The New Gynology: Writing on Women and Literature in the United States

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume IO,No. 3, Wmter 1979 The New Gynology: Writing on Women andLiterature in the United States Robin P. Hoople ElameShowalter. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Pnnceton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977.378 pp. Marlene Ann Springer, ed. What Manner of Woman: Essayson English and American Life and Literature. NewYork: New York University Press, 1977.357 + xx pp. In a famous dictum, D. H. Lawrence said: "never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The tale has an independence, an integrity, a life of its own; the teller has feet of clay. Two recent books, What Manner of Woman and A Literature of Their Own, part of a wave of literature reflecting women's experience in a hostile society, tell a tale instructive, chilling, revelatory of a long tradition of oppression and misery that encourages resistance to tyrants. Sometimes, to the detriment of the tale, the tellers intrude and attempt to choreograph the readers' responses. What Manner of Woman, edited by Marlene Springer, is a collection of essays attempting to cover women in literature and society-in England from the fourteenth century to the present; in the United States from the seventeenth century to the present-in thirteen essays and an introduction. A Literature of Their Own, by Elaine Showalter, is an historical treatment of women writers in England from the Brontes to Margaret Drabble. While What Manner of Woman must make its mark through the uneven resultant of multiple scholarship, A Literature of Their Own focuses a single mind. Both books survey broad universes, putting a heavy impost on the authors to approach exhaustiveness and yet pay adequate attention to detail. Marlene Springer hopes to provide an overview of women in society and literature in What Manner of Woman; Elaine Showalter hopes to make a contribution to a theory of female art in A Literature of Their Own. 326 Robin P. Hoople While the two purposes are similar, even-in the eras and literatures that overlap-complementary, the focus of the Springer book rests on how men have treated women in major literary productions through the ages; whereas the focus of the Showalter book rests on how women have treated themselves and society in their fiction. Thus the criteria by which the two books must be judged-chosen by the principal authors themselves-differ markedly. Springer's collection, in spite of the diversity of authorship, results in sufficient coherence to provide .an overview; Showalter's study must be accurate enough and comprehensive enough to support the demands of theory. And while the subject fields of these two books occasion a preponderance of commentary on British writing, it is notable that the writers are all Americans, all but one, academics. Aside from the literary and historical purposes that the two books serve, it seems possible to me that there is a motive of sympathy, even of enlistment, as well. For in their constant documentation of society's (men's) domination of women, these books applaud the idea of a universal sisterhood, while leaving the impression that British women are less militant, less thoroughly revolutionized than their American literary counterparts. To deal first with What Manner of Woman, some of these essays are quite simply outstanding. All of them offer something of value to the layman, and it is my judgment that the book does indeed serve its purpose of providing an overview of the condition of woman in society through the ages and through two literatures. Inevitably, the achievement is uneven through so many essays. Best among them is Martha Banta's essay on women in the time of James and Faulkner. Her thesis is sharply focused by her adopting William James's terminology for the American success myth-the pursuit of the bitch goddess-and showing that it cuts two ways. First, Banta shows that this formulation materializes the whole pursuitideology of the American Civil Religion; second, it accuses the success-enchantment of being feminine. Shrewdly Banta concludes that the real perpetrator of the fraud is the male, who becomes his own dupe, an ironic counterpart of the victim of Romanticism's Belle Dame sans merci...