[In the following review, Smith outlines the feminist scholarship of Sexual/Textual Politics, comparing it to the political and social concerns of Making a Difference and Rewriting English, two other gender studies.]

These books [Sexual/Textual Politics, by Toril Moi, Making a Difference, by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, and Rewriting English, edited by Janet Batsleer, Tony Davis, and Rebecca O'Rourke], all part of the Methuen “New Accents” series, edited by Terence Hawkes, represent the offerings on gender in a series intended to respond to a time of radical social change. All three explore significant aspects of gender studies; one in particular is important because it reflects a current debate within feminist literary criticism. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, by Toril Moi, which appears at first to be an introductory survey of the major figures of literary feminism from Kate Millett and Simone de Beauvoir to the present, is, in fact, a critique of two major strands of feminist thought, American feminist criticism and French feminist theory, from the viewpoint of a new generation of feminists impatient for social change and critical of both the “humanism” of an earlier generation of American critics and the apolitical stance of the French. Moi's book reflects her belief that feminist criticism has been stifled by the absence of a genuine critical debate about the political implication of its theory and methodology. She takes as a central principle of feminist criticism that no account (including her own) can ever be neutral, and she justifies her criticism by saying that the principle that has worked so well to challenge patriarchal thought should be used to examine the biases and assumptions of earlier feminist criticism. Her own biases, she tells us, are those of both an insider and an outsider: as “a Norwegian teaching French literature in England,” she remains in some ways marginal to both the Anglo-American and French traditions; yet as a “white European trained within the mainstream of Western thought,” she sees both traditions as crucial to her own critical and political practice (xiv). (It must also be said that her biases include a preference for deconstructive theory and little personal familiarity with the historical atmosphere in which American feminist criticism arose.)

In tracing the history of Anglo-American feminist criticism, Moi begins with two early classics, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1969) and Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women (1968). Both set the standard for feminist criticism of the 1970s, especially Millett in her bold break with the practices of the New Criticism. Moi credits Millett with defending the reader's power to free herself from “the received hierarchy of text and reader” (25) in her insistence on the social and cultural contexts of the text and in reading “against the grain.” Her powerful thesis that sexual domination pervades cultural ideology is marred by her insistence on sexual politics as “a conscious, well-organized male conspiracy” (28).

The publication of Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) marked a major shift from Ellmann's “images of women” criticism to an interest in the special history of women. Arguing that the female literary tradition had come from a relationship between women writers and their society and that it was society, not biology, that shaped women's perceptions of the world, Showalter ushered in a new era of feminist scholarship. In coining the witty terms “feminist critique” for criticism dealing with women's reading of male texts and “gynocriticism” for women's reading of female texts, Showalter brought many early issues of feminist theory into open discussion. While Moi acknowledges the importance of this work, she faults Showalter for encouraging an uncritical acceptance of women's texts as realistic reflections of experience while searching out the underlying contradictions, absences, and silences in male texts. Showalter could, of course, respond that this criticism reflects not only Moi's bias for deconstructive criticism, but a misunderstanding of Showalter's view of female readers in relation to male texts.

Another important study, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), offered a theory of female creativity that has influenced many later critics. They asserted that women's writing is characterized by a palimpsestic pattern—a surface design that conceals or obscures deeper meanings and thus simultaneously conforms to and subverts patriarchal norms. Moi approves their awareness that texts can deceive but feels that they do not go far enough to disrupt the authority of the text. As a reproof, she quotes a famous passage by Roland Barthes on “the death of the Author.” This objection gets to the heart of Moi's response to all American feminist theory—the too easy acceptance of a female authorial voice.

Moi is obviously more sympathetic to the tradition of French feminist theory. She considers Simone de Beauvoir to be the greatest feminist theorist of our time. Beauvoir's main thesis in The Second Sex (1949) is that “throughout history, women have been reduced to objects for men: ‘woman’ has been constructed as man's Other, denied the right to her own subjectivity and to responsibility for her own actions” (Moi 92). Beauvoir's monumental study shows how these assumptions affect all aspects of social, political, and cultural life. She also shows how women themselves have internalized this objectified status, living in a constant state of “inauthenticity.” Beauvoir's famous statement, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one,” sums up her refusal to accept the essentialism of any claims of a “woman's nature” or essence.

In contrast to Anglo-American emphasis on practical criticism, the major figures in French feminist thought after Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva write about the construction of sexual difference and women's relation to language. All three are strongly influenced by Lacan's reading of Freud, especially his distinction between the pre-Oedipal Imaginary stage of human development and the child's entry into the Symbolic order, which links to the acquisition of language. Woman's relationship to the language of the Symbolic order (which sees her as Other) centers French theory.

It is out of this context that Cixous proposes an alternative to the hierarchical, binary oppositions Derrida describes as characterizing Western thought. As an alternative to oppositions such as Activity/Passivity, Culture/Nature or Head/Emotions (in which women are always on the losing side), Cixous sets the concept of multiple, heterogeneous “difference” and a new écriture feminine (feminine writing). Cixous attempts to link women's writing to the Imaginary realm that precedes Symbolic language. Moi credits her with moving the whole feminist debate about the problems of women and writing away from the sex of the writer to an analysis of the articulations of sexuality and desire in the text. While acknowledging the importance of Cixous' work for all feminist thinkers, Moi notes her own “slippage” into the very dichotomies Cixous abhors.

For Moi, as for many other feminists, Irigaray's importance as a theorist rests on Speculum (1974), her masterly critique of Freud's theory of femininity seen in the context of Western philosophers from Plato to Hegel. Using the figure of the speculum, a mirror-like instrument used by gynecologists to shed light on and to penetrate the mysteries of a woman's sex, Irigaray literally shapes her inquiry to mirror this male approach to woman; the speculum section is in the center of the work, framed by her discussion of Freud and Plato. Freud's famous question “What is woman?” and his assumption that woman's nature is a “dark continent” are the predictable end of a long misogynist tradition. Moi sympathizes with Irigaray's visionary attempts to construct a new theory of femininity and a new woman's language, but she echoes the same criticism she made of Cixous' similar efforts; both assign fixed characteristics to woman. More importantly, Moi reflects the concerns of a younger generation of women impatient with utopian dreams when women's material well-being should be addressed.

The work of Julia Kristeva addresses the questions of women's oppression and emancipation from a position somewhat closer to material reality. Seeing language as the context of social meanings but rejecting modern linguistics as authoritarian, Kristeva shifts the feminist debate from language itself to the speaking subject and from linguistics to semiotics. For her, language is a signifying process that is interactive. Rather than seeking a women's language she urges the study of specific linguistic strategies in specific situations. If all meaning is contextual, and isolated words or syntactic structures take on the meaning provided by individual speakers, then language itself cannot be said to be either sexist or non-sexist, especially when similar speech by men and women is interpreted differently. In her theory of marginality and subversion, Kristeva recognizes the power of the marginal and the heterogeneous to subvert the central structures of traditional linguistics and the Symbolic realm. But, as Moi points out, this theory of revolution, although less visionary than the theories of Cixous and Irigaray, avoids any discussion of conscious decision-making or revolutionary agency.

Even though Moi is more sympathetic towards Kristeva's ideas than those of any of the other feminist thinkers she discusses, she protests Kristeva's lack of a materialist analysis of social change, saying “it is still not clear why it is so important to show that certain literary practices break up the structures of language when they seem to break up little else” (171).

In part, the value of Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics lies in the examination of both the French and the American traditions so that their differences can be assessed. While she describes the separation of the two traditions as more rigid than it actually was (and is), she obviously does this to keep clearly before us a consistent evaluative standard and a sense of how these approaches fit her sense of today's needs. We feel her deep personal concern for the importance of change in women's lives and her admiration for the work of the critics and theorists she treats. The critical standards and political concerns that emerge from her study are clear: she warns American critics of the unreliability of the text as a reflection of reality and of an unconscious acceptance of the aesthetics of a formalist criticism; she warns the French that their dreams of a woman's language will lead to the same separatist categories that have marginalized women throughout history and chides them for their lack of attention to social reform.

But in attempting her own deconstruction of both traditions, Moi reveals an inconsistency that troubles us as readers partly because it reflects a fundamental dilemma facing all feminists today. The real question this study poses, an all too familiar one for feminist critics and researchers, is whether it is possible to work for social change with only the tools of deconstruction. Deconstruction itself recognizes this problem (which is why Derrida insists that deconstruction is a method, not a theory). It is clear in several places in her text that Moi too is aware of this problem; her preference for the semiotics of Kristeva and the theories of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey demonstrates this. Yet many of her objections to individual critics or theorists betray a mixed message. An example of this ambivalence is her approval of the use of women's texts to open up the lives and work of forgotten authors and a new women's history, yet she rejects the possibility of the author's presence in these same texts. Despite this problem, Moi's book represents an important effort to sort out the differences in assumptions and methodologies in feminist criticism and a willingness to make explicit the sometimes contradictory demands of her own theoretical position.

Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, collects essays by feminist scholars that echo many of the same issues as Moi's book, but from the added cultural perspective of the social sciences. The excellent introductory essay by the editors describes the same “dual task” of feminist scholarship: “deconstructing predominantly male cultural paradigms and reconstructing a female perspective and experience in an effort to change the tradition that has silenced and marginalized us” (1). Part of the charm of the opening overview comes from the matching of sections on feminist developments in anthropology, history, and literature against a story by Isak Dinesen, “The Blank Page,” which beautifully represents many of the issues of patriarchal power and the challenges to that power possible for those who are marginal. Other essays survey the state of feminist criticism and language studies, French theories of the feminine (adding the work of Monique Wittig to the theorists Moi presents), and psychoanalysis. Essays by Bonnie Zimmerman on lesbian feminist criticism and Susan Willis on the work of four black women writers give focus to the book's purpose of exploring the many ways feminist studies open up the literary canon. One particularly impressive essay by Cora Kaplan deals with socialist feminist criticism, a subject especially interesting in light of issues raised in Moi's study. Kaplan describes the split between “liberal humanists” and socialist feminist critics on the relative value of feeling versus social analysis in literature. She traces the origins of this division to Rousseau and Wollstonecraft in a fascinating historical/literary analysis.

Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class, by Janet Batsleer, Tony Davis, Rebecca O'Rourke, and Chris Weedon, adds a specialized perspective to the subject of gender and class. Written by members of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, it explores the history of a group project that began as an examination of the literature of the 1930s but grew into a project of “contextual” studies that looked behind such decade labels to determine the forces which “construct” dominant versions of literary history. In particular, the Birmingham group moved their study away from “literature” and closer to “English studies,” to focus on the dominance of certain literary-critical ideologies, their forms of power, and their institutional locations. Chapters deal with literacy and literature, educational priorities, working-class writing, the difference in the forms of popular fiction read by men and women, and women's reading and writing. As the project developed, the relationship of gender and class became an important category, and several chapters include gender issues. Two paired chapters investigate the ways in which both masculine and feminine romances help to constitute a sense of gender in readers; their depressing conclusion seems to be that women read romances because they end in marriage, while men read adventure fiction to reinforce their masculinity—women in male books are present only as sexual objects. The concluding chapter notes that contemporary socialist feminism has opened up many questions of class and gender that must now be part of new definitions of contextual studies.

Different as these three books are, their combined presence in an important series addressing new issues in literary studies shows the important place feminist scholarship now holds, at least in academic departments, and the growing general interest in the relationship of gender and class. All three in different ways show not only the rapid growth of gender scholarship, but also the movement to expand literary studies into more broadly social and political concerns.