Laurie A. Finke - Feminist Theory, Womens Writing

To Stephen and Hannah and in memory of my mother

The first draft of the introductory chapter of this book began by recounting exhaustivelyand rather drylythe history of feminist criticism between 1975 and 1985.I tore it up. Instead, by way of preface to the chapters that follow, it seems appropriate, because I am writing about women writers, to offer some account of myself as a woman writer and, because I am writing about feminist theory, to offer a brief history of my own encounters with a developing and dynamic feminist theory during those years. But like the medieval saints' lives that are the subject of my third chapter, this brief autobiographical excursion is meant to function emblematically: my political situation is, I think, characteristic of a generation of female scholars who entered graduate school before there was such a thing as feminist theory and who, having been trained in the patriarchal traditions of careful scholarship, found by 1980 or so that the tradition to which we had pledged our fealty had been exposed, to varying degrees, as a procession of false idols. In this respect, my experiences in the profession disclose a political (and generational) history that I hope will focus attention on the institutional consequences of my analyses of feminist theory.

I spent the years between 1974 and 1978 in Philadelphia as a graduate student training in medieval studies. I sweated, willingly, over at least nine dead languages, from Old Irish to Middle High German. Except for learning those languages, I was not really doing anything I had not already done as an undergraduate. The restlessness and boredom I experienced during those years was symptomatic of the ennui of a profession that was growing disenchanted with New Criticism but had nothing else to do to justify its existence except to spawn newer and newer readings of the same canonical texts or ever more arcane and esoteric dissertations and monographs on inaccessible ones. In the 1970s feminist criticism was neither required nor recommended reading for field exams in Old or Middle English. Upon completing a dissertation on Piers Plowman which I had little desire to revise for publication, I tried to get a job. I spent the years between 1979 and 1984 during the worst period of the job crunch in English in a series of temporary and underpaid positions (in Virginia and Oklahoma) and unemployed (in Lubbock, Texas); I taught freshman English and wrote dozens of applications each year for tenure-track positions.

During those years I made two discoveries that changed (or perhaps I should say confounded) my sense of professional purpose. I read Gayatri Spivaks translation of Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology and, shortly thereafter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubars Madwoman in the Attic. My discovery of feminist literary criticism thus became inextricably intertwined in my own mind with my discovery of literary theory. My understanding of each has been, from the start, informed by the other; I do not think even now I could easily separate the two. I began reading in both feminist criticism and literary theory, spending five years literally retraining myself in new fields that in graduate school I had not even known existedand indeed, at least in the institution where I studied, did not exist. Although always a politically committed feminist, I had assumed that, except for such workplace issues as discrimination and harassment, my feminism was separate from my scholarly work. My specialized areas of expertise had always seemed remote from womens issues, irrelevant to contemporary debates about abortion or comparable worth. Soon, however, my reading began to politicize my teaching and research. Like many of my contemporaries, I began to recognize that the political circumstances that created what we glumly referred to as the job market" might be related to the restlessness that seemed evident in so much American theory during this time. If the New Criticism, as some have argued, was a response to the need to find pedagogical methods adaptable to the influx of new students into the universities after World War II, it was equally plausible that the new theorizing, including feminist theorizing, might be a response to the dilemma facing literary faculties in the 1970sa vicious circle that created a surplus of new Ph.D.s trained for a very few tenure-track jobs, coupled with a lack of turnover in mostly tenured-in departments that required more and more graduate students to fill classes. My reading in feminist criticism satisfied my desire to recontextualize and to subvert the orthodoxies I had been taught as an undergraduate and graduate student. I began to forge connections, to think about the intersections and conflicts among my personal, political, and professional lives and among the several disciplines I encountered as a teacher of writing. Like many of my generationvictims of the same peculiar forms of late capitalist logicI had discovered that feminism, along with literary theory, offered a means to bring the political idealism of the 1960s into academic institutions by transgressing the boundaries between politics and the separate disciplines that divided knowledge in the university.

In the midst of this excitement of discovery, however, I found myself once again marginalized, an outsider, this time because of the field I had chosen. I had known all along that most medievalists did not really have much use for feminism. I soon learned that feminism had as little use for medieval studies, or for any literature before 1800, unless it was to catalog images of women as portrayed by the canonical male writers. The more feminist criticism I read, the more it seemed clear that, as a practice, feminist literary criticism had been created from a canon of works by women written during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England and America. Rarely did feminists venture on the other side of a great divide erected around 1800, when, as Virginia Woolf comments in A Room of Ones Own , women supposedly first became writers. If, as many critics complained, Western feminism had excluded and silenced women of other races and other cultures, it had also excluded its own history before the nineteenth century.

Even more disheartening, literary theoristswho also did not seem much interested in literature written before the eighteenth centuryoften seemed only marginally concerned with what was happening in feminist criticism, while many feminists seemed downright hostile to literary theory, which they characterized as obscurantist and elitist. This hostility between literary and feminist theory, which began to be addressed only in the late 1980s, struck me as so shocking that around 1985 I began to explore it as a starting point for a series of investigations into feminist literary theory. To dismiss the theoretical insights of the previous decadeor to claim that theory is tangential, even hostile, to the processes of resurrecting or celebrating women writersseemed to me to force feminist criticism into a single-voiced, authoritarian mode of discourse, which domesticated the subversive, demystifying potential of the feminist theory I found so exciting. As I suggest in Chapter 1, the challenges posed by contemporary theory have begun to spur feminists, including myself, to articulate a dialogic concept of what feminist theory might accomplish by encouraging a decentralized, polyvocal alternative to the dominant discourses of Anglo-American literary criticism and theory.

This book, which examines feminisms ambivalent and often conflicted relationships with the institutions of literary study, was begun during my own somewhat rocky initiation into the profession. In 1984, months after giving birth to my first child, I landed my first tenure-track job at Lewis & Clark College, moved from Texas to Oregon, began a commuter marriage, and settled into both mothering and teaching. Hired to teach primarily Chaucer and medieval literature, I found myself teaching linguistics, literary theory, and feminist theory as well. I became involved in designing and administering an interdisciplinary gender studies minor, one of the first programs in the country to take seriously the insight that gender is a relational system and that women cannot be studied in isolation from the forces that shape gender relationships in any social formation. As I worked on this book, I found myself juggling several commitmentsteaching schedules, cross-country commutes, baby sitters, a second child, day care, and committee meetings. I discovered that I no longer had the luxuryif I had wanted itof separating my personal, political, and professional lives. Circumstances brought them into sharp and often painful juxtapositions. But these juxtapositions also revealed any number of intersections among feminist political activism, the structures of everyday life, the specialized periodization that organizes the teaching of English literature, and the linguistic and cultural theory that is challenging those structures. These issues have inevitably found their way into the chapters that follow.