Writing Like a Woman

Abstract

Alicia Ostriker's Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America is the latest in a rash of studies that have attempted to define by women as generically distinct from the dominant male tradition. Suzanne Juhasz's Naked and Fiery Forms, Emily Stipes Watts's The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945, and Margaret Homans's Women Writers and Poetic Identity are the book's major precursors, and it appears simultaneously with Paula Bennett's My Life, a Loaded Gun, a study of anger in poetry. The appearance of Gilbert and Gubar's Norton Anthology of Women's Literature crowned the notion of a female tradition and helped to complete a second stage of feminist criticism. No longer would the feminist critic's task be to liberate women writers from a gender-based system of exclusion; now gender difference would be highlighted and the literary canon forced open to admit that difference on equal terms. Ostriker's book contributes significantly to this enterprise, outlining a set of stances and preoccupations that have arisen in the development of poetry. But her book also shares the many pitfalls of this enterprise: a theme-bound reading of poetry, an inadvertent reinforcement of female stereotypes originating in the male mythology, a retention of female identity within a binary structure of relatedness to men, and a prescriptive rather than descriptive relationship to by women. The fundamental confusions of Ostriker's book (and others like it) are embedded in its title. Does women's poetry name all by women or a special category of by women that focuses on

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