Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique

Starting Over: An Afterword

Starting Over: An Afterword The following essay, as I explain in my Preface, is an attempt to tell one story of myself as author of this book. I wrote it because not to do so seemed a contradiction and a blatant evasion in a critic who has so often emphasized the importance of connecting personal life and desires with public discourse. I am intensely, and sometimes painfully, aware of many things this narrative reveals and of the many that it glosses over. In telling this partial and imperfect story I do not mean to suggest that my life has been unusually interesting, different, or dramatic. The narrative I construct for myself in these pages intersects with the narratives of many other first generation feminists that I know, and that is part of the reason for its telling. I tell this story as well because I am a materialist-feminist, because the investigation of the personal, the familial, the psychoanalytical are part of what women's and ethnic studies have contributed to our sense of "the material," and because, in teaching the nineteenth-century British past, I have always felt convinced by a central feature of Raymond William's thought, that "great social and historical changes . . . altered not only outward forms-institutions and landscapes-but also inward feelings, experiences, self-definitions . "1 This process, of course-always assuming the constructed nature of the categories-goes both ways. Excerpt from an Application for a Sabbatical, University of California, Davis, Winter, 1991 ... I am especially interested in reading strategies that assume a fluid relation between "public" and "private" and that explore the bearing of familial relations, domestic investments, sexual anxieties, and desires on the construction of dominant forms of cultural knowledge and expertise. 177 178 Starting Over California Dreaming I began this book in the spring of 1981 while I was living in California, first in Laguna Beach and then in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. I had come to California the summer before to get a better grip on a relationship (a long-distance relationship that had "failed" some months earlier). But having reinserted myself in the landscapes of my childhood (I had grown up in Compton, at the southern tip of South Central Los Angeles) and being habitually open to new beginnings , I had decided that I would try to stay on the West Coast anyway, that I would return "home." That spring, in due course, I sent to Philadelphia, where I actually lived, for my cast-iron pots, my records, and my cat-I have never traveled light-and book by book, box by box, I began to feel that I was starting over. In the winter of that year my first book, Women, Power, and Subversion , had been published (it had focused on nineteenth-century female writers and a subculture both of resistance and participation in dominant forms of power), and I was thinking about a second, a book that would focus on gender rather than on women and that would deal rather less with subversion and rather more with the construction of dominant discourses of gender and class. In preparation for that project I decided I should think through the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of my previous work and try to establish where they lay in relation to other literary critical work that I cared about. In the process, I hoped, I would carve out a set of revised strategies for myself. But I had other agendas as well, some of them having to do with relationships of a different order, not failed relationships to be exact but ones I hoped to improve or indeed pursue . I was at that time national coordinator of the Marxist Literary Group (MLG), a task for which my social skills perhaps better suited me than my theoretical commitments or expertise. I was on the editorial board of Feminist Studies, as well, and I was beginning to feel that my theoretical and personal home was with this latter collective of women rather than with the somewhat embattled feminists in the largely male MLG. Not that I disliked men or working with men, most particularly the men in MLG, with whom I shared many interests and concerns. (I liked men, if anything, too well, and when a critic I admired once read my essay on Charlotte Bronte as an ex- Starting Over 179 ample of "Marxist aestheticism," as an undervaluation of...