Feminist criticism in the wilderness-政界中的女性主义批评.doc

Elaine Showalter “Feminist criticism in the wilderness Pluralism and the feminist critique” Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. Louise Bogan, Women In a splendidly witty dialogue of 1975, Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson identified two poles of feminist literary criticism. The first of these modes, righteous, angry, and admonitory, they compared to the Old Testament, looking for the sins and errors of the past. The second mode, disinterested and seeking the grace of imagination, they compared to the New Testament. Both are necessary, they concluded, for only the Jeremiahs of ideology can lead us out of the Egypt of female servitude to the promised land of humanism. 1 Matthew Arnold also thought that literary critics might perish in the wilderness before they reached the promised land of disinterestedness. Heilbrun and Stimpson were neo-Arnoldian as befitted members of the Columbia and Barnard faculties. But if, in the 1980s, feminist literary critics are still wandering in the wilderness, we are in good company; for, as Geoffrey Hartman tells us, all criticism is in the wilderness. 2 Feminist critics may be startled to find ourselves in this band of theoretical pioneers, since in the American literary tradition the wilderness has been an exclusively masculine domain. Yet between feminist ideology and the liberal ideal of disinterestedness lies the wilderness of theory, which we too must make our home. Until very recently, feminist criticism has not had a theoretical basis; it has been an empirical orphan in the theoretical storm. In 1975, I was persuaded that no theoretical manifesto could adequately account for the varied methodologies and ideologies which called themselves feminist reading or writing. 3 By the next year, Annette Kolodny had added her observation that feminist literary criticism appeared more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coh