Images of Men and Maleness: A Thematic Approach to Teaching Women Writers

Abstract

THIS ESSAY IS A COURSE DESCRIPTION, but it is also an argument. I would like to use it to give an overview of a course that I have been teaching for three years now, and in the process, I would like to present some proposals about pedagogy in general, about teaching introductory literature courses, about women writers, and about the relationship between feminism and literary study. Some of what I have to say will be familiar, for, although my course is not, strictly speaking, a Women's Studies course, it is in large part a response to the kinds of issues which Women's Studies has been raising, and a great deal of the strength of the course derives directly from what I have learned from my contacts with academic feminism. The course could not have come into being without the work that has been done by feminists in over the past five or six years. My approach to feminist issues, however, is, I hope, fresh enough to justify my writing this piece, and the arguments I want to present are, I hope, sound and useful enough to be valuable to teachers who teach, think, and write about literature both within and outside the structure of a Women's Studies course or program. My course comes to rest right at the junction of several ways of thinking: it combines a shamelessly old-fashioned critical emphasis on theme and character with a new moral and political vision. The hybrid thus created has yielded gratifying results, and I want to recommend the informing ideas of the course to a wide variety of teachers of English. The approach I have developed works no miracles, but it does, I think, provide a coherent framework for exploring the pleasures and seriously confronting the questions that follow when one gives assent to the most basic feminist arguments. That approach, quite simply, is this: I teach a body of good literature, all written by women, and I teach it as specifically female writing; I encourage the students to read for ideas first; I do not ignore my own gender (about which more later); and I try to direct the students toward the kinds of moral and sexual-political insights that are to be found in women writers' vision of the world-especially their vision of the male half of it. English 160/Images of the Male in Women's Writing, was inspired by this passage in Virginia Woolfs A Room of One's Own (1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957):