[In the following review, Costello exposes a number of pitfalls attending the theoretical orientation of Stealing the Language.]

Alicia Ostriker's Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America is the latest in a rash of studies that have attempted to define poetry by women as generically distinct from the dominant male tradition. Suzanne Juhasz's Naked and Fiery Forms, Emily Stipes Watt's The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945, and Margaret Homans's Women Writers and Poetic Identity are the book's major precursors, and it appears simultaneously with Paula Bennett's My Life, a Loaded Gun, a study of anger in women's poetry. The appearance of Gilbert and Gubar's Norton Anthology of Women's Literature crowned the notion of a female tradition and helped to complete a second stage of feminist criticism. No longer would the feminist critic's task be to liberate women writers from a gender-based system of exclusion; now gender difference would be highlighted and the literary canon forced open to admit that difference on equal terms. Ostriker's book contributes significantly to this enterprise, outlining a set of stances and preoccupations that have arisen in the development of women's poetry. But her book also shares the many pitfalls of this enterprise: a theme-bound reading of poetry, an inadvertent reinforcement of female stereotypes originating in the male mythology, a retention of female identity within a binary structure of relatedness to men, and a prescriptive rather than descriptive relationship to poetry by women.

The fundamental confusions of Ostriker's book (and others like it) are embedded in its title. Does “women's poetry” name all poetry by women or a special category of poetry by women that focuses on questions of female identity? Since the major task of the book is to define a genre, this is an important question. How broadly can we identify gender as the determining factor of authenticity and power in poetry? Ostriker's claims are very broad, but her examples derive from poetry that deals explicitly with the female self. She does not examine the validity of her generic argument in poems where the “woman question” is not at issue. Few would deny that a group of women writers since the sixties have taken up women's experience under patriarchy as their subject matter and have tended to echo the range of ideas raised by feminists throughout the culture. And few would deny that gender is a powerful determinant of vision. It is quite another thing to argue that gender identity is the inevitable subject of poetic vision. If many of our best women writers eschew that label, it is less because “woman writer” has meant “inferior writer” in our culture, or because they deny the importance of their female experience, than because their humanity takes precedence over gender. Ostriker is far readier than most writers are to see gender as absolute, to deny the possibility of the universal in art, to see the goal of poetry by women as an explicit, unified female subjectivity.

If there has been a double bind for the woman poet in patriarchal society (as Juhasz, Homans, Ostriker, and others have all argued), she is now threatened by a new one, created in the name of feminism:

Insofar as women's poetry attempts timidly to adjust itself to literary standards which exclude the female, it dooms itself to insignificance. Where it speaks in its own voice, it enlarges literature. The belief that true poetry is genderless—which is a disguised form of believing that true poetry is masculine—means that we have not learned to see women poets generically, to recognize the tradition they belong to or to discuss either the limitations or the strengths of that tradition.

(Stealing the Language 9)

Ostriker herself determines when a voice is authentically female and when it has adjusted itself to male standards. Ironically, the true female self in Ostriker is predicated upon the patriarchy it seeks to upset. Ostriker's own strategies are defensive. We are told on page nine that “most critics and professors of literature, including modern literature, deny that ‘women's’ poetry, as distinct from poetry by individual women, exists.” A quick glance at curricula across the country, or at the programs for MLA in the last decade, ought to dispel this suspicion. But certainly few would argue, as Ostriker does, that women writers must be seen in a women's tradition to be best understood: “Without a sense of the multiple and complex patterns of thought, feeling, verbal resonance, and even vocabulary shared by women writers, we cannot read any woman adequately” (9). On the contrary, in many cases such a generic frame distorts rather than illuminates the achievements of women poets. Thus the rich ambiguity, indirection, restraint, reticence, irony, abstraction of Dickinson, Moore, Bishop are reduced to defensive or at best subversive strategies directed at patriarchy. “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint,” writes Marianne Moore.¹ Ostriker never entertains this notion. The metaphysical reach of many women poets is ignored in favor of their ideological status. Dickinson's ambivalence and ambiguity Ostriker names, pejoratively, “duplicity,” apparently unaware that in doing so she participates in a traditional male stereotype of female behavior. She assumes that personal directness has more aesthetic as well as psychological integrity (“women write personally,” she asserts). Doubleness is allowed as a self-transcending strategy for men and only a defensive or repressive one for women. Cerebration is masculine; women belong to the “line of feeling.” Yeats is allowed to resolve his split ego in a very naive reading of “Sailing to Byzantium,” but self-division in women's writing remains schizophrenic. Ostriker's most promising argument concerns the release of body language in women's poetry and the special position women take toward nature. But in celebrating this release she comes close at times to reducing mind to body rather than obliterating the Cartesian dualism. Also suggestive is her claim that women poets respond to an “imperative of intimacy” that challenges the logocentric/phallocentric conception of self. But she does not sufficiently distinguish this “weak ego boundary” from the “weak ego” that limits the value of earlier women poets. Nor does her argument confront the major critique of poetic subjectivity launched by contemporary theory.

Ostriker's title also suggests a historical argument, but she does little to gauge the relation of this genre's internal history to larger movements in literary history. The female “line of feeling” might easily be identified with late Victorian and Georgian poetry, the “exoskeleton style” with modernism. The more direct assertion of female experience coincides with the confessional movement which rejected modernism's impersonality. The dominant aesthetic has provided women poets with as many opportunities and discoveries as obstacles or diversions, and they are not readily alienated from it. Indeed, women have helped to shape the dominant tradition—a credit Ostriker is unable to allow them. The hard modernism of Stein, Amy Lowell, Moore, and others might be considered original rather than male derivative. Certainly a number of male poets and critics—among them William Carlos Williams, William Gass, John Ashbery, and Brad Leithauser—have read these women as originals. More troubling than Ostriker's underestimation of the greats is her indifference to questions of quality in an argument that invites such questions. Men, she reminds us, have undervalued poetry by women. Yet she seems to judge this poetry by ideological rather than aesthetic standards. If this is a problematic distinction, it needs to be addressed as such. But to my ear much of the poetry Ostriker finds noteworthy is sentimental, crude, sensationalist, or hackneyed. She provides no defense of it as art, attending only to its attitudes toward femininity and patriarchy. And some of our best contemporary women poets—Jorie Graham, Ann Lauterbach, Pam Alexander, Heather McHugh—are not even mentioned.

This unwillingness to erect new aesthetic criteria in place of that rejected as male biased belies the title of the book. Stealing the Language really deals very little with language except as a byproduct of semantics. Ostriker's title is itself stolen from Claudine Herrmann's Les Voleuses de langue and thus invites comparison with work in French feminist theory and the concept of écriture féminine. Whatever one thinks of the conclusions drawn by this movement (which includes Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and others), its ambition is to define within male-dominated discourse a distinctly female discourse with its own structure and diction, not necessarily about the female body and female experience as such, but about a consciousness emerging from these. Ostriker has not really met the challenge of écriture féminine, let alone addressed its critics (among them, French feminists such as Monique Wittig). Even her chapter “Thieves of Language,” which mentions Herrmann, deals with mythology rather than language itself, thus remaining in the realm of images. This may be because the highly metaphoric tendency in écriture féminine is alien to Ostriker's empirical mind. Indeed, in this third phase of feminist criticism, the specificity of gender determination becomes suspect. In her essay “Mallarmé as Mother,” for instance, Barbara Johnson, an unusually astute critic on most occasions, makes an oddly circular move in which she first identifies Mallarmé's linguistic structures as maternal and then argues that men have appropriated female power.² But such arguments at least acknowledge that a discourse originating in female experience can be shared. The closest Ostriker comes to a consideration of linguistic structures and lyric stances is in her discussion of the fluid ego membrane in women's writing. But she restricts this to the subject of maternal and sexual intimacy and does not extend it to consciousness generally. If she had, the polyphonous self in John Ashbery, the self of interpenetration in Gary Snyder, though not always thematized in terms of gender, might meet her criteria. Perhaps these structures are more prominent among women. By confining the forms of consciousness to their experiential sources she severely limits women's power to change the dominant tradition, to influence men.

Ostriker's book cannot fully accommodate those poems that present the experiential world as partial, poems of intellectual and metaphysical ambition, or poems that present any serious difficulty through their conceptual or figurative reach. Indeed, almost all of the poems Ostriker quotes take gendered experience as their subject and offer an uncomplicated view of it. But what about the many poems on other subjects? Do these belong to the “genre” of women's poetry? Jorie Graham's poetry is conspicuously absent from Ostriker's discussion, though the female body and female occupations and concerns often provide her image base. The question haunting all Graham's poems is the ancient, unresolved one, “in what manner the body is united with the soule.” The female vantage point is for her the concrete from which the universal is projected. Of course that universal is altered by the perspective, but it is not bound by it. Because to Graham the soul is not defined by the body, or even by history, the question can be shared. Themes of sex, love, privacy in her poems appeal to a plural audience; indeed, a nongendered “we” or “us” often speaks in the presence of the female body, not to achieve a sexless objectivity but to unite readers before the shared mystery of embodiment. Graham's universal is not a disguised adherence to male or female bias. She deliberately mingles these points of view. Conventional roles and symbols are reversed and meshed. Thus in “San Sepolcro” she allows herself no special female privilege before the painted body of Mary in labor. She is one of “the living,” Mary a symbol of the mind's power to conceive eternity—thus partaking of both male and female mythology. Male and female stereotypes are transcended in this poem. The self of the poet is a transparent vessel (“snow having made me / a world of bone / seen through to”) but also active (“I can take you there”).³ This structure is repeated in the presentation of Mary, whose figure unites male mind and female body—or rather erases these gender associations without at all sterilizing the image. This body is laboring yet at the same time is penetrable, like the poet. One can argue that only a woman poet could so reconstruct Mariology, yet the aim of the poem is inclusive. This is not a personal poem, though it is certainly intimate, nor does Mary represent “woman.” Yet to me it is more exquisite, and more expressive of my consciousness, than anything Ostriker quotes, except perhaps from Dickinson, Bishop, or Glück, Graham's major female precursors.

Of course female experience shapes the consciousness of women, though in what ways or how absolutely we still don't know with any precision. And of course women have increasingly allowed these shaping principles to inform their artistic vision. But many have resisted labeling this vision as female precisely because they wish to make it available to all readers, because female identity is their means (one among many), not their end, and because the urge to write is generated from very private and very universal longings. The “emergence” Ostriker writes of privileges polemical and theme-bound feminist poetry. This is a very narrow program for women poets.

Notes

1. Marianne Moore, “Silence,” The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Viking, 1981) 91.

2. Barbara Johnson, “Mallarmé as Mother: A Preliminary Sketch,” Denver Quarterly 18.4 (1984): 77-83.

3. Jorie Graham, “San Sepolcro,” Erosion (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 2-3.