Women’sStudies In:. &rum, Vol. 12, No. 6. pp. 639444, 1989 F’rinted in the USA.

0277~5395/8913.00 + .a0 0 1989FeropmonRess plc

BOOK REVIEWS

FJMINIST &SUFSIN L RERARY SCHOLA~~P, edited by Shari Benstock; introduction by Catharine R. Stimpson, 242 pages. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987. Price USS27.50 hard cover USS9.95 pb.

The collection Feminist Issues in Litemry Scholarship sets out to answer the central questions of feminist scholarship: What spaces do women writers like Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Doris Lessing occupy in their literary landscapes and what models of critical discourse can we use to read them. One reason why Feminist Issues in Litemry Scholarship is an important and valuable collection is that the essays are at the cutting edge of post modernism. Another is the attention to writers due for a major revival like Anna Kavan and Sylvia Townsend Warner who, in their very different ways, cannot easily be incorporated into domi- nant critical modes. (Wendy Mulford’s This Narmw Place: Sylvia lbwnsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, published by Pandora Press is a very fine example of this new, politically conscious feminist criticism.) And Enal- ly the contributors manage to address accessibly such difficult issues as- the balance of empiricism to theory, and of traditional and nontraditional notions of the feminine in relation to differences among women writers as well as between women and men.

The book contains essays originally published in ml- sa Studies in Women’s Litemture by the major contem- porary feminist critics Nina Auerback, Nina Baym, Shari Benstock, Josephine Donovan, Judith Kegan Gar- diner, Jane Marcus, Judith Newton, Lillian Robinson, Elaine Showalter, and Paula Treichler, together with es- says which have appeared elsewhere by Elizabeth Fox- Genovese, Hortense Spillers, and Susan Friedman. It ranges from consideration of the history of feminist crit- icism to black women’s autobiography.

The most interesting papers for me, and perhaps the most provoking, are those which examine particular writers through several critical windows in turn. For ex- ample, Benstock convincingly shows how reading Gertrude Stein through the obscure lens of modernism or with the deconstructive eye of lesbian feminism we would still be trying to fit Stein into a mistress, if not into a master narrative-as if word and meaning were indissoluble. What we understand from Benstock and indeed from all the essays is that language is never a mirror of reality but a construction which might deny the social while simultaneously being shaped by race, class and gender.

The newcomer to feminist criticism will want to read these essays-not necessarily all at once-but first those which explicate a particular genre like the fine introduc- tion by -Fox-Genovese to -Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Zora Neale Hurston proving that the tools of criticism, as she says, are always shaped by the poli- tics that guide them; and then Showalter’s, Marcus’s,

and the other essays which focus more on arguments within literary theory. In reading this collection what came through to me more strongly than anything else is that feminist literary scholarship is unique. Feminist criticism is not linear or evolutionary in the sense of discarding the carapaces of earlier practices but with its agenda of retrieval, re-vision and rejoicing can refuse Aristotelian beginnings and middles which must, howev- er implicitly, carry the notion of an end. It could be argued that the 1980s have seen a major proliferation of feminist writing that could effect cultural politics as pro- foundly as the second wave did in the early 1970s. The kind of critical practice needed for such a major shift in feminist politics, as I see it, is the kind contained in this volume-a way of reading the social and discursive rep- resentations of women that holds tight to the concept of criticism as resistance.

M~oom HUMM NORTHEASTLONDONPOLYTBCHNIC,L~ND~N, UK.

READING WOMAN. ES~S IN FEMINIST Carrrcmru, by Mary Jacobus, 316 pages. Columbia University Press, New York, 1986. Price USS30 cloth.

THE Ponrscs OF GENDER, edited by Nancy K. Miller, 302 pages. Columbia University Press, New York, 1987. Price USSl2.50 pb.

TECHNOUXIES OF GENDEP, by Teresa de Lauretis, 151 pages. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987. Price USS7.95 pb.

Feminist literary criticism and theory has come of age. Who would doubt it after Columbia University’s presti- glous colloquia on poetics deigned to consider gender a topic worthy of the attention of the literary luminaries in academe. an attention sustained outside this one-time event by the on-going critical discourse such as the one led by the authors of all three books under review? And yet, while we rejoice in being finally heard beyond our ghetto, we also have cause to worry. For some, the temg tation to join the elite circle may have been stronger than their commitment to the basic idea of Women’s Studies, which is to put their intellectual pursuits in the service of social change.

On the other hand, the categories (personallpoliti- cal, object/subject, sex/gender, male/female, etc.) with which we hoped to easily expose patriarchal ideology, proved eventually much more complex and led to a vari- ety of substantial critical procedures. While these vrui- ous approaches could be and are being seen as a sign of vitality conducive to a thorough feminist critique of pa- triarchy, it seems that the psychoanalytical and decon- structive methods in the footsteps of Lacan, Derrida,

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