[In the following review of The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, Belsey examines the differences between American and British feminist criticism and asserts that more attention should be paid to the social construction of women's reality rather than to promoting a gender-inclusive “populist” canon.]

Feminist criticism has come of age. Eighteen years on from Mary Ellman's Thinking about Women, these two collections of essays are elegant, accomplished and quite free from the (tomboyish?) high spirits that antagonised some women and electrified others in the early years. Feminist criticism is now ready to assume adult responsibilities. Confidently, fluently, readably, both Making a Difference [edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn] and The New Feminist Criticism [edited by Showalter] reiterate the case for reading as a woman, point to the work that has already been done and define a series of projects for the future.

Both these volumes are predominantly American. Taken together, they give the impression that before the advent of feminism literary criticism was even more misogynistic there than it was here. Elaine Showalter reprints Nina Baym's witty analysis of the American literary canon as a series of ‘melodramas of beset manhood’. In the Great American Novel man (and the sexist term is the appropriate one) seeks the freedom that comes from escaping the constraints of the social. In the end real men always light out, like Huckleberry Finn, for the Territory. Women, as agents of domestication and socialisation, try to hold them back. Meanwhile, however, the Territory too is identified as feminine—but this time in the right way. The wilderness invites conquest and once subdued it becomes compliant, nurturing, supportive.

Repeatedly these feminist critics insist that the American equivalent of the Great Tradition does not include a single woman author. British values have not been quite so overtly virile. Since the Thirties at least Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot have been taken seriously. Of F. R. Leavis's four great English novelists two were women.

And yet courses on women's writing and feminist criticism are now much more common, more acceptable in the United States than they are here. Perhaps in the Home of Human Rights things were easier for the feminists? It was not hard to demonstrate that women writers had been systematically excluded from equal access to the pursuit of happiness. Harriet Beecher Stowe was not taken seriously; Kate Chopin was reviled; lesbians and black women had no voice at all. Among the feminist critics of the Seventies Showalter herself was one of the pioneers in giving back to women a literature of their own. Both these new volumes reaffirm and develop that project.

Was there, however, a price to pay for the success of feminist criticism in the States? The emphasis has been on reinstating writing by women, broadening the canon to include what has been repressed. Women's writing, varying with race, class and sexual orientation, is held to emanate from women's culture and is seen as expressive of women's experience. But, as Lilian Robinson points out in the Showalter collection, this project of inclusive pluralism doesn't go much beyond a new kind of populism and in a programme for the reorganisation of social relations populism doesn't go very far at all.

In this instance it leaves in place what seem to me some very dubious assumptions about literary criticism. One of these is the belief that fiction is a transcription of the author's experience of real life. Another is that the purpose of criticism is to evaluate the fiction and thus the experience. And yet another is that readers will in some not very clearly specified way derive benefit from the works of fiction prescribed by critics. These commonplaces have not proved very progressive in the past.

British feminist criticism, developing in a different cultural context, has tended to move in another direction. In Britain the sexist assumptions of conventional criticism, though no less powerful, have been at first glance less glaring. Women were included in the Great Tradition. But this was always on the unspoken condition that they were not treated as women. Similarly, the fact that Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre and Dorothea Brooke were women also conventionally went unmentioned and their struggles for identity and independence in a patriarchal society were represented as the necessary process of learning to bring their unruly dispositions under moral control.

Obviously the sexism of the reading process was not to be transformed simply by putting more women authors on the syllabus and British feminism consequently took a rather different turn. The only one of these essays which I know to be British is Rosalind Coward's ‘Are Women's Novels Feminist Novels?’ in the Showalter collection. As the title indicates, Coward raises questions about the difference between being a female and being a feminist (between anatomy and politics) and between telling it (like it is, or otherwise) and intervening in it in order to change things. An essay about the politics of form, Coward's stands out from most of the others in its attention to writing itself, to the ways in which fiction addresses readers.

Ann Rosalind Jones, who writes in both volumes about French feminism, also displays the kind of political edge more familiar to feminists on this side of the Atlantic. ‘We need,’ she argues in the Showalter collection, ‘to know how women have come to be who they are through history … and only then will we discover what women are or can be.’

And that perhaps is the point for a feminism which wants to move beyond populism towards a politics of change. In this context what women can be matters as much as what they have experienced. But what we take to be possible depends on how we understand both what we are and what history has made us.

Women's experience, at least as far back as it is documented, has been experience of or within patriarchal societies. To that extent it needs to be analysed as an effect of culture, not its origin. If women are better at personal relationships (and we are), if women are more caring and more compassionate (and we may be), we are so not only in the context of a patriarchal culture but also as a consequence of it. In the liberal West the place that has been allotted to women is precisely private, emotional, supportive and nurturing.

What more we can be is to some extent conjectural, but we can best discuss it on the basis of an analysis which firmly frees both women and men from the determinism of the natural. It is because experience is culturally produced that experience itself can change.

Feminism needs to recover women's writing. But it also needs to produce a historical and cultural analysis of the system of differences which has held women in place. Nelly Furman in the Greene and Kahn volume draws on new developments in critical theory to move in this direction. She argues that the institution of marriage, which depends on the affirmation of a polarity between men and women, serves as an analogy for a feminist criticism which finally reaffirms the position of women as the opposite sex. ‘Women's writing’ is always what is not men's writing, is always the transcription of an experience which is identified as inevitably other. This is not just ‘making a difference’: it's freezing it into place. Neither marriage nor the reinstatement of women's writing quite makes the break that will release us from the constraints of the stereotype.