
Lemaster interprets this type of dream as one that portrays motherhood as a series of contradictions. She then asserts that ‘the recurring dreams become more threatening and uncontrollable in mood as Jane’s final dream concludes with the child falling to its death’:
On sleeping, I continued in dreams the idea of a dark and gusty night. I continued also the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep, I was following the windings of an unknown road; […] I was burdened with the charge of a little child: […] which shivered in my cold arms, and wailed piteously in my ear. I thought, sir, that you were on the road a long way before me; and I strained every nerve to overtake you, and made effort on effort to utter your name and entreat you to stop – but my movements were fettered, and my voice still died away inarticulate; […].
‘I dreamt another dream, sir: that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. […] Wrapped up in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms – however much its weight impeded my progress, I must retain it. I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance on the road; I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many years, and for a distant country. […] I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every moment. […] I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke’.
Tracy Lemaster affirms that, in both dreams, Jane must endure an obstacle that prevents her from moving/travelling freely: the child appears as a weight that hinders progress. She comments upon the hindrance, stating that Jane’s physical exhaustion and her uninterrupted/constant carrying of the child evoke pregnancy. ‘Jane carrying the child in her arms is symbolic in a Freudian sense surely, for to “carry” or “bear” are verbs teeming with significance to women’.
The feminist literary critic further argues that the hindrance (the child) that prevents Jane from moving in her dream is connected to her famous soliloquy that touches upon feminist issues such as the restraints against female mobility, against social advancement:
Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow – creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh: the same peal, the same low, slow ha! Ha! Which, when first heard, had thrilled me: I heard, too, her eccentric murmurs; stranger than her laugh.
This connection is (in Lemaster’s opinion) suggestive of Jane’s fear of pregnancy which would prevent her from experiencing life freely. The feminist literary critic asserts that the protagonist’s reflection on women’s lack of freedom indicates that she is painfully aware of a limit which she cannot overpass (in order to enjoy the life that she desires). According to Tracy Lemaster, this limit is a stationary mother role. ‘Jane contrasts her restricted mobility as governess/mother to the possibilities available to men and anticipates […] public disapproval of this statement’ (by affirming that anybody who wants to may blame her for her unconventional ideas). In Lemaster’s view, the fact that Jane complains about the hardships of motherhood (in this scene) is suggested by the allusions to maternity that her feminist speech contains: the cooking of puddings (food edible for babies) and the knitting of stockings (which is also a reference to motherly duty). The feminist literary critic further argues that the millions to whom the protagonist refers in her soliloquy is such a great number that it must also include mothers. Furthermore, Jane compares the confinement that mothers must endure to her own ‘imprisonment’ and (as Lemaster notes) realises that their confinement is even greater – realisation which is suggestive of the heroine’s fear of becoming a mother. Therefore, the practical experience (that Jane desires and mentions in her monologue) is – in Tracy Lemaster’s opinion – unavailable not just to women but, primarily, to mothers.
Returning to the dreams that frighten the protagonist before her wedding, Lemaster continues the analysis of the heroine’s fear of motherly duties. In her view, ‘Jane’s ominous dreams depict her as either overwhelmed and conflicted by the presence of children or “impeded” and physically endangered by the necessity to carry them, to where she struggles for her own physical footing, or psychological balance, in choosing a focus. The dreams threaten the absorption or termination of Jane’s identity for emphasis on saving the child’. Thus Tracy Lemaster believes that Jane regards pregnancy (and, subsequently, maternity) as dangerous for a woman’s selfhood (sense of self), as a state that involves fragmentation of self. ‘For the apparition of the child in these crucial weeks preceding her marriage is only one symptom of a dissolution of personality which Jane seems to be experiencing at this time … [i]n view of this frightening series of separations within the self’.
Tracy Lemaster comments on the literary criticism that rejects the interpretation she has so far presented: ‘Jane’s recurring nightmares of suffocating children are seldom read as metaphoric of her resistance to being a mother despite their gothic presentation’. She asserts that the common reading of Jane Eyre involves the analysis of her nighttime visions as: ‘a symbol of erotic impediment, of lost childhood (read: virginity), of blighted love, or fears of abandonment […]’. Lemaster offers a few examples of such standard readings. She mentions Esther Godfrey who reads Jane’s dreams as symbolising the protagonist’s attempt to come to terms with her childhood past: ‘What are we to make of these strange dreams?…To begin with it seems clear that the wailing child who appears in all of them corresponds to the “poor orphan child” of Bessie’s song at Gateshead and therefore to the child Jane herself’. Tracy Lemaster also mentions Seelye who equates Jane’s powerlessness (in relation to Rochester) to a child’s helplessness: ‘the dream reveals a curious ambivalence toward the dependency of infancy, the helplessness and weakness that Jane displays in the company of Rochester, which we might explain as the conflicted response by a child-woman to the child forced by some mysterious agency into her arms’. Furthermore, ‘when expanded into a larger social context, Jane’s dreams are aligned with marriage, not motherhood, as representing Jane’s conflict with an unequal marriage where she is infantilised or, conversely, a self she must relinquish as a barrier to her marriage as a signifier of adulthood. Sandra Gilbert early argued that the dreams symbolise Jane’s resistance to an unequal marriage where she will occupy a child-like position’.
Lemaster states that the readings mentioned overlook an essential detail: Jane is a young woman and, subsequently, the fear of becoming a mother is likely to affect her. Moreover, she points out the confessional nature of the novel, arguing that Brontë’s dislike of children must have influenced her creative process. Trying to draw a conclusion, Tracy Lemaster affirms that the interpretation she has provided her readers with is worth taking into consideration despite the tendency (of literary critics) to marginalise the impact of Brontë’s fear of motherhood on her novel.
3.2. Watching and Displaying in Jane Eyre
Beth Newman argues that the manner in which Jane Eyre displays herself reflects her innate qualities, her social status as well as the Victorian version of ideal femininity (which she embodies). According to Elsie B. Michie, Newman attempts to show ‘the inherent contradictions of Jane’s position, the way the heroine’s internal depths are defined simultaneously as something that comes to her naturally and as something she achieves through hard work. That doubleness marks the position of the middle classes who present themselves as both naturally better than those above and below them, and at the same time as working hard to secure their superiority’.
Jane’s art is a means of ‘displaying’ her innate qualities and a way of asserting her class membership. Newman states that Jane tries to paint the sublime and the subjects she chooses reflect the unique interior depths (of the protagonist) which compensate for her plain physical aspect. Moreover, the literary critic believes that the paintings are proof of the heroine’s nondomestic (even antidomestic) impulses which also suggest the uniqueness (distinctiveness) of her nature:
These pictures were in water-colours. The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. […] Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.
The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark- blue as at twilight: rising into the sky was a woman’s shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. […]
The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head – a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it. […]
‘Were you happy when you painted these pictures?’ asked Mr. Rochester presently.
‘I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.’
As mentioned earlier, Jane’s paintings are also indicative of her social status. According to Beth Newman, art fulfils the social function of legitimising social differences, pointing out the separateness between the individuals who are able to appreciate (and understand) art and the ones who are not (and can, therefore, only belong to the lower social classes). However, the literary analyst asserts that Jane’s artistic creations indicate her radical difference not only from those socially beneath her, but also from those belonging to the upper classes (who, unlike the heroine, create automatically, effortlessly). Therefore, Jane’s paintings set her apart from ladies such as Blanche whose ‘purely performative […] art seems distinctly soulless and brittle’.
The way the female characters ‘display’ themselves and are watched (by men – particularly, by Rochester) in the novel can be understood only if placed within social context. Newman affirms that ‘an increasing secularisation loosened the grasp of the evangelical fervour of the 1780’s and 1790’s that had insisted on the subordination of worldly interests to spiritual ones. Indeed, as the middle classes gained culturally and economically, it became not only convenient to accommodate worldly interests, but even necessary to do so; for credit depended on reputation, and middle-class enterprise, on which so much depended, in turn depended on credit. What better way of indicating creditworthiness than by manipulating various conspicuous signs of dress, consumption, speech, etiquette, and the like, in order to display the family wealth? And who better to do it than the woman, on whom the crucial task of forging and consolidating social ties fell […]?’ The literary critic argues that this social context accounts for the contradictions between the negative and positive social meanings of display (that are identifiable in the novel): Mr. Brocklehurst lectures the girls at Lowood against the display of physical beauty, but his wife and daughters arrive at the school dressed fashionably and made-up. By placing this contradiction within Victorian social context, Beth Newman explains it in terms of the divided ideal of social duty that required wealthy women to maintain their families’ social position through costly dress and self-presentation (through personal display) while also requiring lower-class women to respect the ideal of Christian duty which entailed humility and spirituality.
Therefore, for upper-class women, personal displaying was a social duty. However, even, at this level, there is a contradiction: besides the negative and positive meanings of social display already mentioned, there is another dissociation between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ self-presentation. Newman discusses this (second) contradiction/dissociation by pointing out the difference between Blanche’s and Jane’s manner of displaying (herself). Jane does not enjoy being the centre of attention and prefers to be modest, refusing Rochester’s expensive gifts, whereas Mrs. Ingram likes being watched by others, but fails to realise that her indiscreet manner of presenting herself is what repels Mr. Rochester:
Miss Ingram was very showy, but she was not genuine; she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments, but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil: no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good: she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment, but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her. Too often she betrayed this, by the undue vent she gave to a spiteful antipathy she had conceived against little Adèle, pushing her away with some contumelious epithet if she happened to approach her; sometimes ordering her from the room, and always treating her with coldness and acrimony. Other eyes besides mine watched these manifestations of character – watched them closely, keenly, shrewdly. Yes: the future bridegroom, Mr. Rochester himself, exercised over his intended a ceaseless surveillance: and it was from this sagacity – this guardedness of his – this perfect, clear consciousness of his fair one’s defects – this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her, that my ever-torturing pain arose. […] But, as matters really stood, to watch Miss Ingram’s efforts at fascinating Mr. Rochester, to witness their repeated failure – herself unconscious that they did fail; vainly fancying that each shaft launched hit the mark, and infatuatedly pluming herself on success, when her pride and self-complacency repelled further and further what she wished to allure – to witness this, was to be at once under ceaseless excitation and ruthless restraint.
Beth Newman insists on the fact that the protagonist renounces the exhibitionistic display that her future husband tries to impose on her (by wanting to buy her jewellery and fashionable items of clothing). Newman underlines the importance of this aspect, stating that it is this very quality (visible in the heroine’s attitude) that makes Rochester love Jane. He admires the fact that the heroine is different from the other women he has met (Bertha, Céline, Giacinta, Clara and Blanche) who have displayed their charms in such indiscreet manners and have, finally, proven to be unworthy of a gentleman’s love. Beth Newman draws a conclusion by affirming that Jane’s originality (which seems to attract the man she loves) is constructed as the Victorian version of ideal femininity: the protagonist embodies the ideal domestic woman (who knows how to present herself) in contrast with Rochester’s former mistresses who appear as unabashedly exhibitionistic. Therefore, the second disassociation between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ display (of oneself) is related to the opposite manners in which a lady may choose to present herself: discreet or indiscreet. Nevertheless, I may add that this perspective on Victorian women’s self-presentation can be considered a chauvinistic one, since the way they display themselves is judged by the ones who are looking (watching): men. As a result, the Victorian social duties (and the entire mentality) presented earlier may be regarded as directly connected to gender oppression.
3.3. Cora Kaplan’s and Virginia Woolf’s Perspectives on Jane Eyre
Cora Kaplan presents Virginia Woolf’s perspective on Jane Eyre and discusses its weak points while asserting the importance of her own (socialist feminist) perspective:
Citing the passage from A Room of One’s Own where Virginia Woolf critiques the uncontrolled passion of Jane Eyre’s assertion […], Kaplan notes that here Jane allies her personal rebellion with the impulses that were fuelling the working-class rebellions in both early 1800’s and the 1840’s. Kaplan calls on critics to explore the ways in which the arguments Brontë makes about individual identity and women’s resistance also implicitly involve other form of social distinction.
Kaplan focuses on a certain passage in Jane Eyre which was used by Virginia Woolf to illustrate the negative effect of anger and inequality on the female imagination:
Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow – creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh: the same peal, the same low, slow ha! Ha! Which, when first heard, had thrilled me: I heard, too, her eccentric murmurs; stranger than her laugh.
According to Kaplan, Virginia Woolf criticises the shift from feminist polemic to the laugh of Grace Poole which brings about an awkward break:
The writer of such a flawed passage will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself when she should write of characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?
Cora Kaplan argues that Woolf’s criticism is harsh and not entirely justified (unfair to a certain extent) because, in discussing this moment in the novel, she overlooks an important passage that precedes the one she quotes:
Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it – and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended – a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.
Kaplan asserts that this passage omitted by Woolf is important due to its ‘visionary’ character: it reflects Brontë’s belief that, even in a confined and restless state, one may delight in visions produced by the imagination for the enjoyment of the soul. ‘Art, the passage maintains, can be produced through the endless narration of the self, through the mixed incoherence of subjectivity spoken from subordinate and rebellious positions within culture. It was this aesthetic that Woolf as critic explicitly rejected’.
Cora Kaplan argues that, besides the passage mentioned above, Virginia Woolf also overlooked the logical sequence of the narration at the symbolic level of the novel: Jane’s soliloquy is interrupted by the mad woman’s laughter for a certain reason and, subsequently, does not simply reflect the negative effect of anger on the female imagination, the lack of aesthetic detachment. Kaplan attempts to point out the logical sequence mentioned by means of a thorough analysis. She begins by underlining the fact that Brontë associates political and sexual rebellion even as she distinguishes between them. According to her, contemporary reviewers often criticised the relationship established between revolution and feminism. In order to support her statement, Cora Kaplan quotes Lady’s Eastlake’s comments in the Quarterly Review of 1849:
[…] The tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.
‘Yet Charlotte Brontë was no political radical. How is it then that she is pulled towards the positive linking of class rebellion and women’s revolt in this passage […]?’ The answer Kaplan provides her readers with is the following: it is a moment of incoherence in which the association of the subordination of women and class oppression is only tentative and partial. Furthermore, Cora Kaplan argues that this moment brings with it its own narrative reaction (which was unfairly overlooked by Woolf) that appears as a warning against the association of feminism and class struggle – association that may lead to madness, to a state suggested by the mad mocking female laughter which interrupts Jane’s soliloquy:
Retroactively, in the narratives the laughter becomes a threat to all that Jane had desired and demanded in her roof-top reverie. Mad servant, mad mistress, foreigner, nymphomaniac, syphilitic, half-breed, aristocrat, Bertha turns violently on keeper, brother, husband, and, finally, rival. She and her noises become the condensed and displaced site of unreason and anarchy as it is metonymically figured through dangerous femininity in all its class, race, and cultural projections. Bertha must be killed off, narratively speaking, so that a moral, Protestant femininity, licensed sexuality, and a qualified, socialised feminism may survive.
Kaplan returns to her presentation of Virginia Woolf’s literary critical perspective and comments on another flaw of Woolf’s analysis, quoting the view expressed in ‘Women and Fiction’ (1929):
[…] In Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer’s character, […] but we are conscious of a woman’s presence – of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights. This brings into women’s writing an element which is entirely absent from a man’s, unless, indeed, he happens to be a working man, a Negro, or one who for some other reason is conscious of disability. It introduces a distortion and is frequently the cause of weakness. The desire to plead some personal cause or to make a character the mouthpiece of personal discontent or grievance always has a distressing effect, as if the spot at which the reader’s attention is directed were suddenly two-fold instead of single.
‘Woolf was at her most vehement and most contradictory about these issues, which brought together for her, as for many other feminists before and after, a number of deeply connected anxieties about subjectivity, class, sexuality, and culture’. Cora Kaplan criticises Virginia Woolf for reducing the plea for a sex and a class to individual grievance, the subordination of women to a private disability, to a mere weakness. Kaplan contradicts Virginia Woolf by stating that the significance of the passage under discussion is greater than it seems. ‘It is a passage about need, demand, and desire that exceed social possibility and challenge social prejudice. In Jane’s soliloquy, inspired by a view reached through raising the “trap-door of the attic”, the Romantic aesthetic is reasserted for women, together with a passionate refusal of the terms of feminine difference’.
In my view, Virginia Woolf is a representative of the ‘female stage’ and criticises the feminist attempts to protest against the power, the control that men have in society. She does not tolerate female rage, bitterness or envy of men’s social power, instead she believes that women writers (and women in general) should create their own space outside the male-dominated society and ignore the authority men have over their ‘male’ space. However, Cora Kaplan asserts beliefs that are consistent with the ‘feminist stage’ (and not ‘the female phase’). As a result, she criticises the following view expressed by Woolf:
The woman writer is no longer bitter. She is no longer pleading and protesting as she writes… She will be able to concentrate upon her vision without distraction from outside.
Kaplan sees Virginia Woolf’s viewpoint as the expression of a desire unmet by social and psychic experience:
Although the meanings attached to race, class, and sexuality have undergone fundamental shifts from Wollstonecraft’s (and Woolf’s) time to our own, we do not live in a post-class society any more than a post-feminist one. Our identities are still constructed through social hierarchy and cultural differentiation […]. The identities arrived at through these structures will always be precarious and unstable. […] For the moment, women still have a problematic place in both social and psychic representation. […] Although psychoanalytic theories of the construction of gendered subjectivity stress difficulty, antagonism, and contradiction as necessary parts of the production of identity, the concept of the unconscious and the psychoanalytic view of sexuality dissolve in great part the binary divide between reason and passion that dominates earlier concepts of subjectivity. They break down as well the moralism attached to those libidinal and psychic economies. […] Perhaps we can come to see it [the female psyche] as neither sexual outlaw, social bigot, nor dark hiding-place for treasonable regressive femininity waiting to stab progressive feminism in the back.
Therefore, Cora Kaplan asserts the importance of feminist perspectives that cannot be ignored by representatives of the female stage (just as oppressive social realities cannot be ignored either). She then asserts the importance of her own social feminist perspective (on Jane Eyre) which, in her opinion, is necessary and illuminating. In the view that there should be a full understanding of how social division and the inscription of gender are mutually secured and given meaning, Kaplan analyses Jane Eyre as a novel with an orphaned, impoverished heroine whose social status (as a semi-servant in a grand patriarchal household) reflects the crisis of middle-class femininity, the sexual vulnerability of all working-class servants in bourgeois employment. Furthermore, she is concerned with the representation of sexuality and sexual difference in Jane Eyre and with the difference between working-class and bourgeois women which is blurred (in the novel) through condensation. However, the literary critic affirms that bourgeois novels like Jane Eyre tell us almost nothing about the self-defined subjectivity of the poor, male or female.
To sum up, the purpose of this sub-subchapter is to present the perspective that Virginia Woolf (as a representative of the female stage) has on Jane Eyre and the (almost contrasting) socialist feminist view of Cora Kaplan on the same novel.
3.4. ‘Slavery’: a Feminist Metaphor in Jane Eyre
Jenny Sharpe analyses the feminist metaphor of domestic slavery that Charlotte Brontë deploys for staging Jane Eyre’s protest against gender oppression:
[…] Sharpe argues that the self-assertive middle-class heroine of Brontë’s novel is positioned between images of the rebellious Bertha Mason and of Indian women forced to accept the wills of their husbands even after death […].
A similar perspective is provided by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who argues that the incipient feminism of Jane Eyre suggests Brontë’s acceptance/embracement of nineteenth-century feminist individualism. However, she adds that the fact that the heroine is afforded progress and emancipation, whereas another female character in the novel – Bertha Mason – is portrayed as being half animal, half human and outside the law, indicates the novelist’s conservative view of racial difference:
Gayatri Spivak’s well-known 1985 essay ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ […] argues that Jane’s triumphant emergence as a subject controlling her own destiny is only possible after the annihilation of her colonial other, Bertha Mason. A number of articles have since been written on Jane Eyre, race, and empire, including Susan Meyer’s work […].
As mentioned above, Susan L. Meyer also writes on the issues of race and empire in Jane Eyre, pointing out the association of the ideology of male domination and the ideology of colonial domination in the novel.
Women as Slaves
As already stated, Charlotte Brontë embraces the nineteenth-century feminist individualism which ‘is precisely the making of human beings, the constitution and “interpellation” of the subject not only as individual but as “individualist”. This stake is represented on two registers: childbearing and soul making. The first is domestic-society-through-sexual-reproduction cathected as “companionate love”; the second is the imperialist project cathected as civil-society-through-social-mission.’ Feminist individualism is related to meritocratic individualism which is based on the assertion of rights, of individuality on grounds of personal merits and not social status (or gender). In the aesthetic field, this assertion is founded on merits related to creative imagination (to creative power). The assertion (of rights and individuality) based on creative abilities is identifiable in Jane Eyre: at the beginning of the novel, Jane’s creative abilities are evident when she starts taking refuge in the joy of reading. ‘She cares little for reading what is meant to be read: the “letter-press”. She reads the pictures. The power of this singular hermeneutics is precisely that it can make the outside inside.’ Therefore, ‘the pictures are deciphered by the unique creative imagination of the marginal individualist (ch. 1).’
I may also add that, later in the novel, Jane’s creative abilities are, once more, noticed, this time not only by the reader, but also by Bessie, Rosamond (and her father) and Mr. Rochester. They all admire the heroine’s paintings which, according to Rochester (and Jane herself), are strikingly unusual. They, most certainly, set Jane apart from the ordinary type of governess and even Victorian woman:
As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking;
‘ […] The drawings are, for a schoolgirl, peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are elfish. These eyes in the Evening Star you must have seen in a dream. […] And what meaning is that in their solemn depth? And who taught you to paint wind? […]’
These pictures were in water-colours. The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or, rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. […] Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.
The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark- blue as at twilight: rising into the sky was a woman’s shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. […]
The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head – a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it. […]
‘Were you happy when you painted these pictures?’ asked Mr. Rochester presently.
‘I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.’
Therefore, the nineteenth-century notion of democracy of the merit of the individual is reflected in the novel.
Another means by which the incipient feminism is made obvious in the novel is the figurative use of race:
Brontë uses references to colonised races to represent various social situations in British society: female subordination in sexual relationships, female insurrection and rage against male domination, and the oppressive class position of the female without family ties and a middle-class income. […] The function of racial ‘otherness’ in the novel is to signify a generalised oppression. But Brontë makes class and gender oppression the overt significance of racial ‘otherness’, displacing the historical reasons why colonised races would suggest oppression, at some level of consciousness, to nineteenth-century British readers. What begins then as an implicit critique of British domination and an identification with the oppressed collapses into merely an appropriation of the metaphor of ‘slavery’. […] My own proposition is that the historical alliance between the ideology of male domination and the ideology of colonial domination which informs the metaphors of so many texts of the European colonial period in fact resulted in a very different relation between imperialism and the developing resistance of nineteenth-century British women to the gender hierarchy […]. In Jane Eyre, Brontë responds to the seemingly inevitable analogy in nineteenth-century British texts that compares white women with blacks in order to degrade both groups and assert the need for white male control. Brontë uses the analogy in Jane Eyre for her own purposes, to signify not shared inferiority but shared oppression. This figurative strategy induces some sympathy with blacks as those who are also oppressed, but does not preclude racism.
Thus Brontë uses slavery as an analogy for the lot of the lower-middle class (for the governesses who ‘serve’ their ‘masters’) and for Victorian women who have to endure gender oppression.
As a child, Jane is an orphan and poor relation at Gateshead. Because of her social status, she often associates herself with the oppressed slaves. For instance, she compares John Reed (her cousin who mistreats her) to a slave driver. To this, I may add that Jane thinks of her aunt’s lack of love for her in the same terms, affirming that she does not consider herself as being of the same race as Mrs. Reed:
[…] But how could she really like an interloper, not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her husband’s death, by any tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hard-wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group.
The treatment Jane receives from her aunt is the cause of the heroine’s revolt/rebellion which gives her a sense of freedom, the feeling that she has been liberated from an invisible bond:
Speak I must: I had been trodden on severely, and must return […] Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty. […] I was left there alone – winner of the field. It was the hardest battle I had fought, and the first victory I had gained. I stood awhile on the rug, where Mr. Brocklehurst had stood, and I enjoyed my conqueror’s solitude.
‘This opening scene, with its movement from bondage to freedom and from an imposed silence ton speech, has been triumphantly claimed by feminist critics. Yet, if one reads the scene in terms of its slave references […], one notices that assertions of a rebellious feminism are enacted through the figure of a rebel slave’.
When Jane invokes the master/slave relation to point out her own condition, she refers to Roman times/realities, but this idea was, more likely, taken from a recent past: that of the slave uprisings of Jamaica in 1808 and 1831, Barbados in 1816, and Demerara in 1823. The antislavery movement, the increased popularity of abolitionism in the 1820’s led to English women’s and workers’ use of the moral language of the abolitionists for the expression of their own wish for equality: women compared themselves to West Indian slaves and the members of the working class complained about the ‘white slavery’ in English factories. ‘Yet, the social groups that identified themselves as slaves did not necessarily identify with black slaves’. This peculiar disassociation is identifiable in Jane Eyre: ‘there is no character of a West Indian slave to be found […]; she remains inaccessible except through Jane’s own acts of rebellion’. Moreover, in the novel, ‘the agency of the female as individualist cannot be enacted through the figure of a rebellious slave because slaves were not considered part of civilised society’.
In Jane Eyre, there is also a connection established between the right of slaves to react violently to the slavery system and the heroine’s wish to rightfully rebel against her oppressors. Additionally, free blacks no longer have the right to revolt and, likewise, the heroine’s rebellious nature must change when she becomes an adult:
The violence slaves commit during times of rebellion would be immoral without the prior violence of the master enslaving them against their wills. […] Missionaries were especially disturbed by the immorality of a system in which black slaves, having no control over disciplining their bodies, were not accountable for their souls. […] Since slave rebellions are perceived as a savage response to an even more barbaric system for extracting labour power, once blacks are free they no longer have the right to revolt. Jane’s development from a rebellious child into a self-assertive woman is represented by her movement from the instinctive rebellion of black slaves toward assuming the moral responsibility of a cognizing individual. The figure of the rebel slave, […] lacks the cognition on which moral agency is based. This is the mark of racial difference, a point of resistance for extending the meaning of the slave rebellions to a female agency predicated on speech. […] Jane’s education into adulthood involves learning to control her anger and to channel her desires into a socially acceptable form of self-determination. Even though her childish explosions of anger are liberating, in retrospect, the adult Jane comments on these instances as improper conduct for a child.
3.5.. Man: the Oppressor
‘Jane Eyre associates dark-skinned peoples with oppression by drawing parallels between the black slaves, in particular, and those oppressed by the hierarchies of social class and gender in Britain. […] In addition, this use of the slave as a metaphor focuses attention not so much on the oppression of blacks as on the situation of oppressed whites in Britain’. However, the class of the oppressor is also associated with the blacks. This association is hinted at in the descriptions of the Reeds: Mrs. Reed’s face resembles that of Bertha when she falls ill on account of her son’s actions, the protagonist compares John to a Roman emperor and describes him as having grown into a man with thick lips which remind the reader of the physical aspect of dark-skinned people. Moreover, the association also applies to Blanche Ingram. In my opinion, the fact that the protagonist sees a potential oppressor in Blanche is suggested by her wish to leave Thornfield when she realises that Miss Ingram might marry Mr. Rochester and might gain authority over the servants of the household (including the governess who is considered a mid-servant). As described by Jane, Blanche Ingram has a dark complexion (resembling a Spaniard), a low brow which is a mark of social inferiority (according to nineteenth-century race-science) and wears an Indian shawl. Her name (Blanche) and the white dress she wears at the party at Thornfield emphasise the contrast between what she tries to be (the embodiment of ideal white English femininity) and the fact that her purity and femaleness are stained by the darkness and oppressiveness of British colonialism:
Her face was like her mother’s; a youthful unfurrowed likeness: the same low brow, the same high features, the same pride […]
Therefore, the oppressed as well as the oppressors are associated with dark-skinned peoples. The idea that the British can be changed by the contact with the racial ‘other’, with the intrinsic despotism of dark-skinned people (and that such contact makes them arrogant oppressors both abroad and at home in England) is what leads to this association of certain qualities of the blacks with characters who are oppressors in the novel. ‘The novel also associates the gender oppressor with darkness, primarily through Rochester’. The fact that Mr. Rochester represents man as the oppressor in the novel is suggested by his association with the dark-skinned people. He marries a Creole and spends time in Jamaica where he breaths the ‘infected’ air of the Orient:
‘It was a fiery West Indian night […] Being unable to sleep in bed, I got up and opened the window. The air was like sulphur streams […]. Mosquitoes came buzzing in […] the moon was setting in the waves, broad and red […] I was physically influenced by the atmosphere… I meant to shoot myself… A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean […] the air grew pure, I then framed and fixed a resolution’.
He also has a dark complexion (just like Blanche Ingram, Mrs Reed and John Reed):
My master’s colourless, olive face, […], broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth – all energy, decision, will – were not beautiful, according to rule […]
Furthermore, Mr. Rochester compares himself to ‘the Grand Turk’, declaring that he prefers an English girl to a seraglio. His affirmation makes Jane feel that he is a potential gender oppressor and offers him an answer that suggests her wish to remain independent and not submit to a man who would use his authority to treat women like slaves:
‘I’ll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio… If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you […] and lay out in extensive slave-purchases […].
‘And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining […]?’
‘I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved – you harem inmates amongst the rest… I’ll stir up mutiny […]
I may also add that Rochester compares his mistresses with slaves and affirms that he sees them as inferior beings. His own statement indicates that he is a gender oppressor who sees (and, to a certain extent, treats) women as slaves:
‘It was with me; and I didn’t like it. It was a groveling fashion of existence: I should never like to return to it. Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Céline, Giacinta, and now Clara.’ I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had ever been instilled into me, as – under any pretext – with any justification – through any temptation – to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory. I did not give utterance to this conviction: it was enough to feel it. I impressed it on my heart, that it might remain there to serve me as aid in the time of trial.
3.6. Sati or Self-Sacrifice as Feminine Ideal
At Lowood, Jane meets Helen Burns (the prototype of the angelic Victorian woman) who teaches her the concept of Christian endurance and dies of consumption, happy in the knowledge that she is going to her heaven. Therefore, ‘the novel confronts its reader with two equally undesirable alternatives for female socialisation: the silent space of passive victimage or the tragic space of early death. […] Having established an irreconcilable conflict between her desire for self-assertion and her preassigned gender role of self-denial, the educational novel moves into a new phase that shows her negotiating a socialised space that does not negate a female self’. The novel is structured like a female Bildungsroman, charting the heroine’s attempt to resolve the conflict between self-determination and socialisation – conflict which appears evident in the phase previously analysed. To solve it, Jane must find a socially acceptable form of rejecting the restrictions imposed on women and working classes (more precisely, on governesses). One possible solution is offered by the doctrine of feminine influence which was very popular at the time. According to this doctrine, middle-class women had the power to intervene in the public sphere through their relationship to men as wives, mother and daughters:
We see that power, while it regulates men’s actions, cannot reach their opinions. It cannot modify dispositions nor implant sentiments, nor alter character. All these things are the work of influenced. Men frequently resist power, while they yield to influence an unconscious acquiescence.
‘The idea of feminine influence suggests an inherent conflict between a woman’s desire for personal advancement and a disinterested duty to her family’. Sarah Lewis (who explains the doctrine in Woman’s Mission) suggests that this conflict can be solved by women’s training in denial, devotion and self-sacrifice (female self-renunciation):
The one quality on which woman’s value and influence depend is the renunciation of self […]. Educated in obscurity, trained to consider the fulfilment of domestic duties as the aim and end of her existence, there was little to feed the appetite for fame, or the indulgence of self idolatry.
In Jane Eyre, this self-sacrifice (female self-renunciation) that Victorian women had to endure is associated with West Indian women’s sati.
The protagonist does not seem to embrace the idea that women’s duty is to dedicate themselves to men and their families by being willing and capable of self-denial. Instead, she proves capable of active self-determination that derives from social action in the public sphere. As a wage earner, Jane enjoys a certain degree of autonomy at Thornfield, scolding Mr. Rochester for assuming an attitude of superiority. However, the social status of a governess is not a model for female emancipation and Jane is aware of that, which is why she expresses her wish to experience more in life. She breaks social norms by agreeing to marry an upper-class gentleman (Mr. Rochester). But, at this point in the novel, Jane discovers that, despite the legitimacy of her forthcoming marriage, her future husband tends to treat her and speak to her as to a mistress (who has to be ‘bought’ with expensive gifts) rather than to a wife. Rochester’s behaviour is made obvious by means of Eastern references. For instance, he compares himself to ‘the Grand Turk’ – comparison which determines Jane to offer him an answer through which she reasserts her independence:
‘I’ll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio… If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you […] and lay out in extensive slave-purchases […].
‘And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining […]?’
‘I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved – you harem inmates amongst the rest… I’ll stir up mutiny […]
Other notable Eastern references are the ones involving Hindu woman’s sati. Such an example is the scene in which Rochester expresses his wish for his future wife’s devotion by singing a song in which the woman promises to live and die with the man she loves. Jane’s reaction to the song suggests (once more) her rejection of the Victorian concept of female self-renunciation: ‘I had as good a right to die when my time came as he had: but I should bide that time, and not be hurried away in a suttee’. ‘Here, Hindu widow sacrifice refers to the self-sacrifice that the doctrine of woman’s mission [previously analysed] requires of English women. As a proper name for a woman’s submissiveness, […] and devotion to her husband, sati locates female passivity in Hindu women. The Eastern analogy of gender hierarchies exposes the barbarism of English marriage laws […] as Oriental despotism is a paradigm for such barbarism’.
Sati refers to Hindu woman’s ‘duty’ to be burnt alive if she has become a widow. The British intervened through colonial reforms in order to forbid the practice of widow burning. Sati was redefined as a crime during the years leading up to the Abolition Act of 1829. First, widow-sacrifice was legislated by finding a precedent in ancient Sanskrit texts and distinguishing voluntary from coerced sati. Therefore, English magistrates had to determine whether the widows were willing to commit sati or were coerced to do it. Even the widows who were supposedly willing to sacrifice themselves were drugged (at the moment of the actual sacrifice), were persuaded to commit sati for familial or economic reasons, or, sometimes, changed their minds a few minutes before the ritual. Although, due to colonial reforms, Hindu women were able to choose whether to commit sati or not, they were, often, forced by different factors (economic, social and familial) to accept being burnt alive. Moreover, they were not capable of struggling for their own freedom of choice: English magistrates had to speak on their behalf, which is why they were regarded as mere victims that needed to be saved. Thus, in their case, the effacement of female agency was inevitable.
The English felt compassion for Hindu women, but there was no common identity established between coloniser and colonised because the Europeans asserted their racial superiority. This same structure is visible in Jane Eyre – the protagonist distinguishes herself from Hindu women by means of her reaction to Rochester’s reverie on the devotion he expects from her: ‘I had as good a right to die when my time came as he had: but I should bide that time, and not be hurried away in a suttee’. ‘The novel’s reference to sati ranks Hindu woman low on the feminist scale of emancipation. This distancing of the English woman from her Eastern sisters enables the problem of female emancipation in marriage to be resolved in what constitutes the final stage of Jane’s development’.
After refusing to become Rochester’s mistress (a status which would have transformed her into an inferior being similar to Clara, Giacinta and Céline who are compared to slaves by Rochester himself), Jane has to face another despotic master (St. John Rivers) who wants her to be an obedient student and then tries to convince her to join the Indian missions (for which she feels she has no vocation because this type of work is guided by the spirit of self-sacrifice which she refuses to embrace, distinguishing herself from Hindu women) and accept a loveless marriage. The overseas missions to which she is expected to dedicate her life have a feminine form and require the English woman’s effacement of herself: Jane would have to accept a low social status (because the hierarchical Anglo-Indian society disapproves of European contact with poor natives) and she would have to obey her husband throughout the whole process as single women are not allowed to join these missions. In order to become a missionary, Jane would have to accept St. John Rivers as a husband and, subsequently, embrace the self-sacrifice that is expected from her (because she feels that marrying Rivers would be the equivalent of committing spiritual suicide: ‘if I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now’). In contrast with the sacrifice that is required from Jane, St John Rivers gains the right to a heroic discourse (through which he asserts his masculinity), claiming that his labour for God is above any other concerns.
As already mentioned, Jane’s acceptance of Rivers’ proposal would be the equivalent of spiritual suicide. But, unlike Hindu women who fail to oppose the sacrifice that is imposed on them, Jane is capable of one final act of resistance, choosing to return to Rochester instead of entering a loveless marriage. However, Jane’s resistance to the doctrine of female self-renunciation is not complete. Despite the fact that she rejects this doctrine throughout the whole novel, at the end she seems ready to accept it (although not entirely). ‘The problem of self-determination for the domestic woman is resolved through a linguistic power capable of making the feminine virtue of self-sacrifice represent self-fulfilment’: ‘Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? […] famine for food, expectation for content… is that to make a sacrifice?’. Therefore, in Jenny Sharpe’s view, the final message is that woman can find self-fulfilment in devotion to her family.
Another message identifiable in the novel is the one Susan L. Meyer discovers in the closure. Meyer agrees with Carol Ohmann and Igor Webb who believe that the solution offered at the end of the novel is only on an individual level: the couple retreats in a place far from the society that cannot be transformed and does not offer any possibility for women’s active self-fulfilment. The protagonist’s married life is different from the typical one since (in the last chapter) Jane describes her marriage as an egalitarian one. The redistribution of wealth that equalises gender power and makes this type of union possible reflects the incipient feminism in the novel.
5.3.5.4. The English Woman in Contrast with the Creole Woman
As argued in the previous part of the sub-subchapter, Victorian women (as reflected in the novel) must embrace the female doctrine of self-renunciation even if they regard devotion to their families as self-fulfilment (the way Jane does in the end). According to this doctrine, women cannot have direct influence in the public sphere. They can only exercise power in the social sphere through their relationship to men. ‘Since domestic women influence the public domain only in relationship to men […], they are not individuals in the sense of being moral agents. […] The paradox of being an individual in the domestic sphere is resolved by defining the English woman in relation to other women instead of to men. In Jane Eyre, a domestic form of social agency is established through a national and racial splitting of femininity, with the creole woman serving as a figure of self-indulgence and the Oriental woman of self-immolation’. The Creole who serves as a figure of self-indulgence is represented by Bertha Mason in the novel.
As mentioned in the previous part of the sub-subchapter, Jane does not embrace the concept of female self-renunciation until the end of the novel when she is willing to sacrifice by marrying (and looking after) a maimed older man. Even this postponed sacrifice becomes a means of achieving self-fulfilment since the protagonist is happy to marry Rochester because she loves him.
Therefore, Jane Eyre is an unconventional domestic novel in which the virtue of self-renunciation is devalued. However, Brontë reassures her readers that this devaluation does not lead to moral chaos by creating the character of Bertha who embodies female self-indulgence/passion/sexual appetite. ‘It is clear from Rochester’s description of his first wife that it is not her madness he finds so intolerable as her debauchery’:
‘Jane, I will not trouble you with abominable details; some strong words shall express what I have to say. I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed: […] her vices sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check them; and I would not use cruelty. What a pigmy intellect she had – and what giant propensities! How fearful were the curses those propensities entailed on me! Bertha Mason, – the true daughter of an infamous mother, – dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste […] a nature the most gross, impure, depraved, I ever saw, was associated with mine, and called by the law and by society a part of me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings: for the doctors now discovered that my wife was mad – her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity.
‘Jane I approached the verge of despair; a remnant of self-respect was all that intervened between me and the gulf. In the eyes of the world, I was doubtless covered with grimy dishonour; but I resolved to be clean in my own sight – and to the last I repudiated the contamination of her crimes, and wrenched myself from connexion with her mental defects. Still, society associated my name and person with hers; I yet saw her and heard her daily: something of her breath (faugh!) mixed with the air I breathed; and besides, I remembered I had once been her husband – that recollection was then, and is now, inexpressibly odious to me; moreover, I knew that while she lived I could never be the husband of another and better wife […].’
‘It is not madness that is the cause of Bertha’s moral degeneration but rather the other way around – her “excesses” have strained her minuscule mind to the point of unhinging it’. Jane is also capable of excesses: when she is tormented by her feelings for Rochester, she often believes that her state of mind resembles madness. However, she can dissociate herself from Bertha due to self-discipline and intellectual superiority. By means of these two qualities that Jane possesses, Brontë manages to reassure the readers that the protagonist’s rejection of the doctrine of female self-renunciation cannot lead to the moral chaos reflected in the character of Bertha.
Jane manages to dissociate herself from Bertha not only due to self-control, but also due to her racial purity: ‘the narrative function of the creole stereotype is also to disassociate a pure English race from its corrupt West Indian line’. In Jamaica, the term ‘Creole’ was used to designate all native-born population (of African or European origin). The fact that Bertha is referred to by means of this term is indicative of her racial ambiguity, but her moral features (which she inherited from her infamous insane mother) and her dark complexion suggest that she is black and a member of the colonised even though she is the daughter of a merchant-planter. In the novel, racial purity is identified with English national culture and Jane (as a true English woman) embodies honesty and national pride – she embodies the English national character. Therefore, (narratively speaking) the Creole is sacrificed so that an English woman (who is, naturally, superior to Bertha) can take her place. Although Jane’s inheritance from a rich uncle in Madeira might suggest an association between the protagonist and the racial ‘other’, the hardships that she suffers after leaving from Thornfield (despair, loneliness, hunger which forces her to resort to common begging) distance her from the class of the West Indian plantocracy.
Despite the marginal and negative role that Bertha seems to have in the novel, some critics suggest that she may have a more important role than it would appear at first sight. Brontë uses slavery as a figure for gender oppression, a figure illustrated by the presence of Bertha. Moreover, Bertha may be said to function as the central locus of the novelist’s anxieties about oppression. Up to her emergence in the novel, these anxieties are located in the character of Jane. Once Bertha appears in the novel, the anxieties become absorbed by her and, therefore, her annihilation leads to their elimination as well. The character of Bertha is considered of even greater importance by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar who believe that she is ‘Jane’s truest and darkest double’. They read Bertha ‘as a symbolic substitute for Jane Eyre and the monstrous embodiment of unchecked female rebelliousness and sexuality’. They argue that she represents ‘the rebellious passions she [Jane] has been trying to repress since childhood. Hence, they see the madwoman’s opposition to the forthcoming wedding as a figurative and psychological manifestation of Jane’s own desires for independence that her marriage to Rochester would negate’. What is also worth mentioning is that behind Jane’s revolt against gender oppression is the revolt of this black woman who achieves the most important act in the novel: the act of burning Thornfield down and of, subsequently, diminishing Rochester’s wealth and power of his gender.
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