Feminist Postmodernisms

ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 Feminist Postmodernisms Pamela L. Caughie. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. xxviii + 236 pp. Cloth 39.95 Paper 15.95 A FULL-LENGTH postmodernist study of Virginia Woolf's supple, chameleon -like prose is long overdue. Pamela L. Caughie's exploration of the postmodern element of Woolf's works is a thorough, deft, and persuasive demonstration of Woolf's prescient experimental genius, a genius which has too often been extinguished by reductive readings. Deliberately destabilizing the methodical progress from novel to novel, from fiction to essay, from major works to minor, Caughie jumbles the traditional organizing categories. For example, one chapter is on the artist figure, another on narrativity; there is a chapter on the prose and another on the canon. Within the chapters as well there are fertile and surprising juxtapositions: Lily Briscoe stands painting next to the "I" who speaks in A Room of One's Own; Mrs. Brown, Jacob Flanders, Clarissa Dalloway and Orlando share a chapter on characters and narrators. Throughout, Caughie is constantly reminding her readers to invert, up-end, turn inside out, and re-invent the ways of reading. For example, with regard to Orlando, Caughie observes that "[a]ndrogyny, then, is a refusal to choose. The androgynous vision is paratactical, not dichotomous . It affirms a 'fertile oscillation'between positions" and "does more than expose conventional forms, it also exposes the process of producing these forms." The postmodern conceptual framework is certainly not new; its systematic application to Woolf's oeuvre is. Yet, given that the postmodern destabilizes language, negates questions of essential identity, and subsumes meaning into rhetoric, one must acknowledge that the definitional distinctions between modernism and postmodernism are necessary fictions. As Caughie's reading of Woolf occasionally suggests, the postmodern can itself become an orthodoxy . Despite her reiterated denials, Caughie's argument is entrapped in the infinite regress of postmodern indeterminism; her insistent rejection of the binary is betrayed by its own oppositional positioning in relation to prior critics. Even her own self-irony does not save her. Caughie asks, "Am I not in danger of falling back into the same kind of critical practice I take issue with[?] . . . For all my talk of refusing to 386 BOOK REVIEWS choose and resisting right readings, do I not offer postmodernism as the right choice after all?" The answer is emphatically yes. Italicized phrases emphasize Caughie's corrective contrasts. For example , in Orlando, Woolf "is not arguing for one of two ontological theories. . . . Rather, she is testing out the consequences of different concepts of language and identity." As this passage indicates, Caughie's standard syntactic pattern inadvertently sets up a "noVbut" dichotomy which covertly resituates certainty precisely by rejecting it. As she fuHy acknowledges, "I could be seen to present the correct reading of Woolf. .. [However,] my approach is not 'normative' (arguing for right readings) but 'corrective' (arguing for better ways of reading in light of different concepts of language and literature)." Caughie's differentiation between the correct, the normative, and the corrective is at best problematic since all three terms are derived from the same root concept ("right" in the sense of straight, regulated, authoritative, and, yes, punitive). Given that postmodernism has often been criticized for its apolitical tendencies, this corrective intent seems to be a potentially dangerous shift away from engagement. Not coincidentally, Caughie claims Toril Moi as her critical avatar. Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics (1985) bravely and blessedly rescues Woolf from the unfriendly attentions of Elaine Showalter. But later, in a text which explicitly situates the political in its title, Moi dismisses "black or lesbian (or black-lesbian) feminist criticism" as (merely) political and thus unworthy of discussion because her book "purports to deal with the theoretical aspects of feminist critics" (86). Like Moi, who gives the last word of her study of feminist theory to Derrida, Caughie ends her study with a quotation from a Great White Father as well. Apassage from Wittgenstein, as Caughie claims, "voices Woolf's sentiment... and serves as a fitting conclusion for this book." Further, Caughie invokes Jane Gallop's scandalous and brilliant The Daughter's Seduction...