SOURCE: Howard, June. “Feminist Differings: Recent Surveys of Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (spring 1988): 167-90.

[In the following review, Howard surveys various volumes of feminist thought, including Sexual/Textual Politics, praising Moi's book for showing “an extraordinary range, sophistication, and power.”]

The title of one of the books I review in this essay—Making a Difference—evokes some crucial elements of the situation of feminist literary criticism and theory at this moment. Feminist critics, like those of other persuasions, necessarily write these days in dialogue with (whether from or against) a theoretical perspective in which “difference” is a privileged term. From Ferdinand de Saussure's “in language there are only differences” to Jacques Derrida's “différance” and since, the recognition of the way in which meaning is constituted through difference, and the way in which our apparently stable world is ceaselessly constituted and reconstituted through language, has become pervasive. That perspective has proved more compatible with feminist thought than many in the United States first expected and has opened up (as is repeatedly demonstrated in these books) fascinating explorations of the linguistic construction of sexual difference, providing a new way of understanding the ways in which woman and women are not born but made. But feminist criticism is also concerned with “making a difference” in the vernacular sense. For most of us feminist criticism matters at least in part because it contributes to the feminist political project, to our effort to make a difference in the social world. From this perspective too the category of difference opens up a whole range of concerns, from the need to insist that the apparently symmetrical pair “male/female” invokes not simply a conceptual opposition but an unequal power relation, to the immediate and profound political questions about class and race framed today in feminist politics in terms of the differences among women.

The title of Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics also evokes these two ways of thinking about “making a difference,” and its division into a section on “Anglo-American feminist criticism” and a section on “French feminist theory” even more clearly indicates how, in recent years, feminist literary study has seemed torn between two radically different approaches. A concern with how literature represents the social reality of women's oppression and resistance to oppression, and the declaration of commitment to the perspective of women writers and readers and, more, to the practical interests of women, has characterized “Anglo-American” sexual politics, as opposed to “French feminist” textual politics. (Those quotation marks, which I will not always use but which are implied when I use the terms, are meant to remind us that these terms indicate intellectual traditions which are only imperfectly described by the national attributions, as explained in more detail in several of these volumes.) The “French,” of course, might quite properly challenge the very terms in which I pose this opposition, pointing out that I have not problematized the category “women,” that there can be no social reality that is outside language, that some of them have explicitly rejected “feminism” as a politics too deeply implicated in the very system it criticizes. One can criticize the politics of Anglo-American feminist criticism in various ways, but the French feminisms frequently challenge the very categories in which feminist politics have usually been understood. And because of the prestige that French theory has acquired in the U.S. academy, the Francophile perspective has seemed the less embattled, if not the less strenuous, choice. These books are true to their moment in presenting the relation between Anglo-American and French feminist criticism as a confrontation, even an impasse. But they also provide evidence that that moment is already passing, perhaps that it has already passed.

Certainly the appearance of these volumes surveying and assessing the state of feminist literary criticism and theory is a cause for celebration. They demonstrate that feminist criticism has achieved an extraordinary range, sophistication, and power. There is very good work in these volumes, from many different points of view, on many different topics, and a moment for collective self-congratulation is in order. Although they contain little that is, in 1987, radically new, they are a practical aid in achieving continuity as a new generation of students encounters feminist criticism, and as the growing influence of feminist criticism, and as the growing influence of feminist criticism within the academy engages established scholars in an effort to come to terms with it. Not long ago, when asked for an introduction to feminist criticism, one could only suggest Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own or loan out tattered photocopies of articles now conveniently reprinted in Showalter's New Feminist Criticism; now we have a choice of introductory and synthesizing works. Finally, the publication of these books is a cause for celebration because it attests to the field's increasing legitimacy. Our marginalization has begun to break down; we are increasingly a force to be reckoned with.

Three of these books come from one publishing house, the English firm of Methuen, which has been active in publishing and commissioning theoretically and politically informed cultural analysis. Their New Accents series (to which Moi's and Greene and Kahn's books belong) in particular consists of clearly written treatments of theory which not only explain the backgrounds and premises of the school in question but also engage critically with the material, proposing left appropriations of contemporary critical thought—not only post-structuralism but the full, rich range of cultural theory as well. The appearance of such popularizations directly addresses the tensions within feminist criticism. It is not only these French feminisms but what we call “theory” in general that many of our colleagues and students—and probably some of my readers—regard with ambivalence or outright hostility.

From the point of view of institutional politics there is good reason for that hostility. Theory is generally associated with elite institutions and advocated by people who have the time and resources to master intricate, sometimes arcane systems of thought, and the confidence—frequently rooted in social privilege—to lay down the law to other critics. I sat at a conference not long ago and listened to a graduate student from a prestigious department at an Ivy League university deliver an elegant and highly theoretical—although ultimately not very substantial—talk denouncing the elitism of literary studies and advocating the examination of a particular form of oppositional popular culture. Then I listened to a young faculty member from a two-year satellite campus of a state college deliver a painfully simple explanation of a theory that has been rather old hat for some years now and proceed to misapply it. Perhaps others in the room were, like me, thinking about aspects of what we were seeing and hearing that could not politely be mentioned—the class system in the academy, the mobilization of a theoretical vocabulary as a claim to authority, the probable difference between the two speakers' access to information about current developments in literary theory and to expert mentoring and the certain difference in their teaching loads. After watching such a performance one might argue that “theory” serves as the intellectual capital of an academic elite, enhancing speakers' prestige by demonstrating their ability to perform hermetic rites that generate more and more complex readings of texts (more and more often, of critical texts). One might argue theory has become a self-contained and self-serving scholasticism, which despite its obsessive and now virtually formulaic invocation of difference makes no meaningful, certainly no political, difference at all.

Yet the same concepts that the first speaker invoked contributed to shaping the perspective from which I describe the event. What we call “theory” is neither empty of content nor uniform in its political implications, and much of it enjoins us to reflect critically on how power functions in cultural institutions and on our own practice. (Such self-reflection is precisely what was missing at that conference.) Theoretical work can be not only a good career move but illuminating and unsettling, not only professionally useful but intellectually and politically empowering. Assuming one wants to do intellectual work in the first place, one cannot avoid abstraction and conceptual difficulty. French criticism in particular is part of a body of thought that seeks to reconstruct our most basic assumptions about identity, language, social existence. One simply cannot do that in everyday English or, for that matter, French. Ordinary language and common sense are themselves sites where those assumptions are constructed and maintained, and the radicalism and the difficulty of theory are in some sense inseparable. But to question one's assumptions is not necessarily to abandon one's politics, and to acknowledge difficulty is not necessarily to endorse elitism. I would argue that the effort to disseminate, without dissipating, the radical implications of critical theory is not only compatible with but crucial to the radical enterprise of feminist scholarship. Each of the books I review here—indeed, everything feminist critics write these days—must negotiate these tensions, and I will try to suggest what kind of criticism and what kind of a critical community each is proposing.

Elaine Showalter's introduction to The New Feminist Criticism treats the turn to theory as the distinctive characteristic of the present moment in feminist literary scholarship. A first stage, in Showalter's version of a now-familiar formulation, concentrated on “exposing the misogyny of literary practice,” a second on developing “the discovery that women writers had a literature of their own” (pp. 5-6). Showalter, as the phrase evoking the title of her best-known book¹ reminds us, was one of the architects of that second, gynocritical stage. Here she welcomes a third stage in which—in response to both issues developing within the field and to the influence of “radical critical thought from other countries” (p. 8)—feminist critics have begun to rethink the conceptual basis of the discipline. But the collection seems less concerned with making peace with French feminism than with occupying the terrain of theory for Anglo-American criticism. That radical, foreign critical thinking here remains almost as alien as Showalter's introductory characterization makes it sound, and the topics viewed through the lens of theory are, as represented by the three categories into which Showalter divides the anthology, very much those of the first two stages: the sexism of literary institutions, the nature of the enterprise of feminist criticism, the literature of women.

This is an essential book because of the quality of the articles it reprints, most of which are already influential. Showalter, with an admirably, predictably sure grasp of the field, has selected essays that are both excellent and representative, and puts the context and significance of each in clear focus. She delivers, as she promises, a collection of “the most important and controversial essays written by pioneers in the field over the past decade” (p. 3). I am willing to believe that we are entering a third stage in feminist criticism, despite the fact that Showalter also found three stages of development in English fiction by women in A Literature of Their Own and three stages in the history of psychiatry in The Female Malady. I am less convinced, however, that this is the new feminist criticism, as the title announces. Showalter's formulation certainly has descriptive power—feminist critics have turned to theory—but it is given little analytic development: she never really says where theory is leading us. Showalter's effort to “represent a variety of positions and strategies engaged in a vigorous internal debate” (p. 4) enables the productive diversity of the book, and perhaps for the reader coming to it from mainstream criticism it produces an impression of controversy and innovation. From within the field, it appears an inconclusive pluralism, in which it matters less what theory is used or what it is used for than that theory is invoked.

Unarguably, however, in these essays the various theories have produced fascinating results, and theory also seems to have worked its legitimating magic. The appearance of a volume such as this, lauded on its back cover not only by Barbara Johnson (Harvard—the affiliations are conspicuously listed with the comments) and Barbara Gelpi (Stanford) but also by Geoffrey Hartman (Yale) and Jonathan Culler (Cornell), marks the visibility and prestige of feminist criticism. Showalter acknowledges that this could be a cause for worry as well as celebration: some “contend that acceptance by the critical establishment is a dangerous sign that the vitality and integrity of American feminist criticism are being compromised” (p. 16). The voices of feminist criticism that Showalter has selected for us in this volume are allusive, flexible, sophisticated, usually although not always professional voices rather than the “angry and denunciatory,” “lyrical and emotional” (p. 4) voices one heard in the early years of the enterprise. We need all these voices, and I am not disturbed by the book's success or its polish. I am disturbed by the casual quality of Showalter's nod toward the problem, and by the lack of any effective resistance to the way in which an anthology like this collaborates with the academic star system. We are blending all too smoothly into conferences like the one I described earlier, and we need to maintain more critical distance from the routinely brutal competitive practices of our profession.

Sexual/Textual Politics, Toril Moi's sharply focused and frequently polemical account of the principles of feminist literary theory, is an impressive accomplishment. In a book only 200 pages long, Moi offers both a summary and a critique of the major elements of Anglo-American and French feminist criticism. Her demonstrations of, for example, the ways in which feminist critical projects are undercut by traditional methods or essentialist thinking are extraordinarily incisive and persuasive. Necessarily this is a process of reduction, and much is lost in the process. But the fact that references to Sexual/Textual Politics have so quickly become ubiquitous is evidence that we have badly needed such a clarifying reduction. For all our fascination with theory, in most feminist criticism these issues remain implicit; even if they are made explicit, the relations between the perspective advocated and other points of view generally remain unarticulated. In contrast, Moi is very much aware of the place of each argument and practice in the field, and aware, too, of the nature of her own intervention. It takes a great deal of sophistication to write a discussion of feminist literary theory as lucid and apparently simple as Moi's.

Her rigorous critiques of Anglo-American feminist criticism do occasionally slip into nastiness. The opening section, which skillfully opens up the central issues of the study through a provocative and persuasive reading of Virginia Woolf, is marred by the gratuitously hostile tone of Moi's reading of Anglo-American feminists', and particularly Elaine Showalter's, readings of Woolf. It seems peculiar for her to attack Showalter's humanism by detouring through a critique of the work of Georg Lukács, a denunciation that is a familiar ritual in British Marxist criticism but is scarcely relevant for most of Moi's readers. More often, however, I find Moi's representations of a given critic's work both accurate and fair. She gives a full and warm appreciation of a wonderful and relatively neglected early work, Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women, and a useful history of the beginnings of feminist literary criticism, stating in a sentence or two critiques that are not new but have not often been so cogently compressed. On the “images of women” school, for example, Moi comments:

writing is seen as a more or less faithful reproduction of an external reality to which we all have equal and unbiased access, and which therefore enables us to criticize the author on the grounds that he or she has created an incorrect model of the reality we somehow all know. Resolutely empiricist in its approach, this view fails to consider the proposition that the real is not only something we construct, but a controversial construct at that.

(P. 45)

Less familiar and equally decisive is Moi's searching critique of the ways in which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic equates character and author, reduces the complexity of texts to a true meaning which always turns out to be “feminist rage” (p. 62), assumes a monolithic patriarchal ideology and a virtually biological, equally monolithic femaleness, and ultimately relies on the ideology of the integrated individual self. All those attitudes, Moi shows, tend to efface difference within and among women and elevate the difference between women and men to a static, essential division.

Those who align themselves with the Anglo-American tradition are likely to think of Moi as a follower of the French, but she is not simply an advocate for one school. Moi's theoretical position parallels the biographical position she evokes in her preface, that of “a Norwegian teaching French literature in England,” a foreigner who nonetheless is “a white European trained within the mainstream of Western thought” (p. xiv)—that is, a kind of distant relation both outside of and engaged in a family quarrel. Her expositions of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva are both appreciative and critical; if, in Moi's view, Anglo-American critics are empiricist and insensitive to difference, Cixous is essentialist and Irigaray is ahistorical. Moi is gentler with Kristeva, whose work she acknowledges she has found “the most challenging point of departure for my own feminist enquiry” (p. 150). She argues effectively that although “Kristeva's vision is not exclusively or essentially feminist,” it is profoundly useful for feminism, implying a “vision of 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).

Although Moi is certainly closer to French than to Anglo-American feminist critics, I doubt that her book will find much favor in the French camp. It is less Moi's arguments than her framing of the field and her style that place her slightly outside the French tradition and will, I suspect, alienate those who align themselves with it. Like many feminists, Moi identifies the position from which she speaks far more self-reflectively and self-revealingly than is acceptable in traditional literary criticism, but unlike the authors of some of the playful texts she discusses or, say, Jane Gallop (the most visible and consistent U.S. practitioner of this technique), she does not allow the deconstructive process to double back upon her own writing. Nor does she challenge the Anglophone focus on the much-translated trinity of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, omitting a host of French critics who would necessarily have complicated her picture of the field. It is also not likely to endear Moi to the Anglophone but Francophile feminist critics who have been influenced by Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida that she omits them for “lack of space” (p. 98). Sexual/Textual Politics would do more to suggest the present direction (as opposed to the present state) of feminist criticism if it considered the many critics who cannot be accommodated in the dichotomy that structures the book. But it goes a long way toward overcoming the impasse between Anglo-American and feminist criticism simply by making clear exactly what it is that divides them.

Despite its utopian conclusion, the perspective Sexual/Textual Politics seems most strongly to direct us toward as a way out of the static Anglo-American/French confrontation is one which the book discusses only briefly: Marxist feminism. Moi positions her discussion of that tradition at the pivotal slash in her title, in the chapter at the beginning of the second book that makes the transition between the Anglo-American and the French schools. She gives another indication that this point of view can disrupt the dichotomy that structures the book when she appends to the sections on Anglo-American criticism and French theory in her suggestions for “Further reading” a section on Marxist feminist theory. Although critical of Marxist feminist work that simply adds class to other topics of concern, Moi finds that some Marxist feminist cultural criticism enables the critic to link the literary work “to a specific historical context in which a whole set of different structures (ideological, economic, social, political) intersect to produce precisely those textual structures” and opens up the possibility of “studying the historical construction of the categories of gender and … analysing the importance of culture in the representation and transformation of those categories” (p. 94). She does not attempt to lead the way into this field, explaining that her “project has been to develop a critical presentation of the current debates within feminist literary criticism and theory. It is a sad fact that Marxist-feminist concerns have not been central in this debate, and it is also, perhaps, an indictment of this book that its basic structure does not present a more radical challenge to the current dominance of the Anglo-American and the French critical perspectives” (p. 93). One can only agree and turn, as I will later in this essay, to Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture.

To acknowledge that Moi is right about her book's limitations, and to wish that she had gone on to do more of the work for which she constructs an agenda, is not to diminish the book's real and important contribution to the very project I recommend in this essay. Sexual/Textual Politics is more than just a useful introduction because of its eloquent advocacy of a feminist criticism that is both thoroughly theoretical and thoroughly political. Moi's uncompromising critique of essentialism and her utopian vision of a sexual multiplicity beyond the binary masculine/feminine opposition do not prevent her from seeing the necessity, in our present circumstances, of “defending women precisely as women” (p. 82). From her description of the “two-pronged” (p. 23) battle of the feminist critic working both for institutional change and within literary-critical discussions, to her diagnosis of Anglo-American criticism as “despite its often strong, explicit political engagement … not quite political enough … in the sense that its radical analysis of sexual politics still remains entangled with depoliticizing theoretical paradigms” (pp. 87-88), Moi resists any tendency to attenuate the radicalism of feminist criticism. The recognition that the field is defined, not by an object of study or a method, but by a political project, provides a solid theoretical grounding for the pluralism that characterizes, and should characterize, feminist critical practice. Moi writes that the “political evaluation of methods and theories is an essential part of the feminist critical enterprise” (p. 87). That evaluation is precisely what Moi herself is engaged in, and it is what makes the book, indeed, essential.

Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, another volume in Methuen's New Accents series, covers a wider range of topics in more detail than Sexual/Textual Politics. The introduction defines feminist scholarship and briefly surveys its accomplishments in anthropology, history, and literary criticism, and eight subsequent essays cover the varieties of (Anglo-American) feminist literary criticism, the politics of language, French theories of the feminine, psychoanalysis and feminism, subjectivity and socialist feminist criticism, lesbian feminist criticism, black women writers, and feminist reinterpretations of the canon. All the essays provide both some overview of existing work and some original propositions; the balance varies, but the tendency of the collection is toward summary rather than innovation. This book takes the reader further into the questions than Sexual/Textual Politics does, without providing so many answers.

Editors Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn's introduction opens up a broad, well-chosen range of topics and issues. Their approach to feminist literary criticism as one branch of an interdisciplinary enquiry into gender—although it leads them into some uninspired summaries—is an important perspective; the necessity of disrupting disciplinary boundaries ought to be asserted more frequently in the other books reviewed here. In what they write about literary criticism, Greene and Kahn try to combine what is valuable in Anglo-American criticism and French theory, but their synthesis is not entirely coherent or convincing. Does Derrida's work really imply that “an alternative literary canon based on redefined values … can only reduplicate the initial system” (p. 26)? To equate Derrida's philosophical analysis of the nature of binary oppositions with a statement about a social institution like the academic literary canon is to oversimplify his thought; to see feminist struggles over interpretation and evaluation as a mirrored reversal of masculinist assertions is to produce “deconstructive feminist criticism” as the kind of demoralizing, depoliticizing practice that the authors reject later in the same paragraph. And what are we to make of an essay that espouses deconstruction but on occasion uses “female experience” (p. 6) with apparent unself-consciousness? Here, as in many such attempts at synthesis, attitudes and categories from each school exist side by side, rather than producing a new position, from which one could launch a more satisfactory discussion of the nature of canonicity and “experience.”

But the reader will learn a great deal from Making a Difference about the terms in which this discussion can be carried on. The encapsulation of the “work”/“text” distinction and its history in Nelly Furman's “politics of languages,” for example, works both to open up the critical community by making ideas accessible and to put issues in broad perspective; I only wish, in this instance, that she had gone on to include the more current term “discourse.” The impact of poststructural theory and “French feminism” is prominent in about half the essays in Making a Difference; this volume, like the others under review, attests to the enormous energy Anglophone critics are expending in the effort to come to terms with “theory.” Such translations or imported thought are undeniably a somewhat domesticated, denatured product, but they provide useful introductions to—not, one must insist, substitutes for—the material itself. For example, Ann Rosalind Jone's valuable work appears in three of these volumes; she goes beyond Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to include Monique Wittig and, in the essay on “French Theories of the Feminine” in this volume, a wide range of lesser-known French and American practitioners of “Franco-feminist” criticism.

One of the most valuable essays in Making a Difference (the only previously published essay in this collection, it is also reprinted in The New Feminist Criticism), Bonnie Zimmerman's “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism” concentrates primarily on issues internal to the development of that perspective within Anglo-American criticism (it does include a paragraph about work on Wittig). As Zimmerman acknowledges and concisely demonstrates, the projects and problems of this enquiry have run parallel to those of the rest of the field: the critique of heterosexism in literary criticism (frequently, feminist literary criticism), the recovery and rereading of texts to establish a lesbian literary canon and critical tradition, the debate over the demand for appropriate role models in literature, the search for a lesbian aesthetic. To that extent the article might seem to confirm Toril Moi's unfortunately, even offensively, dismissive comment that “so far, lesbian and/or black feminist criticism have presented exactly the same methodological and theoretical problems as the rest of Anglo-American criticism” (p. 86). But Zimmerman's discussion of what is at stake in the definition of lesbianism (pp. 183-86) cogently characterizes the “special problem” of the field and suggests ways in which lesbian feminist criticism opens up new problems and solutions for the field as a whole.

Zimmerman demonstrates a sharp awareness of the historical mutability of sexuality and sexual identity, writing for example that to “state simply that Mary Wollstonecraft ‘was’ a lesbian because she passionately loved Fanny Blood, or Susan B. Anthony because she wrote amorous letters to Anna Dickinson, without accounting for historical circumstances, may serve to distort or dislocate the actual meaning of these women's lives (just as it is distorting to deny their love for women)” (pp. 198-99). In her thoughtful and informative “Inverts and Experts: Radclyffe Hall and the Lesbian Identity,” in Feminist Criticism and Social Change, Sonja Ruehl extends this exploration and provides a model of materialist lesbian feminist analysis grounded in such historical circumstance. The next step, it seems to me, is the fuller incorporation of the historicized account of the category of “identity” (fundamental to both essays) proposed by historians of homosexuality such as Jeffrey Weeks. The questions raised, from the nature of identity and the history of sexuality to the relation of sexual and gender identities to each other and their imbrication with language and cultural texts, will require the most sophisticated theories (literary, cultural, social, political) we can muster.

As we work through the political implications of our theories and subject our politics to theoretical analysis, both theory and politics may be reshaped. There is a basic tension between a gay “politics of identity” that speaks in terms of self-affirmation, community, and the rights of a sexual minority, and the strict antiessentialism of the academic theorists of gay liberation.² From Zimmerman's suspicion of a lesbian feminist universalism that seems to imply the innate superiority of women to men (p. 199), to Moi's scrutiny of feminist theory for the slightest taint of essentialism, academic feminism too has insisted on—as in the title of Greene and Kahn's introduction to Making a Difference—the “social construction of woman.” I applaud the consensus against cultural feminism (as we have come to call it) and against the idealization of woman that emerges in all the books under review here, and I hope we will increasingly find ways to mobilize that critique in practical politics. But, conversely, I do not think we have sufficiently theorized the appeal of the politics of identity, sufficiently distinguished between the distinct determinations of various levels of—admittedly constructed—identity, sufficiently explored the nature of agency. It is not that I want to retreat from the insights of constructionism; rather, that it seems to me that to move forward our emphasis must fall less on ‘correct’ demonstrations of the fictionality of the subject and more on investigations of the constraints within which identity is elaborated and the uses to which it is put.

It is in attempts to think about confluence of and contradictions between sexual, racial, class, and gender identity that such problems are most directly faced. Cora Kaplan's “Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism” speaks directly to this problem. Kaplan gives, in thirty pages, both a brief, thought-provoking characterization of that field and an original argument of extraordinary interest. This is not an accessible summary of issues in socialist feminist criticism; that task is better performed by editors Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt in their introduction to Feminist Criticism and Social Change. Kaplan's essay is not without flaws; although she usefully problematizes most of the categories of her analysis, she fails to follow through on her own premises when she treats the French Revolution and Romanticism as more or less static entities. She cannot quite keep all the balls in the air at once. But the opening of investigations such as these suggests that a new framework of discussion is being worked out, one which through its methodological self-consciousness and its historical specificity can incorporate both the “Anglo-American” responsiveness to “experience” and the “French” sensitivity to “difference.”

Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, contains fourteen essays on the full chronological range of fiction by Black American women, from slave narratives through contemporary science fiction, and an introduction and afterword commenting generally on the nature of this literary tradition. The contributors' approaches are ones widely used in Anglo-American examinations of women's literature: the retrieval of lost texts and historical contexts, the analysis of stereotypes, appreciative explication, mythic and archetypal reading, literary-historical arguments for women's traditions, structural analysis. Conjuring is not fully commensurable with the other books discussed in this essay, because it takes a body of literature rather than a body of criticism as its topic, and it is striking that the same is true of the essay in Making a Difference that deals with issues of race—Susan Willis's article on “Black Women Writers” (and in fact she discusses only some twentieth-century Afro-American novelists), not Black feminist criticism or theory.

I find myself, on the one hand, uncomfortable with that pattern and wondering about the editorial decisions that produced it. Does it not suggest the correlation of privilege, in this case white skin privilege, with abstraction, and oppression with confinement to the concrete, that Adrienne Rich has recently written about?³ On the other hand, one can only sympathize with Barbara Christian when she complains that she is “tired of being asked to produce a black feminist literary theory as if I were a mechanical man.”⁴ In the context of the politics of our profession, that request does sound like a demand that the field be legitimated by a theoretical defense of what it does. The way the request is framed, too, actually refuses the theoretical insights of recent years; the theory of race, gender, and culture that would fill the place opened for it in these books is unlikely to be either narrowly literary or exclusively feminist. For example, Gayatri Spivak's development, in essays published during the past decade, of a deconstructivist “reading method that is sensitive to gender, race, and class” presents a formidably difficult and almost counterdisciplinary appearance.⁵ The books under review here, with their genuine diversity of opinion, nevertheless speak from the Western, Anglophone academy; they stretch to the inclusion of antihumanist poststructural theory and the cultural work of women of color—but not to the two in combination.

But discussion of race and ethnicity as socially constructed, fundamentally fictional categories, in the vocabulary of contemporary critical theory, have been appearing for several years. Like the academic theories of homosexuality discussed earlier, these investigations exist in a certain tension with the political movements that made them possible. It is a delicate matter to balance a recognition that “race” is the invention of human beings, not nature, with attention to its social effectiveness. As Steven Epstein writes, this is a dilemma “by no means peculiar to the gay movement: How do you protest a socially imposed categorization, except by organizing around the category?”⁶ These investigations, too, suggest the emergence of a new framework of discussion, and the widest implications of the controversy we tend to think of too narrowly as the opposition between Anglo-American and French feminist criticism.

Barbara Christian, however, might say that I am still looking for Black feminist literary theory in the wrong places. In the essay quoted above, she rejects French feminism and explicit theory altogether, writing that “people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.”⁷ In fact, people do often use “theory” these days not in its strict sense of the systematic statement of underlying principles but to describe writing of many schools that works to expose and dismantle the assumptions that underlie our common sense and our habitual ways of reading. I would argue against much in Christian's essay. But I do think that it is precisely because Afro-American women storytellers have been so marvelously inventive that a book of applied criticism like Conjuring can open a place for the radical innovations of a cultural politics of women of color.

The title Conjuring itself indicates ways in which the book's project exceeds its gynocritical study of Black women writers. In her introduction, Pryse describes conjuring as both a subject matter for Black American fiction, notably in the work of Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker, and as a metaphor for writing. Black women novelists, this book suggests, cast a spell of “mutual naming” (p. 5) that creates a community. And, as Marjorie Pryse writes in the introduction, the title also is “a reminder … of the ‘magic’ involved in writing literary criticism as well as fiction, and of the oath we all must take to continue the work of speaking with each others' tongues in our mouths” (p. 22). The emphasis on finding a voice, on the creation of an affirmative identity and tradition, is familiar in Anglo-American feminist criticism. On the other hand, the emphasis on the world-shaping magic of narrative and the elision of the boundary between literature and criticism suggests an affinity with poststructuralism. Or we might juxtapose with the image of conjuring Peter Dews's defense of Adorno's philosophy of identity (as against the poststructural critique of the coercive ego), in which the “metaphor of the spell … captures both the repressive and enabling features of processes of socialization.”⁸

In her afterword, Spillers raises the problems of theorizing self and community and argues explicitly that Black women's writing and contemporary critical theory are converging. She affirms the distinctive narratives of Black American women as self-naming, socially symbolic acts without assuming that either gender or race constitutes an essential identity, and asserts the possibility of not simply reversing the values of the canon but transforming its very function. Spillers' own language is dense and “theoretical,” but she predicts that the tradition now being created will bring together the two discourses, “the language of learning woven into the tongue of the mother” (p. 260). That suggestion poses a challenge all feminists share, a challenge to develop both concepts and critical community, a challenge to ask ourselves what it would mean to have a theory for “everyday use.”⁹

The essays collected in Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt's Feminist Criticism and Social Change represent, they tell us, “an attempt to theorize about and to practice a materialist-feminist criticism” (p. xi)—that is, “a criticism combining feminist, socialist and anti-racist perspectives” (p. xxvii)—of literature and, more broadly, culture. Feminist Criticism and Social Change can be seen as a challenge from the Left to the portrait of contemporary feminist literary criticism that Elaine Showalter's New Feminist Criticism has given us. I too have inhabited for some years that vexed region of the connection, or failure of connection, between Marxism and feminism; reviewing these previously published, often well-known essays again it seems to me that they do, as the editors assert, “acquire new dimensions of meaning when presented as part of a collective critical endeavor” (p. xi).

Newton and Rosenfelt's introduction rigorously but clearly defines the project of a “materialist-feminist” criticism and review the theoretical problems it entails. The individual articles are excellent, and each contributes a distinctive perspective to the common project. The section on theory includes not only Barbara Smith on Black feminist criticism and Ann Rosalind Jones on the French feminisms but also Paul Lauter's study of the formation of the U.S. literary canon and pieces by Catherine Belsey on the construction of subjectivity and by Michèle Barrett on ideology and gender in cultural analysis (the latter two excerpted from their widely read books of 1980 but including some more recent revisions). The section of “applied criticism” examines literature and films by British and American women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the essays range quite widely within that focus, the fact that no other cultures and no male writers are represented marks this as a retrospective collection. These are not programmatic applications of the theories in the first half of the book (no one, for example, has tried to use the overly schematic categories Michèle Barrett derives from Terry Eagleton's work of a decade ago), but rather enrich and extend the dialogue. The diversity of this book makes clear that there is no one method, no global theory for a materialist feminist criticism; gender is inscribed too thoroughly and unevenly through the representations and practices of different societies at different moments for there to be one approach that can infallibly seize its significance.

Newton and Rosenfelt sharply and successfully distinguish materialist feminist from other feminist criticisms, asserting, much in Toril Moi's vein, that traditional attitudes can vitiate our project: patriarchy becomes tragedy, feminism “comedic essentialism,” and, obscuring “historical change, cultural complexity and women's agency, they [feminist critics] themselves replicate the habits of thought they intend to challenge” (p. xvii). They distinguish their own concern with the economic even more rapidly from that of “traditional Marxists, for whom gender is not a major category of analysis” (pp. xiii-xiv).

But that orthodox Marxism is, surely, a straw target. At the very moment when Newton and Rosenfelt explain that they use “materialist feminist” rather than “socialist feminist” because the former term is “more inclusive” (p. xviii), they attach a note acknowledging that feminist criticism has much in common with “the new Marxist cultural theory” and citing the work of Tony Bennet, Fredric Jameson, Michael Ryan, and Terry Eagleton (p. xxiv n. 17). Does this mean that their refusal of the terms “Marxist feminism” and “socialist feminism” is purely verbal and strategic? Or is materialist feminism divided by a fundamental theoretical and political break even from the undogmatic, nondeterminist, lower-case “marxism” now being articulated in the academy? To unfold the implications of those questions would take Newton and Rosenfelt further into specialized debates over Marxism than they, and probably their readers, are willing to go in this introductory volume. But those answers are, surely, necessary if we are to move forward from where Newton and Rosenfelt have taken us, and I wish they marked more clearly as controversial the question of how and why Marxism is to be revised or abandoned.

Certainly, however, the notion of “materialist feminism” works for Newton and Rosenfelt. It allows them to assemble a powerful collection of essays, a kind of rainbow coalition that is very much in the spirit of Left politics these days. It is an unequivocal gain to have opened up space for Black feminism at the center of this enterprise. A genuine reorientation is visible here: this is a different collection than the one that would have been assembled under the sign of socialist feminism.

Feminist Criticism and Social Change takes up versions of all the issues I have identified in this essay as the questions of the moment, and many more. It is taking, and will still take, some time to bring together categories like “experience” and “agency” with categories like “subjects in process.” But the reward is suggested by such illuminating, if at this moment still rather strenuous, passages as this one by Catherine Belsey.

Women as a group in our society are both produced and inhibited by contradictory discourses. Very broadly, we participate both in the liberal-humanist discourse of freedom, self-determination and rationality and at the same time in the specifically feminine discourse offered by society of submission, relative inadequacy and irrational intuition. … One way of responding to this situation is to retreat from the contradictions and from discourse itself, to become ‘sick’. … Another is to seek a resolution of the contradictions in the discourses of feminism.

(P. 50)

Newton and Rosenfelt's collection provides an excellent introduction to these issues, because it is so clearly written and so intelligently arranged.

It is a good introduction, too, because it so strongly affirms equal commitment to conceptual rigor and to historical information, to theory and to politics. “Materialism” is, indeed, it seems to me, a site from which we can make theory, poststructural and otherwise, useful for feminism. High theory teaches us that language is never a transparent window to what is “real,” and it is often taken to mean that language is reality. But one can believe in the shaping force of discourse, as an element in all aspects of social existence, without abandoning a belief in nondiscursive forces. To say that there is no human reality outside of language is not the same as saying that there is nothing but language. The task of a materialist feminism is to attend to the consequences of the first position, without slipping—either in theory or practice—into the second.

The theoretically eclectic, politically engaged path Feminist Criticism and Social Change marks out is not an easy one. Newton and Rosenfelt comment on how much knowledge, in this perspective, must be brought to bear on a single object of study. They call it a “double shift,” but it seems like even more than that: “work on the power relations implied by gender and simultaneously on those implied by class, race, and sexual identification; an analysis of literature and an analysis of history and society; an analysis of the circumstances of cultural production and an analysis of the complexities with which at a given moment in history they are inscribed in the text” (p. xix). There is the vertiginous difficulty, too, of dialectical thinking, of constantly interrogating the categories of one's own analysis, simultaneously working with them and against their limitations. The difficulties are formidable. It is not surprising that brilliant critics like Spivak and Kaplan have published relatively fragmentary work over the past decade—work which is now more accessible in volumes of collected essays.¹⁰ The achievements of materialist feminist criticism are also formidable, and are constantly increasing. As Newton and Rosenfelt put it: “The uncompromising complexity of its vision may sometimes discourage those who long for certainty and simplicity. None the less, in its insistent inclusiveness, in its willingness to embrace contradictions, materialist feminist analysis seems to us the most compelling and potentially transformative critical approach to culture and society” (p. xxx). Both in its content and in its style, materialist feminism seems to me to offer the best hope for an approach that resists both the glamour of high theory and the comforting certainties of political correctness and common sense, for an approach that is theoretically rigorous, historically specific, and politically engaged.

To many spectators of the current scene in literary criticism it may seem that “difference” has become a mere formula and that “French” and “Anglo-American” critics simply cannot talk to each other. But the moment of these books is, I think, the moment of our movement past that static confrontation; the increasingly obvious inadequacy of those labels marks the opening up of an area between the lines and the slow emergence of a new framework of discussion. Many critics I have not mentioned, from Alice Jardine to Elizabeth Meese, as well as those I have, contribute to a project that is more than the sum of its parts. One must reckon, too, with the increasing volume of “gender criticism,” which threatens to substitute itself for a more openly political feminist criticism but which also offers an intellectual and strategic opportunity. The turn to theory and to gender need not be depoliticizing. Its consequences depend on what we choose to do, on the kind of theory and the kind of critical community we build.

Those articulating a new framework for feminist criticism and theory must negotiate not only the less and less interesting tension between Anglo-American sexual and French feminist textual politics but also a tension that runs, discontinuously but consistently throughout feminist thought: the tension between an emphasis on the similarities between women and men and the demand for equality, and an emphasis on the differences between women and men and the affirmation of the female. One might crudely correlate those two attitudes with the first two stages of feminist criticism, the critique of sexism in literature and literary institutions and the celebration of women's literature. The opposition between Anglo-American and “French feminism” cannot be mapped onto this tension in any simple way. Accusations invoking it fly in every direction: the French accuse the Americans of “phallic feminism,” the Americans accuse the French of glorifying femininity; Anglo-American critics appeal to female experience, Francophile theoreticians deconstruct the category.

The current turn to theory correlates with a third position, advocated by Julia Kristeva (and prefigured, I would argue, in much feminist thought, certainly by Virginia Woolf), in which “the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics. What can ‘identity,’ even ‘sexual identity,’ mean in a new theoretical and scientific space where the very notion of identity is challenged?” Kristeva is primarily interested in proclaiming the end of anthropomorphism and the triumph of individual difference or “singularity.” But we may want to linger a moment with the recognition of “the multiplicity of every person's possible identifications” which she also invokes.¹¹ I would argue that Kristeva and so apparently Anglo-American a theorist as Adrienne Rich are converging when Rich in a recent essay struggles with the recognition that “from the outset [my] body had more than one identity. … I was located by color and sex as surely as a Black child was located by color and sex—though the implications of white identity were mystified by the presumption that white people are the center of the universe.”¹² Or we might compare sociologist Bonnie Thornton Dill's argument against “the concept of sisterhood as a global construct” and call for “a more pluralistic approach that recognizes and accepts the objective differences between women.”¹³ For feminist scholars, as for theoreticians of sexuality and “race,” Kristeva's question about what identity can mean is not a rhetorical one but the starting point for one of the most urgent investigations we can undertake. Although we must stop believing quite so firmly in common sense versions of identity, we cannot stop analyzing them, for identities inevitably constitute the locations from which we act. The intertwining of the subjective and social in literature provides, of course, one of the most productive sites for such investigation.

Socialist and Marxist feminist criticism have, from the beginning, posed questions about the multiplicity of identities and determinations. They have not always managed to avoid subordinating class to gender or gender to class, but they have always tried to deal with both, and the materialist feminist criticism represented by Feminist Criticism and Social Change puts race as well at the center of this investigation. In this sense, materialist feminist criticism has always been “gender criticism”; it has never been exclusively fascinated by a unitary female identity but has always asked difficult, decentering questions about the circumstances under which “woman” is constructed. As Cora Kaplan writes in “Pandora's Box,”

Masculinity and femininity do not appear in cultural discourse, any more than they do in mental life, as pure binary forms at play. They are always, already, ordered and broken up through other social and cultural terms, other categories of difference. … Class and race ideologies are, conversely, steeped in and spoken through the languages of sexual differentiation.

(P. 148)

The concern of materialist feminist criticism with gender, race, and class is not a mere addition of topics, but a perspective that transforms our understanding of all those categories and of the functioning of culture in general.

Whether we think of the possibilities for a global women's movement imaged by the Nairobi Women's Conference, or the continuing explorations of identity and difference in literary theory, the usefulness of the category of difference is not exhausted. Both require us to question the “we” of feminism. They do not ask us to stop affirming our experience, but they do ask us not to stop there, not to take experience as a final term; they do not ask us to give up being women and sisters, but they do ask us, in the interest of an inclusive and effective feminism, to inhabit those identities more self-consciously and provisionally. We cannot afford to let “difference” become a formula if we are to develop a theory and a critical community that is captive neither to abstraction nor to experience but is responsible to both.

Notes

1. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970).

2. The quoted phrase is from Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 185. See also Steven Epstein, “Gay Politics, Ethnic Identity: The Limits of Social Constructionism,” Socialist Review, nos. 93/94 (May-August 1987): 9-54.

3. See Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” in Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the 1980s, ed. Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz and Iris M. Zavala (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985), 7-22.

4. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” this issue, p. 69. This article originally appeared in Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987), the first of two issues composed of papers from a conference on “The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse.”

5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 81.

6. Epstein, 19.

7. Christian, 68.

8. Peter Dews, “Adorno, Post-structuralism, and the Critique of Identity,” New Left Review, no. 157 (May-June 1986): 42-43.

9. My allusion is to the short story “Everyday Use,” by Alice Walker, which deals with some of the same issues through narrative. The story appears in In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 47-59.

10. Spivak's collection cited above. Kaplan's collection, which includes “Pandora's Box” but not the essay on Aurora Leigh that appears in Feminist Criticism and Social Change, is Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986).

11. Julia Kristeva's “Women's Time,” translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, appeared in Signs 7 (Autumn 1981): 13-35; it was reprinted in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

12. Rich, 1.

13. Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an All-Inclusive Sisterhood,” Feminist Studies 9 (Spring 1983): 146.

My thinking on the topics of this essay has been deeply affected, over the years, by dialogues in my study group in Ann Arbor on feminist criticism and theory, and I would like to thank the past and present members of that group. I am grateful to Peg Lourie, Paula Rabinowitz, Alice Fulton, Julie Ellison, and especially to Anne Herrmann, for their contributions to this article.