[In the following review, Rose evaluates the themes of Sexual/Textual Politics in the context of comparison to Gayle Greene's Making a Difference.]

It hasn't been much more than a decade since the first, ground-breaking anthologies of feminist literary criticism appeared, bravely claiming The Authority of Experience, heralding nothing short of a revolution in pedagogy, publishing and canon (re)formation. Yet three years ago as I was putting together a reading list for a course in Feminist Literary Theory, I thought I could glimpse outlines of an emerging “history,” as “Images of Women” produced “Resisting Readers” who called for a “Literature of Their Own” until reminded of Archimedes. And then New French Feminisms changed the language and the name of the game. Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics is the book I might have wished to write, had some grant-giving fairy godmother provided me an opportunity to develop my casual observation into an analytic critique of that reading list.

Moi's book begins with Virginia Woolf. Where else? As she says, our goal as feminists must be a critical theory that does “both justice and homage to its great mother and sister.” Moi's book also begins with Elaine Showalter, who accuses Woolf of a “flight” from her gendered identity “into androgyny” and ends with Julia Kristeva, whose “deconstruction of the opposition between masculinity and femininity” provides a perspective from which to see that Woolf's “crucial concept of androgyny” recognizes the “falsifying metaphysical nature” of fixed gender identities.

Showalter slates Woolf for embracing androgyny because she sees it (accurately, Moi would cede) as a radical undermining of “the notion of the unitary self” which is crucial to the liberal humanist feminism Anglo-American feminists espouse. What Showalter and the Anglo-Americans fail to appreciate, Moi says, is that humanism is part and parcel of patriarchal ideology. Its “integrated self” (commonly called “Man,” Moi reminds us) is, according to Derrida, Irigaray and Cixous, “a phallic self … sole author of history and of the literary text.” Liberal humanist feminism—which posits both the unitary self and the possibility of a text that transparently represents this self—is thus ironically and embarrassingly in collusion with phallocentric ideology. (Moi distinguishes between Anglo-American and French feminists not geographically but ideologically: the American Jane Gallop is thus “French” and exempted from Moi's critique.)

French theorists, Kristeva in particular, are Virginia Woolf's true heirs, Moi maintains, because like her they reject the “metaphysical essentialism underlying patriarchal ideology, which hails God, the Father or the phallus as its transcendental signified [sic].” A combination of Derridean deconstruction and Kristevan semiotics “would seem” then “to hold considerable promise for future feminist readings of Woolf” and—if adequate readings of Woolf are taken as the litmus test of feminist theory—would therefore be the epistemology of choice for feminist criticism. But, Moi says, there are serious limitations to this poststructuralist theoretical orientation. Like psychoanalysis, which of course it has appropriated to its own ends, it is insufficiently sensitive to the historical matrix in which language and the subject are embedded. The project of feminist theory must, then, be the integration of deconstruction's insight—that the self is constructed in and by language—with a “larger” feminist theory of ideology that takes race, class and history into account.

I have lingered over Moi's introductory chapter because it elegantly encapsulates the larger enterprise of her book: “to discuss the methods, principles and politics at work within feminist critical practice” from an explicitly political vantage point. Yet at the same time that Moi's survey of “the most representative figures” of Anglo-American and French critical theory is biased towards continental theorists, it is disarmingly self-reflexive. Moi begins with Showalter and ends with Kristeva because she finds French deconstruction more congenial than Anglo-American liberal humanism. But as she has the honesty to fault Kristeva for political naiveté, so she also recognizes that her own book could be “indicted” because “its basic structure does not represent a more radical [Marxist-feminist] challenge to the current dominance of the Anglo-American and the French critical perspectives.”

In fact, I think she is unduly apprehensive on this score. The basic structure of her book demonstrates precisely the kind of deconstruction practiced by such British Marxist-feminists as Penny Boumelha, Cora Kaplan and Michèle Barrett. Moi's reading of representative Anglo-American and French feminist theorists uncovers the “gaps,” “absences” and fissures in their texts through which ideology can be glimpsed. She turns this deconstructionist screw on Kate Millett, Mary Ellmann (who fares better than the other Anglo-Americans because of her “deconstructive, decentering” irony), “Images of Women” criticism, Ellen Moers, Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar, Annette Kolodny and Myra Jehlen. (She excludes black and lesbian contributions to American feminist criticism because “so far, lesbian and/or black feminist criticism have presented exactly the same methodological and theoretical problems as the rest of Anglo-American feminist criticism.”)

Thus Kate Millett's rejection of Freud, in particular her resistance to the notion of an unconscious, reveals to Moi her investment in the idea of a conscious male conspiracy against women who, once made conscious of it by Millett, can rise up and declare themselves free. When Gilbert and Gubar maintain on the one hand that the traditional view of the relationship between author and text is hierarchical, authoritarian and paternal and insist on the other on the absolute subjective authority of the female writer, their inconsistency discloses their adherence to a critical practice “still laboring under the traditional patriarchal aesthetic values of New Criticism.” And, to give one example from the French theorists Moi prefers (no one is safe from the deconstructionist) Hélène Cixous's slide into biologism in her distinction between the “gift” and the “proper” not only contradicts her Derridean notion of différance but reveals that her “vision of women's writing” is “steeped in the very metaphysics of presence she claims she is out to unmask.”

Neither a purely objective documentary nor a narrowly sectarian polemic, Sexual/Textual Politics commands our respect, whether or not we agree with Moi's theoretical preferences, because of its unflinching integrity. Intended as an “introduction to feminist literary theory,” this book exemplifies feminist theory-making at its rigorous best.

Although with two exceptions the pieces collected in Making a Difference are review-essays, Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn's book does more than provide surveys of recent scholarship in linguistic, French post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, socialist, lesbian and black feminist criticism. The editors' own impressive contribution to the book establishes the context within which we are meant to read the rest of the essays, demonstrating the multiple perspectives feminist scholarship brings to our understanding of “the social construction of woman.”

Greene and Kahn's “Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Woman” is arguably more interdisciplinary than the collection of literary-critical essays it prefaces. Literature, they assert, is only one of several discursive practices “whose conventions encode social conventions and are ideologically complicit.” And “a feminist interpretation of literature involves decoding many of the same systems of signification with which social sciences,” chiefly anthropology and history, “are concerned.” Elegantly employing a polysemous text other feminist critics (notably Susan Gubar and Christine Froula) have invoked—Isak Dinesen's “The Blank Page”—Greene and Kahn consider the questions these disciplines, as practiced by feminists, ask in chorus: how did patriarchal power arise? what makes it persist? what is the relation between canonical history and its subversive subtext, women's history? what is the ideological status of narrative?

Greene and Kahn advocate and practice “an epistemologically radical feminist criticism” similar to Moi's, combining as it does deconstructive and materialist approaches to understand the “collusion” between discourse and ideology. The best pieces in the collection follow their example.

Given that each contributor seems to have been assigned a piece of the total picture, it is remarkable that so many manage to suggest the whole while developing their particular perspective. Nelly Furman and Cora Kaplan, for example, appear to be approaching the collusion between discourse and ideology from alien perspectives: Furman begins with language, Kaplan with class. Yet Furman's ultimate concern is with “the constitution of the social subject” in and by language, and Kaplan acknowledges that “class and race ideologies” are “steeped in and spoken through the language of sexual differentiation.” Both Furman and Kaplan question the assumption made by liberal feminist criticism—represented in Making a Difference by Sydney Janet Kaplan's survey of Anglo-American critics from Ellmann to Showalter, Kolodny and Gilbert and Gubar—that there exists a unified subject whose experience is reflected in literary representation. Rather, they argue, the subject is constructed in and by the “languages” of race, class and gender. The feminist critic's task, as Greene and Kahn insist in their introduction, is “to deconstruct [both] the social construction of gender and the cultural paradigms that support it.”

Furman's “The Politics of Language,” Kaplan's essay on “Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Feminist Criticism,” Ann Rosalind Jones on “French Theories of the Feminine” and Bonnie Zimmerman's “Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism” (reprinted from Feminist Studies) not only survey existing scholarship but also evaluate its epistemological sophistication. Sydney Janet Kaplan's survey of feminist critical practitioners and Judith Kegan Gardiner's review of feminist adaptations of a variety of psychological theories are less satisfying because less self-reflexive. Neither Kaplan nor Gardiner devotes much attention to post-structuralist, neo-Lacanian French theory, which informs the other essays in Making a Difference and contributes to the methodological posture of the book as a whole.

Two fine essays avoid the survey approach: Susan Willis “develop[s] a theoretical perspective” for reading black women writers and Adrienne Munich gives a virtuoso demonstration of how a feminist critic can “re-vise” the patriarchal canon to uncover a “female presence shin[ing] through the text's negation of it.” Although both Willis and Munich could have surveyed the critical tradition each represents (there is a growing corpus of both black feminist criticism and revisionary reappropriations of male-authored texts), I for one am glad they decided instead to demonstrate it. Willis argues persuasively for a reading of black women's writing that sees its central concerns—community, journey and the reclamation of sensuality—as more than thematic motifs or structuring devices. Rather, they constitute a “mode of discourse” which enables the writer to bring a “critical perspective” to bear on her personal and cultural history and on “the forms of oppression generated by capitalism.” In Willis's essay, as elsewhere in Making a Difference, the languages of race, class and gender interact in a sophisticated critical discourse. It is a powerful challenge to Moi's claim that black feminist criticism has not made a significant contribution to feminist theory.

Sula is a text that figures prominently not only in Susan Willis's essay but in Adrienne Munich's as well; there it serves to illustrate a strategy feminists might adopt, of “reading male-authored texts from the margins.” Another favorite text for feminists, The Yellow Wallpaper, provides Munich with “a striking metaphor for the feminist critic who is locked in a patriarchal world.” Like the narrator in that story, Munich discovers that “in the background of patriarchal texts are women trying to escape into readability.” Her readings of Genesis 2 and an episode from Don Quixote reveal a fear of female authority which may account for the erasure of the female voice in these and other male-authored texts. “The absence of Eve,” she proposes, may in fact merely screen “women's significant role” in the production of texts and of culture.

That feminist literary theory has a history was evident several years ago; these two critical surveys of that history not only put it in perspective but issue a challenge to aspiring theorists. Implicit in Greene and Kahn's book, explicit in Moi's, is a rigorous epistemological yardstick for judging the adequacy and comprehensiveness of any feminist approach to theory-making. Cora Kaplan, in her contribution to Making a Difference, says that “semiotic or psychoanalytic perspectives have yet to be integrated with social, economic and political analysis” and although Toril Moi persuasively argues that either of these approaches is preferable to “the homogenizing author-centered readings of Anglo-American critics,” she too calls for their combination. Both she and Nelly Furman conclude by invoking Jacques Derrida, who once imagined a discourse “beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine.” That discourse might, Furman believes, “explode the fabric of our society which we now conceive within the terms of the restricted economy of [patriarchal] exchange.” That discourse might also enable us to read Virginia Woolf.