Trends in Literary Theory: The Female Aesthetic and German Women's Writing

Abstract

The title of my paper draws upon a well-known essay by Silvia Bovenschen, Ober die Frage: Gibt es eine weibliche Asthetik?' and indicates an important development within recent German feminism. From about the middle of the 1970's, German feminists recognized that beyond patriarchal stereotyping and the demand for equal rights, women were different from men, though not necessarily in the ways men had maintained, and that the task of feminism was to assert and explore, not eradicate, that difference. The literary response to this perception of radical difference was an outpouring of feminist creativity as, from a consciously feminist standpoint, women writers tried to speak about the female specificity of their own experiences. At issue was a new feminist form as well as content; for, it was argued, if women's subjectivity has stood in a different relationship to the objective world than men's, then different literary techniques will be required to express the different shapes of women's lives. Asserting women's subjectivity as an epistemological model opposed to dominant male structures of thought, women's writing became a form of feminist resistance and struggle, as Johanna Wordemann reported in Alternative: Ein Ziel der Frauenbewegung: die 'Entdeckung' des Spezifischen der Frau, Erkenntnis und Erforschung des Spezifischen. . . . Als Spezifikum weiblichen Denkens-Schreibens wurde .. . immer wieder die 'radikale Subjektivitat' genannt, Subjektivitat, wie sie in den Selbsterfahrungsberichten gefordert wird. Diese Subjektivitat wird in Opposition zum mannlichen, 'objektivierenden,' von sich absehenden Denken begriffen. Frauen wollen nicht langer 'von sich absehen'; das ist ihr Widerstand, das ist ihr Kampf.2 In their endeavor to explore the alternative possibilities of female subjectivity, German feminist writers were supported by a direction of feminist analysis beginning to seep into German feminism from France.3 Drawing on the work of Derrida and Lacan, French feminists like Luce Irigaray, H6lne Cixous, and Monique Wittig argue that male domination is established and maintained by the society's symbolic order or structures of thought. These structures are logocentric; they conceptualize the world as a system of polarities involving a central term or logos