[In the following essay, Landry addresses the political implications of Sexual/Textual Politics in the context of contemporary feminist theory.]

“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them. …”

… And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that those authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?

Bessie Head, A Question of Power¹

It is hardly a startling revelation that feminist theorists have tended to write essays rather than books. Indeed, something of a feminist orthodoxy has developed from this preference for the open arena, in which the dialogue is never forced into anything but a provisional closure, unlike the monumental silences that mark the endings and shuttings of books. Besides, essays are modest and bespeak collectivity and community: published articles are said to have a half-life of six months, and they take their place next to other articles in collections where they attain a certain collaborative aura even if they are not officially labelled as the products of collective labor. The appearance of the first booklength surveys of the field thus cannot fail to strike problematical as well as possibly progressive notes: disciplinary expansion and recognition (cheers!), creeping reification and theoretical dogmatism (boos!). The convenience of having a single text to recommend to students and other interested parties, or to order for a course in which feminist theory is to be represented, does not necessarily outweigh the political and theoretical consequences of this discursive shift within feminism that locates it ever more securely within the capitalist circuitry of book publishing.

The immediacy of this shift is apparent from the first footnote of Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory,² Moi finds herself claiming that in spite of the appearance of K. K. Ruthven's Feminist Literary Studies in 1984,³ her book remains as its first sentence announces, “the first full introduction to this field … to be published in English.”⁴ She insists that she does not really need to change her introductory sentence, written “some months” before Ruthven's book was published, not least because his book is more concerned with practical or applied feminist criticism than hers is, and because his is too English-department oriented, thus ignoring French feminist theory. Yet neither of these assessments is strictly accurate, thus arousing, however reluctantly, the suspicion that Moi has not read Ruthven carefully enough. And both of these assessments can be seen to redound upon her own work in peculiar ways.

But Moi's major objection to Ruthven's study is an important one, characteristic of her book's interventionist brilliance. Moi's consistently lucid analysis of the political implications of a number of (it must be said: largely First Worldist, white, academic and class-privileged) feminist theoretical positions in vogue today is her book's chief strength. Her objection to Ruthven is not, as he seems to fear, that he is a man intervening in feminist debates, but that he is a man who perhaps overestimates the advisibility of or necessity of men in this historical moment to assume a vanguardist or “leading role” in feminist debates, especially if, like Ruthven, they have a tendency to fall back on a “safe” academicism just at the point when a more radical theoretical position would demand a critique of the institutional bases of the bastion of literary criticism itself. Ruthven writes, disappointingly, but not perhaps surprisingly (given his rather snide anti-marxism and verging-on-the-paranoid polemic against a “feminist separatism” that seems to be lurking everywhere and is intransigent when confronted with liberal male offers of a helpful “moderation”) that, “whatever else feminism might be, and whatever ends it might think of itself as serving, by the time it enters literary studies as critical discourse it is just one more way of talking about books.”⁵ One can only insist, and ideology, and the politics of cultural production of value, and so politics will never be entirely absent, however harmless “purely academic” feminist-inspired discussions of books may sometimes seem. Moi is right to object to this depoliticizing tendency of Ruthven's scholarly, witty, and in other ways extremely useful book.

Procedurally speaking, Moi's approach to the texts of feminist theory she has chosen is admirable. She situates herself as a culturally-specific subject, acknowledging both her marginality as a Norwegian who teaches French at Oxford and her imperial (etho)centrism as a “white European trained within the mainstream of Western thought” (p. xiv). Her method of exposition consists of a recapitulation of the argument under discussion followed by a more or less strident critique of its theoretical limitations, ideological blind-spots, and political dangers. This is a brave book: it tackles without apology (thus breaching some feminists' assumptions about sisterly solidarity) several of our most influential Anglophone theorists. And while Moi's study presents the post-structuralist, post-deconstructivist theories of the “French feminists” Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva on the whole more sympathetically, it does not flinch from engaging in the most thorough and direct exposure of some of the problems such work presents for a feminist critical practice or a feminist politics.

The crux of Moi's argument as it emerges in her readings of such “classic” texts of feminism as Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1969), Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), and Myra Jehlen's “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism” (1981),⁶ is that mainstream Anglo-American feminist criticism suffers from an insufficiently critical dependence upon a bourgeois, humanist, hence patriarchal aesthetics:

What feminists … fail to grasp is that the traditional humanism they represent is in effect part of patriarchal ideology. As its centre is the seamlessly unified self—either individual or collective—which is commonly called ‘Man.’ As Luce Irigaray or Hélène Cixous would argue, this integrated self is in fact a phallic self, constructed on the model of the self-contained, powerful phallus. Gloriously autonomous, it banishes from itself all conflict, contradiction and ambiguity. In this humanist ideology the self is the sole author of history and of the literary text: the humanist creator is potent, phallic and male—God in relation to his world; the author in relation to his text. History or the text become nothing but the ‘expression’ of this unique individual: all art becomes autobiography. …

(p. 8)

In these terms it becomes possible to critique feminist texts as diverse as those listed above in relation to a certain bourgeois humanist thematics of authenticity, self-identity, and emotion that reveals itself as ideology. That the theoretical underpinning of such influential works as Showalter's and Gilbert and Gubar's can justly be classified as liberal humanist will not be news to many. And there are those who might wish to object to this definition of the bourgeois self as “seamlessly unified” rather than as (equally reified) “self-divided.” But Moi's characterization of liberal feminist theory as it reproduces itself in textual interpretation reveals certain limiting, even reactionary, assumptions about subjectivity that many feminists whose practical politics are far more radical than Showalter's or Gilbert and Gubar's help perpetuate.

The veneration accorded female anger, for example, by Millett, Showalter, and Gilbert and Gubar, as the determinant key to unlocking women's experience of the real, becomes recognizable through Moi's analysis as a naively mimetic, psychologistic, and ethnocentric prejudice, interpretatively reductive as well as politically unsound in its preservation of a tendency toward violence. Autobiography, too, so often regarded as a sanctified means of politicizing the personal in feminist theory and practice, while all the while satisfying that bourgeois hunger for subjectivity-confirming plaisir, becomes in Moi's analysis not ideologically suspect as a genre, but inappropriate as an interpretative expectation when (mis)applied to other kinds of texts. Gilbert and Gubar in particular are taken to task, not for the more familiar accusation of relying too heavily on the oedipal dynamics of Harold Bloom's influence theory—a reliance that is problematical for feminism—but for reading all women's texts as fables of rebellious artistic struggle and development, an equally post-Romantic adherence to traditional literary-critical codes:

Their critical approach postulates a real woman hidden behind the patriarchal textual facade, and the feminist critic's task is to uncover her truth. … This position, which in less sophisticated guises is perhaps the most recurrent theme of Anglo-American feminist criticism, manages to transform all texts written by women into feminist texts, because they may always and without exception be held to embody somehow and somewhere the author's ‘female rage’ against patriarchal oppression.

(pp. 61-62)

If the “autobiographical tendency” within feminism does little more than perpetuate the bourgeois humanist illusion of a self that can be repeatedly secured through acts of writing as “self-expression” and acts of reading as self-constitution-in-consumption, then that notion requires a major overhaul. Otherwise feminist criticism will fail to be socially transformative in any radical way, or fail to offer us any new forms of subjectivity, only the repackaged replication of liberal humanism that radical or socialist feminisms theoretically strive to reject.

The substantive challenge of Moi's argument lies in her contention that Western feminist aesthetics lags behind feminist politics on the road of revolutionary feminist praxis. All too often in the West, when we read a literary text, we are apt to fall back on a naive mimeticism, in which authorial and characterological struggles stand in for our own. This naive relation to questions of signification is often accompanied by a residual bias toward realism and against modernism or avant-garde experimentalism. The feminist desire for an historicist reconstruction of the suppressed texts of women's experience does not obviate the need to develop new, politically useful strategies for reading those texts. To fail to do so would be to fall prey to bourgeois empiricism as well as humanism. And post-structuralist ideas, Moi argues, especially the theories of subjectivity and textuality put forward by Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, and Kristeva, are crucial to the development of a theoretically sophisticated, politically progressive feminist criticism.

According to Moi, bourgeois notions of the unitary self reproduce themselves in unitary readings of texts, preferably realist texts (as Moi demonstrates, a bias shared by Lukácsian as well as bourgeois criticism). Many feminist critics thus find the modernist textuality of a writer like Virginia Woolf surprisingly troubling and difficult of access—for Moi, a signal that feminist criticism needs precisely a theory of textuality that can accommodate such “pioneering modes” of textual—and subject(ive)—production:

The humanist desire for a unity of vision or thought (or as [Marcia] Holly puts it, for a ‘noncontradictory perception of the world’) is, in effect, a demand for a sharply reductive reading of literature—a reading that, not least in the case of an experimental writer like Woolf, can have little hope of grasping the central problems posed by pioneering modes of textual production. A ‘noncontradictory perception of the world’, for Lukács's Marxist opponent Bertolt Brecht, is precisely a reactionary one.

(pp. 10-11)

The values espoused here can be understood as those of marxian ideology critique: contradiction rather than monism or consensus; progressivism and variously experimental forms of cultural production with their estranging or alienating effects rather than “nostalgic” movements of return to a pre-existing and repressively “unified” order. Throughout Moi's book, left-leaning post-structuralist textual theory and innovative textual production collude to help make thinkable a new social order less bourgeoisified and patriarchal than our own. But as my epigraph from the South African writer Bessie Head's novel suggests, this very reliance on theoretical and literary vanguardism is itself a “high cultural” and Eurocentric notion which assumes that the complex, the difficult, and the elusively incoherent are “truer” or more culturally “progressive” than more familiar literary forms accessible to those outside the vanguard.

The character who smugly reels off a list of authors famous for being almost impossible to understand is Camilla, a Danish agricultural expert working in Botswana, whose method of teaching stands in stark contrast to the sympathetically rational, methodical explanations of other knowledgeable characters in the novel. The interior reflection on the political uselessness of these elite Danish writers is Elizabeth's; she is a “coloured” South African exile who resents Camilla's assertions of cultural superiority: “She flung information at her in such a way as to make it totally incomprehensible and meaningless, subtly demonstrating that to reach her level of education Elizabeth had to be able to grasp the incoherent.”⁷ The irony lies in Head's own textual production, which is far from “simple” in its exploration of socially produced mental breakdown, its mingling of African and Western mythemes, its generic disruptions and characterological discontinuities, and its far from naively utopian political vision. Yet Head's novel is grounded in certain realist assumptions about narrative and can be understood by the post-colonial Anglophone “ordinary man” (though many American undergraduates find it unsettling). The difference between Head's “pioneering mode of textual production” and Moi's examples is that Head's is not classically “modernist” in the high European sense; indeed it explicitly questions the depoliticizing elitism of modernism's insularly formalist concerns, while producing new post-colonialist modes of textual and subjective confrontation. The legacy of modernism is surely not, politically or aesthetically, an unmixed one. And while the Lukács-Brecht debate provides a useful touchstone for a critique of humanist aesthetics, the terms of that debate are too narrow to supply us with contemporary feminist answers to the problem of reading the politics of literary forms against masculinist traditions and in less ethnocentric ways. The limitation of Moi's critique of feminism's residual humanist aesthetics is its substitution of a modernist polemic for a more heterogeneous encounter with textual and theoretical developments outside the mainstreams of Europe and North America.

If Moi has powerfully foregounded the need for new aesthetic criteria in the struggle to change subjectivity, she has also supplied us with the best available introduction to French feminist theory in English. Much of the fuss and bother over the high theoreticism of “new French” feminisms on this side of the Atlantic has by now died away, and so it is no longer accurate to claim, as Moi does, that “Anglo-American feminist critics have been mostly indifferent or even hostile towards literary theory, which they have often regarded as a hopelessly abstract ‘male’ activity” (p. 70). Many are by now aware of the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva, the three theorists Moi analyzes in some detail. Previous discussions widely available in America, whether in the influential anthology New French Feminisms or such essays as Ann Rosalind Jones's “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'écriture féminine,”⁸ have tended to treat these writers as participants in a discourse of French feminist theory in such a way that their ideas, critical positions, and politics seem so intellectually cross-hatched as to be almost interchangeable. One might wish to object to Moi's author-centered approach to the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva on other, post-structuralist grounds. But her examination of their theoretical positions here as distinguishable in terms of certain aims and tendencies is useful; she characterizes each in relation to essentialist or biologistic assumptions, the politico-aesthetic project of women writing/writing about women, and feminist political praxis.

Briefly: Cixous's notion of écriture féminine, despite its residual biologism and essentialist implications with regard to gender, is recuperated as utopian in the liberationary sense; Irigaray's groundbreaking critique of patriarchal discourse is valued over her (residually essentialist) attempts to write “femininity” and her work as a whole is criticized as lacking in historical specificity and any coherent materialist analysis of power. Kristeva emerges as the nearly impeccable heroine of this text:

If, as I have previously argued, all efforts towards a definition of ‘woman’ are destined to be essentialist, it looks as if feminist theory might thrive better if it abandoned the minefield of femininity and femaleness for a while and approached the questions of oppression and emancipation from a different direction. This, to a great extent, is what Julia Kristeva has tried to do. But it is also paradoxically one of the reasons why Kristeva, as opposed to Cixous and Irigaray, cannot strictly speaking be considered a purely feminist theorist.

(pp. 148-49)

Given the likelihood of a feminist refusal to concatenate such notions as “purity” with an interdisciplinary, indeed anti-disciplinary, and emancipatory feminist praxis, the “purely” here is surely an unwitting orthodoxism. Kristeva's work does appeal to Moi because her critical enterprise, less essentialist, because less woman-centered than Cixous's or Irigaray's, equates the alien(ating) and the (e)strange(ing) with the radically subversive, especially as exemplified in avant-garde artistic production—compatible with Moi's own attention to (her) cultural difference and aesthetic privileging of modernism. Kristeva also “speaks across” the disciplines of linguistics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, as an authoritative theoretical subject not bound by the essentializing provincialisms of “pure” feminism. Her formulation of femininity, analogous to other forms of philosophical, political, and social marginality, as a matter of “positionality rather than of essences” (p. 166) is presented as potentially liberationary:

Kristeva's vision … is one in which the hierarchical closure imposed on meaning and language has been opened up to the free play of the signifier. Applied to the field of sexual identity and difference, this becomes a feminist vision of a society in which the sexual signifier would be free to move; where the fact of being born male or female no longer would determine the subject's position in relation to power, and where, therefore, the very nature of power itself would be transformed.

(p. 172)

Such a “vision” is, as Moi admits, “utopian” and thus not likely to be realized soon. But is gender finally the only ground upon which an all too elusive “power” structure is to be, de facto (“therefore”), transformed in such a way as to banish as well class, race, and other historico-political and hierarchically-deployed differences? Many feminists will doubtless remain unconvinced that the globally applied, suspiciously liberal/libertarian free-market and post-sixties-sexual-revolutionary rhetoric of such a “vision” will provide an unproblematical model for a feminist utopia.

Let me hasten to add that Moi does not find Kristeva's theoretical interventions above reproach. She concedes, rather daringly if not downright disablingly, that there are certain political questions to be raised: “I will try to show how many of Kristeva's most valuable insights draw at times on highly contentious forms of subjectivist politics” (p. 169), and “Equally noticeable is the lack of materialist analysis of social relations in Kristeva's concept of ‘marginality’, which lumps together all kinds of marginal and oppositional groups as potentially subversive of the social order” (p. 171). This sounds so damaging as to leave us with little beyond Kristeva's dedication to “anti-essentialism” and commitment to the subversive potential of those “pioneering modes of textual production” Moi also wishes to endorse. One might add that Kristeva's more recent work on the figure of the Madonna is problematical for feminism. It is not easy to see how it is supposed to function as a critique of what Moi unmaterialistically and misleadingly calls “the material basis for women's oppression: motherhood” (p. 168, italics mine). For surely “motherhood” is a cultural and ideological phenomenon, unlike the “womb” and “clitoris,” material sites of reproduction and women's sexual pleasure, respectively, the social control of which constitutes a cross-cultural basis for women's oppression. It is arguable that these texts of Kristeva's are not necessarily recuperable as feminist documents but should be read as a woman's contribution to the discourse of the “eternal feminine” as maternal (read anti-clitoral). Following Gayatri Spivak, one might wish as well to question once again a global “anti-essentialism” as a post-structuralist piety not necessarily useful for feminism. As Spivak has suggested, in this historical moment, women may have to take “the risk of essence” in order to act politically and think really differently, a suggestion recently applauded by Alice Jardine.⁹

Given the obvious strengths of Moi's readings generally, it is disheartening to find her capable of reductive misreading, historical misunderstanding, a rigid binarism that she deconstructively objects to but does not in practice sufficiently displace, and a rather surprising penchant for notions of authorial greatness and canonicity at odds with her other theoretical preferences. To take the last of these first: In the light of the occultation of Virginia Woolf to be found within both academic feminism and something we could call a popular female readership, Moi's discussion of modernist fiction may at first seem as puzzling as it is illuminating. Only after we recognize the gap between the cult of personality, that has so often made Woolf the object of tokenization as well as feminist admiration, and the challenge presented by her ideology-critical texts, can we appreciate Moi's project of “rescuing” Woolf from critical misapprehension. It is thus doubly disappointing to have Woolf's stature as a canonical writer invoked as a final reproof to recalcitrant feminist critics, as if the true test of a theory were its capacity for dealing with “genius,” a term suggestive of a residual bellelettrism: “The feminist critic thus unwittingly puts herself in a position from which it becomes impossible to read Virginia Woolf as the progressive, feminist writer of genius she undoubtedly was” (p. 18). An author-centered approach to the whole field of feminist theory has its strategic drawbacks, as well. A reading of a “representative” theoretical text can so easily turn into an ad feminam attack; this is the case with Moi's reading of Myra Jehlen's essay, “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism.”

Originally published in Signs in 1981 and anthologized twice since,¹⁰ Jehlen's essay should be understood in its peculiarly American context, a context which Moi seems to have slightly misjudged. Jehlen's advocacy of a “radical comparativism” should be read primarily as a challenge to Elaine Showalter's notion of gynocritics as the principal field for future feminist investigations. Jehlen fears that a feminist focus on women's writing in isolation from men's—for which read the canonical texts of patriarchal culture—will result in the ghettoization of feminist criticism and the institutional cooptation of feminist political energies: “The problem is that the issues and problems women define from the inside as global, men treat from the outside as insular. Thus, besides the exfoliation of reports on the state of women everywhere and a certain piety on the subject of pronouns, there is little indication of feminist impact on the universe of male discourse.”¹¹ This is a reasonable complaint about the institutional effects of women's studies courses that do not also seek to challenge masculinist assumptions in other disciplines. Unaccountably, Moi takes this to mean that Jehlen is advocating abandoning the study of women's writing for a return to studying the canon; this is Moi's first move in a strategy of (mis)reading to make Jehlen's essay fit certain assumptions that Moi, quite rightly, wishes to reprove.

In a sense Jehlen's essay is ripe for such misreading because, in a characteristically American fashion, she eschews a rigorous presentation of her position for an engagingly discursive examination of some of the contradictions that traditionally trained feminist scholars often find themselves confronting, such as the contradiction between an inherited formalist aesthetics and the avowedly political commitments of a feminist critical practice. Few American feminists in departments of literature are likely to be as comfortable as Moi is with the theories of radical textuality she seeks to promote, however interested they may be in such theories' politico-critical possibilities. Jehlen's essay appeals to this lack of ease with left-wing theory while simultaneously claiming for feminism a certain alliance with it: “(I cite Sartre and Macherey more or less at random among more or less left-wing critics because theirs is a situation somewhat like that of feminists, though less difficult, many would argue, in that they already have a voice of their own …)” (p. 194). This is the studiedly “disinterested” stance of the American feminist who wishes to advance difficult, perhaps unpopular ideas without offending anyone or generating a certain characteristically American, irrational response that many Europeans seem to have trouble understanding.

So also, Jehlen is not able casually to banish New Critical criteria from her aesthetic agenda, because such criteria remain the dominant critical currency in American academia, to be abandoned at the risk of disciplinary exclusion and accusations of critical dogmatism at the very least. Hence she maintains an uneasy distinction in her essay between “ideological” or “political” criticism, and “appreciative” criticism. This does not mean that she denies or “forgets” the political nature of criticism generally, as Moi accuses her of doing. The unrigorous terminology is, I think, meant to suggest the often incompletely understood self-division that an American-trained literary critic (“taught to value, above all, value-free scholarship” [p. 194]) who is also a feminist, will most likely experience. For Jehlen, the contradiction between political commitment and aesthetic judgment is precisely the space in which to intervene, “for a work may be, from my standpoint, quite wrong and even wrongheaded about life and politics and still an extremely successful rendering of its contrary vision” (p. 192). Hence Jehlen's reluctance to endorse the gynocritical flight into a realm of women's texts where sympathetic appreciation seems likely, and the more awkward contradiction is not broached.

For Moi, maintaining such a distinction at all, even in the interests of a self-critical rhetoric of “contradiction,” is untenable. She takes Jehlen to task for “undermining” some of “the most basic tenets of feminist criticism” (p. 86) and for “believing” that “critical appreciation” may in fact be “non-political,” thus “abandoning one of the most fundamental political insights of former feminist analysis,” a gesture that she finds “particularly bizarre” (p. 84). As well she might, but Jehlen has done no such thing. Jehlen's essay could profit from a better understanding of the work of Macherey, and from a Derridean recognition that there is no critical stance available outside the enclosure of what one seeks to criticize, but Moi has done her readers a disservice by failing to register the nuances of Jehlen's peculiarly American critique of current feminist practices.

More problematical still is Moi's dismissal of black, lesbian, or black-lesbian criticism as not worth discussing because it presents “exactly the same methodological and theoretical problems as the rest of Anglo-American feminist criticism” (p. 86). Given that Moi herself maintains that the political stakes of a particular enunciation or event determine its meaning (or undecidability) in feminist terms, this seems a questionably off-hand dismissal. It is also arguable that “in so far as textual theory is concerned” (p. 86), lesbian and black feminist criticism have foregounded problems quite different from those of the white Anglo-American mainstream. Analyses of the textual silences surrounding lesbianism, and, alternatively, the construction of a lesbian discourse, as exemplified in several of the articles in the “Lesbian Issue” of Signs,¹² go beyond the naive mimeticism of a focus on “lesbian women in literature” that Moi describes. The controversies surrounding Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple and its adaptation for the screen sharply focus a number of significant differences between white middle-class, black masculinist, and black feminist conceptions of textuality, and characterological and narrative functions. When a text's reception is marked by expectations of “typicality” (if not “stereotypicality”) rather than of “individuality” in the representation of characters, for example, quite different theoretical as well as political questions are being broached. Work on the black or native figure as the excluded other, often ex-orbitant to or uncontainable by the text's putative closure is also hardly as innocent of post-structuralist theory as Moi implies; see, for example, Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gayatri Spivak's recent essays such as “‘Draupadi’ by Mahasveta Devi” and “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.”¹³ Such work often refuses to accept the theory it appropriates without also offering a political critique of “imperial theory” or “imperial feminism,” and engagement with such critiques, rather than a mere acknowledgment of them (“In this respect, recent work on Third-World women has much to teach us” [p. 86]), would have improved Moi's claim to be offering a politically astute survey of the field of current feminist theory.

But it is one of the oddities of Moi's structural procedure that she deconstructively objects to her own division of the field into Anglo-American and French feminist theory, yet clings to these categories anyway. No third term is allowed to insinuate itself for long between the poles of this binary opposition, neither the “marginal” feminisms noted above nor the marxist-feminism to which Moi is obviously very much indebted. Indeed, with the notable exception of French theory, as we have seen, the closer Moi comes to approving of a critical position, the likelier she is to dismiss it as outside the bounds of her admittedly limited introductory survey. Such an attempt to clear ground, set limits, and define one's turf is understandable. One can only regret that Moi has found it necessary to define her turf in such an admittedly unsatisfactory way. Nevertheless, she has managed to do two difficult things at once: to introduce a field so as to make it both interesting and negotiable for the novice, and to produce her own theoretical intervention so that the field of feminist debate will never again be quite the same.

Notes

1. Bessie Head, A Question of Power (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 79.

2. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985).

3. K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984).

4. Moi, Preface, p. xiii and Notes, p. 174. Subsequent references appear in the text.

5. Ruthven, p. 8.

6. Mary Ellmann, Thinking about Women (New York: Harcourt, 1968), Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1969; London: Virago, 1977). Elaine Showalter, A Literature Of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), Myra Jehlen, “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” Signs, 6:4 (Summer, 1981), 575-601.

7. Head, p. 76.

8. New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981), and Ann Rosalind Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'écriture féminine,” Feminist Studies, 7:2 (Summer, 1981), 247-63, reprinted in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

9. Alice Jardine, “Men in Feminism: Odor di Uomo or Compagnons de Route?” in Critical Exchange, 18 (Spring, 1985), 27.

10. Myra Jehlen, “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” reprinted in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982) and The “Signs” Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship, ed. Elizabeth Abel and Emily Abel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983).

11. Jehlen, “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” as reprinted in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, p. 190. Subsequent references appear in the text.

12. Signs, 9:4 (Summer, 1984).

13. Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (London and New York: Methuen, 1984) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “‘Draupadi’ by Mahasveta Devi” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 381-402 and “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” in Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (Autumn, 1985), 253-61.