When a “Feminist Approach” Is Too Narrow

For feminist literary critics and teachers writing about and teaching literature “after feminism,” the path is potentially treacherous (Felski 1). As Rita Felski explains in her book Literature After Feminism, feminist literary critics have acquired a reputation for being “mean-spirited malcontents who know how to debunk and denounce,” but do not know how to love and revere the texts they read, write about, and teach (1). The problem Felski sees with feminist literary critics and teachers is that their work often presupposes an artificial separation between art and politics. Felski also suggests that this kind of criticism is taught as if it were simply an exercise at an “ideological boot camp” in which feminist analyses are taught above all other kinds of interpretations and readings (2). Feminist literary criticism, then, if it is applied too narrowly and used to reject complex literary texts that do not uphold an imagined feminist standard of “positive images” of women, can end up undermining other feminist goals—including helping students claim or recover their own agency and their own readings of literary texts (Felski 2). This has happened to me. I have fallen into this trap as a literary critic and teacher.

When I taught Literature and the Contemporary: Representations of the Existential Self course, I assigned a range of existential novels, including Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea, and Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein. The central idea of the course was to explore literary representations of existential philosophy, and for the most part this is what I focused on as a teacher. Yet as a feminist teacher I was troubled from the start of the course by the group of texts that I had compiled. Only one of these novels was written by a woman. (When I taught this course a second time, I added selections from Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Ethics of Ambiguity, but here in this note I limit my discussion to my first experience teaching this course.) And to be fair, not one of the texts on the syllabus includes a particularly “positive image” of women: the male characters in the novels are the existentialists—the ones allowed to think about their own existences and test out their thoughts and ideas through action. Also by and large, the women are the secondary figures who are acted upon. I do not deny this. Nevertheless these were the texts that were on my mind when I put together this course, and I decided to teach them knowing that I would have to confront the question of gender inequity. What I did not fully anticipate was that teaching The Ravishing of Lol Stein would be the most difficult text of all.

No doubt Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein is a complex text for feminist literary critics and teachers. The novel focuses on the life of its protagonist, Lol Stein. Lol’s life has not been easy: her parents are largely absent. As a schoolgirl “there was already something lacking in Lol,” and “she gave the impression of being in a state of passive boredom” (Duras 3). The difficulties we imagine that Lol experienced as a youth are reinforced when she is publicly jilted by her fiancé Michael Richardson at the local town ball. Rather than leave the scene of her public humiliation, she watches Michael and his new love interest dance: “They had walked out onto the dance floor. Lol had watched them, the way a woman whose heart is wholly unattached, a very old woman, watches her children leave her: she seemed to love them” (Duras 8).

I argue that Lol demonstrates what Sigmund Freud would call a “compulsion to repeat” and that she draws pleasure from re-experiencing the painful events of her past. As Freud explains in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “the re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure” (42). Freud’s theory holds true for painful events as well—the repetition...