The Rhetoric of Marginality: Why I Do Feminist Theory

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The Rhetoric of Marginality: Why I Do Feminist TheoryAuthor(s): Laurie FinkeReviewed work(s):Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 251-272Published by: University of TulsaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463997 .Accessed: 27/08/2012 09:55

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The Rhetoric of Marginality:

Why I Do Feminist Theory

Laurie Finke Lewis and Clark College

In her editorial essay in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2 (1983), Shari Benstock poses a number of questions that must figure prominently in any dialogue about feminist literary practices.

Is woman's literary creativity fired by her cultural, economic, and sexual marginality? What is the province of feminist criticism? Is it an archeological dig or something other (or more) than this? Is feminist criticism in the process of establishing a hierarchy of woman's writing that will keep some women's writing and some forms of feminist criticism at the margins of discourse and others at the privileged center? When does the magic circle of centrality become a prisonhouse? How have the developments of the woman's movement in the 1970s significantly altered the relation between woman and her writing, between the woman critic and her literary subject?1

Although Benstock attempts to answer these questions in her essay by analyzing Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, she also conceives of these questions as part of an ongoing debate. The essay does not end by closing itself off. Benstock extends the dialogue by asking for further com? ment. She asks that "in the pages of Tulsa Studies women critics might treat themselves as women writers, might include themselves among the women writers under examination" and goes on to call for "contributions on femi? nist literary theory for publication in Tulsa Studies'1 (FC, 148).

One response to this call is a special double issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3 (1984), entitled Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, which features articles by a number of well-known feminist critics including Elaine Showalter, Nina Baym, Nina Auerbach, Josephine Donovan, Judith Kegan Gardiner, and Lillian S. Robinson. The debate among the contrib? utors about the role of critical theory in feminist literary criticism offers feminist critics a yardstick by which to measure how far they have come in the last decade and to assess the impact feminism has had on the institution of literary studies. The issue, for this reason, is a provocative and challenging one. The theoretical questions Benstock poses in her editorial essay, "Beyond

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the Reaches of Feminist Criticism," suggest an agenda for feminist criticism that this essay attempts to realize: "What," she asks, "is the feminist critic's relation to the language she uses? What are the principles on which her method is founded? Is language?the literary language of the woman writer whose work she examines and her own critical language?an issue?" (25). My responses to these questions differ substantially from those of the contrib? utors to Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship; to me, it seems that the essays largely ignore the problems posed by a critical language that often re?

produces the ideological assumptions the contributors wish to attack. It is not my intention here to attack any particular feminist critic or any particu? lar brand of feminism, but I would like to explore the implications of Benstock's questions by examining the critical rhetoric of the essays in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship. In various ways these essays are indica? tive of the problematic relationship of feminist literary criticism to contem?

porary theoretical discourse. I wish to argue that to dismiss the theoretical

insights of the last decade?or to claim that theory is tangential, even

hostile, to the processes of resurrecting or celebrating women writers?is to force feminist criticism into a single-voiced, authoritarian mode of dis?

course, thereby domesticating the subversive, demystifying potential of feminist criticism. As I shall suggest at the end of this essay, the questions Benstock poses may lead us to a dialogic, Bakhtinian conception of what feminist theory might accomplish if it encourages a decentralized, polyvocal alternative to the dominant discourses of Anglo-American literary criticism.

Benstock's questions in "The Feminist Critique" begin with the assump? tion that women are culturally, economically, and sexually marginal. Fur?

thermore, their marginality has been imposed upon them by a culturally, economically, and sexually dominant group?men; this is an assumption shared, in some form, by most if not all of the contributors to the special issue. Benstock's questions set up a series of corresponding binary opposi? tions: centrality/marginality, men/women, privilege/oppression, free?

dom/prisonhouse, theory/practice. Eventually all are deconstructed by her

reading of Russ, which demonstrates the ways How To Suppress Women's

Writing calls attention to its own gaps, omissions, hesitations, and subter?

fuges. Benstock argues that Russ's epilogue calls into question the claim by white middle class feminists to critical marginality, issuing a timely warning to those who would form a "counterculture" that "presumes its own cen?

trality" (FC, 144). Benstock's oppositions resurface consistently in the essays included in

Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship; for many of the contributors these

oppositions are subsumed by the textual metaphor of centrality and mar?

ginality. That opposition, as it is inscribed in the discourses of Feminist Issues

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in Literary Scholarship, bears closer examination. For feminists, the dichot?

omy centrality/marginality is irrevocably intertwined with the problem of

sexual difference. Josephine Donovan argues that "women, whether in

communities or isolation, share a condition of oppression, or otherness, that is imposed by governing patriarchal or androcentric ideologies" (101). Like

Benstock, she constructs a series of binary oppositions that can be organized under that of center/margin: male/female, power/powerlessness, same/other. But unlike Benstock, she fails to grasp how slippery such

linguistic oppositions can be. If one is simply marginal, an outsider denied

access to the power that controls society, "patriarchal or androcentric ide?

ology" is a male conspiracy and women remain innocent of any complicity in

their oppression. But this is too monolithic a view of patriarchal ideology and oppression, one that misses the contradictions and gaps within the

ideology itself. Women have always been complicit in their own victimiza? tion and that of other women, often internalizing their oppression and

identifying with their oppressors. Judith Newton argues in her essay, "Making?and Remaking?History: Another Look at Patriarchy" (125-42), that women have been as efficient as men in propagating their own version of

patriarchal and bourgeois ideology. "Marginality," then, is a relational concept, not a reified category; as Toril

Moi suggests, "What is perceived as marginal at any given time depends on the position one occupies."2 White middle class women may be marginal or

oppressed in relation to white middle class men; but in relation to black

women, even perhaps black men, they are, because of their race, potentially the oppressors. There are no oppressed groups pure and simple, only shifting relations between oppressors and oppressed. Yet, the relational nature of

marginality frequently remains unacknowledged, even by feminists. The

tendency in our patriarchal and Cartesian culture is to determine value by hierarchical classification. To give a name, to assign a label in Western

philosophy, literature, and sociology has been traditionally to "objectify" a

person or group, presumably once and for all, to reify the subject. To name is,

finally, to establish difference as a natural and hierarchical condition. Yet

defining difference?specifically sexual difference?is what many of the contributors to Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship want to do. Nina Baym writes, "Differences abound; but what they are, how they are constituted, what they entail, and whether they must be constant, seem to me above all

questions that a feminist might ask, questions that are least adequately answered" (46). Yet, as Barbara Johnson has argued, fixing difference can be

theoretically tricky. The differences between oppositions (like male/female, center/margin) often repress the differences within them. And, as Moi has

argued, "To see difference principally as the gap between two parts of a binary

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opposition (as for instance between masculinity and femininity) is therefore to impose an arbitrary closure on the differential field of meaning."3

We might begin to explore the differences within marginality by looking at what is central and what is marginal within the discourse of Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship. The "center" of the issue is taken up with nine articles, all by prominent white female critics. Six of these are members of the Tulsa Studies editorial board. In the margins of the text are the book reviews to which are relegated women of color (there is one review on works by black feminist critics), lesbians (there is one review of a book on Radclyffe Hall), men (three of the reviewers are men and four books by men are reviewed), and women writers before 1800 (three reviews). The very composition of the issue would seem to belie Benstock's original call for "essays on women writers in foreign language literatures [there are none in this issue], essays on women of color, essays on third world women writers [none]" (FC, 148). This absence of diversity is not a failure of will on Benstock's part or her

contributors'; instead, it is an indication of how difficult and subversive the critical task that she has posed may prove (as Jane Marcus suggests, 88). Despite her hope that uTulsa Studies will resist the reestablishment of the old

centrality under a new guise" (FC, 148), that is precisely what Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship has done, beginning with its sparse cover, which

highlights the names of its prominent contributors.4 While this volume should go a long way in solidifying the reputation of Tulsa Studies in the field of women's studies, it also suggests that women's studies already has both an established hierarchy of feminist critics and a canon of women writers. If

academic, institutionalized feminism is a marginal discourse, it has inscribed within itself both a center and margins. I point this out not to denigrate these critics who, after all, have experienced and struggled against the very marginality they protest (and for whom Elaine Showalter's account of her careef might serve as an illustration, 33-34) and have contributed enor?

mously to the advances made by feminist criticism since 1979, when

Carolyn Heilbrun wrote that "only the feminist approach has been scorned, ignored, fled from, at best reluctantly embraced."5 Rather, I would argue that feminist criticism as it has been conceived in this country could hardly avoid

replicating the dichotomy between marginality and centrality that feminists

perceive in masculinist discourse. The "margin" of feminist discourse is

institutionally part of the "center," which we know as literary studies. However marginal, feminist criticism is still part of a dominant ideology defined by institutions and taxonomies?universities; academic depart? ments; English, French, and German majors; indeed "women's studies"

itself?which, some Marxist critics contend, must be subverted in order to

bring about meaningful change. As long as feminist critics reify "feminism" as a seamless whole, it will tend to repeat the social relations of androcentric

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institutions and discourage a decentralized, multivocal feminism that might work to change radically those institutions and practices that oppress both men and women.

For this reason, any feminist approach that establishes a two-sided argu? ment?them against us?is, in effect, fostering the repressive duality between center and margin that feminist critics should seek to undermine. The

particular "blindness" that accompanies the insights of Feminist Issues in

Literary Scholarship is to the ways in which the institution of literary criticism has made the position of feminist critics ambiguously non-hegemonic. Although they are insiders in a "dominant system of meanings and values" by virtue of their profession, feminist critics are excluded from the system by virtue of their sex.6 The liberal academy has placed feminist critics, particu? larly those Showalter refers to as "pioneering feminists," into positions of

authority in which they must paradoxically uphold and challenge the traditions of authority. They have become complicit in a system that allows them to modify the canon and shift emphases within the study of literature, but prevents them from challenging the privileges of a dominant masculinist

ideology. This tension between what is most conservatively central and most

radically marginal in feminist criticism is built into the very structure of the volume. Thus the title, "Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship," is mislead?

ing because it suggests that essays in the volume examine the impact of feminism on literary scholarship. To be sure, many of the contributors

complain that feminist issues as they are defined in this country?the revision of the "masterpieces" of Western literature, the reevaluation of the

literary canon, and the recognition of women writers?have largely been

ignored by literary theory. Women, women's writing, and the practical criticism or empiricism or pluralism that frequently mark feminist critical

practice often seem beyond the pale of the more "central" issues of literary theory: textuality, intertextuality, deconstruction, and hermeneutics.7 But of more concern to the volume's contributors is the question of what role

literary theory should play in feminist scholarship. Many attempt to turn the

center/margin dichotomy back upon theorists. If feminist criticism is mar?

ginal to literary theory, they ask, should not literary theory be marginal to feminist criticism? The volume, then, might more accurately be called "Theoretical Issues in Feminist Literary Criticism," a title that focuses on the

incipient debate among the contributors. A number of critics in this issue place themselves self-consciously in the

anti-theoretical camp, voicing opposition to "the modish new way of read?

ing" (Robinson, 149) and testifying to their fear of being appropriated by the "masculinist" discourse of critical theory. Showalter, Baym, and Marcus all assume anti-theoretical positions, although not for the same reasons nor with the same vehemence. Baym's rejection of theory is absolute. Theory is

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misogynistic, either ignoring or appropriating feminist insights. She writes that "feminist theory addresses an audience of prestigious male academics and attempts to win its respect. It succeeds, so far as I can see, only when it

ignores or dismisses the earlier paths of feminist literary study as 'naive' and

grounds its own theories in those currently in vogue with the men who make

theory" (45). Because they situate their arguments in the theories of men, theories like deconstruction or Marxism, Baym argues, feminist theorists are

misogynistic, phallic feminists who "excoriate" their "deviating" sisters.

"Feminism," she writes,

has always been bifurcated by contention between pluralists and legalists. Pluralists anticipate the unexpected, encourage diversity; legalists locate the correct position and marshal women within the ranks. Theory is, by nature, legalistic: infractions?the wrong theory, theoretical errors, or insouciant

disregard for theoretical implications?are crimes; theory is a form of policing. Pluralists "dance"; theorists "storm" or "march." Theorists constrain what may be allowably discovered; their totalizing, in the name of feminism, reproduces to the letter the appropriation of women's experience by men, substituting only the appropriation and naming of all women's experience by a subset of women: themselves. This repetition of authoritarian structure betrays an infatuation with male forms and deconstructs the feminist project. (45)

Baym's confrontational rhetoric creates binary oppositions that polarize feminists into two camps. Feminism is "bifurcated"; it has been violently split apart by "theorists," the legalists. The opposition pluralists/legalists (like all such binary oppositions, it privileges the left-hand member) struc? tures this paragraph, which highlights the dichotomy through a series of

parallel and antithetical phrases: "pluralists anticipate the unexpected, encourage diversity"; "legalists locate the correct position and marshal women within the ranks"; "pluralists 'dance,'" "legalists 'storm' or 'march.'"

Baym's imagery locates all the forces of oppression, suppression, and repres? sion on the side of the legalists. Carrying the implications of Baym's images to their logical conclusions, one could argue that because pluralists "dance," they are more feminine, less aggressive, and less shrill than the storm

troopers, thought police, and martinet generals she calls legalists. Hence

they are better representatives of the feminist project. Baym's alternative to literary theory is a pluralism, which she defines only

in opposition to the theories she attacks. Pluralism, however, is not without its own difficulties as a theoretical position. And pluralism is a theory, however theoretically innocent (or naive) its adherents claim to be. By pluralism, Baym means to suggest a theoretical position that assumes that

interpretations of texts can compete with one another without invalidating

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each other.8 At first glance this might seem a logical position for a feminist

literary criticism trying to legitimate itself within the institution of literary studies. But Showalter has astutely argued that this strategy of legitimation presents its own difficulties. In "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," she

writes, "in the free play of the interpretive field, the feminist critique can

only compete with alternative readings, all of which have the built in obsolescence of Buicks, cast away as newer readings take their place."9 The "feminist critique" of Shakespeare, Pope, or even Jane Austen can, in the "free play" of Anglo-American criticism, remain in fashion until the atten? tion of one's colleagues wanders to another fashionable mode of assembly- line analysis. But beyond the practical difficulties Showalter directs our attention to, we ought to consider the theoretical problems of this position? problems that may prove more damaging to feminist criticism than mere obsolescence. Pluralism serves as the philosophic legitimation of the cen?

ter/margin dichotomy, keeping mainstream discourse, whether andro? centric or middle-class feminist, firmly in the center. It "allows" marginal or subversive systems of thought such as Marxism, radical feminism, or black feminist criticism, but does not require that we take them seriously.

Pluralism presupposes that all ideas compete equally in a free marketplace of ideas. And, like the laissez-faire economic theory I am invoking with my metaphor, this presupposition masks its own special interest?the defense of the status quo. "Ideas" compete no more equally in the academy than commodities do in a capitalist economy. The critical free market is more an

ideological myth than reality, a way of distancing ourselves from institu? tional inequalities among interpreters and interpretations. If feminist dis? course is marginal to literary criticism, how then can it compete "equally" with a masculinist criticism that denies its own privileged centrality? Plu?

ralism, whatever its guise, often simply reasserts orthodox positions and ideas. New Critical pluralism might serve as a cautionary example. It

effectively pre-empted feminist literary criticism for years by defining male

experience as "universal truth" and female experience as "special pleading." The Anglo-American New Criticism that I was taught as a graduate student defined what could be said about a text, indeed what could be allowed as

"literary." As Baym herself argues, the literary establishment has long ex? cluded women writers simply by declaring their writing "non-literary" (46). In "Storming the Toolshed," Marcus quotes Gayatri Spivak in an un?

published reply to Annette Kolodny's defense of feminist pluralism: "To embrace pluralism (as Kolodny recommends) is to espouse the poetics of the masculinist establishment. Pluralism is the method employed by the central authorities to neutralize opposition by seeming to accept it. The gesture of

pluralism on the part of the marginal can only mean capitulation to the center.10 The guise of critical plurality can mask homogeneity and au-

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thoritative, monologic discourse. In this light, Baym's pluralism ends up being an exclusionary strategy, a totalizing feminism that allows only "prag? matic, empirical attempts] to look at women" (45).

American feminism has traditionally relied upon a rhetoric of marginality that enabled feminists to express their anger at women's oppression by and exclusion from the dominant culture. But anger, however justified, can be a

self-defeating rhetorical gesture. Whether it is the writer who is angry or the

goal of the writer to arouse anger, or both, anger divides the world into hostile camps?them and us. Its tactics preclude subtle or close analysis of social relations. Contradictions, gaps, and differences cannot be figured rhetorically or tolerated politically either within the ranks or within the

opposition. This seems the case with the essays by Baym and Marcus.

Although Baym seems to have Marcus in mind among the "legalists" to whom she objects (with her reference to legalists who "storm"), their two

essays are more alike in their anger and in the rhetorical deployment of that

anger than their differences might suggest. Ironically?and significantly? the two "angriest" pieces in this double issue direct their anger not at

patriarchal ideology, or men, or even women who self-consciously reject feminism, but at other feminists whom they perceive as practitioners of

"phallic" feminism. Like Baym, Marcus employs an exclusionary rhetoric that divides femi?

nism into two groups. She creates a center of marginality that ironically renders all opposition marginal. At the center, Marcus envisions an "um? brella of sisterhood under which to shield many writers who feel that their

privileged, straight, white sisters are not sisters at all" (88). Marcus attempts to create a united sisterhood, only?paradoxically?to divide it by disallow?

ing any difference from her position; she creates a sisterhood from which

many "sisters" are by definition excluded. She seizes the center so that she can speak for all feminists, indeed for all politically, socially, and eco?

nomically oppressed women. She identifies herself as "the voice of the reader, the translator, the middle-class feminist speaking for her sisters" (79).

Marcus seems unaware of the contradictions inherent in the particular brand of "socialist feminist criticism" she offers as an alternative to aesthetic theories grounded in psychology or formalism. In her attempt to de?

scribe/prescribe the feminist critic's relation to oppressed women, she col?

lapses two distinct feminist strategies of reading, suppressing the differences between them. She takes, as the title of her essay and the basis of her feminist

aesthetics, a line from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, a play about the rape and silencing of women. Confronted by his raped, mutilated, and mute

daughter, the hero vows to learn how to interpret her gestures so that he can exact his revenge: "But I, of these, will wrest an alphabet,/And by still

practice learn to know thy meaning" (IILii., 44-45). Without pausing over

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the contradition between "wrest" and "still" or the ironies of situation and

speaker in these lines, Marcus goes on to define "still practice" as "the patient struggle to 'read' the body of the text of the oppressed and silenced" (80). The

white, heterosexual woman critic, she argues, must be careful not to impose her languages on women of color or lesbians. But at the same time, she must "wrest" an alphabet from their signs. "Wrest" suggests a forceful, even

violent, extraction that, however appropriate to Shakespeare's sanguinary play and hero, seems at odds with the egoless, trancelike openness to the text Marcus attributes to "still practice." If Lavinia is ultimately overshadowed by Titus's extravagant and gory acts of vengeance, in Marcus's essay, "still

practice" is in danger of being lost altogether in the act of "wresting" an

alphabet. "Still practice," as Marcus acknowledges at one point, does not even have to be "still"; it is "not entirely pacifist" (80). It is, in effect, no different from "wresting an alphabet." Both become evaluative standards rather than theoretical models of the reading process. I find it difficult to

distinguish the act of "wresting" an alphabet from what Marcus defines as

phallic feminism: "an aggressive forced entry into the text of the writer with a reading of one's own" (80). What she praises in Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon, her "brilliantly overdetermined and insistently feminist

readings" of Victorian myths that "urge her own readers to similar subversive acts" (82), she condemns in Gayatri Spivak's and Peggy Kamuf's work on

Virginia Woolf, because these two women draw on male theorists like

Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Marcus accuses both critics of "taking father-guides to map the labyrinth of the female text," of denying "the motherhood of the author of the text" (89). Spivak's reading of To The

Lighthouse "places a Derridean box over the text and crushes and squeezes everything to fit" (88); Kamuf's essay on A Room of One's Own "does not try to wrest a woman's alphabet from the woman writer but spells her message in male letters" (89). Her rejection of Spivak and Kamuf seems as much based on their failure to cite feminist critics in their footnotes?and on their use of male theory?as on any methodological difference from Auerbach.11 While one can certainly sympathize with Marcus's frustration at feminist critics' "silence regarding the impulse to political action" (80), her rhetoric of anger, violence, and confrontation confuses her own position. Her alternative to Lawrence Lipking's "poetics of abandonment,"12 which, she argues, is based on a "nostalgic vision" of the virtuous, suffering woman, is a feminist aesthetics of power based on virginal vengeance (Judith's beheading of

Holofernes), sisterhood, and maternal nurturance (81-82). The problem is that?however enabling each of these images may be separately?the specific deployment of power in each is quite different. Vengeance implies an

appropriation of masculine aggressiveness; sisterhood, an organized re? sistance to that aggression; maternal nurturance, a subversion of the values

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that enable Western privileging offeree and violence as the ultimate arbiters of power. Without confronting the "differences" among these various ap? proaches, she preaches?and practices?a confrontational rhetoric that imi? tates the violent practices she attacks.

For Marcus, reading, and particularly theoretical reading, is the site of a

struggle; it is anything but a passive reception or "still practice." Her own

aggression is evident in the rhetoric of her attack on "masculinist" theory.

The language of current theoretical writing is a thicket of brambles; the reader must aggressively fight her way into it, emerging shaken and scratched. Those survivors in the central clearing congratulate themselves on being there. Everyone on the other side of the bushes is a coward or an intellectual weakling. Bleeding and exhausted from their struggle, they invent a new

hierarchy, with theorists at the top, vying to be scientists and philosophers. Literary criticism and theory are somehow tougher and more rigorous than other forms of literary study. (86-87)

The Darwinian metaphor here casts the "survivors" of an intellectual "strug? gle" as a self-privileging, hegemonic center that renders the stragglers marginal, "cowards and intellectual weaklings." Polemically this rhetoric

may be effective, but it is successful precisely because it casts "theory" as the villain in a nightmare image of literary criticism as a competitive venture in

power brokering. As the basis of the differences between "theory" and other unspecified

literary practices, Marcus posits sexual difference. Theory is "scientific"; it is

"tougher and more rigorous" than other subjective and intuitive critical

practices. In a word, theory is masculine, a counter to the more feminine tendencies of literary criticism. Showalter, in her essay "Women's Time, Women's Space: Writing the History of Feminist Literary Criticism," even more explicitly sexualizes the difference between theory and practice. She first quotes Northrop Frye's 1975 statement that "the sciences, especially the

physical sciences, are rugged, aggressive, out in the world doing things, and so symbolically male, whereas the literatures are narcissistic, intuitive, fanciful, staying at home and making the home more beautiful, but not

doing anything serious and therefore symbolically female" (40). She then

argues, quoting Frye, that theory makes "the study of literature more serious and manly by structuring its principles scientifically like the laws of physics, biology, and mathematics" (40); in her mind, theory attempts to make

literary studies objective, rational, and subject to external verification of one sort or another. The impetus behind most of the anti-theoretical rhetoric of

contemporary American feminism lies precisely in this belief that theory is an attempt to make literature more "masculine" by moving it closer to the

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rational sciences. In one respect, Baym, Showalter, and Marcus all agree that feminist critics should not be using "masculine" strategies to produce femi? nist readings of texts.

A more pertinent matter, it seems to me, is whether literary strategies?or indeed thought itself?ought to be gender-typed at all. The associations in all three articles between masculinity, science, rationality, and objectivity on the one hand and femininity, literature, intuition, subjectivity on the other depend on the familiar opposition of center and margin: the first set is

highly valued, composing the cornerstones of Western thought (and so

symbolically male); the latter set is devalued, marginal, female. This dualism of masculine science and feminine literature, which underlies many feminist

critiques of theory, is based on outmoded and essentialist notions first about the relationships between the sciences and literature and secondly on a by- now cliched metaphor that links field of inquiry and gender. For feminists to

accept uncritically what is quickly becoming an obsolescent dichotomy between literature and science, and then to relate this duality to sexual

difference, seems to me politically naive and disabling. Philosophers and historians of science in the 1980s are almost routinely demystifying scientific

objectivity and inductive reasoning; and scientists themselves are critically and productively examining the ideological assumptions and values of late twentieth century science.13 Feminists ought to be just as interested in

deconstructing culturally erected "differences" that relegate one way of

thinking to men and another to women. Sexuality does not determine modes of thought or the ability to think. The belief that it does (that women, because they menstruate, do not get enough blood flow to their brains to think rationally, for instance) has until recently been a valuable strategy for those seeking to type women as intellectually and emotionally inferior to men.

Too frequently feminist analyses of theory rely on such unexamined

assumptions about the nature and purpose of theory. Showalter's essay, "Women's Time, Women's Space," is a case in point. Showalter divides all feminist criticism since 1975 into two camps: gynesis and gynocritics. She

rejects the theoretical formulations that mark the French exploration of the textual representation of sexual difference (Alice Jardine's gynesis) for

gynocritics, the Anglo-American focus on women's writing. What most troubles Showalter about gynesis is its "dependence on male masters and male theoretical texts" (37). For "pioneering feminist critics," the "glittering critical theories of Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan seem like golden apples thrown in Atalanta's path to keep her from winning the race. In the adaptation of continental theory to feminist practice they see the dictatorship of the dominant, the surrender of hard-won critical auton?

omy to a reigning language and style" (35). Gynocritics, however, has

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remained free of this contamination. Pioneering feminists, she argues, quoting Rider Haggar's She, "never pay attention to or even acknowledge any man as their father, even when their male parentage is perfectly well known" (37).

But denying one's critical paternity does not make it go away. Showalter's claim that feminist criticism is autonomous, free of male "masters," obscures and mystifies the sources, the theoretical underpinnings of most Anglo- American feminist criticism, including her own. Most of the "pioneering feminist critics" to whom she refers were trained in the New Criticism, the dominant theoretical paradigm of literary criticism in the late 1960s and

early 1970s when they began writing. While feminist new critical readings of

literary texts can provide a "turn of the screw" to male readings, they remain indebted to the aesthetic values and ideological fictions of New Critical doctrine?the autonomous, unified, experiencing self, the superiority of

"poetic" experience to the mundane concerns of economics and politics, and the holistic coherence of the literary text as a reflection of experience?a doctrine articulated by a male intellectual elite. That literary feminism should lack the autonomy often claimed for it is not surprising if we consider the ambiguously non-hegemonic position of women in the academy. Once the feminist critic has been granted the privileges of academia?tenure, grants, publication, lectures?she is in the ambiguous position of criticizing the system while enjoying its fruits?not an impossible position, but not a

purely autonomous one either. The premises that enable her own readings of

literary texts may become invisible to her, creating the illusion of autonomy from androcentric theory and methodology. But the theory is there nonetheless.

When Baym, Marcus, and Showalter criticize "theory," what they are

really attacking are particular theories, primarily those emerging from France since the early 1960s?structuralism and poststructuralism, particularly deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the ecole freudienne. It is

significant, I think, that the rhetoric these critics use to attack theory is based on rigid models of structuralist inquiry, which are themselves inevita?

bly characterized as masculine, "scientific," and repressive. Yet, to label Derridean grammatology, for example, as "rationalist" or objective is to caricature it as part of the repressive ideology it attempts to dismantle from within. What postmodern theories have tended to valorize or coopt (de? pending upon your perspective) are the places from which women have

usually spoken?the margins, the irrational or anti-rational, the non-

scientific, the gaps and silences of the text?which oppose the traditional

rationality of Western philosophy and science. While marginality may be a social and material reality for many women, the recent work of Derrida, Paul de Man, and Hillis Miller suggests it may be a freely chosen philosophical

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stance, a subversive alternative to the (phal)logocentrism of Western

thought.14 For this reason, when the history of poststructuralism comes to be

written, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Johnson, Shoshana Felman, and Gayatri Spivak may ultimately prove as central as Hillis Miller or Geoffrey Hartman.

Why then should feminists not seize the opportunity to build their critique of sexual difference on a philosophical construct that embraces the irra? tional as well as the rational, the margins as well as the center, the female as well as the male? One reason, as Shari Benstock argues in her editorial essay, is our suspicion of the motives of those who would seize the margins: "If some of those men align themselves and their theoretical practice with les mar-

ginaux in Western culture, we suspect it is only to secure for themselves a firmer grip on the center of theoretical discourse" (7).

Another reason is that particular theories can be misogynistic, as Baym argues in her assessment of theories about female languages, psychoanalysis, and the pre-Oedipal mother.15 The theorists of the ecole freudienne?Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva are the most familiar to American feminists?offer brilliant and subtle analyses of the linguistic slippage in? volved in the male/female dichotomy and of the ideological formations that

oppress women; at the same time, they embrace and valorize essentialist notions of the "feminine" that perpetuate oppressive stereotypes of women's

silence, irrationality, and sexual promiscuity. Frequently these theorists conflate the so-called "feminine" aspects of avant garde artists like James Joyce, Stephane Mallarme, and Le Comte de Lautreamont with the histor? ical and material oppression of real women. As Showalter and Marcus both

argue, particular theories abstracted from historical and cultural contexts can be shameless manifestations of the male will to power that ally them? selves against the feminist project. Theory can mask and indeed become the occasion for the exercise of raw power precisely because theory redefines what is central and what is marginal; it determines the kinds of questions that can legitimately be asked of a text and thus directs their outcomes. From a feminist perspective, theory can be used to silence and appropriate the female voice, to locate the female supinely between two Oedipal rivals. Mary Jacobus's analyses of Stanley Fish's opening anecdote in Is There a Text in This Class? and of James Watson's exploitation of Rosalind Franklin in his account of the discovery of DNA suggest that women have good reason to fear the ways male theorists use the female as the impetus for their

competitions.16 Jacobus's analysis of theoretical misogyny in "Is There a Woman in This

Text?" subtly explores the interaction between language, rhetoric, and

ideology that structures power relations between the sexes, between teacher and student, and between analyst and analysand. A feminist theory that

adapts the rhetorical patterns of mastery and dominance typical of the

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androcentric theories it analyzes can unwittingly reproduce the same exploi? tation and silencing of women. Donovan's essay, "Towards a Women's Poet?

ics," illustrates this danger. Unlike feminists who draw on insights gleaned from psychoanalysis, deconstruction, or Marxism, Donovan does not rely explicitly on any "male models" or "guides" to construct her poetics. She

argues that "a women's poetics must be wholly grounded in works by women"

(100). The only male she cites is Lawrence Lipking, whom she dismisses. Yet, while she uses only the works of other women, her methodology and her critical vocabulary are rigorously structuralist. She is attempting to con? struct a grammar of the female narrative. Her essay outlines "six structural conditions that appear to have shaped traditional women's experience and

practice in the past and in nearly all cultures?conditions that have, in short, shaped women's world views" (101, emphasis added).17 The phrase "in nearly all cultures" implies a universal "feminine" experience qualitatively different from that of men. It privileges sexual difference, rather than, say, racial

persecution or socioeconomic inequality as the essential characteristic of women's "experience," denigrating others to a secondary status.

The difficulties inherent in this paradigm of women's epistemology are

suggested by a closer examination of Donovan's rhetorical and critical

strategies. Like Fish's Is There a Text in This Class?,18 Donovan's essay begins with a joke, a New Yorker cartoon depicting a woman sitting in front of a television explaining to a man (her husband presumably) the outcome of a show: "You missed the end, but it came out happily. She shot him." Donovan

argues that "the woman viewer's judgment stems from her empathetic identification with the triumphant female character" (99). This identifica?

tion, Donovan argues, points to her thesis: "women's aesthetic and ethical

judgments, when authentic, are rooted in a woman-identified, or woman-

centered, epistemology. That epistemology derives from women's cultural

experience and practice (praxis)" (99). At first glance this thesis might seem

logical, even commonsensical. But we might ask who is the butt of the cartoonist's joke and why? Its humor, it seems to me, derives almost entirely from the viewer's perception that the woman's aesthetic and moral judg? ments are, if not "wrong," at least typically, even stereo typically, female; how like a woman to miss the point altogether, to substitute her experience for the author's (or screenwriter's) intention. Donovan might have used the joke as a springboard to explore the radical reading strategies women must learn in order to read (or misread) their story as it is told, mostly by men, in this culture. But she does not. She does argue promisingly that a women's poetics must be grounded in the diversity of women's experience: "A black women's

poetics must be grounded in black women's experience and practice, as a lesbian poetics must be grounded in lesbian culture" (101). But that hetero?

geneity is quickly effaced by the structuralist imperative. Donovan appropri-

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ates a stereotypical caricature of a woman to advance a theory that taut-

ologically reinforces women's "praxis," their marginal position in society. In

practice Donovan's "poetics" threatens to recreate and valorize bourgeois values?domesticity, self-sacrificial nurturing, and silence?extending these to include women of all races, classes, and cultures.

This paradigm, however well intentioned, reproduces what Judith New?

ton, in "Making?and Remaking?History: Another Look at Patriarchy," calls the "comedic essentialism" of feminist criticism, an essentialism that valorizes women's nurturing and connecting qualities as a cure for men's domination (126). Donovan's poetics is reminiscent of the ideological con? struction of middle-class womanhood that Newton argues took place during the 1830s and 1840s in England. During this period, women participated in a "shared class strategy," which served to obscure and mystify some of the more glaring contradictions within patriarchal capitalism (129). We might compare the following passage from an 1828 "Female Character" with one from Donovan's essay:

The world is dead to sympathy, man is too much occupied in the pursuit of wealth or fame to lend a willing ear or a consoling voice to the complaints or the afflictions of disappointed hope and blighted expectations. But there is an ear, which is open to the sorrows of man; there is a voice, whose sweetest accents are the accents of comfort and consolation.19

The housewife is immersed in the daily world of concrete realities in a way that most men are not, and the qualitative nature of her products?that they have been personalized by her touch?gives women an avenue to the sacred that most men, immersed as they are in the profane, alienated world of exchange or commodity production, do not have. (Donovan, 103)

As Newton persuasively argues, as long as feminist literary theory is

grounded in a theory of history that focuses on "the unchanging, the

universal, and the monolithic" (127), it will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, doomed to political ineffectuality. Donovan's argument that housework is non-alienated and pre-capitalistic labor, a retreat from the male world of power and conquest, seems to implicate itself in an updated "class strategy." Her use of Angela Davis for support coopts feminism, Marxism, and the struggle against racism into its project. To my mind there is little unalienated or pre-capitalistic about vacuuming, doing dishes, or

cleaning toilets. Donovan's essay comes dangerously close to sounding like a

sophisticated version of the articles one reads in popular women's magazines and the women's pages of daily newspapers so popular in Reagan's America and Thatcher's England.20

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Closely linked to Donovan's ahistorical essentialism is her failure to consider the relationship of language to experience. She argues that a women's poetics must be built upon women's experiences, but she does not consider how language relates to and shapes those experiences. She assumes that experience is separable from language, that women (particularly women

theorists) can control language, and hence experience, rather than being controlled by a patriarchal model of language.21 Despite her caveats that feminist methodologies should not be built upon masculine models (107), Donovan consistently adopts a structuralist rhetoric that promotes the cultural distinction between the sexes as somehow essential, natural, and irrevocable. The languages of power and mastery, on the one hand, and

experience and subjectivity, on the other, effectively confine oppositional strategies to a kind of ideologically sanctioned "reform." The ends that Donovan?like Baym, Marcus, and Showalter?envision are admirable, but, like them, she has not given us a language capable of subverting the

strategies that encourage women to be complicit in their own victimization. This complicity is perhaps the most insidious effect of patriarchal ideology on women.

The question, then, becomes whether or not it is possible to have feminist

literary theory at all?that is, whether we can construct a theory or theories that are not simply exercises of power, that do not appropriate women in order to define them, and that are open to the diversity of real women and their historical situations. If theory, as Baym and Showalter assume, is the

systematic articulation of rules, then feminist criticism has no theory?nor should it. Feminist criticism is a diverse practice and there is no single set of rules that generate feminist readings of literary texts. But I would like to

argue for a definition of "theory" that veers away from rigid models and

promotes the questioning of "natural" distinctions and "universal truths."

Etymologically, "theory" is derived from the Latin theoria and Greek Oecogla: it is a mode of vision, of contemplation, and of speculation. From this

perspective theory may become an interrogation and subversion of critical

practice, an attempt to discover the values and assumptions that underlie the production of (in this case feminist) literary criticism.

This theory will evolve from a rhetoric of marginality that will enable feminist critics to do more than simply decry the victimization of women or celebrate their domesticity. It should enable us to create a. position from which we can, as a first step, deconstruct?subvert?the hierarchical cen?

ter/margin dichotomy, unmasking the reified categories that underwrite

gender distinctions. We must, of course, recognize that such a critical

position will always be provisional, always subject to revision based on the

shifting relations between the centers and margins of social and critical discourse. The construction of this theory will be an ongoing, complex

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process, which cannot be boiled down to a few precepts or rules; it will

require a non-Cartesian language that will continually evolve and revolu? tionize itself.

If I had far more time and space, I would argue that the impetus for such a critical rhetoric might be found in Bakhtin's "anti-linguistics," or what Tbdorov calls Bakhtin's "dialogics of culture."22 Both of these terms call attention to the ways in which Bakhtin questions and inverts the basic

premises and arguments of traditional linguistic and cultural theory, a

strategy that feminists might adapt for their own purposes. It is not my intention simply to introduce yet another "master" text, a new patriarchal authority, to direct feminist discourse. Nor am I promoting a simplistic reading of Bakhtin that would domesticate him for use in assembly-line readings of feminist texts. Indeed, Bakhtin's concept of "dialogism" as an "intense interaction and struggle between one's own and another's word," "a

process in which [these words] oppose or... interanimate one another," does not readily lend itself to producing new readings of texts.23 Yet Bakhtin's theoretical formulation of all discourse as inherently dialogic, double-

voiced, and subversive renders pointless any argument that feminist dis? course ought to free itself of subservience to patriarchal "masters"; it under? cuts both authoritative and separatist poses as so much "monologic" postur? ing. Rather than envisioning Bakhtin's discourse as "authoritative"?single- voiced, mystifying, something to be blindly followed?I would argue that his work might be read as "internally persuasive discourse," a discourse that, apart from its power to persuade, has the power to incite struggle, to

encourage creative misreading.24 Internally persuasive discourse is open, unfinished; it may become assimilated to our own voices, but it is always the occasion for the struggle with another's words that Bakhtin sees as crucial to

ideological consciousness.25 It is "dialogized" in the sense that it becomes

double-voiced, "half-ours, half-someone else's." We learn from it, but we also "take it into new contexts, attach it to new material, put it in new situations in order to wrest new answers from it, new insights into its meaning, and even wrest from it new words of our own (since another's discourse, if

productive, gives birth to a new word from us in response)" (DI, 346-47). While Bakhtin may never have envisioned his theory of dialogic discourse as

grist for the feminist's mill (there is little evidence he ever thought much about women's issues), his writing would seem to encourage the kind of

ideological struggle, or "creative misprision" I believe is necessary to con? struct a productive theoretical criticism.

If feminist criticism is to claim women as oppressed or repressed subjects, it must lodge that claim within a theory of the subject; if feminist writing is to represent women's experiences, it must do so within a larger framework of a theory of representation; and if feminist critics are to examine the

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uniqueness of women's relation to language, they must ground that examina? tion in a persuasive theory of language. To date, feminist critics (as I have

argued above) have?with few exceptions?worked (consciously or uncon?

sciously) within a Cartesian theory of the autonomous, unified self, a mimetic theory of representation (ultimately Aristotelian), and a Saussurean notion of language as a closed system of signs, an abstract, ahistorical structure of "rules." Bakhtin rejects the Saussurean distinction between

langue and parole, arguing that no language exists as an abstract, holistic

entity but only as a series of utterances in a "dialogically agitated environ? ment." In "Discourse in the Novel," he writes:

any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualification, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist?or, on the contrary, by the "light" of alien words that have already been spoken about it. (DI, 216)

This formulation of language as a struggle among competing codes, inter?

pretations and reconstructions of "meaning," offers feminists a radical cri?

tique of language that calls attention to the ideological bases of both identity (women's identity) and representation (the representation of women). Bakhtin's notion of the word as "half-ours, half-someone else's" could move feminists beyond simplistic notions of patriarchal ideology as a stick to beat women or a series of deceptions foisted upon women by a ruling sex eager to

perpetuate its power. For Bakhtin, ideology is an activity created by conflicts and contradictions within and among words as social utterances. Patriarchal

ideology produces and reproduces strategies of social domination through gender divisions, creating a complex web of power relationships that en?

tangle the individual and force her to become complicit in her own oppres? sion.26 As feminist inquiry proceeds to reconstruct the chimera of "woman's

experience," a concept of patriarchal ideology as contradictory and fragmen? tary would call into question "woman" both as a pristine unit of semantic

meaning and as a preconstituted subject, an autonomous and unified self. "Woman" as the object of feminist discourse is a concept already "entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents" (DI, 276), created as much out of conflicting and contradictory ideological representations as by woman's own self-actualization. The prob? lem of identity, then, merges with the problem of representation: how do we

represent woman as subject and how will that representation be colored by other?that is non-feminist?representations of woman? The object toward which feminist criticism is directed, the female "text," "weaves in and out of

complex interrelationships" (DI, 276). The problem for feminist theory is to describe these "interrelationships," the ways in which "woman" is cultur-

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ally?not biologically?constructed as the subject and object of "feminism." As I have suggested, woman, or the collectivity subsumed under the rubric

"feminism," can be neither autonomous nor subservient, neither a given "center" nor a self-conscious "margin." We can not simply oppose woman and feminism to man and patriarchy; we must investigate internal conflicts, the tensions within the "dialogics of culture" problematically represented by contemporary feminist discourse.

A dialogic, nonauthoritarian critical rhetoric might enable feminists to envision a "theory" that will be formulated in practice rather than ide? alist ically and prescriptively decreed. It will involve men and women in

rethinking gender as an organizing ideological principle of philosophical, social, and political thought by allowing us to perceive "gender" not as a reified category but as a concept "overlain with qualifications, open to

dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist." This

dialogic account of language, representation, and ideology cannot be simply a means of producing readings of literary texts. It must be tied to political action, historically situated and committed, and founded on the assumption that institutional change is inevitable but inevitably uneven. The goal of a feminist dialogism must be not the creation of a theory to be rigorously applied but the mapping out of strategies for analyzing what has never been

analyzed before. Theory, in this sense, necessitates our demystifying Western

philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literature, re-envisioning what has been protected by our gender marked language.

NOTES

This essay was written with the support of a faculty development grant from Lewis and Clark College. I wish to thank Robert Markley for his careful readings and helpful comments on drafts of this paper.

1 Shari Benstock, "The Feminist Critique: Mastering our Monstrosity," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2 (1983), 139. Subsequent references to this article will be noted parenthetically in the text as FC.

2 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), 166.

3 Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), x-xi; Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 153-54. For another important discussion of the hierarchical nature of Western thought and language, see Leslie W. Rabine, "Searching for the Connec? tions: Marxist-Feminists and Women's Studies," Humanities in Society 6 (1983), 195-221.

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4 Editor's note: Indeed, the effort to fulfill the editorial objectives outlined here (objectives I myself set for Tulsa Studies) has been demanding. The effort is an ongoing one, however. Readers should note that an expanded version of Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship will be published by Indiana University Press in 1987; published in paperback, the collection is aimed toward classroom use.

5 Carolyn Heilbrun, "Bringing the Spirit Back to English Studies," ADE Bulletin 62 (1979), rpt. in Elaine Showalter, ed., New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 22.

6 The term (ambiguously) non-hegemonic is used by Rachel Blau DuPlessis to describe women's ambiguous participation in patriarchy. Women remain "outside of the dominant systems of meaning, value, and power." Yet, because of the nature of hegemony?it is a social process "which does not simply exist, or exist to crush all comers, but rather has 'continually to be renewed, recreated, defended and modified' as well as 'continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged'"?women are frequently internally oriented toward hegemonic norms in what DuPlessis calls a "painful double dance." See "For the Etruscans: Sexual Difference and Artistic Production? The Debate Over a Female Aesthetic," in The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 148-49.

7 One critic who has argued explicitly that feminist criticism can and must illuminate these central concerns of literary theory is Jonathan Culler. He writes, "Though one of the most significant and broadly based critical movements of recent years, feminist criticism is often ignored by self-styled historians of criticism and critical theory. Whether or not it displays striking philosophical affiliations, feminist criticism addresses theoretical questions in concrete and pertinent ways." He notes, as I intend to argue in this essay, that "the example of feminist criticism suggests that politically successful criticism may be immensely heterogeneous and epis- temologically problematical." See On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 42, n.4. Bernard Duyfhuizen's review essay, "Deconstruction and Feminist Literary Theory," also explores the

possibilities, as well as the dangers of appropriation, inherent in the uneasy "mar? riage" of deconstruction and feminism; see Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, 162-67.

8 On pluralism as a theoretical position, see Paul B. Armstrong, "The Conflict of Interpretations and the Limits of Pluralism," PMLA 98 (1983), 341-52 and the recent issue of Critical Inquiry, "Pluralism and Its Discontents," 12 (1986). Essays in this issue of particular relevance to my critique of pluralism are the article by Bruce Erlich, "Amphibolies: On the Critical Self-Contradictions of Pluralism," 521-49, and the analysis of his essay by Ellen Rooney, "Who's Left Out? A Rose By Any Other Name Is Still Red; Or the Politics of Pluralism," 550-63.

9 Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 182.

10 Jane Marcus, "Storming the Toolshed," Signs 1, 3 (1982), 623. 11 Marcus's references are to Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1983); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Making and Unmak? ing in To the Lighthouse" in Women and Language in Literature and Society, eds. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker and Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980),

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310-27; Peggy Kamuf, "Penelope at Work: Interruptions in A Room of One's Own," Novel 16 (Fall 1982), 5-18.

12 Lawrence Lipking, "Artistotle's Sister," Critical Inquiry 10 (1983), 61-81. 13 Evelyn Fox Keller has written several analyses of the ideology that links

objectivity, science, and masculinity, opposing them to subjectivity and femininity. See "Feminism and Science," Signs 1, 3 (1982), 589-602, and Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), especially 3-13. For an analysis of objectivity in scientific writing see Robert Markley, "Objectivity as Ideology: Boyle, Newton, and the Language of Science," Genre 16 (1983), 355-72.

14 See especially Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy; J. Hillis Miller, "Narrative Middles: A Preliminary Outline," Genre 11 (1978), 375-87; and Robert Markley's analysis of the center/margin dialectic in deconstructive criticism in "Tristram Shandy and 'Narrative Middles': Hillis Miller and the Style of Deconstruc? tive Criticism," Genre 17 (1984), 179-90, especially 179-80.

15 See Baym, 48-58, although more balanced and detailed analyses of this body of work may be found in Margaret Homans," 'Her Very Own Howl': The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction," Signs 9, 2 (1983), 186-98; Rabine, "Marxist-Feminists and Women's Studies," 206-11; and Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 102-73.

16 Mary Jacobus, "Is There a Woman in This Class?" New Literary History 14 (1982), 118-19, 129-30.

17 Those conditions, in brief, are as follows: 1) women as a group are oppressed; 2) women nearly universally occupy the domestic sphere; 3) women have historically created objects for use rather than exchange; 4) women share certain physiological experiences, including menstruation, childbirth, and lactation; 5) nearly all cultures assign the childrearing role to women; 6) the psychological maturation of girls differs from that of boys (101-05).

18 Stanley Fish, Is There A Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Commu? nities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 305.

19 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Style as Ideology in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 10.

20 For a description of feminist response to the new radical right, particularly its capitulation to the rhetoric of the right on the issues of motherhood and the family, see David Bouchier, The Feminist Challenge: The Movement for Women's Liberation in Britain and the United States (New York: Schocken, 1983), 197-201; Zillah Eisenstein, "The Sexual Politics of the New Right: Understanding the Crisis of Liberalism for the 1980s," Signs 1, 3 (1982), 567-88; and Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981), 201-19.

21 Margaret Homans makes this point about American feminism in general; see "In Her Own Howl,'" 186.

22 Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 104. Susan Stewart has coined the term "anti-liguistics" to describe Bakhtin's radical analysis of language. See "Shouts on the Streets: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics," Critical Inquiry 10 (1983), 265-81. Others who have noted the potential in Bakhtin's theoretical writing for a

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radical critique of the human sciences in Western discourse include Julia Kristeva, "\vbrd, Dialogue, and Novel," in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 64-91; and Ken Hirschkop, "A Response to the Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin," Critical Inquiry 11 (1985), 672-78. For another view of Bakhtin's dialogics and feminist inquiry see Wayne Booth, "Freedom of Interpreta? tion: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism," Critical Inquiry 9 (1982), 45-76.

23 "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 354; subsequent refer? ences to this work will be noted parenthetically in the text as DI. I have drawn

primarily upon "Discourse in the Novel" for my discussion of "dialogism" as it seems to me Bakhtin's most accessible discussion of that term. However, the concept informs all of his work and that of his circle. Many of the same points are made in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, the latter usually attributed to V. N. Volosinov; the question of authorship that plagues the Bakhtin canon is cogently summarized by Todorov, Dialogic Principle, 5-13.

24 The term is Bakhtin's; see DI, 342-46, for a comparison of "authoritative discourse" and "internally persuasive discourse."

25 That Bakhtin conceived of this struggle with another's words as more than

simply "polite disagreement" is suggested by his own encounters with the not-so- subtle oppression of Stalinist Russia.

26 For another critique of feminist constructions of patriarchal ideology see Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 26, 63-64.

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