Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism

Abstract

Had anyone the prescience, ten years ago, to pose the question of defining literary criticism, she might have been told, in the wake of Mary Ellmann's Thinking About Women,' that it involved exposing the sexual stereotyping of women in both our literature and our literary criticism and, as well, demonstrating the inadequacy of established critical schools and methods to deal fairly or sensitively with works written by women. In broad outline, such prediction would have stood well the test of time, and, in fact, Ellmann's book continues to be widely read and to point us in useful directions. What could not have been anticipated in 1969, however, was the catalyzing force of an ideology that, for many of us, helped to bridge the gap between the world as we found it and the world as we wanted it to be. For those of us who studied literature, previously unspoken sense of exclusion from authorship, and painfully personal distress at discovering whores, bitches, muses, and heroines dead in childbirth where we had once hoped to discover ourselves, could-for the first time-begin to be understood as more than a set of disconnected, unrealized private emotions.2 With renewed courage to make public our otherwise private discontents, what had once been felt individually as personal insecurity came at last to be viewed collectively as structural inconsistency3 within the very disciplines we studied. Following unflinchingly the full implications of Ellmann's percepient observations, and emboldened by the liberating energy of feminist ideology-in all its various forms and guises-feminist criticism very quickly moved beyond merely expos[ing] sexism in one work of literature after another,4 and promised, instead, that we might at last begin to record new choices in new literary history.5 So powerful was that impulse that we experienced it, along with Adrienne Rich, as

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