[In the following review of volumes one and two of No Man's Land—The War of the Words and Sexchanges—Herrmann argues that Gubar and Gilbert have “abandoned” the notion of the separate literary tradition for women, which they had offered in The Madwoman in the Attic, and devalue lesbian writers, especially Gertrude Stein.]

I remember walking down a tree-lined street in New Haven, between the library and a small, set-back bookstore, when a fellow graduate student rushed up to me to announce that the first “feminist poetics” had arrived. No longer would the French have a monopoly on discourses that addressed the intersection of literary theory and gender. No longer would members of clandestine reading groups seek out unpublished manuscripts that made such discourses available to those unfortunate few who only read English. No longer would every seminar paper on feminist criticism require a rationale. The year was 1979 and the “poetics” was Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.

Ten years later I find myself reviewing the first two volumes of the sequel to that “poetics.” Ten years is a long time to wait and a long time to sustain the same project, especially in a field as transformational and transformed as feminist criticism. Gone is the exhilaration and trepidation of the “first,” perhaps because Gilbert and Gubar's edition of The Norton Anthology of Women Writers: The Tradition in English has stolen the limelight. Perhaps because so much of the material in No Man's Land is already familiar, having been published elsewhere. Perhaps because Shari Benstock's encyclopedic survey of the modernist women (at least those who made it to Women of the Left Bank) has already appeared (1986). It is not a sense of “belatedness” (the apprehension underlying Harold Bloom's theory of the “anxiety of influence”) that one is left with at the end of almost 800 pages. Rather, it is a sense that even though the co-authors “had to rethink everything we had ever been taught about twentieth-century literature,” that rethinking does not include the category of Literature nor the project of a literary history.

While The Madwoman in the Attic attempted to construct a distinctly female literary tradition in the nineteenth century, No Man's Land focuses on the “social, literary and linguistic interactions of men and women from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present.” Gilbert and Gubar have abandonned both the (feminist literary critical) notion of a separate literary tradition and the (literary historical) notion of periodization strictly by century. Instead they have retained the spatial metaphor, substituting the figure of female confinement and escape borrowed from Jane Eyre with a soldier's description of the trenches from World War I, subsequently borrowed as trope by numerous writers. The self-division of the woman writer has been replaced by the war between the sexes. An internalized conflict between the author and her enraged double has given way to the externalized conflict between an impotent and hostile “no-man” and an anxious because potent New Woman over primacy in the literary marketplace. The pen, which was once a metaphoric penis, has become a metaphoric pistol.

The first volume, The War of the Words, offers “an overview” of literary production from 1850 to 1980 in the United States and England by means of stories and poems which are read allegorically in order to reiterate ad infinitum the meta-story of the sexual battle. The second volume, Sexchanges, focuses on the period between 1880 and 1930 and analyses fewer texts in greater detail, with entire chapters devoted to Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. The assumption of the second volume draws on that of the first: “the sexes battle because sex roles change, but, when the sexes battle, sex itself (that is, eroticism) changes.” Because the second volume treats “eccentric subjects” like “necrophilia, parthenogenesis and transvestism,” and because some of its topics are not only “eccentric but painful,” such as imperialist xenophobia, lesbianism and the Great War, the authors feel the need to include a disclaimer: “About such disturbing material, all we can finally say is, Reader, we felt we had to write it, but please don't kill the messenger.” Still hearing the echoes of Bronte's heroine, it doesn't take long to realize that the repressed double, not the Creole but the lesbian writer, has moved out of the attic and into the closet.

The “anxiety of authorship” which named the conflict for nineteenth century women writers between accepting and rejecting a literary tradition based on paternal authority in the absence of literary foremothers has been replaced by the “female affiliation complex.” The source is still Freud (“Female Sexuality”), the woman writer is still a literary daughter and her story is still told as a family romance:

If we translate this model of female psychosexual development into a map of literary paths, we can see that, whether the female artist turns to what Freud would judge a normative renunciation of her desire for a literary mother to the tradition of the father, whether in what Freud might see as a frigid rejection of both allegiances she attempts to extricate herself altogether from her own aesthetic ambitions, or whether in a move that Freud might define as “defiant” and “homosexual” she claims the maternal tradition as her own, she has at last to struggle with what we would provisionally define as a complicated female affiliation complex.

(Vol. I, p. 168)

But given the fact that there is only one metastory, namely the battle of the sexes, how many of these paths will be not just described, but valorized (using terms like “normative” and “homosexual”)? In Freud's own words, the three options are asexuality (the woman gives up on her “masculine proclivities” because boys are better at them), homosexuality (she forms a “masculinity complex” by refusing to give them up) and heterosexuality (the masculine is the love object rather than the source of identification). On the one hand this set of relations between the feminine and the masculine is much more complicated than the simple binarism of the battle. On the other hand, given the metaphor of (hetero) sexual conflict (for Gilbert and Gubar as well as for Freud) the only legitimate battle and/or sex is with men. On some basic level, the two sets of paths are not even comparable, given that Freud never mentions the maternal or the relations between women.

If the nineteenth century was characterized by a powerful father-daughter paradigm, the twentieth is marked by “anxiety and exuberance” over finally having, not a mother, but a choice of literary parentage. Literary foremothers produce as much if not more ambivalence than fathers once did. Rather than “influence” from outside, there is now a choice. And because there is a choice, women writers can decide with whom to affiliate (although one cannot choose not to affiliate). And having chosen, they become linked (once again) to a genealogy with its own “quasi-familial inevitability.” Should one choose the mother,

the literary daughter finds herself in a double bind. If she simply admires her aesthetic foremother, she is diminished by the originatory power she locates in that ancestress; but, if she struggles to attain the power she identifies with the mother's autonomy, she must confront … the peril of the mother's position in patriarchy, the loss of male emotional approval paradoxically associated with male approbation—as well as the intimacy with the mother that would accompany daughterly subordination.

(Vol. I, p. 195)

In other words, the relation to the mother, and thus to other women, is not the solution either. Although Gilbert and Gubar suggest that the “monolithic pattern” of an earlier women's literary history has been displaced by a “variety of patterns,” it is clear that the same patterns keep repeating themselves. The one who wins the battle is the one who keeps it going longest and the author who claims that distinction is Edith Wharton.

The chapter entitled “Angel of Devastation: Edith Wharton on the Arts of the Enslaved” is truly exceptional. Like Gilbert and Gubar, Wharton addresses the same issues “book after book, story after story,” namely “The subject creature. The arts of the enslaved.” In other words, she provides “a feminist analysis of the construction of ‘femininity.’” But presumably unlike her co-critics, she repudiated both the “bonds of sisterhood” (of a woman's separate sphere) and the “shoulder to shoulder feminist solidarity” (adopted by the New Woman). Instead, she was nicknamed “John” and expressed more concern for what she would wear than for what she had written before her first meeting with Henry James. What distinguishes this chapter is that contradiction has replaced dualism, a search for “Herland” (the utopian alternative to “No Man's Land”) has given way to an analysis of patriarchal gender formations (at least for the leisure class of the Gilded Age) and revealing social ills is seen as a separate enterprise from curing them. Wharton was not a feminist but she can be read as offering a feminist analysis of gender relations which ultimately indicts men for the formation and perpetuation of the leisure class. In spite or because of her “ferocious irony” she offers no alternative for the feminine except “contact with the stronger masculine individuality.” She was both a “man's woman” and a “self-made man” and within that contradiction one finds the most complex rendition of “sexchanges,” not as redemption but as critique.

At the same time Wharton's depiction of sexual arrangements can do nothing but repeat itself, finding variations only in the multitudinous character formations and plot structures of her novels and short stories. Because there is no solution, the battle must go on: “For though this writer was never consciously to align herself with the female camp in the battle of the sexes, her secret feelings toward men, even toward men she loved, were often, and not surprisingly, at least subtly hostile.” This statement makes explicit the fundamental paradox of patriarchal gender relations and thus of Gilbert and Gubar's argument. Like the plot of a popular romance, the point is not to avoid or settle the dispute but to keep it going in the name of love for the purpose of marriage. What makes Wharton additionally attractive is that female rage once again undergoes repression and reappears in the subtext, in this case, the ghost story. There Wharton can safely imagine turning on her master by portraying the erotically illicit.

A similar attempt to rewrite eroticism on the part of lesbian writers encounters a quite different critical reception. Even though the chapter “‘She Meant What I Said’: Lesbian Double Talk” ends with the statement that its subject matter has been the “first, fully self-conscious generation of lesbian writers,” the authors nevertheless choose as their analytic categories the loneliness of the lesbian in heterosexual society and thus of the lesbian writer in literary history, an aesthetic of mutuality or “double talk” that can turn collaboration into collusion, and a principle of pain which seems to persist in same-sex relations, primarily because these relationships so isolate the lovers that each one must constantly fear the loss of a separate identity. “Perpetual, ontological expatriation” becomes the plight of those who live in the “supposedly native land which is heterosexuality.” The real danger is not the “no man's land of sex” but the attempt on the part of any woman writer to create “her own land” and thus put into question not only the “female affiliation complex,” but the very notion of a literary history: “In their attempts to write new and strange words that evade the territorial battles between literary men and women, the lesbian expatriates looked back to an ancient, almost mythic literary history or forward to the total annihilation of literary history.” In either case, not to the kind of literary history that Gilbert and Gubar want to construct. Here the chief offender is Gertrude Stein.

The reading of Stein is the least successful in the entire two volumes. At one point the co-critics go so far as to begin a paragraph: “While a number of readers have felt victimized by Stein's impenetrable sentences or resentful about their failure to makes sense of her nonsense, even the responses of her admirers identify her authorial audacity with male mastery.” (A footnote corroborating the first point of view refers the reader to a male critic whose book appeared in 1958). Certainly Gilbert and Gubar include themselves among “a number of readers” and their main complaint about Stein has to do with the fact that she created “her own land,” put herself at its center and from there engaged in a “self-authorizing aesthetics” that exploited not only Alice, but continues to exploit us as readers. Neither a utopian “Herland” nor a battle of the sexes, Alice simply cannot be portrayed as the enraged but repressed dark double of Gertrude nor can Gertrude be described as an anxious and thus hostile “no-man.” Instead (in Gilbert and Gubar's emplotment) Alice becomes the author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which she gives to Gertrude as a subversive gift by producing the only readable Stein.

Since even Gilbert and Gubar complain that Stein herself is always the central focus of any treatment of her work, it might be useful to consider what the stakes are, besides lifestyle. Worse than being manly in the most masculinist way, Stein puts into question three fundamental principles underlying the project of No Man's Land: she refuses predecessors, thus rejecting the “female affiliation complex”; she engages in an “aesthetics of solipsism,” thus undermining the very notion of Literature; and she turns collaboration into collusion, thus challenging the premises of co-authorship (“We feel this book is fully collaborative,” Gilbert and Gubar write in their introduction). Paraphrasing their own words: Stein claims all literary history as her own; she refuses to produce representational works; she rejects the notion of revision; and she creates only for herself. What could be more frustrating, more anxiety-provoking, more antithetical for two critics who want to create their own (definitive) literary history based on representational works required to substantiate a meta-story, having done so for over ten years in the hope of reaching the entire community of literary critics? Stein's worst crime is that she turns words into weapons, not against men, but against women readers, and not because her topics might be “eccentric and painful,” but because there are none that lend themselves to recuperation by Gilbert and Gubar's history. Her textual/sexual strategies make us rethink everything, not just “twentieth century literature.”

From Freud's point of view (according to Gilbert and Gubar) “the ‘masculinity complex’ could be carried no further.” For Gilbert and Gubar, “The father had been turned into a fat-her” (based on the insights of six year old Molly Gubar). Perhaps an even more fundamental anxiety lies at the heart of their project, a fear of the female body which in its “excess” usurps the position of the father and/or abuses the role of the mother. In an otherwise interesting and provocative discussion of Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, one finds the following statement: “If Tant’ Sannie is the only mother figure on the farm, we can understand the dilemma she poses by crystallizing it into the sentence, There is no mother and she is huge.” Both of these sentences, in their aphoristic brevity, in their focus on fatness, in their concern with the parental, point to issues that can't be dealt with simply by including a chapter on lesbian writers or by suggesting that daughters can choose with whom to affiliate. They reflect an unquestioning attachment to the family romance, to Freudian discourses on sexuality, and to quotable quips. What, then, one might ask, has feminism done for anyone besides the publishing industry?

The point is not to reveal and revel in the unexplored anxieties of Gilbert and Gubar. The point is that a feminist criticism which thought that the daughter would be better off having a choice of parentage than an “anxiety of no-authorship,” must eventually recognize that some choices are more valued than others and that choosing peaceful co-existence with a woman can be more threatening than engaging in battle with a man. More importantly, the privileging of analytic paradigms like the “battle of the sexes” not only laments but produces forms of epistemic violence by categorically excluding lesbian writers who can then only be included as nostalgic, lonely expatriates. The move from the attic to a “no man's land” has proven perhaps more advantageous for the modern woman writer than for the feminist literary critic. The fact that there are no men or men with “no-manhood” means that there might be women who embody those attributes once thought to be inherently masculine.