Gilbert and Gubar describe the female writer's journey as long and somewhat rebellious. It makes me wonder, why did they fight so hard? Why not prove themselves instead of provoking more pigheadedness?
Gilbert and Gubar admit, "... Western literary history is overwhelmingly male" (450). Whether this is sexist or not is debatable. Does that mean that every male author is sexist? Of course not. So, why, then, have women rebelled against their fellow male authors? Gilbert and Gubar describe this rebellion by saying, "The woman writer--and we shall see women doing this over and over again--searches for a female model not because she wants dutifully to comply with male definitions of her 'femininity' but because she must legitimize her own rebellious endeavors" (452). It seems to me that her endeavors were counterproductive since men simply took this as a sign of insanity (456).
I wonder if we would have more female writers today if earlier female writers had taken a different approach? Perhaps if they had tried to blend in more? Prove that they could do exactly as the men did? How then would men claim that female writers were crazy? They would have been doing the exact same things as men. They could have proven themselves as naturally intelligent beings by writing as men did and then doing it better. This might have taken more effort and would have been slow going at first, but this approach could have led to a stronger and fuller future for female literature.
Jaylyn -
ReplyDeleteI am not sure that from Gilbert and Gubar's essay we can extrapolate that literature is or is not sexist. Gilbert and Gubar do say that it is patriarchal - that is, it stems from a society organized around male power. This is not the same thing as asserting that every male author is sexist.
I am also not sure that, from this piece, we can make an evaluative claim about what women author should have done. Rather, Gilbert and Gubar are examining what they did, and then theorizing about what that may mean for female writing theory historically and presently. We can with this piece continue theorizing about authorship and literary history, female and male.
According to the authors, women did not rebel against fellow male authors. Rather, "Her battle, however, is not against her (male) precursor's reading of the world but against his reading of her" (452). That is, female writers wanted to define themselves outside the "angle/monster" type binary assigned to women. The definition of "male author" didn't fit particularly well to writing females, but neither did the angelic, weak woman. (453). The "anxiety of authorship" stems from this.
I don't think that Gilbert and Gubar are making any sort of claim about whether women write better/worse/the same as men, or that they should have tried to blend in, or that they provoked pigheadedness, or the like. Rather, I think that Gilbert and Gubar are making a historical case for thinking or theorizing about female authorship in a different way than male authorship.
I wonder what implications this new theory of female authorship Gilbert and Gubar put forth has for the agency of the author? Does this mean that female writers such as Jane Austen and Emily Dickenson have a different sort of agency? Where does the agency come from?
I think Gilbert and Gubar would have said that it was impossible for a female author to "blend in" with her male contemporaries. G & G's essay was trying to argue that women writers had no point to start from; female authors had no literary well to draw from like their male counterparts did.
ReplyDeleteIf a female writer had tried to "blend in" with other male writers, she would have been seen as inferior since it was believed that women had no business writing anyway. This problem was what Gilbert and Gubar called "anxiety of authorship." A female writer would encounter this problem because there was a system of patriarchy set up in the literary world which told her that she could not write or should not be writing in the first place.
I personally think a female writing trying to "fit in" probably would have been critiqued for the sole fact that she was a female trying to mimic an already established male author's style. She would be seen as infringing upon the male literary domain.
This was a problem Gilbert and Gubar saw in the patriarchy of the literary world. There was no way a woman could blend into such a world because of her sex. Gilbert and Gubar were trying to say that, to change the system, importance must be placed upon having more prominent female authors in a male-dominated literature field so that future female authors could have someone to draw influence from. Only then, can women authors have agency in the literary world.