[In the following review, Fishburn praises Gubar and Gilbert for their explication of modernism in The War of the Words, the first volume in their No Man's Land series.]

What was modernism anyway? What were its origins? What distinguishes the work of the female modernists from that of the male modernists? These are the basic questions underlying volume one of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's projected three-volume series No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth-Century. In this volume, The War of the Words, they “offer an overview of social, literary, and linguistic interactions between men and women from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present” (p. xii). In the second and third volumes, Sexchanges and Letters from the Front, they plan to examine the literature of the period in more detail, including the feminist modernism of Virginia Woolf and the postmodern feminism of Sylvia Plath.

Ten years ago Gilbert and Gubar burst into critical prominence with the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale, 1979), their highly acclaimed study of nineteenth-century women's fiction and poetry. Not only did The Madwoman in the Attic provide feminist scholars with a convenient catch-phrase, more seriously it helped to lay the foundations of American feminist critical theory and forced critics to rethink the literature of an entire century. What Madwoman did for criticism of the nineteenth century, No Man's Land promises to do for that of the twentieth. As their title suggests, the metaphor Gilbert and Gubar have chosen is that of war—the war between the sexes that seared the modern period, making monsters of women and martyrs of men, the same war that is being bitterly fought today in the pages of critical theory. For the battle they wage in this war of the words, Gilbert and Gubar have come fully armed with passionate conviction, mother wit, and multitudinous examples. In short, No Man's Land is a delightfully worthy entrant on the critical field of battle, certain to inspire vigorous debate wherever it is read.

In tracing the origins of modernism, Gilbert and Gubar do not entirely dismiss the traditional explanations for its rise (Darwin, Freud, World War One), but they do insist on the importance of the profound social changes “brought about by the ‘new women’ and, in particular, by their struggle for the vote” (p. 21). For the men, it was a time of almost debilitating anxiety, occasioned not just by the uncertainties of war but also the stunning entry of women as serious competitors into the economic and literary marketplaces. This anxiety found expression in the abundance of “maimed, unmanned, victimized characters,” which according to Gilbert and Gubar, were “obsessively created by early twentieth-century literary men” (p. 36). And because “modernist texts describe explicitly sexual duels between characters who tend to incarnate female voracity and male impotence” (p. 35), Gilbert and Gubar argue that these victimized men function as more than traditional “metaphors of metaphysical angst” (p. 36). These victimized men, in fact, represent a widespread and quite specific fear of women. Even where the texts “do not explicitly deal with sexual battles,” it is nonetheless clear that “men feared they were losing such contests” since “[i]mages of impotence recur with unnerving frequency in the most canonical male modernist novels and poems” (p. 35). A representative example of this tendency, of course, is T. S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which was originally titled “Prufrock Among the Women” and which in its final form “emphasizes the ways in which the absurdly self-conscious modern male intellectual is rendered impotent by, and in, the company of women” (pp. 31–32). That the male modernists felt particularly threatened by literary women is also clear from James Joyce's confident prediction that The Waste Land would end the “idea of poetry for ladies” (p. 156).

As the century progressed, literary men found various ways to defend themselves against women. One strategy was to weaken women by feminizing them; ironically enough, “just as more and more women were getting paid for using their brains, more and more men represented them in novels, plays, and poems as nothing but bodies”—bodies subdued and regulated by men (p. 47). In short, the penis became “a therapeutic instrument in the domestication of desire,” which “was always on the verge of turning into a penis as pistol, an instrument of rape and revenge” (p. 48). Other strategies Gilbert and Gubar identify involved “mythologizing women to align them with dread prototypes; fictionalizing them to dramatize their destructive influence; slandering them in essays, memoirs, and poems; prescribing alternative ambitions for them; appropriating their words in order to usurp or trivialize their language; and ignoring or evading their achievements in critical texts” (p. 149). Of all these, the most significant seems to have been the attempt the avant grade male writers made to “define their artistic integrity in opposition to either the literary incompetence or the aesthetic hysteria they associated with women” (p. 157). Was male modernism, in other words, an inspired phobic response to the growing power of women? Was it a brilliant offensive campaign to transform “the materna lingua into a powerful new kind of patrius sermo” (p. 253), a language women could not speak? Gilbert and Gubar seem to think so. Indeed, they work from the controversial hypothesis that “a reaction-formation against the rise of literary women became not just a theme in modernist writing but a motive for modernism” (p. 156; emphasis added).

But what of the women themselves? What were they up to? Noting that the period “is differently inflected for male and female writers” (p. xii), Gilbert and Gubar found that women “often felt even more imperiled than men did by the sexual combat in which they were obliged to engage” (p. 66). Though it is true that many women suffered from feelings of “guilt” and “vulnerability,” still others “felt empowered” by their sex's advancement; as a result, “the female half of the dialogue is considerably more complicated than the male” (p. 66). But as powerful as they might have felt themselves, many women writers could only “imagine female victory” through such indirect means as “duplicity and subterfuge or through providential circumstance” (p. 66). Or they simply emasculated the male characters, a solution that brought victory but very little satisfaction, since “[t]riumph over an unworthy, diminished, or disabled opponent may feel like exploitation of his misfortune” (p. 90). Although some women managed to fight the trend and create truly powerful female protagonists, it was a limited insurrection soon contained by other women's terrible need to punish their own heroines. What we would regard today as “a healthy impulse to depict women actively fighting their male opponents” (p. 100), turn-of-the-century writers saw as a “horrifying necessity, born of escalating male bellicosity and inexorably leading to female defeat” (p. 101). These earlier texts are so “punitive” toward strong women, Gilbert and Gubar reason that their authors had “internalized just the horror at independent womanhood which marks the writings of literary men from Faulkner to Wylie” (p. 101).

Not only did women writers feel ambivalent toward their own heroines, they felt ambivalent toward their female ancestors, vacillating between feelings of prideful joy and fearful anxiety. Unlike women of the nineteenth century, twentieth-century women have been faced with choosing between “their matrilineage and their patrilineage in an arduous process of self-definition” (p. 169). Because women are faced with “a bewildering multiplicity of stances toward the past,” Gilbert and Gubar suggest that women have had “to struggle with … a complicated female affiliation complex” (p. 168). This “paradigm of ambivalent affiliation [is] a construct which dramatizes women's intertwined attitudes of anxiety and exuberance about creativity” (p. 170). In other words, though women writers revere their female precursors, they are “also haunted and daunted by the autonomy of these figures” (p. 195). The ambivalence arises, Gilbert and Gubar suspect, because “the love women writers send forward into the past is, in patriarchal culture, inexorably contaminated by mingled feelings of rivalry and anxiety” (p. 195).

While I find their model (based on Freud's model of the family) theoretically persuasive, I am not sure I can agree with their conclusion that having a female history “may not be quite so advantageous as some feminists have traditionally supposed” (p. 196). I cannot help but think, for example, that Alice Walker speaks for most twentieth-century women writers when she describes the joy and self-affirmation she felt upon discovering the work of Zora Neale Hurston (“Saving the Life that is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life,” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose [New York: Harvest, 1984]). Is Gilbert and Gubar's theory of a female affiliation complex, therefore, a projection of what they themselves have experienced in reverse? In other words, could it be, as a colleague of mine from VPI has suggested, that Gilbert and Gubar themselves have been caught up as critics in the receiving end of this ambivalence? Are the newest feminist critics “haunted and daunted” by these two (too) powerful foremothers?

Whatever the answer to these speculations might be, I find in Gilbert and Gubar's own work evidence of some ambivalence regarding the theories they propose. Most of this ambivalence occurs in the book's final chapter, “Sexual Linguistics: Women's Sentence, Men's Sentencing.” Although I found here some of the most exciting and appealing ideas in the entire book, Gilbert and Gubar, strangely enough, seem almost reluctant to claim them as their own. Arguing that James Joyce's puns represent “not a linguistic jouissance rebelliously disrupting the decorum of the text, but a linguistic puissance fortifying the writer's sentences,” for example, they then apply their thesis to Jacques Derrida but do so almost unwillingly: “Provisionally, tentatively,” they write, “we would suggest that a similar maneuver may be at the heart of what Geoffrey Hartman calls Derridadaism, in particular at the heart of an otherwise opaque exercise like Derrida's Glas” (pp. 260–61; emphasis added). In a related passage, they introduce yet another challenge to male thinking through the odd device of calling their own ideas into question: “if any of our speculations have any validity,” they write, “we must also ask whether the whole structure of ‘hierarchized’ oppositions that some of us have thought essentially patriarchal has been historically erected as a massive defense against the deep throat of the mother and the astonishing priority of that mother tongue which is common to both men and women” (p. 266; emphasis added). No fan myself of Jacques Lacan, I find Gilbert and Gubar's insistence on the priority of the mother tongue a compelling alternative to his Law of the Father. For this reason, I am puzzled by the rhetorical hesitancy in these passages. I realize the theories they challenge are both popular and powerful—but that is all the more reason for Gilbert and Gubar to be as intrepid here as they are elsewhere in the book.

In fact, for me, much of the pleasure of No Man's Land comes from the authors’ profanation of the sacred ground of twentieth-century literature. Clearly, they too take pleasure in desecrating the father's gods, graves, and scholars as in their contention that Hemingway and Fitzgerald regarded the Louvre as a “penile colony” (p. 36); their description of Norman Mailer's Stanley Rojack as a “Ruta-rooter” (p. 53); and their transformation of Derrida's Grammatology into a “grandmatology” (p. 239); and so on. Though their outrageous punning will surely offend many (as in their tasteless reference to Gertrude Stein as a “fat-her” [p. 188]), this humor is not without purpose. Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us in The Dialogic Imagination, for example, that laughter “demolishes fear and piety before an object … thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it” (Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1981; p. 23). And so it is here: Gilbert and Gubar's feminist humor is both liberating and empowering, permitting us, in Bakhtin's words, to “finger” modernism “on all sides … dismember it, lay it bare and expose it” (Bakhtin, p. 23). Nor is humor their only weapon. For, as their attacks on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Lawrence, Graves, etc., suggest, these postmodern women warriors certainly have, in Mary Daly's words, the “courage to blaspheme” (Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism [Boston: Beacon Press, 1978] p. 264). Why, then, do they fight so cautiously to have their own ideas accepted?

Whatever the reason, they show a similar caution when they respond to the theories of the French feminists. In the following example, they are speculating about what Virginia Woolf meant by the phrase a “woman's sentence”: “Provisionally, we want to suggest that Woolf used what was essentially a fantasy about a utopian linguistic structure … to define (and perhaps disguise) her desire to revise not woman's language but woman's relation to language” (p. 230). This strikes me, as does much of the above, as an eminently reasonable interpretation and a practical way out of what often become the labyrinths of linguistic theory. It is not the last word on a female language, but it gives us a great deal to think about.

Though the book's impact is somewhat lessened by the hesitancy evident in the final chapter, overall it remains a powerful vehicle for interrogating our most deeply held convictions about modernism. For this reason alone, it would be worth reading. the woman's need of man” (p. 41) and of Austen she writes “a subtler reading of Jane's fiction shows how consistently she queries and even reverses the agreed social assumptions” (p. 44). I cannot help but think that when Miles refers to Brontë and Austen in this way she undermines the stature of two of our greatest (women) writers. She also seems to contradict herself in her final chapter. On page 204 she criticizes the “sheer parochialism of much women's writing” because of its “narrow concentration upon the minutiae of women's lives, the emphasis on domestic difficulties and sexual sorrows”; then on page 206 she claims that “any denial of the validity of women's lives and experience—any denial—is inescapably the same old misogyny rising up from the primeval swamp, whether expressed by a man, or as frequently happens, a woman.”

In conclusion I feel impelled to comment on certain errors and omissions in both The Female Form and No Man's Land. Although they are not major problems, they seem to suggest a pattern. For some reason, Miles is under the impression that Rita Mae Brown is a black woman (p. 110) and that Maya Angelou's autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a novel (p. 104). For their part, Gilbert and Gubar think Richard Wright's book is called A Native Son and Zora Neale Hurston's heroine is named Janie Crawford Killocks Starks Woods (p. 238). Though these are admittedly minor mistakes, I cannot help but be troubled by the fact that in one way or another they all involve blacks. I am also troubled by Gilbert and Gubar's subtitle, The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth-Century, when what they mean is the place of the Anglo-American woman writer. Miles, in referring to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, observes that: “Female Angst and alienation from the all-pervading structures of male domination are expressed with no less anguish in the ‘advanced’ world” (p. 126). As far as I am concerned, when Miles puts the word advanced in inverted commas here, she does nothing to correct or eliminate the cultural slam implied in her comparison.

These mistakes and oversights ruin neither book for me (though for other reasons I find them much more problematical in Miles’ book than in Gilbert and Gubar's), but I interpret them as a disturbing indication of the continuing ethnocentricity of white western feminists. It is perhaps no wonder that Alice Walker prefers the concept of “Womanist,” when three such notable feminist scholars inadvertently duplicate the same kind of critical narrowness they have set out to correct.