Abstract
Like response theory and deconstruction, feminist criticism has pursued a reader-oriented, revisionistic interpretive practice, as well as a rigorous critique of the ideological infrastructures of interpretation. But unlike its male counterparts that have often taken an ahistoric turn, overlooking ‘the issues of race, class, and sex, and giv[ing] no hints of the conflicts, sufferings, and passions that attend these realities’,1 the feminist approach to reading has been more pragmatic, politically-oriented, revalorising women’s experience and exposing their traditional suppression as signifiers in culture. For feminists, ‘the question of how we read is inextricably linked with the question of what we read. More specifically, the feminist inquiry into the activity of reading begins with the realization that the literary canon is androcentric, and that this has a profoundly damaging effect on women readers’.2 Theory and practice, response and canon revision actively interact in feminist criticism. The act of reading is in this perspective ‘frankly political’, a ‘search for feminine identity’, a struggle to regain access to the process of signification. The interpretive act is integrated, if somewhat ostentatiously, into a political practice aimed at reversing the sociocultural roles ascribed to women in patriarchal culture. The task of understanding ‘one’s own feelings, motivations, desires, ambitions, actions and reactions’ is related directly to a critical examination of ‘the forces which maintain the subordination of women to men’.3
But meanwhile, just to hasten that difficult birth, can’t you give a fellow a clue?
Henry James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (p. 288)
Many current formulations of narrative process fail to see that subjectivity is engaged in the cogs of narrative and indeed constituted in the relation of narrative, meaning and desire; so that the very work of narrativity is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire.
Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (p. 106)
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Notes and References
Patrocinio P. Schweickart, ‘Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminine Theory of Reading’, in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 35.
Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1983), pp. xi–xii.
Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978/1981), p. viii.
Another early book that made direct use of classroom discussions and critiques is Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1975).
Elaine Showalter, Toward a Feminist Poetics, in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 141.
Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 194.
See Paula A. Treichler, ‘Teaching Feminist Theory’, in Theory in the Classroom, ed. Cary Nelson, pp. 81–4;Paula A. Treichler and Cheris Kramarae, ‘Women’s Talk in the Ivory Tower’, Communication Quarterly, 31/2 (Spring 1983): 118–32. For an application of this concept to James’s fiction
see Carren Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), pp. 14–17, 149–67.
Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976);
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977);
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985);
Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986);
Joanne S. Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986);
Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and London: Methuen, 1987);
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988).
Maggie Humm, Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics (Brighton, Sussex: the Harvest Press, 1986), p. 8.
See Rowena Fowler, ‘Feminist Criticism: The Common Pursuit’, New Literary History, 19/1 (Autumn 1987): 53.
See, for example, Lillian S. Robinson, ‘Feminist Criticism: How Do We Know When We’ve Won’, in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 141–9.
Ellen Messer-Davidow, ‘The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms’, New Literary History, 19/1 (Autumn 1987): 85. Still, in her own attempt to define the philosophic specificity of feminism, Messer-Davidow repeats some of the totalising gestures of ‘phallocratic’ criticism: systemic inference, over-generalisation, the treatment of the sex/gender complex as a ‘totality’ affecting all disciplines and modes of expression.
Susan S. Lanser, Shifting the Paradigm: Feminism and Narratology, Style 22/1 (Spring 1988): p. 54.
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. xiii.
Mary O’Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Dialectical Logic’, in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 99–100.
Susan Lanser, ‘Toward a Feminist Narratology’, Style, 20 (1986): 343.
Alice Jardine, ‘Pre-texts for the Transatlantic Feminist’, Feminist Readings: French Texts/American Contexts, Yale French Studies, 62 (1981): 226–7.
Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 249.
Luce Irigaray, ‘Women’s Exile’, Ideology and Consciousness, 1 (Spring 1977): 64.
Geraldine Pederson-Krag, ‘Detective Stories and the Primal Scene’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 18 (1949): 212.
Elaine Showalter, ‘Women and the Literary Curriculum’, College English, 32 (1971): 856–7.
Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 38.
Marge Piercy, Small Changes (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972), p. 267.
Barbara Godard, ‘Redrawing the Circle: Power, Poetics, Language’, in Feminism Now: Theory — Practice, ed. M. Kroker (Montreal: Culture Texts, 1985), p. 167.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 155–6. See also Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 91.
Xavière Gauthier, ‘Creations’, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 163.
Christine Makward, ‘To Be or Nor to Be… a Feminist Speaker’, in The Future of Difference, ed. Alice Jardine and Hester Eisenstein (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980), p. 96.
Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973), p. 8.
Julia Kristeva, ‘The Subject in Signifying Practice’, Semiotext(e), 1/3 (1975): 22, 24–5.
Donna Przybylowicz, ‘Contemporary Issues in Feminist Theory’ in Criticism Without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1987, pp. 129–59).
Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 15.
The emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged…. But woman could never become a sign and nothing more, even in a man’s world she is still a person, and since in so far as she is defined as a sign, she must be recognised as a generator of signs’. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. J. Harle Bell, J.R. von Sturmer and R. Needham (London: 1969), p. 496.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 218.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, eds., Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1977), pp. 8, 10.
For an application and refinement of this analysis of specularity, see Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 4.
See especially Carren Kaston, Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James (1984);
Donna Przybylowicz, Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and Other in the Late Works of Henry James (1986).
Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 36. Trans. Inge Crosman Wimmers.
Ezra Pound, Henry James’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 296.
As an example of the latter attitude, see Quentin Anderson, ‘The Golden Bowl as a Cultural Artifact’, in The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Knopf, 1971), pp. 161–200.
See John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 90–1.
Kaja Silverman, ‘Too Early/Too Late: Subjectivity and the Primal Scene in Henry James’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 21 (Winter/Spring 1988): 157.
See also Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 115–32.
Henry James, Letters, 1843–1875, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1974), vol. I, p. 226.
J.P. Mowbray, ‘The Apotheosis of Henry James’, in Henry James: the Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), p. 331.
Linda Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 232.
Maxwell Geismer, Henry James and His Cult (London, 1964), p. 146.
John Carlos Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 38.
P.J. Eakin, The New England Girl (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), p. 221.
See Kappeler, Writing and Reading in Henry James, pp. 98–112; Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery of the Canvas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 44–5.
See, among others, E. Duncan Aswell, ‘James’s In the Cage: The Telegraphist as Artist’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 8 (1966–1967): 375–84;
Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 306, 318.
Leon Edel, Henry James, The Untried Years: 1843–1870 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), pp. 56–7;
see also Edel, Henry James, The Conquest of London: 1870–1883 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), p. xiii.
Gabriel Pearson, ‘The Novel to End All Novels: The Golden Bowl’, in The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James, ed. John Goode (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 332.
For a good discussion of this aspect, see Lisa Appignanesi, Femininity and the Creative Imagination: A Study of Henry James, Robert Musil, and Marcel Proust (London: Vision Press, 1973);Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: the Embroidery on the Canvas, pp. 3–28.
George Bishop, When the Master Relents: The Neglected Short Fictions of Henry James (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 4.
Quoted in F.O. Matthiessen, The James Family (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. 339.
Naomi Lebowitz, The Imagination of Loving: Henry James’s Legacy to the Novel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965).
David Carroll, The Subject in Question: The Languages of Theory and the Strategies of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 66.
Leo Bersani, ‘The Jamesian Lie’, Partisan Review, 36 (1969): 58.
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© 1992 Marcel Cornis-Pop
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Cornis-Pope, M. (1992). Difficult Figuration: Feminine Signifiers in Male Texts. In: Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371378_4
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