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CRITICISM: ‘NEW

COLOURS AND SHADOWS’

CORA KAPLAN

In a 1929 essay titled ‘Women and Fiction’, published in the same year as A
Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf speculated on the ‘new colours and
shadows’ in women’s writing which would inevitably appear now that the
‘English woman’ was transformed ‘from a nondescript influence, fluctuating
and vague, to a voter, a wage-earner, a responsible citizen’. As women took
up their place as full civic subjects in the public sphere, Woolf considered that
their ‘relations’ would become ‘not only emotional’ but also ‘intellectual’ and
‘political’. Their novels would become more engaged with the ‘impersonal’,
more ‘critical of society, and less analytical of individual lives’. No longer the
‘dumping ground for personal emotions’ women’s fiction would observe men
and women ‘as they cohere and clash in groups and classes and races’. This
political transformation of imaginative writing would, she hoped, be but a
first ‘short step to the practice of the sophisticated arts…to the writing of
essays and criticism, of history and biography’. More important still, for Woolf,
the ‘greater impersonality of women’s lives will encourage the poetic spirit’
that will lead them even further, ‘beyond the personal and political relationships
to the wider questions which the poet tries to solve—of our destiny and the
meaning of life’. Lest this hope resonate as pure idealism, Woolf reminds the
reader that ‘the poetic attitude is largely founded upon material things’, ‘upon
leisure, and a little money’ which provide ‘the chance…to observe impersonally
and dispassionately’. With all the advantages of middle-class men—a
professional job, a vote, economic independence, leisure and a legitimate public
presence—women, Woolf prophesied, ‘will make a fuller and more subtle use
of the instrument of writing’ ([1929] 1979, pp. 50–1).

Woolf’s projection of a dynamic transformation and exponential increase

in women’s writing turned out to be well-founded, if we accept the social
boundaries of her Utopian vision that the requirements of leisure, money and

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the novelty of wage-earning implies. Even so, it took another world war, the
expansion of education in Britain and America, and the second wave of the
twentieth-century woman’s movement to give white middle-class women, and
to some extent their less privileged sisters also, the professional base, the
political platform and the reading audiences on which to build their new
discursive Jerusalem. Feminist criticism as a lively and growing body of work
is one aspect of that cultural revolution. Yet although Woolf’s writing in every
genre remains a touchstone for many feminist critics, the ‘field’ of feminist
criticism in its anglophone formation is now some twenty years old, and no
longer needs to display a distinguished lineage to legitimize its project. Indeed,
feminist criticism today prefers to play down the question of its origins and to
emphasize instead the present richness, diversity and intellectual influence of
its product. For it is a modern phenomenon, a broad strand, wider and more
dazzling than even Woolf’s euphoria allowed her to imagine. Its rubric now
includes the criticism of visual narrative from avant-garde cinema to
pornography, interdisciplinary studies that fully integrate social and cultural
material, and work in which theory is read and written through the strategies
of literary analysis. Competing perspectives, theoretical and political, reflect
debates within feminism, within literary and cultural studies generally and at
the busy intersections of English-speaking academia where they meet and
engage. Origins may be elided amidst this confusing bounty, but genealogy
still has its uses in helping us to focus upon the most significant differences
between discrete moments in the development of feminist criticism. In this
sense genealogy may serve as historical critique, without implying either
justification or progression.

As a first step we might explore the ways in which Woolf’s inter-war agenda

for women novelists, which included her hopes for criticism as well, is in
synch or at odds with the premises which underlay feminist cultural analysis
from the late 1960s onwards. A crucial distinction between the two is their
characterization of the domestic and private. Woolf described this women’s
world of cooking and childrearing as intangible, vague, anonymous—a ‘dark
country’ she calls it ([1929] 1979, p. 50), echoing Mary Wollstonecraft’s charge,
almost 150 years earlier in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that women
were ‘immured in their families, groping in the dark’ ([1792] 1988, p. 5).
Second-wave feminists, too, would repeat this analogy, locating woman’s
oppression initially as her imprisonment in the bourgeois household as mother
and unpaid servant, a position, they argued, that was not fundamentally
changed either by the franchise or by the expanded opportunities for women
workers in the decades that followed it. Yet although marriage, the family,
motherhood and the fetishization of domesticity were subjected to a powerful
attack in post-war feminist analysis, this critique tried hard not to denigrate
either the lives or the creativity of those female subjects caught and fixed in

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the exploitativeideologies which maintained the separate spheres. Under the
banner of ‘the personal is political’, feminist critics reread the domestic and
sensational fiction that Woolf had stigmatized as the mere ‘dumping ground
for the emotions’ as political texts, honouring, as Woolf did not, both the
autobiographical impulse, and the proto-feminist one, the desire to expose
their own suffering, to plead their own cause. Woolf saw the intrusion of ‘a
woman’s presence’ in the form of woman’s ‘anger’—‘of someone resenting
the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights’ ([1929] 1979, p. 47)—as
a distortion or weakness in writing. Her analysis reduced this anger to a
selfish subjectivism—‘personal discontent or grievance’ (p. 47)—rather than
reading it as collective or general. Post-war feminist criticism would effectively
reverse this judgement, arguing instead for a revision of critical value to include
an aesthetics of anger. Instead modern feminist criticism championed a politics
of writing that thrived on difference and protest and did not yearn, as Woolf
did, for an ‘aloofness’ of vision, with ‘little or no foreign influence to disturb
it’ (p. 48). As a consequence recent feminist criticism has singled out the ‘angry’
fictions that Woolf used as her examples of ‘flawed’ texts, Jane Eyre and
Middlemarch, for special praise and attention, and has reread more
conventional women’s fiction against the grain to find in them elements of
rebellion, rage, and resistance to the hierarchies of gender.

In Woolf’s repeated use of it the term ‘impersonal’ as an ideal for women’s

writing comes to signify an impossible relationship between gendered identity
and artistic practice. Women’s art, Woolf argued, would become both more
political and more poetic if liberated from the claustrophobic intensity and
self-absorption of a female subjectivity bred and confined in the domestic
ghetto. In it there are no libidinally creative spaces—neither kitchen, nursery
nor bedroom can serve—except perhaps, and her disgust is vivid and visceral,
the lavatory or ‘dumping ground’ which is the only women’s room available
when the private sphere is all she has. There is something distressing and
unreflective in the subliminal, scatalogical violence of this attack which involves
a blurring of the domestic setting of women’s subordination with an already
degraded definition of femininity. The oppositions between the personal and
impersonal become those between the grotesque and the classical body which
are figured as feminine and masculine. The one is pathologically distressed,
transgressively emotional, execratory, unaesthetic—the other ‘aloof’, imperially
remote, objectively observing. Woolf’s metaphor betrays among other things
the naïve nativism, even racism of her inter-war nirvana for the creative
imagination. She evokes a social and psychic writing space imagined as an
intellectual little England—with ‘no foreign influence to disturb it’ ([1929]
1979, p. 48). And here her liberating visions become wholly incompatible,
the aesthetic radically at odds with the political, for women writers in her
new dispensation were simultaneously to remain distant from and engaged

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with the conflict of men and women as they ‘cohere and clash in groups and
classes and races’ (p. 51).

These unresolved contradictions focus a particular set of cultural anxieties

for Woolf and other feminist modernists of the 1920s and 1930s. However,
the issues these aporias raise are part of a more general crisis of representation
in the twentieth century and they continue to haunt second-wave feminist
criticism, for they both define and interrogate the terms of its feminist agenda.
The ‘personal’/‘impersonal’ binary, for example, gets translated into
‘experience’/‘theory’, ‘social’/‘psychic’, ‘humanist’/‘antihumanist’, ‘essentialist’/
‘antiessentialist’, ‘psychoanalytic/materialist’. These opposed categories are,
today, further divided into different post-structuralist camps, where, for
example, feminist Derrideans face feminist Foucauldians. These are by no
means the only or most important differences within feminist cultural analysis.
The tacit cultural exclusions of Woolf’s analysis, reproduced by some of the
most important feminist work of the 1960s and early 1970s in America, elicited
another kind of response from the groups thus marginalized—a defiant and
productive fragmentation of feminist criticism into categories of identity—
Black feminist criticism, lesbian feminist criticism, for instance. Work in these
tendencies, as in the more heterogeneous and nominally post-modern strands
of ‘gender studies’ and ‘gay and lesbian studies’, crosses and recrosses both
disciplinary and theoretical divides.

Feminist criticism today is as much concerned with woman as reader as

with woman as writer—what Elaine Showalter usefully defined in ‘Towards
a Feminist Poetics’ (1979) as the twin projects of ‘feminist critique’ and—in a
word she coined—‘gynocritics’. Showalter originally thought of ‘feminist
critique’ as a somewhat negative enterprise, teaching us ‘only what men have
thought women should be’, and, in its theoretical register, requiring ‘a long
apprenticeship to the male theoretician’ (1979, p. 27). In practice, however, it
has seemed more liberating and less depressive than that, generating a wide
variety of work that does much more than confirm the burden of our
oppression, from Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969), which made it
impossible to read the sexual scenarios of modern literature as innocently
liberatory, to such different kinds of studies as Alice Jardine’s Gynesis:
Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), Naomi Schor’s Reading in
Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (1987) and Tania Modleski’s study of
Hitchcock, The Women Who Knew Too Much (1988).

I have begun, however, with a discussion of the shifting terms and recurrent

pitfalls of gynocriticism partly because in some sense the issues which it
foregrounds include those which arise when we consider woman as reader—
of men’s texts and women’s texts, whether literary or theoretical. Men’s writing
across discourses, as feminism has rightly argued, constructs a range of
denigrating ideological representations of ‘woman’, in order to attach a

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virtuous masculinity to a miscellany of valorized concepts—aesthetic,
philosophical, political or scientific. Decoding, in order to disarm these
insidious negative inscriptions, has been one of the most important tasks of
feminist critique, and belongs to a project that goes back to the origins of
modern feminism, that is, to the early years of modernity itself and to the
writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. But, as we have just seen in relation to Woolf,
a shift of attention to the woman writer, or woman theorist/critic, does not
necessarily displace these negative and projective descriptions of the feminine,
though they are now seen as inscribed from a different subject position. In
order to really ‘dismantle the Master’s house’, in poet Audre Lorde’s words,
post-war feminist criticism has had to stand back a little from the generally
celebratory register in which it had initially constructed an alternative canon
of women’s writing. The texts in that revised canon and the principles
underlying their selection can, it is now recognized, reinstate old and instate
new negative femininities at the same time as they imagine feminist utopias.

As part of its sometimes painful review of its own history, feminist criticism

in the 1980s has fielded a series of questions that move across the binaries
noted above and break down the distinction between woman as reader and
woman as writer, as well as between imaginative writer and critic. Concerned
with textuality as well as subjectivity, the first cluster of questions is
simultaneously epistemological and political: ‘What is woman?’; ‘Where is
writing?’; ‘What and where are woman and writing when women are writing
about women?’

The first question—‘What is woman?’—summarizes a long debate within

feminism about its appropriation of both liberal humanism and essentialism.
Immanent in all the feminist critical interventions of the 1960s and early
1970s, liberal humanism assumes the possibility of a coherent social and
psychic identity, an identity endowed with individual agency. Humanism insists
on a concept of self as potentially unified even where it has been fragmented
by the cultural violence of oppression—that aspiration to psychic unity and
social agency is the nub of women’s freedom, the heart of her emancipation.
Woolf’s ideal combination of the rational impersonal with the poetic is a fair
enough representation of its aesthetic dimension. Feminist humanism has
rewritten the script of a universal human nature, redressing to a certain extent
its masculinist bias, but it does not necessarily endow supposed female virtues—
of nurturance, non-violence or relatedness for instance—with a biological
base, or claim that sexual difference is somehow fixed as gender divided human
essence. Essentialism, therefore, adds another element to humanism (though
the two terms are often used interchangeably) and one which makes it easier
to claim both transhistorical and transcultural unity between women, as well
as to emphasize the similarity between all forms of patriarchal domination.

The positions sketched out above are necessarily abstracted outlines of a

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general philosophical ground from which specific works of humanist feminist
criticism proceeded. In answer to the question ‘What is woman?’, we might
argue that such criticism did not ask enough questions about the relationship
between patriarchal ideologies—the dominant discourses of sexuality in
Victorian England for example—and subjectivity. Was bourgeois femininity a
set of prescriptions imposed on an ungendered humanity, or a female but not
feminine subject; or, as a materialist feminism would argue, were sexual identity
and difference constructed by and through those discourses? Most of these
early feminist humanist studies do not even address these kinds of
epistemological questions or their political implications. To dismiss this body
of work because of this absence is, however, to miss the real contribution of
the recent past to feminist theory and analysis. The major achievement of
feminist criticism of the 1960s and 1970s was to rewrite the cultural history
of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and America, putting gender,
not just women, in where it had been left out by an older liberal tradition of
cultural history and criticism. The effect of this intervention was a profound
disruption of the androcentric and universalizing assumptions of that tradition
about culture and subjectivity. None of the work of younger critics today
could have proceeded without this spirited challenge to male humanism in
the interventions of Mary Ellman (Thinking of Women, 1968), Sandra Gilbert
and Susan Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979), Ellen Moers (Literary
Women, 1976) or Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own, 1977); nor
have their studies been superseded by new cohorts of critics who write from
other perspectives. Their original research, innovative interpretations and
eloquent, elegant polemics provided a base and a model for others to build
their critiques upon. Kate Millett—the only radical feminist in this imposing
critical vanguard who might, at a stretch, be called an essentialist in that her
work seems often to play into a notion of a naturally nasty masculinity, psychic
and social—is also, interestingly, the critic whose post-war project most closely
resembled that of Michel Foucault—to write the history of sexuality and the
history of representation together by looking at the power relations immanent
in the languages and practices—what Foucault calls ‘discourse’—of particular
historical periods. Sexual Politics (1969) was a stunning example of ‘feminist
critique’ (Showalter, 1979, p. 25), a reading of male texts, which made a
whole generation who came of age as Lady Chatterley’s Lover entered the
public domain, and who naïvely celebrated it as a liberating narrative, look
again—and again—at the textual politics of sexual narrative.

Yet these studies were vulnerable in ways that now seem obvious, and

which return us to the question ‘What is woman?’ Marxist-feminist criticism
from Britain in the 1970s, and socialist-feminist criticism in the United States
in the same period, had been quick to point to the universalizing assumptions
of feminist humanism and its implication in a bourgeois aesthetics. Toril Moi’s

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influential Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) initiated a sharp socialist-feminist
critique from an Anglo-European point of view of the politics of American
feminist humanism; her emphasis is on the unexamined ‘liberal individualism’
of their perspective. Another set of Anglo-American criticisms focused on the
textual/authorial exclusions in this work. Where feminist humanists focused
on middle-class women’s writing as the marginal or suppressed writing in the
public domain, they rarely looked for or at what was marginal or suppressed
within that writing, at the negative class and racial identities, often gendered
female, which framed the bourgeois ‘heroinism’ of their texts. Even less did
they look at women’s writing from the margins—the work of working-class,
black, colonial or lesbian writers. Humanist feminists assumed that the specific
concerns of white, middle-class heterosexual women writers virtually
represented the narrative of all women, and read their psychic and social
narratives as emblematic of the vicissitudes of gender.

Against this generalizing force, the various versions of feminist anti-

humanism and anti-essentialism (but also an important strand of social
humanism that lies philosophically and politically somewhere in between)
have all highlighted the differences between women—differences of class, race,
nationality and temporality, targeting the universal and the natural as
ideological concepts that serve to reify negative definitions of women. Most
feminist post-structuralism, whatever its particular critical orientation
(Derridean, Foucauldian, Lacanian, New Historicist) now goes much further
in directly challenging the category of ‘woman’ itself, focusing on the
differences within any given definition of woman, or the feminine. And there
are considerable differences within and between these positions. A neo-Marxist,
feminist anti-humanism, or one strongly influenced by the work of Michel
Foucault, might well want to stop at the rejection of the universality of the
feminine or any version of identity or subjectivity that is not socially
constructed. Their notion of a discourse emphatically includes both linguistic
expression and social practice. For strict feminist deconstructionists, on the
other hand, subjectivity itself is an effect of language, a figuration constantly
undermined by the competing terms which define it. Their focus is primarily
on the rhetorical operations of language, on its play, its textuality. But for
feminist psychoanalytic theorists and critics such as Jacqueline Rose, the issue
of ‘the social’ remains, though it no longer does so as a ‘simple dichotomy
between inside and outside’ (1986, p. 23). Rather, she sees femininity as a
precarious and dangerous identity, the product of a psychic process marked
by its violence which establishes all gendered subjectivity as inherently unstable.
This instability is not, however, reducible to a series of rhetorical devices or
tropes, although the psychic in language operates through repetition,
displacement, condensation, projection, metonymy and metaphor. For her,
deconstruction cannot resolve the political and theoretical problem which the

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dichotomy between social/psychic presents for any practice, like feminism,
which demands human agency for its realization. She argues that the Derridean
‘dispatching of the subject and its dissolution into a writing strategy…leads
to the political demand for its return. For the political necessity of the subject
is met in part by the psychic necessity of the subject, but in a way which finds
itself suspended between each of these demands, for this subject is neither
pure assertion nor play’ (1986, p. 26).

As a response to this same problem Barbara Johnson, a feminist

deconstructionist, defends the politics of deconstruction as political, and
feminist, identifying the theoretical project and its contradictions with the
literary one. ‘The task of the writer…would seem to be to narrate both the
appeal and the injustice of universalization, in a voice that assumes and
articulates its own, ever-differing self difference’ (Johnson, 1987, p. 170).
Johnson’s exemplary writer is the African-American novelist and folklorist
Zora Neale Hurston, who can move in the opening pages of Their Eyes Were
Watching God (1937) ‘from the seduction of a universal language through a
progressive de-universalization that ends in the exclusion of the very
protagonist herself’ (Johnson, 1987, p. 170). In a daring appropriation of a
typically ‘essentialist’ or ‘humanist’ strategy, Johnson identifies the task of a
feminist deconstruction with the literally endless tasks of women’s work, and
these with their literary embodiments, Mrs Ramsay’s knitting, ‘Penelope’s
weaving…nightly re-unraveled’ (Johnson, 1987, p. 171). For Johnson, it is
precisely Derrida’s undecidable, as it might reside rhetorically in the ambiguity
of address, in an African-American woman’s poem about abortion (and in
the abortion issue for women generally), that points us towards the
understanding that ‘rhetorical, psychoanalytical, and political structures are
profoundly implicated in one another’ (Johnson, 1987, p. 199).

Johnson’s attempt to instance the feminist politics of deconstruction as non-

coherent identity, and ambivalent positionality, through the work of African-
American women writers, is a complicated engagement of her own cultural
and critical identity, for she is a white feminist critic. Among African-American
feminist critics the debate about the uses of theory—as well as about what
theory to use—has been as impassioned and productive as elsewhere within
cultural/literary studies. Barbara Christian, the author of Black Feminist Criticism
(1985), probably emerges as the most recalcitrant ‘humanist’ in this tendency;
the ‘discovery of self’ is a central theme in her work. Even so, her deployment of
the term ‘universal’ suggests her difference from white feminist humanism, for
it is a universality born of the historical experience of the Black diaspora and of
specific alliances between women of colour which she refers to. Among African-
American feminist critics, Hortense J.Spillers ([1985] 1989) foregrounds the
whole range of post-structuralist theories as part of her critical strategies, but
she is not eager to turn African-American women’s fiction or poetry into ideal

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deconstructive texts. In contrast to Johnson, she is interested in the appropriation
of humanist modes in African-American writers and the limitation this imposes
on their work. Deborah McDowell, another African-American feminist critic,
might well be in debate with Johnson when she interprets Sherley Ann Jackson’s
novel Dessa Rose (1984) about gender and American slavery as participating
‘aggressively in the critique of the subject and the critique of binary oppositions,
both commonly associated with the post-structuralist project’ (McDowell, 1989,
p. 147). The novel, she argues, ‘wrestles with questions about the politics and
problematics of representation’, but ‘swerves away from the empty notions of
radical indeterminacy’ in order to ground ‘the oppositions it stages—slavery
and freedom, orality and literacy, fact and fiction—in an untidy network of
social and material specificities’ (1989, p. 147).

The need to centre historical/cultural specificity when questioning the textual

politics—ideological frameworks and generic conventions—used by Black
women writers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards is argued at length
by a black critic from Britain, Hazel V.Carby, in her important book
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Rise of the Black Woman Novelist (1987).
Carby writes about the history of African-American women as a neo-Marxist
whose theoretical perspective comes out of British cultural studies. In her
essay ‘The Historical Novel of Slavery’, Carby sees a danger in the way in
which Black male critics’ use of contemporary critical theory has ‘produced a
discourse that romanticizes the folk roots of Afro-American culture and denies
the transformative power of both historical and urban consciousness’ (Carby,
1989, p. 140). In line with Carby’s resistance to the political pastoral, as
fiction, criticism or feminism, we might see writer Toni Morrison’s argument,
that what cultural critics describe as the effects of post-modernity—the
fragmentation or erasure of identity, the loss of historicity—had already
happened to Black people in slavery. Morrison has little romantic investment
in the rural or ‘folk’ tradition. Her concern, like Carby’s, is the uses of fiction
in modernity and post-modernity. In ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as
Foundation’, Morrison suggests that Black fiction today functions for a widely
scattered Black population across the world as a forum for debate and
interpretation of their experience, replacing the forms of communication in
Church and polity of those now vanished tightly-knit Black communities
(Morrison, 1985, pp. 340–1). All these Black feminist critics address the third
question I posed earlier, ‘What and where are women and writing when women
are writing about women?’ For them, however, this issue is bound up
inextricably with other political and cultural questions of modernity in an
international as well as nationally specific framework.

This ‘global’ orientation demands that western feminist critics reflect more

fully on their ambiguous and often uncomfortably privileged position vis-à-
vis other cultures and the history of imperialism. The feminist critic and theorist

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who has put this view most urgently and eloquently is Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, herself the cultural product of at least three geopolitical contexts—
the Indian subcontinent of her birth, the world of European theory which she
helped to bring to America as an early translator and interpreter of Derrida,
and the United States where she lives and teaches. A leading deconstructionist,
her answer to the ‘suspension of the subject between assertion and play’ that
Rose describes is rather different from any of the other critics we have
considered. Although her work on both First and Third World texts uses a
wide range of neo-Marxist and deconstructive arguments, she now advocates
a ‘strategic essentialism as a way to break the stalemate between a sophisticated
anti-humanist theory of gender and the political imperatives of feminism’
(Spivak, In Other Worlds, 1987).

The 1980s have therefore been a period of renegotiation for feminist

criticism of the political and conceptual nature of their project and its relation
to other forms of criticism and cultural analysis. As Spivak often reminds her
readers and audiences, even these less ethnocentric and more globally literate
agendas are being, by and large, formulated in the First, not the Second or
Third Worlds, for the Anglophone West still owns the cultural capital—the
economic and institutional framework and the means of distribution of texts—
through which these feminist critiques of representation are funded and
disseminated. Accordingly, feminist criticism today is more aware than ever
that critic and text both need to be understood in relation to their position
within culture—any new reading practice, any interrogation of gender that
moves between the narrative and its audiences must first locate itself, and in
doing so must reflect on its limitations and possibilities for its readers.

The critical pilgrim’s progress of what Spivak has called one of feminism’s

‘cult texts’ (1985, p. 263), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), might be a
useful instance of the shifts in feminist criticism’s theory and perspective,
from Woolf to the present. Brontë’s novel occupies a central place in Woolf’s
own before and after assessment of women’s writing. Its Victorian author is
targeted as the paradigmatic case of the angry and ‘thwarted’ proto-feminism
of the mid-nineteenth century. Woolf’s distaste for any political fictional voice
which ‘pleads its own cause’—women, working-class men and Negroes are
her three linked examples—is intensified by her disavowal of ‘feminine’
emotion and sentiment. Jane Eyre is her example of a ‘flawed text’, both
soppy and shrill, in which the declassée, eternal feminine, ‘always a governess,
always in love’, is disastrously doubled with a soap-box feminist defending
her credo of emotional equality—‘women feel just as men feel’—from the
rooftops of Thornfield. This moment of polemic, Woolf’s ‘awkward break’ in
the narrative, becomes the point of entry for second-wave feminist critics to
insert their sequential rewriting of the aesthetics and politics of the novel.
Feminist humanism in the 1960s and 1970s read Jane Eyre as the triumph of

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female agency over patriarchal power, celebrating Jane’s self-conscious
‘rebellious feminism’. Less problematically, they reversed Woolf’s negative
view of Brontë’s aesthetic. Collectively, these critics successfully argued for
gendered writing and for the focusing on issues of sexual difference as they
are played out in the novel, but this phase of criticism paid scant attention to
the equally important class and racial resonances which orchestrate the drama
of heterosexuality in the narrative. It was not until the mid-1980s that the
book’s feminist reputation underwent a fundamental reversal at the hands of
feminist criticism.

Three new interpretations by Nancy Armstrong (Desire and Domestic

Fiction, 1987), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (‘Three Women’s Texts’, 1985),
and Mary Poovey (Uneven Developments, 1988) stake out new political and
theoretical terrain. The first two critics situate Jane Eyre as an ur-text of
capitalism and empire. Armstrong’s perspective is neo-Marxist and
Foucauldian, and her thesis rewrites the history of the novel in relation to
the centrality of gender. She argues that ‘domestic fiction actively sought to
disentangle the language of sexual relations from the language of politics
and, in so doing, to introduce a new form of political power’ (1987, p. 3).
Domestic fiction, but especially the late romanticism of the Brontës, was
central in ‘formulating universal forms of subjectivity’, translating ‘all kinds
of political information into psychological terms. As they displaced the facts
and figures of social history, the Brontës began producing new figures of
desire that detached the desiring self from place, time and material cause’
(1987, p. 187). These ‘figures of desire’ are, says Armstrong, in Jane Eyre
aligned with the imperialist ideologies of the novel itself. Armstrong’s
reading credits the sentimental power of the novel, and its conservative
rather than radical force. Implicit in her analysis is the view that a feminism
so rooted in the philosophical ground of capitalism and empire cannot be
progressive. Spivak’s argument runs parallel to Armstrong’s in some
respects, both in her general view of nation and novel—‘It should not be
possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering
that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part
of the cultural representation of England to the English’ (1985, p. 262)—and
in her specific placing of Jane Eyre as a fiction which vividly articulates the
‘axioms of imperialism’ (1985, p. 262). Jane’s achieved goal of
‘companionate love’ and St John Rivers’s martyrdom on behalf of ‘social
mission’ (pp. 263–4) are the complementary Victorian ideologies that
reinforce that imperialism.

Mary Poovey tackles ‘the ideological work of gender in Mid-Victorian

England’, the subtitle of her book, from a different angle. Taking the debate
about the status of governesses in the 1840s as an historical ‘border case’, an
issue which condensed and focused contemporary anxieties about class and

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FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

gender, Poovey reads Jane Eyre as a contradictory text, part of a ‘complex
ideological system’ which can be heard as offering both challenge and hostage
to contemporary social conservatism (1988, pp. 126–63).

Each of these readings displaces the feminist humanist emphasis on female

agency, decentring Jane/Brontë as a composite heroine of modern feminism’s
prehistory. But while Armstrong and Spivak challenge the very ground of
that feminism, using Jane Eyre as a case study which uncovers the reactionary
origins and effects of feminist individualism, Poovey offers a somewhat less
negative account of the text’s engagement with contemporary socio-economic
questions. Each of these readings invites more detailed work on the historical
articulation of the text in contemporary discourses, and asks for more complex
theorizations about the interrelation of race, class and gender. Each supports
the argument that the representations of sexuality and difference were crucial
components in the co-ordinate constructions of nation and novel in the
nineteenth century.

As feminist criticism in English moves into the 1990s it does so with a

much firmer institutional base and much greater cultural legitimacy than its
early second-wave practitioners could have envisioned. Its frame of reference
is more comprehensive and politically sensitive to the intersections between
gender and other cultural determinants, race and nationality in particular.
The heterosexual melodrama, the leitmotif in so much imaginative literature
and visual narrative by men and women, is being deconstructed by feminist
critics and theorists alike as an ideological scenario which fixes difference
through the disavowal of other sexual positions and relations. Feminist
criticism has gone far beyond its initial revision of the canon, or its rereading
of particular texts, to argue successfully that the histories of representation
very broadly conceived are fundamentally altered when gender is located at
the centre of cultural analysis. The politics of subjectivity remains at the
heart of feminist criticism’s concern with gender and representation.
However, the political and epistemological status of the female subject herself
as author, reader, character, or supposed historical actor has become a
question for discussion, not an assumed referent. Feminist criticism has
become increasingly concerned with historicizing and theorizing the
discursive construction of the gendered subject, and understanding how that
semiosis always operates under and through the signs of other social and
psychic systems of meaning.

The ‘new colours and shadows’ that inform feminist criticism today have

put feminism itself, in its earlier paradigms and definitions, into question,
shaking up, and in some cases breaking up, its philosophical, epistemological
and political certainties, but confirming its importance as an analytic
perspective. That interrogative force may, in the end, be its greatest strength
and its most enduring contribution.

CRITICISM

762

FURTHER READING

Carby, Hazel V. (1987) Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-

American Woman Novelist, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford.

deLauretis, Teresa (ed.) (1986) Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, Indiana University

Press, Bloomington.

Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman

Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press,
New Haven

Johnson, Barbara (1987) A World of Difference, Johns Hopkins University Press,

Baltimore

Millett, Kate (1969) Sexual Politics, Virago, London
Moers, Ellen (1976) Literary Women: The Great Writers, Doubleday Press, New York
Moi, Toril (1985) Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Methuen, London

and New York

Pryse, Marjorie and Spillers, Hortense J. (1985) Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction,

and Literary Tradition, Indiana University Press, Bloomington

Rose, Jacqueline (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Verso Press, London
Showalter, Elaine (1977) A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from

Brontë to Lessing, Princeton University Press, Princeton

——(ed.) (1989) Speaking of Gender, Routledge, New York and London
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1987) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics,

Routledge, New York and London

Todd, Janet (1988) Feminist Literary History, Polity Press, Oxford
Wall, Cheryl A. (ed.) (1989) Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory

and Writing by Black Women, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick

Woolf, Virginia (1979) ‘Women and Fiction’. In Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing,

introduction by Michèle Barrett, The Women’s Press, London [essay first published
1929]

ADDITIONAL WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Nancy (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the

Novel, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford

Carby, Hazel V. (1989) ‘Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery’. In

Deborah E.McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (eds), Slavery and the Literary
Imagination, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

Christian, Barbara (1985) Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women

Writers, Pergamon Press, New York

Ellmann, Mary (1968) Thinking About Women, Harcourt, New York
Jardine, Alice (1985) Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity, Cornell

University Press, Ithaca

McDowell, Deborah E. (1989) ‘Negotiating Between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after

Freedom—Dessa Rose’. In Deborah E.McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (eds),
Slavery and the Literary Imagination, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

Modleski, Tania (1988) The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist

Theory, Methuen, New York and London

Morrison, Toni (1985) ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’. In Mari Evans

(ed.), Black Women Writers, Pluto Press, London

Poovey, Mary (1988) Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in

763

FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM

Mid-Victorian England, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, and Virago Press,
London

Schor, Naomi (1987) Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, Methuen, New

York and London

Showalter, Elaine (1979) ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’. In Mary Jacobus (ed.), Women

Writing and Writing About Women, Croom Helm, London, and Harper & Row,
New York

Spillers, Hortense J. (1989) ‘Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse,

or Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed’. In Deborah E.McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (eds),
Slavery and the Literary Imagination, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
[essay first published 1985]

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1985) ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of

Imperialism’. In Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), Race, Writing and Difference,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1988) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, W.W.Norton &

Co., New York and London [first published 1792]