Introduction

Abstract

I N T R O D U C T I O N PATRICIA D EM ERS D ifferences — in form, voice, theoretical assumption, gender ideology and feminist understanding — actually glue together this last number of ESC to originate from the University of Alberta. “Glue” itself might suggest more resolute cohesiveness than intended. Yet I have shied away both from making the exploration of differences the theme and from labelling the number a “ Feminist Issue.” Such decisions will, I trust, seem neither faint-hearted nor perverse. Thematics is always a tricky business. Mieke Bal’s recent criticism of a volume of hermeneutic essays entitled “ Reasoning with the Foxes : Female Wit in a World of Male Power,” as furthering the “positivist illusion implied in thematics” and as being trapped by its own trick “of falling back into repe­ tition of the age-old song of good and evil, so often sung against women,” 1 steeled my determination not to limit these essays with a thematic title or squeeze them into its mould. Similarly a desire not to ghettoize feminism or diminish its plurality and the fact that it suffuses, imbricates or, more gener­ ally, influences all critical writing today led to the rejection of a tri-colour banner announcing the (by implication, ludicrously single) “Feminist Issue.” Ironically the epigraph I finally settled on might require more explanation than all the omissions. We’ve come a long way from Bathsua Makin’s program for her Tottenham High Gross girls’ school with its rare insistence on the study of languages — Latin and French for all, with Greek, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish for some — and disdain for the customary instruction in face painting and hair curling. Although not all of the women mentioned in this issue’s essays would qualify as learned, it is worth noting how many male characters and androcentric readers continue to fear and devalue the parabolical curves and elliptical orbits of the female’s “luminous envelope” or coma. The per­ ceived foreboding of mischief — call it the destabilization of patriarchal norms, challenge to the canon, or dismantling of homophobia, if you will — is perhaps the most unsettling but committed and reformative kind of dif­ ference. Linguistic twists and turns themselves are, predictably for this journal, the most cultivated ways of talking about the lights and shadows of identities as E nglish Studies in Canada, xv, 4, December 1989 well as the ineluctability of the differences among us. Rather than endorsing or constructing any “grand field theory” about women and gender, Catharine Stimpson sets the tone of exploratory inclusivity by suggesting that postmod­ ernism and feminism supply their own checks and balances. As postmodern­ ism “purges feminist criticism of goo-goo romanticism about ‘the female,’ ” she maintains, feminism “stops postmodernism from becoming a giddy revel in a musical comedy called ‘Anything/Everything Goes.’ ” Her “shadowed reading” of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas examines the lie and other­ ness of Stein’s packaging of lesbianism. In the “ludic romp” of The Auto­ biography “ the Old Bad Stein, the transgressive Stein,” cajoles and inveigles the prurient reader into accepting “a deceptive, veiled story about the Good Stein.” Language’s secrets along with its incomplete, puzzling, ambiguous disclo­ sures preoccupy the two Renaissance essayists. In their personalized and pro­ grammatic contributions Ian Sowton and Anthony Dawson are intensely concerned to define their position as male feminists, wanting it to be distinct from what Elaine Showalter has wittily termed “ the old misogyny dressed up in Woolf’s clothing.” 2 Writing from a place of “ ‘difference within’ ” the text, Sowton focuses on Spenser’s use of the lexicon of violence and excess in ways which rupture and destabilize “ the construction of Guyon as the rationally continent man.” He is talking about more than the felt disparity between moral purpose and erotic pleasure in the Bower of Bliss. I wonder if similar differences within affect, or infect, all the Arcadian places of this fragmentary, non-integrative epic, which absorbs yet explodes meaning — from the Gar­ dens of Adonis and the Temple of Venus to Acidale and Arlo Hill. Sowton extends his “gender-sensitive dialogue” about the reassertion of “ a normative male point of view” to consider Britomart...