Thinking about female literary tradition

Katja Mihurko

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Learning Objectives

In this chapter you will learn:

what is literary tradition,
what is gender essentialism and gender anti-essentalism,
about important feminist works on female literary tradition
how an American poet Amy Lowell reflected on her literary foremothers in the poem The Sisters.

Looking for literary mothers means focusing on a group which shares the same gender (and presuming that gender is a stable category). As a feminist criticism has shown, this can be problematic: “Generic gender essentialism holds that there is a commonality of experience or a characteristic that unites all women, a core of properties that constitutes the generic Woman and that must be satisfied if something is to count as a woman.” (Witt 1995: 322)

Many feminists have therefore objected this theory and understand themselves as “anti-essentialist feminists” who “reject the thesis of gender essentialism in both its forms. They deny that there are any properties that I have necessarily insofar as I am a woman. Or, to use the variant, they reject the existence of a generic Woman; there is no single, shared property or properties that must be satisfied in order to count as a woman. As a woman, I am not necessarily anything at all, and supposing that I am necessarily one way or the other is taken to be a symptom of theoretical incorrectness, a sign of lingering maleness.” (Witt 1995: 322)

Mary Eagleton states: ” Such “essentialist” or “biologistic” viewpoints imply that there is something both intrinsic in the experience of being female and common to all women. The danger is that gender is privileged at the expense of class or race and that the approach can too easily become ahistorical and apolitical in the assumption of an unproblematic unity among women, across culture, class and history.” (Eagleton ²1996: 2)

However, some experiences can be shared by a certain group, and (comparative) researches of writings by female authors of a certain period have shown their common motives, genre preferences, narrative strategies and other similar literary devices. We must be aware of the difference between female and feminist experience though: “Behind the frequent confusion of feminist with female texts is a complex web of assumptions. It is, for example, often assumed that the very fact of describing experience typical of women is a feminist act. On the one hand, this is obviously true: since patriarchy has always tried to silence and repress women and women’s experience, rendering them visible is clearly an important anti-patriarchal strategy. On the other hand, however, women’s experience can be made visible in alienating, deluded or degrading ways: the Mills and Boon accounts of female love or Anita Bryant’s praise of heterosexual love and motherhood are not per se emancipatory reading for women.” (Moi 1989: 120-121)

Anthologies of women writers have been edited and published from the 19th century onwards (although criteria of inclusion were often problematic, as Margaret J. Ezell showed in her book Writing Women’s Literary History, 1996) and scholarly works with the focus on feminist issues in female writings have been written especially since the second-wave feminism. Exploring female authorship does not necessarily mean that we believe in a “generic” woman but it means that we are aware that in a certain time and place women share experiences which can influence their literary creativity, and still they are not perceived as a monolithic group. In this regard, we can use the term female literary tradition for a corpus of writings written by women from a certain period (as E. Showalter in her “Literature of One’s Own shows) or for the writings which have common traits. Nevertheless, we have to be aware of different meanings that a term “tradition” has, as it is clear from the definition in the Merriam Webster dictionary:

Tradition

is:

1: a: an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (such as a religious practice or a social custom)

b: a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable

2: the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction

3: cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions

4: characteristic manner, method, or style.

In order to comprehend the connection between tradition and literature, it is useful to explore the word “literary” in Oxford Dictionary, which says that literary is

“concerning the writing, study, or content of literature, especially of the kind valued for quality of form”.

When we connect both notions, the definition of “literary tradition” could be as follows:

“In one sense, literary tradition simply means such an accumulative process of handing down texts for future generations. In another sense, however, tradition often involves a selective process whereby the most important (most ‘valuable’) works are singled out as the ones that each generation should know. Taking a term from biblical studies, where the ‘canon’ means those books which are regarded by authorities as authentic, written under divine inspiration and therefore worthy of inclusion in the Bible, such a selection of literary works has been also called the canon. The literary canon as defined by literary critical, educational or sometimes political authorities, thus comprises those centrally important and eminently valuable ‘great’ or ‘classic’ works which all educated members of a given community should read. Since, however, judgements of what is important and valuable do undergo changes, and as the number of literary works continues to grow due to new works (and the discovery of temporarily lost works), the canon itself is also subject to revisions.” Literature and Tradition

However, this definition omits a very important activity in the process of “handing down texts for future generations” and this is the dialogue between the texts from the author who is perceived as an inspiration. This dialogue has always taken place in the history of literary authorship, as Hans Robert Jauss has shown in his article Modernity and literary tradition or as T. S. Eliot put in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent:

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”

The act of revision is, as Adrienne Rich, stated already in 1971, especially important for women:

Adrienne Rich: When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision

“Re-vision—the act of looking back, ofseeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. … A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name—and therefore live—afresh.” (Rich 1979: 33)

Adrienne Rich wrote inspiring texts and poems about female and lesbian experience, however, one of the earliest literary scholars who had been interested in the female literary tradition was Ellen Moers, who explored the literary matrilineality in her seminal book Literary women (1976), where “[E]xamining the lives and works of a number of women authors, Moers argues that new genres and new insights were born as female awarenesses and assertions became part of modern literature. She charts the strengths women writers have drawn from each other: George Eliot from Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gertrude Stein from George Eliot, and Willa Cather from George Sand.” (Literary Women) or in her own words: .

Ellen Moers: Literary Women

“Not loyalty but confidence was the resource that women writers drew from possession of their own tradition. And it was confidence that until very recently could have come from no other source. Male writers have always been able to study their craft in university or coffeehouse, group themselves into movements or coteries, search out predecessors for guidance or patronage, collaborate or fight with their contemporaries. But women through most of the nineteenth century were barred from the universities, isolated in their own homes, chaperoned in travel, painfully restricted in friendship. The personal give-take of the literary life was closed to them. Without it, they studied with a special closeness the works written by their own sex, and developed a sense of easy, almost rude familiarity with the women who wrote them.” (Moers ²1985: 42-43)

In the last years of the seventies another two seminal books exploring the female literary tradition have been published: A Literature of Their Own. British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing by Elaine Showalter in 1977 and two years later The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gubar and Susan M. Gilbert. Their importance for the feminist literary criticism was summed up by Marion Shaw in 2000:

“Showalter, as her title indicates, gave women writers their own tradition; Gilbert and Gubar, as indeed their title also indicates, looked at the authorial anxieties of women writers and their subtexts of passion and anger. In a sense, feminist criticism had come of age with these books, actively establishing its own identity rather than reading to the dominant tradition. Although many sophisticated developments would follow in the next two decades, our debt to these books is huge and should never be forgotten. They have nurtured women’s writing and feminist criticism courses in colleges and universities, they have stimulated research and prompted the publication of neglected women writers, and they have helped many young women go out in the world to speak and act for themselves.” (Shaw 2000)

Read some lines from both books concerning female literary tradition:

Elaine Showalter: A Literature of Their Own. British Women Novelists from to Lessing to Brontë

Women have generally been regarded as “sociological chameleons”, taking on the class, lifestyle, and culture of their male relatives. It can, however, be argued that women themselves have constituted a subculture within the framework of a larger society, and have been unified by values, conventions, experiences, and behaviours impinging on each individual. It is important to see the female literary tradition in these broad terms, in relation to the wider evolution of women’s self-awareness and to the ways in which any minority group finds its direction of self-expression relative to a dominant society, because we cannot show a pattern of deliberate progress and accumulation. (Showalter 1999: 11)

Susan Gubar, Sandra M. Gilbert: The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

“In comparison to the “male” tradition of strong, father-son combat, however, this female anxiety of authorship is profoundly debilitating. Handed down not from one woman to another but from the stern literary “fathers” of patriarchy to all their “inferiorized female descendants, it is in many ways the germ of a dis-ease or, at any rate, a disaffection, a disturbance, a distrust, that spreads like a stain throughout the style and structure of much literature by women, especially — as we shall see in this study — throughout literature by women before the twentieth century. For if contemporary women do now attempt the pen with energy and authority, they are able to do so only because their eighteenth-and nineteenth-century foremothers struggled in isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness, obscurity that felt like paralysis to overcome the anxiety of authorship that was endemic to their literary subculture. Thus, while the recent feminist emphasis on positive role models has undoubtedly helped many women, it should not keep us from realizing the terrible odds against which a creative female subculture was established. Far from reinforcing socially oppressive sexual stereotyping , only a full consideration of such problems can reveal the extraordinary strength of women’s literary accomplishments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” (Gubar/Gilber ²2000: 51)

In her introduction to the chapter Finding a Female Tradition in the reader Feminist Literary Theory (1986, ²1996) Mary Eagleton summarises key problems in discussion about female tradition and offers insights that broaden our perception of it, and moreover, enable thinking about female tradition from new perspectives.

Mary Eagleton: Finding a female tradition

Lesbians, both Black and white, and heterosexual ‘women of colour’ criticize white, heterosexual feminists for creating a literary history which is almost as selective and ideologically bound as the male tradition. Sexism is challenged in the white, heterosexual work but heterosexism or homophobia or racism or ethnocentricity may not be. Unpalatable as this may be for white, heterosexual feminists, their failure to recognize difference, the presumption that what is said about white, heterosexual women’s writing will count for all women has been repeatedly demonstrated by lesbians and Black women. (Eagleton ²1996: 3)

[…]

To talk of the female tradition of writing can reinforce the canonical view which looks upon literary history as a continuum of significant names. Rather than disrupting the individualistic values by which the mainstream has been created, feminist critics may merely replace a male First Eleven with a female one: so you can study Aphra Behn instead of Dryden, Edith Wharton instead of Henry James, Dorothy Wordsworth instead of William. The very approach which has always seemed to find the majority of women writers lacking is transposed uncritically, to a separate female tradition, and the humanist ethic which supports that approach is accepted as basically valid, only in need of extending its franchise. (Eagleton ²1996: 4).

[…]

While Anglo-American critics are looking for women in sphere of history, French women writers, Elaine Marks tells us, are: ‘looking for women in the unconscious, which is to say in their own language. “Cherchez la femme” might be one of their implied mottos; where repression is, she is’. Thus, although we may uncover a whole list of forgotten novels by women, or films with female directors, feminists of this school are unwilling to see that as a necessarily female tradition. They want to ask the questions that Shoshana Felman asks: Are these novelists and directors speaking as women or are they ‘speaking in the language of men’? Can they be said to be speaking as women simply because they are born female? For instance, do the Prime Ministers and Presidents of recent history speak as women or are they, regrettably, ventriloquist dummies for the male voice?
Felman questions raise a further issue echoed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work. The problem is not only who is speaking and how is she speaking but to whom she is speaking and on whose behalf she is speaking. Following Derrida’s double focus, Spivak stresses: ‘Not merely who am I? but who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me?7 (Eagleton ²1996: 6)

In this textbook we will follow the reactions of women writers as a dialogue in which female authors asked precisely those questions that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak adduces: “Who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me?” In this sense the female literary tradition is not perceived just as a static corpus of texts written by women but as a corpus of texts where women communicate with other women about the anxieties and rewards of literary authorship.

Activity 1

Read the poem The Sisters by Amy Lowell and underline the names of women writers whose works you have read.

Amy Lowell: The Sisters

Taking us by and large, we’re a queer lot
We women who write poetry. And when you think
How few of us there’ve been, it’s queerer still.
I wonder what it is that makes us do it,
Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise,
The fragments of ourselves. Why are we
Already mother-creatures, double-bearing,
With matrices in body and in brain?
I rather think that there is just the reason
We are so sparse a kind of human being;
The strength of forty thousand Atlases
Is needed for our every-day concerns.
There’s Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho.
I know a single slender thing about her:
That, loving, she was like a burning birch-tree
All tall and glittering fire, and that she wrote
Like the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there,
A frozen blaze before it broke and fell.
Ah, me! I wish I could have talked to Sapho,
Surprised her reticences by flinging mine
Into the wind. This tossing off of garments
Which cloud the soul is none too easy doing
With us to-day. But still I think with Sapho
One might accomplish it, were she in the mood
To bare her loveliness of words and tell
The reasons, as she possibly conceived them,
Of why they are so lovely. Just to know
How she came at them, just to watch
The crisp sea sunshine playing on her hair,
And listen, thinking all the while ’twas she
Who spoke and that we two were sisters
Of a strange, isolated little family.
And she is Sapho—Sapho—not Miss or Mrs.,
A leaping fire we call so for convenience;
But Mrs. Browning—who would ever think
Of such presumption as to call her “Ba.”
Which draws the perfect line between sea-cliffs
And a close-shuttered room in Wimpole Street.
Sapho could fly her impulses like bright
Balloons tip-tilting to a morning air
And write about it. Mrs. Browning’s heart
Was squeezed in stiff conventions. So she lay
Stretched out upon a sofa, reading Greek
And speculating, as I must suppose,
In just this way on Sapho; all the need,
The huge, imperious need of loving, crushed
Within the body she believed so sick.
And it was sick, poor lady, because words
Are merely simulacra after deeds
Have wrought a pattern; when they take the place
Of actions they breed a poisonous miasma
Which, though it leave the brain, eats up the body.
So Mrs. Browning, aloof and delicate,
Lay still upon her sofa, all her strength
Going to uphold her over-topping brain.
It seems miraculous, but she escaped
To freedom and another motherhood
Than that of poems. She was a very woman
And needed both.
If I had gone to call,
Would Wimpole Street have been the kindlier place,
Or Casa Guidi, in which to have met her?
I am a little doubtful of that meeting,
For Queen Victoria was very young and strong
And all-pervading in her apogee
At just that time. If we had stuck to poetry,
Sternly refusing to be drawn off by mesmerism
Or Roman revolutions, it might have done.
For, after all, she is another sister,
But always, I rather think, an older sister
And not herself so curious a technician
As to admit newfangled modes of writing—
“Except, of course, in Robert, and that is neither
Here nor there for Robert is a genius.”
I do not like the turn this dream is taking,
Since I am very fond of Mrs. Browning
And very much indeed should like to hear her
Graciously asking me to call her “Ba.”
But then the Devil of Verisimilitude
Creeps in and forces me to know she wouldn’t.
Convention again, and how it chafes my nerves,
For we are such a little family
Of singing sisters, and as if I didn’t know
What those years felt like tied down to the sofa.
Confounded Victoria, and the slimy inhibitions
She loosed on all us Anglo-Saxon creatures!
Suppose there hadn’t been a Robert Browning,
No “Sonnets from the Portuguese” would have been written.
They are the first of all her poems to be,
One might say, fertilized. For, after all,
A poet is flesh and blood as well as brain
And Mrs. Browning, as I said before,
Was very, very woman. Well, there are two
Of us, and vastly unlike that’s for certain.
Unlike at least until we tear the veils
Away which commonly gird souls. I scarcely think
Mrs. Browning would have approved the process
In spite of what had surely been relief;
For speaking souls must always want to speak
Even when bat-eyed, narrow-minded Queens
Set prudishness to keep the keys of impulse.
Then do the frowning Gods invent new banes
And make the need of sofas. But Sapho was dead
And I, and others, not yet peeped above
The edge of possibility. So that’s an end
To speculating over tea-time talks
Beyond the movement of pentameters
With Mrs. Browning.
But I go dreaming on,
In love with these my spiritual relations.
I rather think I see myself walk up
A flight of wooden steps and ring a bell
And send a card in to Miss Dickinson.
Yet that’s a very silly way to do.
I should have taken the dream twist-ends about
And climbed over the fence and found her deep
Engrossed in the doing of a humming-bird
Among nasturtiums. Not having expected strangers,
She might forget to think me one, and holding up
A finger say quite casually: “Take care.
Don’t frighten him, he’s only just begun.”
“Now this,” I well believe I should have thought,
“Is even better than Sapho. With Emily
You’re really here, or never anywhere at all
In range of mind.” Wherefore, having begun
In the strict centre, we could slowly progress
To various circumferences, as we pleased.
We could, but should we? That would quite depend
On Emily. I think she’d be exacting,
Without intention possibly, and ask
A thousand tight-rope tricks of understanding.
But, bless you, I would somersault all day
If by so doing I might stay with her.
I hardly think that we should mention souls
Although they might just round the corner from us
In some half-quizzical, half-wistful metaphor.
I’m very sure that I should never seek
To turn her parables to stated fact.
Sapho would speak, I think, quite openly,
And Mrs. Browning guard a careful silence,
But Emily would set doors ajar and slam them
And love you for your speed of observation.Strange trio of my sisters, most diverse,
And how extraordinarily unlike
Each is to me, and which way shall I go?
Sapho spent and gained; and Mrs. Browning,
After a miser girlhood, cut the strings
Which tied her money-bags and let them run;
But Emily hoarded—hoarded—only giving
Herself to cold, white paper. Starved and tortured,
She cheated her despair with games of patience
And fooled herself by winning. Frail little elf,
The lonely brain-child of a gaunt maturity,
She hung her womanhood upon a bough
And played ball with the stars—too long—too long—
The garment of herself hung on a tree
Until at last she lost even the desire
To take it down. Whose fault? Why let us say,
To be consistent, Queen Victoria’s.
But really, not to over-rate the queen,
I feel obliged to mention Martin Luther,
And behind him the long line of Church Fathers
Who draped their prurience like a dirty cloth
About the naked majesty of God.
Good-bye, my sisters, all of you are great,
And all of you are marvellously strange,
And none of you has any word for me.
I cannot write like you, I cannot think
In terms of Pagan or of Christian now.
I only hope that possibly some day
Some other woman with an itch for writing
May turn to me as I have turned to you
And chat with me a brief few minutes. How
We lie, we poets! It is three good hours
I have been dreaming. Has it seemed so long
To you? And yet I thank you for the time
Although you leave me sad and self-distrustful,
For older sisters are very sobering things.
Put on your cloaks, my dears, the motor’s waiting.
No, you have not seemed strange to me, but near,
Frightfully near, and rather terrifying.
I understand you all, for in myself—
Is that presumption? Yet indeed it’s true—
We are one family. And still my answer
Will not be any one of yours, I see.
Well, never mind that now. Good night! Good night!

Activity 2

Write an essay about a book by a woman writer that impressed you.

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