SOURCE: Anderson, Linda. “Review Article: Questions of Feminist Criticism.” Prose Studies 10, no. 2 (September 1987): 225-30.

[In the following review, Anderson compares the feminist theory that informs The Kristeva Reader with that of two others, concluding that Moi's collection represents an ongoing process of questioning within feminist criticism in relation to other critical theories.]

“The problem is not only who is speaking and how she is speaking but to whom is she speaking and on behalf of whom is she speaking.” (Mary Eagleton in Feminist Literary Criticism, 5)

Literary criticism is necessarily framed (both produced and limited) by the questions we ask of it and which we are prepared to make it ask. Over the last fifteen years feminist criticism—drawing its energies from the politics of feminism—has put forward a series of challenging questions to the literary-critical establishment which have done much to widen the frame of literary studies. Foregrounding women as readers, writers or written—which must be the starting premise of all feminist criticism—does more than provide a new or “different” critical perspective, it also undermines the old claims to universality and neutrality: the recognition of women writers' exclusion from the literary canon exposes the idea of the canon itself as a construct, culturally and historically determined; the partiality of literary values and methods also comes into view when they can be seen as shaped by and reproduced within institutions which marginalize or silence women. The questions which feminism raises spread like disturbing ripples beyond their immediate context, giving the literary-critical establishment back a more limited and uncomfortable reflection of itself.

Recent collections of feminist criticism like Mary Eagleton's Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader and Feminist Criticism and Social Change edited by Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt suggest that feminist criticism now has an established and receptive audience. Both collections highlight the debates and differences within feminist criticism itself. Mary Eagleton situates her extracts—which also in their historical coverage provide a retrospective view of the development of feminist criticism—within a commentary organized around certain theoretical controversies or knots: “Finding a Female Tradition,” “Women and Literary Production,” “Gender and Genre,” “Towards Definitions of Feminist Writing” and “Do Women Write Differently?” The result is to provide a clear framework for viewpoints which could seem bewilderingly diverse and complex. Judith Newton's and Deborah Rosenfelt's intentions are more clearly partisan. Identifying themselves in their Introduction as “materialist feminists,” their radicalism is partly aimed at other feminists who, unlike them, “isolate ideas and language from other realms of struggle” (xix); they oppose an essentialism which renders “gender based relations of power” as “unchanging, universal, monolithic” (xvi-xvii):

But where a materialist-feminist criticism still insists upon the intersection of ideas and language with the social and historical, reminding us that we “can't look to culture alone to liberate us”, much feminist criticism implies the primacy of psyche as the essential terrain on which political struggle is waged, viewing texts, discourses, categories of language and symbolic modes as the major armaments in that struggle. Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic, for example, a rich and perceptive work, focuses almost entirely on the entrapment of women in male literary constructs and women's literary resistance and in so doing emphasizes the power of ideas alone which a materialist feminist criticism would seek to qualify.

(xx)

The distinction being made is a real one and represents an important “revisioning” of previous feminist work. The language, however, turgidly embattled, seems to fix us in a deadlock of conflict, rather than offer the sense of an expanding horizon.

Differences of view within feminist theory have recently been offered as evidence of a depressing fragmentation, a post-feminism whose first stage of hopeful and unified struggle has ended in dispersal and disunity. Fragmentation in this sense means breakdown, or as Rosalind Delmar has recently called it “a sort of sclerosis of the movement, segments of which have become separated from and hardened against each other,” an image which also seems to suggest a healthy feminist political body in the past.¹ Encountering a similar diversity among feminist critics Elaine Showalter, however, has used it as evidence of a resilient anti-authoritarianism. For feminist critics, she argues, there are no originating sacred texts:

Feminist critics do not look to a Mother of Us All or a single system of thought to provide their fundamental ideas. Rather, these ideas have evolved from several sources … we are still far from agreement on a theoretical system (a prospect that many, in fact, would find horrifyingly reductive).²

Paradoxically this argument seems to suggest that feminism has an essential claim to heterogeneity, that feminist critics are unified—though disunited—in their relation to knowledge.

That we should be able to encounter such contradictory positive and negative attitudes to the same phenomenon is not really surprising; nor that part of the struggle should be against ourselves—a complex tugging between the unity of “we” and our diversity. Feminism exists both within and against a political and cultural moment, inevitably partaking of some of the terms it is also attempting to subvert. This point is doubly true of feminist criticism which not only occupies the same contradictory ground as feminism but also duplicates the problem in relation to the academy and the literary establishment, having one foot outside them in the feminist movement and one inside the already existing institutions. The kind of radical challenge, therefore, which I suggested feminist criticism brings to literary studies it must also turn against itself; speaking as a feminist may be only part of the meaning we have when we speak. The questions that Mary Eagleton poses are all important: who is speaking; how is she speaking; to whom is she speaking; on behalf of whom is she speaking. They suggest the complex ways in which meaning is determined, and how the questioning of meaning can happen only within a process of also questioning ourselves.

As one looks back to Elaine Showalter's “lost continent of the female tradition which has risen like Atlantis from the sea of English literature”³ it is possible to see how much is still submerged and taken for granted. The recovery of women's literary history, as both these present anthologies suggest, has been exclusive, reflecting the assumption that all women are white, heterosexual and middleclass. In an important essay, drawn on by both books, Barbara Smith asks us (white, feminist readers) to confront the fact that black women have been silenced and rendered invisible just as effectively by the unacknowledged ideological boundaries of feminist criticism as they have been by the dominant (white, male) culture:

It seems overwhelming to break such a massive silence. Even more numbing, however, is the realization that so many of the women who read this have not yet noticed us missing either from their reading matter, their politics or their lives. It is galling that ostensible feminists and acknowledged lesbians have been so blinded to the implications of any womanhood that is not white womanhood and that they have yet to struggle with the deep racism in themselves that is at the source of this blindness.⁴

It is salutary to recognize the ways in which feminist criticism can be seen to have created a canon within a canon, colluding unconsciously with the values it claims to challenge.

Feminist criticism cannot claim neutrality in relation to a women's tradition of literature any more than it can in relation to texts by male authors. Value does not simply reside in the text but is produced by a reading which is historically and culturally determined; with each reading therefore our own subjectivity is at stake, is also the subject of interrogation. As both these collections of essays illustrate, some of the best feminist criticism at present has looked at the “cultural construction of subjectivity”⁵ by investigating “mass culture,” writing which would not be accepted as “literary” at all. The project is not to simply write off the texts and the readers who read them but to open criticism to the complex and dynamic process of reading itself. This is Alison Light about reading Romance Fiction:

We need to balance an understanding of fictions as restatements (however mediated) of a social reality, with a closer examination of how literary texts might function in our lives as imaginative constructions and interpretations … Subjectivity—the ways in which we come to express and define our concepts of our selves—then seems crucial to any analysis of the activity of reading. Far from being “inward-looking” in the dismissive sense of being somehow separate from the realities of the state or the marketplace, subjectivity can be recognized as the place where the operations of power and the possibilities of resistance are played out.⁶

Turning its political energies to opening up the problem of the subject, feminist criticism has become fused or confused with deconstruction and post-structuralist psychoanalytic theory. Once the subject's identity and gender are no longer perceived as the referent we have to begin with but as constituted in and by language, the text becomes not only the site of the production of meaning (and sexual difference) but also a model of the fiction that identity is. For some feminists this kind of deconstructive activity constitutes the most radical dismantling of a whole system of thought which puts the universal male subject at its centre; for others it is a displacement of a political struggle onto language and theory, where, alienated from the specificity of women's lives, it becomes largely academic. Since I believe that both these different viewpoints are in some measure true I want to situate them in the context again of feminism's paradoxical relationship to other criticism.

Speaking as a critic who believes in the radical implications for feminism of deconstruction Toril Moi discounted in her book Sexual/Textual Politics that black or lesbian criticism has anything new theoretically to offer: “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.”⁷ But a theory of the subject which cannot also address differences between subjects except as sexual difference is in danger of reinstating the universal categories it has sought to undo. Because it means that a woman submitting to theory is “renouncing the specificity of her own relationship to the imaginary … any theory of the ‘subject’ has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine,’” Luce Irigaray has warned.⁸ In a recent article Jane Gallop has also suggested that deconstruction can be seen as a way of stemming the threat of feminism:

I would speculate that the phenomenal spread of deconstruction in American departments of English is in actuality a response to the growth of feminist criticism. At a moment when it is no longer possible to ignore feminist criticism's challenge to the critical establishment, deconstruction appeared offering a perspective that was not in opposition to but rather beyond feminism, offering to sublate feminism into something supposedly “more radical”.⁹

For all that it seems to radicalize the very terms of discussion by seeming to go beyond feminism, deconstruction can bind feminists back into the very institutions they have sought to change. The critique for feminists must be double-edged: asking Mary Eagleton's questions again seems appropriate if the academy (for all the intervention of theory still male-dominated) is not going to speak through deconstruction for “us.”

The work of Julia Kristeva has an interesting place within these discussions. For some critics her work can simply be included with that of other French feminist critics offering an abstract account of sexual difference as inscribed within language. For others she is the writer who has most thoroughly carried through the implications of deconstruction in relation to women, avoiding, as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have not, the idea that there can be a writing which is essentially feminine, an écriture féminine. Jacqueline Rose is perhaps right to suggest that Kristeva has “too long served as an ideal”;¹⁰ the danger is that her work is discarded without being understood or we lose a sense of the specific and ongoing nature of her struggle with/for meaning.

The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, brings together work spanning her whole career. It contains well-known essays like “Women's Time” and extracts from Revolution in Poetic Language, 1974, and About Chinese Women, translated 1977, as well as some of her most recent writing, including a chapter from Histories d'amour, 1983, entitled “Freud and Love” and the essay “Psychoanalysis and the Polis,” 1983. Toril Moi's introduction very usefully situates the development of Kristeva's thought both in relation to her own personal development as “foreigner in Paris” to mother and psychoanalyst, as well as to the changing political context she in part shared with the Tel Quel group.

Starting from deconstruction, from an understanding of meaning as produced by rather than represented within writing, Kristeva herself raised important objections to it. Though it attempts to dismantle metaphysics, she thought, it remains itself metaphysical, “enclosed in the field of the signifier” (17). What she brought to deconstruction from her engagement with psychoanalysis was an account of the subject which has involved her throughout her work in a difficult but important ambivalence. On the one hand deconstruction could be seen as not going far enough, unable to account for the forces that disrupt language or the signifier and effect changes in the social structure; on the other it provides no space for the subject:

The grammatological deluge of meaning gives up on the subject and must remain ignorant not only of his functioning as social practice, but also of his chances for experiencing jouissance or being put to death.¹¹

Her account of the subject is also aimed, it seems, at bringing back some notion of history and social practice, but her notion of the subject—and politics—is posited first of all on disruption, on negativity.

Kristeva has never allied herself with feminism; what she gives us is a theory of subversion and marginality. Her concept of the semiotic which she links to pre-oedipal primary processes goes on disrupting language or the symbolic even after the subject has successfully positioned him/herself in language. However, the semiotic does not constitute another language or place from which to speak; its disruptive effects can only be known from within language, from within the symbolic which bears the mark of its pressure. This semiotic dynamic, the inscription of an archaic relation to the mother, is important for creativity, but access to it is not simply the privilege of women; much of Kristeva's work has focussed on the semiotic within the work of male writers. What it does seem to give us is a model for the central dilemma of women, wanting to challenge self-definition whilst retaining the possibility of identity and speech. As Toril Moi writes:

The Kristevan subject is a subject-in-process (sujet en procès), but a subject nevertheless. We find her carrying on a difficult balancing act between a position which would deconstruct subjectivity and identity altogether, and one that would try to capture these entities in an essentialist or humanist mould.

(13)

Kristeva's work certainly raises more questions than it answers. But perhaps what is most important for feminist criticism is that it constitutes itself as a process of questioning which cannot be easily closed.

Notes

1. “What Is Feminism?” in What Is Feminism?, edited by Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 9.

2. “Introduction” in The New Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Showalter (Virago: London, 1986), p. 4.

3. Elaine Showalter, “A Literature of Their Own” in Eagleton, p. 11.

4. “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” in Newton and Rosenfelt, p. 3. A later part of this essay, which does not include this quotation, is reproduced in Eagleton, pp. 77-81.

5. Catherine Belsay, “Constructing the Subject: deconstructing the text” in Newton and Rosenfelt, p. 45.

6. “‘Returning to Manderley’—Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class,” Eagleton, p. 141.

7. Sexual/Textual Politics (Methuen: London, 1985), p. 86.

8. Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill, (Cornell U.P., 1985), p. 133.

9. “Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 13 (Winter, 1987), 314-29 (p. 315).

10. “Julia Kristeva—Take Two” in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (Verso: London, 1986), p. 163.

11. Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 142; quoted in Moi, p. 16.