Abstract
To rephrase the question: Can there be (a politics of) women’s writing? What does it mean to say that women can analyse their exploitation only ‘within an order prescribed by the masculine’? And what theory of sexual difference can we turn to when we speak, as feminist critics are wont to do, of a specifically ‘feminine’ practice in writing? Questions like these mark a current impasse in contemporary feminist criticism. Utopian attempts to define the specificity of women’s writing — desired or hypothetical, but rarely empirically observed — either founder on the rock of essentialism (the text as body), gesture toward an avant-garde practice which turns out not to be specific to women, or, like Hélène Cixous in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, do both.2 If anatomy is not destiny, still less can it be language.
The first question to ask is therefore the following: how can women analyse their own exploitation, inscribe their own demands, within an order prescribed by the masculine? Is a women’s politics possible within that order?
(Luce Irigaray)1
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Notes
Luce Irigarary, ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine’ in her This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, NY, 1985), p. 81.
See Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms, pp. 245–64 (Amherst, MA, 1980).
The implications of such definitions of ‘écriture féminine’ are discussed briefly in ‘The Difference of View’ section 11. 1, and by Nancy K. Miller, ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction’, PMLA, 96: 1 (January 1981), 37; my own essay is indebted to Miller’s account of The Mill on the Floss in the context of ‘women’s fiction’.
See Irigarary, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 68–85, and her Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY, 1985), pp. 133–46.
See also Carolyn Burke, ‘Introduction to Luce Irigarary’s ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, Signs, 6:1 (Autumn 1980), 71.
See, for instance, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘Toward Feminist Poetics’, Part 1 of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT, 1979), pp. 3–104; Gilbert and Gubar’s is above all a work of literary (her)story.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 628; subsequent page references in the text are to this edition. I am especially indebted to Byatt’s helpful annotations.
See Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, who succinctly state that Maggie seems ‘at her most monstrous when she tries to turn herself into an angel of renunciation’ (p. 491), and Gillian Beer, ‘Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’, in Mary Jacobus (ed.), Women Writing and Writing About Women (London, 1979), p. 88, on an ending that ‘lacks bleakness, is even lubricious’ in its realisation of ‘confused and passionate needs’.
See Carol Christ, ‘Aggression and Providential Death in George Eliot’s Fiction’, Novel, 9:2 (Winter 1976), 130–40, for a somewhat different interpretation.
Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore, MD, 1981), pp. 4, 5.
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Jacobus, M. (2002). Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss. In: Yousaf, N., Maunder, A. (eds) The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21296-1_5
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