Elaine Showalter

Elaine Showalter was born in 1941 and has worked as a professor of English at Princeton University. Her book  ‘A Literature of their Own : British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing’ quickly established itself as an authoritative study in the field of women’s study. Contemporary feminist criticism obviously derived its original impetus from the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s. Mary Elman’s ‘Thinking about women’ and Kate Millet’s ‘Sexual Politics’ are pioneering books in this respect. Showalter’s work was a major contribution to this project. Showalter’s article ‘Feminist criticism in the Wilderness’ was first published in ‘Critical Inquiry’ in 1981. She finds feminist criticism no more unified but more adventures in assimilating and engaging with theory. The article was reprinted from the book ‘ The New Feminist Criticism’ edited by Showalter.

In the beginning of the article, Showalter talks about two modes of feminist literary criticism. The first is righteous, angry and admonitory compare to the Old Testament and the second is disinterested seeking the grace is imagination compared to the New Testament. The well known critic Geoffrey Hartman tells that all criticism is in wilderness. It is also observed that the feminist literary criticism appeared more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school or shred goal orientation. Black critics pretest the massive silence of the feminist criticism regarding the black and also the Third world women writers and all call for the black feminist aesthetic that would deal with both the racial and sexual politics.

Marxist criticism wishes to focus on class along with gender as a crucial determinant of literary production. Literary historians want to uncover a lost tradition. Critics trained in deconstruction methodologies wish to synthesize a literary criticism this both textual and feminist.

Freudian and Lacanian critics want to theorize women’s relationship with language and its signification. All the above observations suggest that feminist is a vague term and feminist criticism includes numberless ideologies. One of the chief qualities of feminist criticism is openness to all outside factors. Feminist critics like Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Riche, Marguerite Duras are advocates of the anti-theoretical position in feminist criticism. The famous feminist critic Judith Fetterloy declared in her book ‘ The Resisting Reader’ that feminist criticism had been characterized by a resistance to codification and a refusal to have its parameters prematurely set. Yet now it appears that what looked like a theoretical impasse was actually an evolutionary phase. There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism. The first is ideological; it is concerned with the feminist reading to text which considered the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism. The second made of feminist criticism is engendered by the study of women as writers and its subjects are the history styles, themes, genres and structures of writing by women, the psychodynamics of female creative, the evolution and laws of female literary tradition.

Elaine Showalter gives a new critical term ‘Gynocritics’ and says that unlike the feminist critique, gynocritics offer many theoretical opportunities. Moreover it has been said that all feminist criticism is in some sense revisionist, question in the adequacy of accepted conceptual structures. In the female imagination Patricia Mayer spacks  pointed out that few feminist theorists concerned themselves with women’s writings.

Spacks was the first academic critic to notice the shift from Andecentric to a Gynocritic feminist criticism. Simon-de-Beavoir’s treatment of women writers in the Second Sex suggests a tendency to take women less seriously than their masculine counter parts.

Theories of women’s writing presently make use of four models of difference: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural. Each model is an effort to define and differentiate the qualities of the woman writer and her text. Each model also represents a school of Gynocritic feminist criticism with its own favorite texts, styles and methods. They overlap but roughly sequential in that each incorporates the one before.