The “Woman Writer” and feminist literary history; or, how the success of feminist literary history has compromised the conceptual coherence of its lead character, the “woman writer”

JEMCS 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2004) The "Woman Writer" and feminist literary history; or, how the success of feminist literary history has compromised the conceptual coherence of its lead character, the "woman writer" William B. Warner There is a specific logic that has worked sequentially to produce the necessity behind a literary history ofwomen's writing: first there is the critique of the canon as too much "his," of having systematically excluded "her." Then, by using the wrongs and occlusions of this sexist literary history, an alternative feminist literary history tells "her" story. This proj ect justifies the gathering together of women writers into a separate study, which is studied as a group, so as to isolate its distinct character, sometimes in contrast to its "other"? men's writing. Then, (and this is the third stage of the dis cursive isolation of the woman writer), the separation of women's from men's writings, first justified on political and ethical grounds, is assumed to be grounded in history. It is now assumed that the separation ofwomen writers frommen writers is inevitable, natural, proper, and illuminating. Such an assumption, with the organization of literary and cultural histories it enables, and the category of "women writer" itnat uralizes, have yielded rich critical insights. But this pre sumptive separation ofwriters by gender has also become a kind of filter, encouraging a critical blindness to the contexts, motives, and affiliations ofwriters who were women. Here it is useful to distinguish between the liberal or strict elaboration of women's writing, for each encounters a distinct problem. If there is a generous, inclusive catholic 188 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies impulse to find the minimal common traits of all writers who were women, there is a tendency to suppress the very con siderable differences among women writers. Alternatively, if one develops a more rigorous, strict, and exclusive concept of women's writing, women who wrote are put "on trial'': they are tested for their correspondence to a feminist checklist of desirable traits. In her pioneering essay on Behn's Love Letters, Judith Kegan Gardiner documents the way the inces sant sex, the occasional sexism, and the consistent Toryism of Behn's writing have troubled feminist readers ("Aphra Behn's Love Letters, The Canon, and Women's Tastes," Tulsa Studies inWomen's Literature 8, no. 2 [Fall 1989]: 201-222). This procedure usually works to the benefit of some women writers?for example, those women writers whose opinions were proto-feminist, those who never married, or those who enjoyed relative autonomy from men. By this analysis, some women writers turn out to be more "women" than others. As a corrective to these tendencies, there has been a strong chal lenge to this false harmonization ofwomen's writing. Thus for example, Beth Kowalski-Wallace's book, Their Father's Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth & Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) reads the "good daughters"?those who not only did not advocate separation from the patriarchs, but proclaimed their indebtedness and linkage to the fathers. Paula McDowell's book, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730, contests the notion that women were excluded from the eighteenth-century public sphere or accepted their subordination to men, by documenting the many registers of women's effective economic and cultural agency as printers and writers. Within recent feminist literary history, the woman writer has usually meant more than a woman who wrote: itmeans a woman who wrote as a woman. Such a literary history usually entails a certain way of reading the texts written by women. Thus, pride of place is given to a certain concept of writing: its goals are to achieve recognition as an author; stabilize personal identity, and forge connections with the lives and writing of other women. To state these themes for reading women writers is to confront the essential moderni ty of such a project. As many scholars have argued, author Warner 189 ship only becomes a recognizably modern category over the course of the long eighteenth century; personal identity is an obsession of twentieth-century forms of subjectivity; and the ideas of the...