[In the following review, Todd maintains that Sexual/Textual Politics succeeds in uncovering the theoretical assumptions of feminist theory, but finds some weaknesses in the second half of the book.]

Published as part of the New Accents series, Sexual/Textual Politics presents itself as an introduction for the general reader to “the two main approaches to feminist literary theory, the Anglo-American and the French” (xiii). This is not quite an accurate picture, however. Although Moi does indeed discuss the major texts and authors of feminist criticism in the United States and French theoretical writings on woman in France, her book does not so much “introduce” an already-existing discipline or critical theory as argue for the pressing need for one. For, as Moi realizes, feminist literary theory does not yet exist, not in the United States, where feminist critics have been suspicious of theory, nor in France, where women philosophers and psychoanalysts have rarely concerned themselves with literary issues. Moi's discussions—incisive, critical but admirably well-balanced—uncover the theoretical assumptions at work in both Anglo-American feminist criticism and French theory and reveal how those assumptions are often in conflict with the political goals of feminism.

The book opens with a chapter on Virginia Woolf that underlines a major weakness in American feminist criticism, its failure to recognize Woolf's important literary and feminist contributions. The problem lies in her modernism and in what Moi calls her “deconstructive” approach to language. Critics such as Elaine Showalter, seeking the “message” behind A Room of One's Own as well as an authentic voice recording female experience, are dismayed by Woolf's elusive narrative voice, her irony and playfulness. Moi argues that this view rests on “a strong, unquestioned belief in the values … of traditional bourgeois humanism of a liberal-individualist kind” (6). Those values, she goes on to say, are in complicity with patriarchal ideology. Drawing on the theories of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, Moi convincingly shows that the politics of Woolf's writing lies in a textual practice that disrupts patriarchal ideology and symbolic structures.

The theoretical and political contributions of feminist critics are not negligible, and Moi is careful to underline these even as she questions certain of their assumptions. Early feminist critics effectively challenged the New Critical doctrine about the apolitical and ahistorical nature of the literary text and the reading process. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Moi writes, was “a powerful fist in the solar plexus of patriarchy” (26). She suggests that “Millett's importance as a literary critic lies in her relentless defence of the reader's right to posit her own viewpoint, rejecting the received hierarchy of text and reader” (25).

The weakness of Millett's approach, however, lies in assumptions about the relation of language and literature to society and about the nature of patriarchal ideology. Her notion of ideology as “remorseless, all-encompassing … monolithic” cannot account for the subversive strategies that have resisted this ideology. Indeed, it cannot account for the possibility of its own enunciation. Further, her “rhetorical requirements … force her into sometimes inaccurate or truncated accounts” (27) of complex theories or narrative strategies. In the end, she fails to consider the work of art as “a signifying process” (76) and to seek out the gaps and inconsistencies of ideology that are evident in texts. Mary Ellmann's little-known Thinking about Women, on the other hand, succeeds where Millett fails. This “ironic masterpiece” (35) “illustrate[s] the self-contradictory tangles that emerge as soon as one aspect of ideology is confronted with another” (38).

As feminist criticism shifted its emphasis from the male to the female writer, the relentless criticism of masculist ideology was replaced by a search for a uniquely female tradition. In this search, Moi argues, feminist critics have often reinstated the respect for authorship that the first wave of feminist criticism attacked. For example, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic “never once questions the authority of the female author” (62). Their critical practice still relies on the author as its “transcendental signified” (62). And, in Literary Women, Ellen Moers “avoids confronting the fact that the category of ‘greatness’ has always been an extremely contentious one for feminists, given that the criteria for ‘greatness’ militate heavily against the inclusion of women in the literary canon” (55). In simply expanding the traditional canon to include more women, feminist critics fail to question the assumptions that brought about their exclusion in the first place. In contrast to the critic who chooses to “sit quietly and listen to her mistress's voice as it expresses authentic female experience” (78), Moi argues that a theory that views both reading and writing as textual production will subject even texts written by women to “irreverent scrutiny” (78).

Throughout the first part of her book, then, Moi is arguing for a critical practice that combines political commitment with the subtle textual analysis of the post-structuralists. As her analysis of Woolf (as well as Monique Wittig) makes clear, her method does not locate the political import of literature in its representation of the social or of the author's experience, but rather in its very textuality.

Some readers will be dismayed by Moi's decision not to discuss black and lesbian feminist criticism on the grounds that it presents “exactly the same methodological and theoretical problems” (86) as Anglo-American feminist criticism in general. This exclusion unfortunately perpetuates the marginalization within feminist criticism of black and lesbian writers and their critics, a tendency that poses certain theoretical issues relevant to Moi's thesis. It points not only to an unwarranted reverence for the traditional canon and for the institutions that maintain it, but also to a major flaw in a critical practice that puts a premium on “female experience.” Once the identification of author, character, and reader is taken to be a primary goal, it seems inevitable that critics should seek out authors similar to themselves and should have difficulty dealing with the heterogeneity among women who write.

The second part of the book deals with the theoretical writings of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. Cixous is praised for showing how the “metaphysics of presence” has always arranged its binary oppositions along the axis of the male/female couple, but she is criticized for retaining “a vision of woman's writing steeped in the very metaphysics of presence she claims she is out to unmask” (110). Irigaray is similarly praised for her critique of patriarchal discourse but criticized for her “idealism” and “essentialism.” Yet Moi misses much of the force of Irigaray's work when she characterizes her fundamental strategy as a miming of male philosophical discourse and then objects that “what she seems not to see is that sometimes a woman imitating male discourse is just a woman speaking like a man” (143). Irigaray's “mimicry” is not imitating male enunciation, however, but rather taking on the properties that philosophical discourse has assigned to woman, lending a voice to the object/other in order to mock, in a female voice, a discourse that has always assumed the passivity and silence of the female.

Only Kristeva manages to escape the charge of essentialism, and only by refusing all definitions of the feminine. “In a sense … Kristeva does not have a theory of ‘femininity,’ and even less of ‘femaleness.’ What she does have is a theory of marginality, subversion and dissidence” (164). But this is “paradoxically one of the reasons why Kristeva, as opposed to Cixous and Irigaray, cannot strictly speaking be considered a purely feminist theorist” (148-49). The pressing question that Moi does not ask is why contradictions inevitably arise when female theorists attempt to apply Derrida's analysis of metaphysics to women's issues and why Kristeva's anti-essentialism leads to a distancing from feminism. Since, at another point, Moi argues that “conceptual terms are at once politically crucial and ultimately metaphysical” (160), it seems that these contradictions are not altogether avoidable or even undesirable. Can feminism as a political movement exist without a definition of “woman”?

A major structural weakness of this second part of the book is that Moi seems to have forgotten that her subject is feminist literary theory. It is of course true that French feminist theorists are not primarily concerned with the study of literature, but Moi might have attempted to connect their concerns with the issues raised in the first part of her book. Regrettably, she does not consider the work of such American-based critics as Shoshana Felman, Naomi Schor, Peggy Kamuf, Nellie Furman and others who have already begun to articulate French theory and the study of literature. This conjunction, exploited so productively in the chapter on Woolf, tends to get lost in the more philosophical discussions of the last part of the book.

It is rather unfortunate that Moi's book appeared only months after Alice A. Jardine's Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), a monumental work that will without question change the landscape of contemporary feminist theory. In some ways, the two books complement each other; Jardine takes both American feminist criticism and French theories of the feminine as her immediate context but does not discuss either at any length. Nevertheless, while Moi is sometimes arguing that Lacan and Derrida can provide the needed theoretical framework for feminist criticism, Jardine is convincingly punching holes in their assumptions and rhetorical use of “woman.” Since Jardine and Moi could not consult each other's work directly, the reader is left to construct a dialogue between them. We are fortunate to have these two books to spark productive theoretical debate for years to come.