Rethinking Women’s Literary History

Abstract

Abstract Through a study of the lives and works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Gwendolyn Brooks and their complex and troubled relations with both masculine and feminine literary culture, this book seeks simultaneously to engage and to explore feminist theory and practice as a field of cultural struggle. Broadly stated, this study attempts to “historicize” our understanding of particular women poets and particular (re)constructions of the “female poetic tradition” by focusing on the historical struggles and differences not only among and within women writers but also among feminists themselves. In particular, I argue that the emphasis among many white feminists on both patriarchy as the primal oppression and psycho-analysis as the primary mode of conceptualizing women’s “experience” has tended to reduce all women writers to an economy of the same, trans-historicizing and universalizing the lives and works of women writers across race, class, sexual, and historically specific bounds. Moreover, I argue that under the influence of such French feminist theorists as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, recent feminist representations of women’s literary history have tended to romanticize, matemalize, essentialize, and eternalize women writers and the relationships .among them in ways that have worked to reconstitute the very gender stereotypes and polarities that have been historically the ground of women’s oppression.