Reply to My Father: Confessions of a Feminist Critic

Abstract

LET ME BEGIN by assigning what follows to a genre I will call con fessional criticism. It seems time this genre were formally acknowl edged and named since its practice appears to be a growing trend in femi nist literary circles. Open any recent work of criticism by a woman and you are likely to find, either as part of the introductory matter or scattered throughout the theoretical argument, confessions the part of the author to having been a girl once: to having dressed Barbie dolls or baked cookies with grandma. Almost twenty years ago, a Yale undergraduate named Joyce Maynard made a brief reputation writing social criticism drew upon her female coming of age in the '60s. Her first piece appeared as a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. My friends and I were contemptuous of piece, of what we referred to as that girl's wallowing, confessional style. She made all of us look bad, we thought. But I see now our scorn was less for what Joyce Maynard wrote than for how it was framed. The critical scaffolding supported her observations was too weak and she lacked the proper credentials. But the genre of confessional criticism has been perfected since the appearance of Joyce Maynard's cover story. It has gone to be practiced by the most theoretically advanced academic feminists (finding special favor among literary theorists). Thus Helena Michie, a feminist scholar and author of The Flesh Made Word (a study of the physical representation of women in Victorian novels, published by Oxford University Press and employing the methodology of deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanaly sis), begins her book by explaining it had its source on a beach Long Island, New York, where, stretched out a lawn chair carefully watching my stomach for signs of sunburn, I first readMiddlemarch.Xong Island, beach, lawn chair, stomach, sunburn: these are the signifiers of a life behind criticism Michie calculatedly constructs and allows us to glimpse. The portrait of a vain little girl has been properly framed by (and grown into) the serious adult critic. A more sustained case of confessional criticism, and the most amusing I know, is Rachel Brownstein's Becoming