One of the most diverse fields of literary study is that in which the cultural representation of women takes center stage. In a sense, feminist approaches to literature and culture serve as a hub with extensions reaching outward into every other contemporary theoretical domain, for it is in the rise of feminist theories in Western cultures that one of the earliest, most pervasive, and sustained attacks on formalism, and its divorce of the text from the real world and its people, derives. Following the demise of formalist criticism, feminist scholars have interacted productively with deconstruction and poststructuralism, with psychoanalytic approaches to culture and literature, with theories of ethnicity and postcoloniality, with Marxism, New Historicism, and cultural studies, among others. Indeed, the many feminist approaches to texts and culture remain among the most viable and pervasive contemporary practices.

Feminist theoretical and critical practices, however, do not pretend to present a unified front but rather celebrate their multiplicity and diversity of methodology as well as their engagement with differences. Generally speaking, feminine identity, as a construct, had been historically erased by patriarchal social structures which privileged sameness, unity, and transcendence among men by excluding women. Difference, therefore, was effectively suppressed in a "humanity" that was inflected male. Hence, it is the acceptance of difference that becomes feminism's strength. Women's attention to their inferior social status begins early in the history of the West with a sharpened awareness among women writers, philosophers, and activists of how deeply embedded in ideology and cultural representation are negative reflections of women. Feminist cultural and literary studies have evolved into their present forms from a political engagement born of that early feminist consciousness, so it is important to lay the foundation for a study of feminist theories by first briefly examining the history of political feminism.

Political Feminism: Foundations of Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism

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Women have battled against their inferior status for centuries, but an important originary moment for political feminism in the West could be dated from 1792 with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Great Britain. Wollstonecraft's text provides an early political argument for women's rights in a cogent analysis of the psychological and economic damage done to women from a forced dependence on men, lack of access to an adequate education, and exclusion from the public sphere. Written in the aftermath of American and French revolutions for freedom from an old world order, Wollstonecraft's Vindication clearly partcipates in a wave of beliefs in certain inalienable human rights, which argues against the prevailing view of "woman" as irrational, non-ordered, emotional, and ignorant constructed by the discourse of her time. Mary Astell's Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700) at the dawn of the eighteenth century provides another discursive sample of a woman's public declaration decrying the marginalized status of women as a distinct social category with inferior social status. Just past mid-century, Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) codified the view that woman had no legal, public existence, since married women's identity, under the rule of "couverture" was covered by that of their husbands. By century's end, Wollstonecraft lashed out at social codes of this type which erased the very identity of her sex, insisting on women's full capability, when effectively educated, to be rational.

Advancing into the nineteenth century in England, women became increasingly activist in seeking equality, organizing for the right to vote and presenting petitions for suffrage to Parliament. In related activist causes, Barbara Bodichon initiated a campaign in 1854 for a Married Women's Property Act, providing women with greater legislative equality; and Josephine Butler fought against the insidious Contagious Diseases Act of 1864, which allowed for medical examinations on demand for any woman suspected of being a prostitute. John Stuart Mill supported the founding of a National Society for Woman's Suffrage, and his The Subjection of Women (1869), co-authored with his wife Harriet Taylor, is a classic liberal argument for equal rights for women.

In America, the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of female activism in the work of women like Sarah Grimké, who argued for female equality in her 1838 Letters on Equality lecture tour despite harsh public criticism levelled against her that women, on the authority of Paul's Letters to the Corinthians and Timothy, had no right to speak in public. Women's rights movements, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, originated in anti-slavery and temperance campaigns; but the issue of female equality and suffrage was pushed to the forefront when Stanton, among other women delegates, was excluded from the Anti-Slavery Convention in London, 1840, because she was a woman. This action led to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and a document, drafted primarily by Stanton, entitled A Declaration of Sentiments, which sought to apply the principles of the Declaration of Indepence to women, calling for profound changes in the social order. Stanton's Declaration asserts women's right to overthrow the "absolute despotism" of male domination, insisting that the oppression of women as a group is a historical and pervasive system of subjugation by men (Donovan 5). Later, in 1854 and again in 1860, Stanton delivered an "Address to the New York State Legislature," in which she argued further that the sexes are alike and women deserve equal rights. But following the civil war, former slaves were enfranchised but not women; so Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman's Suffrage Association. In 1867, Sojourner Truth, a former black slave, spoke out for equal rights for black women, insisting upon the vast differences in the situations of white and black women under Reconstruction. With suffrage for women still not approved, Susan B. Anthony encouraged civil disobedience, voting illegally in the 1872 Congressional election.

At last, with the dawning of the twentieth century, women could begin to claim victory. Emmeline Pankhurst founded one of the best known organizations of early feminism, the Women's Social and Political Union. Partial suffrage (for women 30 and over) was approved in Britain in 1918, and full suffrage was granted to American women in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. A first wave of feminism occurred simultaneously in a number of countries, drawing attention to the issues of education and emancipation for women. The International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance dedicated itself in 1913 to Asian women's emancipation, and by the Second World War, there were national women's councils in 16 Third World countries.

At this point in history, an era identified by scholars as the "first wave" of Western feminism was drawing to a close. Differing dates are given for its ending--from the granting of full suffrage in Britain in 1928 to the publication in France of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in 1949--but most agreement fixes the earlier date as more accurate. The later date indicates, however, that first wave feminism did not simply die out in the 20s to resurface as "second wave" feminism in the 60s. Scholars frequently detect a lull in feminist activism between the two "waves," characterizing first wave feminism as concerned with women's inequality and debates about materialism--women's individual and collective social and political interests and self-determination.

"Second Wave" Feminism in the 1960s

By contrast, second wave feminism was more concerned with using women's differences to oppose the legalities of patriarchal systems, with exploring psychoanalytic and social theories about gender difference, and with focusing on the specifics of women's differences from men and from each other. During the interim between the 20s and the 60s, feminists had concerned themselves with welfare issues, campaigning for family allowances and increased legal equality, but women's groups were generally less militant and organized. However, by the 60s, militant feminism was once again on the rise, forging a new political effort from Marxist and socialist feminisms, radical feminism, and other responses to the question of why women continued to suffer social inequality, exploitation, and oppression.

In the US, several key events contributed to this renewed spirit of activism, among them: the establishment of a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy and the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Friedan's book exposed the myth of the happy suburban housewife and questioned, as did the commission's report, American Women, the reasons for women's exclusion from the public sector. By 1964, the criterion of sex was added to Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination against women in employment. In 1966, the National Organization of Women was formed with Betty Friedan as its first president, and there was increased recognition that changes in domestic life were needed if women were ever to participate in public life. In Britain, an example of the rise in militant feminism occurred when women workers struck the Ford plant in 1968, demanding equal pay for work equal to that of men.

Yet another impetus to the higher profile of women's liberation in the 60s in America was a renewed focus on the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been proposed and failed to pass in Congress in 1923. By 1970, the new slogan of the women's liberation movement announced "The personal is the political," suggesting women's conventional association with the personal and the private should no longer be trivialized as unimportant but rather made central to women's political struggle for equality in public life. Furthermore, the women's liberation movement in America attached itself early in its history to the issue of civil rights, in a parallel of women's attachment to anti-slavery in the 1840s. By 1977, the National Organization for Women had added abortion and gay rights to its agenda. In the 80s and continuing into the 90s, both in Britain and America, black women's groups and lesbian groups challenged the heterosexual Euro-centrism of white feminism. White feminism itself seems to have splintered into liberal, radical, and Marxist feminism, groups which range along the spectrum of feminist positions. At one end, feminists adopt a position advising caution in making politics revolutionary, accepting basic political and economic structures while insisting on making them accessible to women (liberal feminism); and at the other, feminists call for a radical overhaul in the family unit as the most basic institution where women are oppressed (radical feminism). All contemporary forms of feminism demonstrate a growing attention to race and class as well as an awareness of the damage done to women through pornography and family violence. Indeed, the 90s have shown a renewed commitment to and support among women for the women's movement.

"It was not isolation, discrimination, [or] radical politics . . . that made women feminist critics," Elaine Showalter writes, "but the political force, active commitment, powerful analysis, and sense of mutual endeavor that came out of the women's movement" ("Women's Time, Women's Space" 34). Showalter's view confirms the powerful connection early on between politics and literary/cultural theory in feminism during the course of the 60s in America, Britain, and France.

The connections between politics and theory, especially literary theory and practice, were spotted quite early by two important foremothers, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. During a twenty-year period, from the publication of Woolf's A Room of One's Own in 1929 to that of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in 1949, the groundwork for the development of feminist theories was laid and two important lines of feminist criticism begotten --Anglo-American and French. Janet Todd argues that feminist criticism probably begins when women become conscious of their relationships to language and of themselves as writers; in the twentieth century that moment can effectively be located within the range of these two works (18). De Beauvoir's book exhibits a more philosophical than literary approach, serving as a precursor to later French feminist theory which engages with philosophy and psychoanalysis and focuses on feminine writing. Woolf, on the other hand, places more emphasis on history and literature, especially devoting an imaginative narrative to uncovering a history of women's writing as well as a history of their silencing. These concerns surface again in the evolution of American sociohistorical feminist criticism and, to some degree, in the concerns of British feminists with women’s material conditions and social, cultural ideology.

However, neither Woolf nor de Beauvoir enjoyed an unproblematic relationship with feminist politics or theory. Woolf, in Three Guineas (1938), hoping for a day when men and women could work side by side as equal partners, called for a public burning of the word "feminist" (101-2). Yet Three Guineas is the most thoroughly researched examination of women's oppression and the most theoretically radical work in Woolf's oeuvre. Similarly, Simone de Beauvoir refused to call The Second Sex a feminist work or to acknowledge it as an analysis of women's conditions, deferring to her lifetime companion, the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, as the one more capable of building a system. Yet founding principles of feminist criticism can be derived from the work of these two women. Together, they insist: 1) that history cannot be understood without a recognition of the influences of the structures of gender and sexual difference; 2) that men have controlled history, politics, and power, deciding which realities will be transmitted and relegating women to the margins of culture; 3) that the study of these facts is insufficient; women must act to change society. Alone, Woolf adds a fourth dimension to these fundamental concepts: that women need to seek out and make known the texts that women have produced.

Following the lead of Woolf and deBeauvoir, a number of works by women concentrating on the cultural representations of women emerged during the years 1963-70. Among the most important of these founding texts are: Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), Tillie Olson's "Silences," (1965), Mary Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968), and from 1970--Eva Figes's Patriarchal Attitudes and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Mary Eagleton argues that Sexual Politics sets the tone for two important characteristics of feminist thinking as 1) comprehensive and 2) interdisciplinary--challenging the canon, seeking to change the social order, paying special attention to the images of women in cultural representations, while indicating the crucial nature of verbal and visual representation as descriptors of oppression (Feminist Literary Criticism 2).

Kate Millett's Sexual Politics was a frontal attack on overt misogyny in literature, particularly in the works of Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, and Norman Mailer. Millett assailed the use of power and domination in the description of sexual activity and re-interpreted several undervalued works by women. One female-authored text on which she anchored her remarks was Charlotte Bronte's Villette, a text that Millett argued had fallen victim to masculine critical prejudice because it refused to submit to the patriarchal social status quo. Even though Millett's position on literature reflected an unproblematic conception of the literary text as a representation of life, her work is especially valuable for challenging the fixity of gender hierarchies and of gender itself, insisting that gender is culturally acquired sexual identity rather than a biological essence. Her reading of the texts of self-proclaimed homosexual Jean Genet, for example, indicates how easily masculine and feminine can be made, as terms, to slip; and how much they encode master and slave positions.

The work of several women scholars would follow Millett's suggestion that literature colonizes the minds of both sexes with those stereotypes which keep each gender firmly in place. Patricia Meyer Spacks, in The Female Imagination (1975), participated in a growing movement to challenge the all-male canon; and her work, describing the literature of female experience, asked what general patterns of self awareness shape the creative experiences of women. Ellen Moers, in Literary Women (1976), linked female characters and authors in the march of female history, positing a female tradition of influence. These two, along with the works by Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, which followed in quick succession, now stand as modern classics of American feminist criticism. Elaine Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own (1977), quotes Germaine Greer to reinforce her concern with the transience of female literary fame and her insistence upon reinstating a women's literary canon, "'. . . almost uninterruptedly since the Interregnum a small group of women have enjoyed dazzling literary prestige during their own lifetimes only to vanish without a trace from the records of posterity.'" Then Showalter adds, "Thus each generation of women writers has found itself, in a sense, without a history, forced to rediscover the past anew, forging again and again the consciousness of their sex" (12). Additionally, Showalter would outline three phases of development in the attitude and work of the woman writer: the feminine phase, in which women tried to equal men; adopting the structures of male culture, the feminist phase, in which women used literature to dramatize the situation of women's oppression; and the female phase, in which women returned to women's experience as the wellspring of art.

Two other important later essays by Showalter which end the 70s and open the 80s are: "Toward a Feminist Poetics" (1979), which stresses the importance of describing feminist critical practice rather than adopting a single theory; and "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" (1981), which abandons her earlier anti-theoretical stance and stresses the need in feminist criticism for a theoretical consensus. In the earlier essay, Showalter coins the term "gynocriticism," by which she means a critical practice devoted to the female author and character, utilizing theories and methodologies based upon female experience. A major contribution Showalter has made to the history of American feminist criticism has been her emphasis upon the specificity of women's writing through uncovering a tradition of women's literature and exploring women's culture. Furthermore, to her credit, Showalter has sought to correct her earlier emphasis on white heterosexual female experience with her later work. Her collection of essays, The New Feminist Criticism (1985), solicited and printed several essays expounding alterity which have now reached classical status--Barbara Smith's "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," Deborah E. McDowell's "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism," and Bonnie Zimmerman's "What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism."

The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, profits from the historical emphasis of Showalter, stressing that in 19th century female-authored texts, an important character is the madwoman double who exists in the fantasies and dreams of every decorous spinster, herself often a double of her author. Gilbert and Gubar probe the work of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, and George Eliot, among others, to elaborate an ambitious theory of female literary creativity. Jane Eyre's own madwoman in the attic, Bertha Rochester, of course, provides the keynote for the theme and the title of the book, which proposes female rage as the power which enabled women to take up the pen and write. Furthermore, Gilbert and Gubar adapted Harold Bloom's reading of male authors, The Anxiety of Influence, to reveal in the work of women writers a narrative that expressed their feelings of being restricted, silenced, and dispossessed by an oppressive patriarchal culture.

Despite the importance of the work of Showalter and Gilbert and Gubar, we should note that their theoretical assumptions are problematic in the light of poststructuralist theories. Both A Literature of Their Own and The Madwoman in the Attic adopt the position that literature is rather uncomplicatedly mimetic; that is, that it is a reflective, faithful representation of reality. It seems natural, then, that these critics chose from among the more realistic women writers, those of the nineteenth century. Gilbert and Gubar, in their zeal to see a madwoman lurking behind each nineteenth century woman writer, assume a reductive identification between the female author, as a real person, and her character. Naturally, this issue tips into the debate surrounding female authority and poststructuralist positions, like those of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, challenging and unhinging author and text and calling into question the author as guarantor of the truth-value of his/her text. In Showalter's view, women's experiences are somehow directly available in the women's texts; the text provides the empirical data for an anthropological uncovering of a female subculture. Such a position stops short of exploring women's texts fully as signifying practices whose medium is language.

In sum, for Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar, and feminist critics who follow their lead, the practice of feminism is political in that any criticism which does not take the feminist perspective into account is flawed and deceptive. An important critical and political moment toward establishing that female tradition as a corrective to a virtually all-male literary canon was the publication in 1985 of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, edited by Gilbert and Gubar, which brought together for the first time women's writing in English from the middle ages to the present.

As the 1980s opened, Annette Kolodny sought an appropriate metaphor to describe the state of affairs in feminist literary criticism, especially in the American academy, at the threshold of a new decade in "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism." As one might expect from such a title, much of the agenda of Kolodny's remarks, both explicit and implied, center upon her conceptualizing the field of feminist criticism as overlaid on a battleground, mined, of course, by male critics against those intrepid women who might dare to venture onto it and even make it safely across. The "dancing" of women is their delicate negotiating of power relationships to forge a political impact upon literary studies, based on an assumption that literature mirrors the values and beliefs of the world, governed largely by men, in which we live. Kolodny's conclusion is that feminist critics should support and nurture the pluralism of their effort, refusing to fall into a universalist or essentialist trap. Pluralism, Kolodny insisted, "place{s} us securely where, all along, we should have been: camped out, on the far side of the minefield, with the other pluralists and pluralisms" (159). Kolodny resists unifying strategies while acknowledging that a caveat for feminist literary critics should be attention to the ways in which male structures of power are encoded in texts and the consequences of that power for women as characters, readers, and writers.

By 1980, in fact, American feminist critics were increasingly invited to consider the challenge of French feminist theory with the publication of New French Feminisms, an anthology compiled by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Although French feminist thought began in linkage with the student revolt in 1968, it quickly lost its political overtones and concerned itself with the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues relating to woman and language--in the search for a writing peculiar to women--l'écriture feminine. Thus the French feminist enterprise has concerned itself with the quest for a uniquely "feminine" experience and language as well as a feminist political involvement in challenging patriarchal theory and society. The writings of three women working in France has had the greatest impact on English speaking feminists: Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. Each of these women has also interacted with two leading French male thinkers--Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis and Jacques Derrida in philosophy.

Helene Cixous was the first French theorist available in English translation in the American feminist journal Signs (Summer 1976). Cixous is allied to other French feminists in her emphasis on the unconscious, the deep structures of culture and language, and the usually hidden female body. She turns away sharply from American critics and their interest in an empirical history, rejecting their efforts as pure "thematics." Rather, Cixous sees the world as text and, using the language of psychoanalysis (in part, against itself), she separates the female from the male unconscious and upholds the former as the site of disruption of a dominant patriarchy. L'écriture feminine, in Cixous's view, can participate in the dismantling of patriarchal binary categories which continuously privilege one term while obscuring and effacing the other. An obvious example of such logic is the opposition male/female--in which male is always the positive, active term, gaining its position by continously destroying its opposite, female. In works like The Newly Born Woman, written in collaboration with Catherine Clément, Cixous argues against such male-dominated binary opposites. Her best known essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1976), intends to break down the favored status of the rational published text, celebrating the Derridean notion of différance and suggesting a repressed, unsignified feminine which "defers" meaning while suggesting multiple signification through "difference." Despite Cixous's troubling contradictions and slippages into essentialism, Toril Moi summarizes her contributions to the state of feminist theory thus: "By enabling feminist criticism to escape from a disabling author-centred empiricism, this linking of sexuality and textuality opens up a whole new field of feminist investigation of the articulation of desire in language, not only in texts written by women, but also in texts by men" (126). Moi suggests a possible direction for criticism of literature and culture grounded in Cixous's theories of the workings of desire and sexuality linked to the text itself rather than to the gender of its author.

Luce Irigaray, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, was expelled from the prestigious Lacanian École Freudienne in Vincennes when she submitted her monumental doctoral dissertation, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974). In it, Irigaray deconstructed virtually all of Western male philosophy, particularly singling out for attack Freud and Plato. The work consists of three main parts: the first, an extensive critique of Freud on female psychosexual development; the second, a series of readings which quarrel with Western philosophers from Plato to Hegel; the third, a reading of Plato's parable of the cave. Her long first chapter on Freud engages him in dialogue, specifically through his essays "Femininity" and "Female Sexuality," to unravel the thread of his argument and propose the possibility of a corrected psychoanalytic vision of the feminine. Freud's reading of the pre-Oedipal phase in boys and girls, for example, reduces girls to the same as "little men," a reduction of females to the economy of the same, which for Irigaray constructs a view of women as nothing more than the negative of reflection of man. Irigaray would not suggest redefining "woman" as a new way of entrapping and essentializing her in male discourse, but rather she would propose seeking the "feminine" in the gaps and spaces between signifiers in language. In This Sex Which is Not One (1977), Irigaray invokes Freud's erasure of the female sex, writing in an essay for which the volume is named:

It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so the meaning will be clear. They are already elsewhere than in this discursive machinery where you claim to take them by surprise. They have turned back within themselves, which does not mean the same thing as "within yourself." They do not experience the same interiority that you do and which perhaps you mistakenly presume they share. "Within themselves" means in the privacy of this silent, multiple, diffuse tact. If you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply: nothing. Everything (29).

Naturally, this passage presents problems, beginning with, as Shoshana Felman has noted, who is speaking and to whom, if women cannot speak meaning at all. Yet another problem suggests Irigaray's failure to escape patriarchal ideology by situating the feminine in the irrational space where men have placed it at least since the eighteenth century. And, the material conditions of women's oppression are especially absent from Irigaray's concerns, essentially blinding her to women's true multiplicity and to women's history. However, Irigaray's efforts to deconstruct patriarchal philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse are formidable and the implications for literary study in her work suggest that scholars celebrate women's differences from men as they recognize the power of the diffuse text, seeking the feminine in the gaps and spaces of an ultimately ungovernable discourse.

Julia Kristeva, as contrasted to Cixous and Irigaray, is not, in the same sense, a theorist of femininity; she is, rather, much more directly interested in examining the nature of literary discourse. Her Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), sought to problematize the position of the subject in language, emphasizing language as process. Kristeva posited two processes in sign-making, which she called the symbolic (or language per se) and the semiotic (all those signs which precede or exist outside of language). The two modalities are inextricably entangled in Kristeva's view, and the dialectic between them determines the type of discourse which emerges. Indeed, Kristeva argues, the speaking and writing subject is always producing meaning by means of both processes. The semiotic process, Kristeva posited, is both pre-oedipal and pre-symbolic; and even though it suggests something like a female modality, it can be observed in the work of male writers as well. The overflow of the semiotic into the symbolic signals for Kristeva the presence of poetic language, especially visible, for her purposes, in male avant garde writers, Artaud and Lautréamont, among others. Indeed, because of her deep suspicion of the possibility of fixed identity, Kristeva rejects the notion of an ecriture feminine or parler femme (speaking as a woman). However, Kristeva's positing of a semiotic process and its potential for disruption of the symbolic order offers an avenue for scholars as explorers in the gendering of language and of texts. Ultimately, though, Kristeva's revolution is one in poetic language alone; she does not here expand her theory to include a revolution in politics or to account for the relationship between society and individual "subject on trial" of whom she writes.

In a number of later essays, Kristeva takes up more specifically feminist issues. In About Chinese Women, a collection of thoughts following Kristeva's 1974 visit to China, she deals, perhaps Eurocentrally, with Chinese culture. However, she offers valuable insights from a Western perspective on the nature of masculine models for women, women's refusal of those models, and the consequence of suicide for those women writers like Virginia Woolf, Maria Tsvetaeva, and Sylvia Plath who would not bend to patriarchy. "I think of Virginia Woolf," Kristeva writes, "who sank wordlessly into the river, her pockets weighed down with stones. Haunted by voices, waves, lights, in love with colours--blue, green--and seized by a strange gaiety . . ." ("About Chinese Women" 157). Kristeva would conclude her meditation on female suicide with the thought: "But when she is inspired by that which the symbolic order represses, isn't a woman also the most radical atheist, the most committed anarchist? In the eyes of this society, such a posture casts her as a victim. But elsewhere?" (158)

Kristeva's "Women's Time" (1979), her most important essay from a feminist standpoint, links female subjectivity to space and time. Arguing first for women's positions in the spaces where society is reproduced, Kristeva seeks also to situate women (in all their multiplicity) in relationship to at least three kinds of time: cyclical time or repetition, monumental or eternal time, and linear time or history. Kristeva further analyzes the relationship of women to time and space by examining three stages of the women's movement. Continuing her attention to the relationship between women as subjects and language, Kristeva writes:

This leads to the active research, still rare, undoubtedly hesitant but always dissident, being carried out by women in the human sciences; particularly those attempts , in the wake of contemporary art, to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract (200).

While not speaking specifically of a woman's language, Kristeva seems to insist upon women's special relationship to anarchy by virtue of their oppression and a refusal on the part of women to accept what she calls the "sacrificial" contract. "Women," she goes on, "are today affirming--and we consequently face a mass phenomenon--that they are forced to experience this sacrificial contract against their will. Based on this, they are attempting a revolt which they see as a resurrection but which society as a whole understands as murder. This attempt can lead us to a not less and sometimes more deadly violence. Or to a cultural innovation" (200). In these essays, Kristeva's excitement about the possibility of women's revolutionary strategies in language and politics seems quite clear.

American Feminist Scholars React to French Feminism

A number of American women have demonstrated their debt to French feminism and psychoanalysis. Shoshana Felman, in "Rereading Femininity" (1981), challenges Freud's view of female sexuality as a male interpretation and raises the question of what femininity means for women. Jane Gallop, in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: the Daughter's Seduction (1982), employs the seduction metaphor to explore the relationship between French feminism and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis. Ann Rosalind Jones, in "Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'Écriture Feminine" (1981), questions the theoretical consistency of French feminism and the political consequences of its celebration of the female body. Alice Jardine, an American francophile, accuses American historical criticism of naivety in Gynesis (1985) and seeks the feminine as intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing, speaking. Jardine's neologism, "gynesis" pits itself against Showalter's earlier term, "gynocritics." As we have seen, the gynocritic devotes herself to the female author and character, develops interpretive methodologies based on female experiences, and works toward the achievement of a cohesive female identity. Gynesis, on the other hand, works in opposition to a historical, empirical view by privileging a discursive, feminine space. For Jardine, gynocriticism's emphasis on the bonds between female author, female character, and female reader ignores the complexity and deception of textuality. Gynesis is uninterested in female experience and calls into question what it means to speak as a woman: does it entail a biological condition or a theoretical, strategic position? Showalter herself recognizes the increasing influence of poststructuralism on feminist thinkers since 1975 and characterizes gynesis as rejecting the "temporal dimension of women's experience, what Julia Kristeva calls le temps des femmes, and seeks instead to understand the space granted to the feminine in the symbolic contract . . . Gynesis repossess[es] as a field of inquiry all the space of the Other, the gaps, silences, and absences of discourse and representation to which the feminine has traditionally been relegated" ("Women's Time, Women's Space" 37). Feminist critics influenced by readings of French theory tend to be largely unconcerned with American sociohistorical feminism, privileging and challenging instead the applications of psychoanalytic, linguistic, and philosophical insights to interpretations of texts.

There are women of nationalities other than French who not only privilege French feminist thought but also question the intellectual content of American socio-historical feminism. Toril Moi, a Norwegian who teaches in Britain, privileges the Frenchwomen Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray in her Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), a work which provides a history for Anglo-American and French feminist criticism through the early 80s. Mary Jacobus, an Englishwoman who works in the USA, also takes a stand in Reading Woman (1986), for the necessity of French influence on American feminist criticism and makes a direct attack on feminist literary history in the persons of "herstorians"--Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar. Jacobus explores the intriguing interactions between psychoanalysis and literature in the following way: "Literature turns from experience to psychoanalysis for an answer to the riddle of femininity, [and] psychoanalysis turns the question back to literature, since it is in language--in reading and in writing woman--that femininity at once discloses and discomposes itself, endlessly displacing the fixity of gender identity by the play of difference and vision which simultaneously creates and uncreates gender, identity, and meaning."

The debate has continued through the 80s among feminist critics in the West who have leaned either toward the American "herstorical" position or the French, divorced from history, psychoanalytic view of "woman." Each side has accused the other of essentialism--a bad name in feminist politics. A word such as essentialism takes us back to Western patriarchal philosophical beliefs in essences which dissolve woman, or women, into human (read masculine) essences. Further, belief in a female "essence" opens the door for belief in a natural and necessary female inferiority. The same issue also raises the specter of gender in the form of questioning how women should be viewed in society: as biologically female, thus inherently inferior, or as constructed female by a male dominated society. Diana Fuss, in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference (1989), examines in depth these issues and more as she tackles the debate between pure essence and social construct to clarify the purpose and function of essence in discourse.

Several attempts on the part of American feminist critics to merge the American and French feminist positions should be mentioned here: Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Syle in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (1984) and Margaret Homans's Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (1986). Both seek to uncover the strategies that women manufacture when confronted with all the myths, including the psychoanalytical, of patriarchal culture. Homans, for example, studies the Lacanian story as cultural myth providing a space for the male writer but problematizing the entry of the female writer into the symbolic realm.

Similar to the involvement of emergent feminist theory and criticism with political activism in France and the United States, second wave British feminism and the theories that would develop from it were founded upon at least two significant texts: Juliet Mitchell's "Women: the Longest Revolution" (1966) and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1971). Greer's text has been considered the founding text of the second wave, yet Greer has never aligned herself with the women's movement. In fact, Greer's work seems more compatible with that of Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone, with whom she is frequently linked, than with British feminist writing. The Female Eunuch does not take patriarchy as the primary target of its attack; rather, it focuses on the "feminine" woman and suggests that (hetero)sexual revolution can free women from the thralldom of inferiority.

Too often, the work of Britistish feminist thinkers has been collapsed into the words "Anglo-American" feminist criticism; so we will follow the lead of British critic Janet Todd's Feminist Literary History (1988) in unhinging "Anglo" from "American" to refer independently to a British practice of feminist theory and criticism. The Marxist concept of ideology has long been in use by British feminists, and the work in England of the interdisciplinary Marxist Feminist Literary Collective has been of pre-eminent importance in marking class and gender as significant for literary and cultural study. By ideology, British feminist scholars, following Althusser, understand: "that system of beliefs and assumptions--unconscious, unexamined, invisible--which represent the 'imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence'" (Todd 85). Rather than a false consciousness or a political affiliation, this definition requires that we recognize that ideology is not something we can "escape" or something that we choose--we are born into a society governed by ideology. It is simply the way that we, usually without reflecting, act and exist in a commonplace world where unexamined assumptions about our condition seem to make sense.

In aligning ideology to literature, we can note the ways that ideology becomes inflected and inscribed in literary forms, genres, conventions, styles, and even the manner in which texts are produced. In Britain, socialist feminism with its emphasis upon the analysis of ideology has been in the mainstream in feminist criticism in a way not possible in the United States before the 1980s. Indeed, British feminist theory achieves a sophistication through its interaction with Marxism as well as French deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory.

Two women scholars working in Britain should be mentioned in this context--Cora Kaplan and Michèle Barrett. Kaplan, best known for her essay, "Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism" (1985), reprinted in her collection of essays Sea Changes, shows how closely a sophisticated notion of ideology can approach psychoanalytical criticism. Kaplan insists that we understand the class-bound nature of bourgeois femininity and that we take notice of how writing from within its assumptions constructs us as readers in relation to its particular subjectivity. Barrett's article, "Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender" (1980), was reprinted in Feminist Criticism and Social Change in 1985. Barrett contends that criticism, feminist or otherwise, cannot transcend its conditions of production; she is fearful of uncoupling ideology from the socially real. Nor does she advocate pillaging literary works for their social content; instead, she seeks the ways in which texts operate on readers through their gaps and silences as well as through their articulations. The materialist feminist position, embodied largely in the collection Feminist Criticism and Social Change, strenuously opposes French poststructuralist theory. The editors of the collection, Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, announce in their introduction: "We have committed ourselves to resist a view of literature--formalism--that sees literature and literary critics as divorced from history, a view still perpetrated--despite the air of currency and French fashionableness--by much of the post-structuralist criticism now dominant in Britain and the United States" (xvi). In addition, Newton and Rosenfelt add a working definition of ideology of their own to set the tone for their collection: "Ideology, then, is not a set of deliberate distortions imposed on us from above, but a complex and contradictory system of representations (discourse, images, myths) through which we experience ourselves in relation to each other and to the social structures in which we live" (xix). Men and women, they go on to argue, are ideologically inscribed in their culture, and ideologies of gender, when caught in texts, should be called into question so that social change can become possible. Theoretically, as Mary Eagleton suggests in her assessment of the potential of materialist feminist criticism, "a materialist politics should offer a real possibility for women who are non-white or lesbian or working class or any combination of the three. If the critic believes that race, sexual orientation and class are important constituents of writing, then a criticism which recognizes difference and represents more than a small privileged group of women becomes possible." (Feminist Literary Theory 4)

As we have seen in the foregoing sections, American feminist scholars have been much influenced by the importing of ideas from feminists working in Britain and France. Contemporary feminist theories owe much as well to the second wave of political feminism for its belief not only in gender differences but also in differences among women themselves. Furthermore, by tracking the work of feminists through the 80s and into the 90s, we find it increasingly possible to map the features of an array of feminist theories and their practices which posit critical patterns for reading texts.

In addition to the theoretical underpinnings of Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction transformed by French feminists and Marxist theories of class embraced and expanded by British feminists, several feminist scholars in other disciplines have done theoretical work which has had a major impact on the work of feminist literary scholars, especially in America. Nancy Chodorow, in The Reproduction of Mothering (1976), uses object relations theory to explore the female child's growth in relationship to the mother and questions Freud's assumptions about gender identity formation. Women, Chodorow argues, experience and treat sons differently from daughters; a mother views a daughter as a narcissistic image of herself, reproducing and imprinting the social construction of female as nurturer, caretaker, domestic worker, and inferior--mothers reproduce mothering by reproducing their daughters in their own image. Carol Gilligan, in In a Different Voice (1982), argues that there is a problem in the representation of moral values and relationships, and that problem is that males have always been taken as the norm for human development. Gilligan's work suggests that women place value and form moral judgments differently from men and this difference must be accounted for rather than used to stigmatize women as morally inferior. Mary Daly, in Beyond God the Father (1973), and Gyn/Ecology (1978), seeks to revise male myths and move beyond a male-centered logic of binary opposites based on gender division to formulate a new female syntax, a radical feminist metaethics. Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born (1976), extols motherhood, creativity, female bonding, and the lesbian experience, arguing for a common language with the potential of uncovering the female self.

Informed not only by the quests described above to insert a female perspective as corrective to our understanding of the human condition but also by explorations into theory being made across the Atlantic, American feminist scholarship has evolved into a weave of theories largely traceable back to these origins. Increasing attention to sex and class as well as race in the sense that British feminists have advocated has allowed for a climate in which black and other minority feminist scholars as well as lesbian feminists could begin to seek out their own traditions. Lesbian and black feminists have also, however, worked largely in reaction to the early sociohistorical scholarship of Showalter and Gilbert and Gubar, women critics, who, they believed, ignored other races and alternate sexual lifestyles in favor of a middle class, white, heterosexual female perspective. Susan Stanford Friedman, in support of the need to recognize alterity, suggests that since the 60s, "four cultural narratives about race and ethnicity . . . have circulated [in many feminist arenas]. . . The first three scripts--which I call narratives of denial, accusation, and confession--have operated within the agonistic white/other binary. While they have all contributed important narratives to the formation of a multicultural feminism, they also represent stories that are caught in a cul-de-sac . . . The fourth script--the narrative of relational positionality--moves beyond binary thinking" ("Beyond White and Other" 7). This, Friedman argues, offers the most possibility for developing a feminist multiculturalism sensitive to the notion of fluid identities; the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender; and the shifting positions of privilege and Otherness (9).

Perhaps what Friedman calls for is increasingly practiced by critics who are women of color and thus not as blind to such relationality. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak places this issue in eloquent perspective when she writes: "let me insist that here, the difference between 'French' and 'Anglo-American' feminism is superficial. However unfeasible and inefficient it may sound, I see no way to avoid insisting that there has to be a simultaneous other focus: not merely who am I? but who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me? . . . Indeed, it is the absence of such unfeasible but crucial questions that makes the 'colonized woman' as 'subject' see the investigators as sweet and sympathetic creatures from another planet who are free to come and go . . ." ("French Feminism" 39). Spivak here speaks to the neglect of non-white, working class, lesbian perspectives and to the tendency to universalize, to make claims for all women, which can no longer form the groundwork of feminist inquiry. Women of color like Cherrie Moraga, writing from a feminist and lesbian perspective; Gloria Anzaldúa, writing for a "mestizan" consciousness; and Barbara Christian, Deborah McDowell, and Barbara Johnson, constructing a history and tradition of black feminist criticism operate in conjunction with lesbian critics like Bonnie Zimmerman, describing a lesbian-feminist critical practice, to create the narratives of relationality of which Susan Friedman writes. In fact, with especial attention to writers who are women of color, scholars have begun to argue for an emergent body of women's literature both in the United States and abroad. Editors like Joanne Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin, in their introduction to Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance (1990), urge our recognition of a rebirth in black women's writing, "the most extensive written exploration of that realm of shared language, reference, and allusion within the Veil of our Blackness and our femaleness. . ." (xxii).

In addition to the issue of race and class as they are implicated in gender, contemporary women theorists like Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990), have continued to challenge the fixity and cultural production of gender and to insinuate the issue of heterosexuality into the debate. "What happens," Butler asks, "to the subject and to the stability of gender categories when the epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality is unmasked as that which produces and reifies these ostensible categories of ontology?" (x). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Between Men (1985), posits a system of cultural exchanges which exist, largely, between men. Sedgwick looks for ways in which ideology can be used to analyze sexuality. Following the lead of Gayle Rubin ("The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex," 1975), Sedgwick argues that in male-dominated societies, women are items of exchange, cementing the bonds between men, serving as the vehicles for male homosocial (including homosexual) desire, and upholding the structures of maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power.

Other directions for contemporary feminist practice include emphasis on forms in female-authored fiction. Sidonie Smith, in A Poetics of Women's Autobiography (1987), seeks a different definition of the genre of autobiography when authored by a woman. Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985) explores the differences in plots and narrative techniques constructed and employed by women. Allied to feminist explorations of postmodern writing are investigations of women's experimental fiction and the manifestations of female narrative voice like Susan Sniader Lanser's Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992).

The feminist critique of culture and literature has made and continues to make an indelible impact on the practice of literary criticism and the evolution of theory during the course of the late twentieth century. Subject itself early on to a myopic concern with white heterosexual feminist practice as the norm, feminism has multiplied into feminisms and welcomed the incursion of other-race, other-ethnicity, and other-sexual preference viewpoints as valuable additions to feminist practices. Indeed, the many varieties of feminism form a matrix of relationships with every other current form of critical practice especially those theories which examine the marginalization of peoples--postcoloniality, race, and ethnicity--the web of theories which form the subject of the next chapter.