Lessons in Difference in the American Feminist Criticism of the 1980s

Lessons in Difference in the American Feminist Criticism of the 1980s

According to the leading American feminist critic Jane Gallop, it was “around 1981” that “feminist criticism attain[ed] some sort of centrality” in the literary scholarship of the country (222). However, this does not mean that feminist literary criticism had positively been peripheral there before the decade. Even though feminist literary traditions had yet to find their “home” in the “wilderness of theory,” as Elaine Showalter put it in 1981 (180), several notable studies had appeared in the 1970s following Kate Millett's forceful disclosure of textual subjugation of women by male authors in her Sexual Politics (Columbia UP, 1970), including A Literature of Their Own by Showalter (Princeton UP, 1977), Woman's Fiction by Nina Baym (Cornell UP, 1978), and The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Yale UP, 1979). If this is the case, what then characterized the core debate among the American literary feminists around that time? Gallop herself identifies the publication of the special issues on feminism in Critical Inquiry and Yale French Studies by the end of 1981 as a symbolic event authenticating her observation. Her comment is justified insofar as she takes the motivation of these prestigious journals to compile feminist criticisms to be proof of these criticisms' diversification of subject matter, interests, and perspectives. In other words, when critics started to question the validity of the feminist critical canon itself and to focus accordingly on “The Difference Within” (Gallop 1), their discourse made inroads into the mainstream where heterogeneous views and experiences would collide and create an arena that would render transcultural decentralization of “woman's desire” (i.e., the psychological locus of feminist thinking latent in patriarchy).