Feminist Literary Criticism: From Anti-Patriarchy to Decadence

IN DEFENSE OF PATRIARCHY
Feminist Literary Criticism: From
Anti-Patriarchy to Decadence
Anne Barbeau Gardiner
The “tiny, embattled band” that
launched feminist criticism thirty
years ago has produced, in the words of
one of its historians, “a widespread and
well-known field of study.” In fact, according
to one Modern Language Association
survey, feminist criticism in recent
times has had “more impact on the
teaching of literature” than any other
school. 1 It is claimed to be “already an
indispensable part of the study of literature”
in universities in Britain, Canada,
and the United States. 2
In this essay I shall examine a handful
of current works that illustrate the nature
and goals of feminist criticism as an
ideology. First, I will analyze what feminist
critics are saying about patriarchy;
second, what they propose as their criteria
for selecting works to replace the great
canon of Western literature; and third,
how they now celebrate a decadence
reminiscent of the Roman empire at the
full measure of its decline.
Patriarchy
To begin, what do feminist critics mean
by the term patriarchy? According to
Judith Bennett, in her recent work History
ANNE BARBEAU GARDINER is Professor Emerita of
English at John Jay College and the author of
several works on the poetry of John Dryden.
Matters, patriarchy is the “central problem”
of women’s history, and even “one of
the greatest general problems of all
history.” 3 She herself admits that nowadays
the average woman dismisses the
term as an outdated “bugbear.” She recounts
how Jane Fonda once remarked
that “patriarchy is very much alive and
well, and we have to do something about
it,” and her interviewer Emma Brockes
replied that patriarchy is an “anachronism”
and that “lots of women would
bridle at the suggestion they are victims
of a patriarchal system.” Bennett is distressed
at Brockes’s reply and insists that
patriarchy is “essential to the future of
feminism.” As evidence she points to Ida
Blom and other feminists who set out in
the 1990s to write a global history of
women and discovered that they could
agree on “only one common theoretical
framework: patriarchy.” According to
Sylvia Walby, no other term is as useful to
describe the “system” by which “men
dominate, oppress and exploit women.” 4
Bennett warns us, however, not to focus
on the origins of patriarchy, for that
could lead to the naive notion that there
are real biological differences between
men and women. Feminists “know,” she
says, that patriarchy is something “contingent,
constructed, and subject to
change.” And thanks to transsexuals, they
also realize that women cannot be “clearly
Modern Age 393

identified” by their bodies: “There is, in
other words, no stable subject, no coherent
thing called ‘women’—at the heart of
either feminism or feminist history.” 5 For
Bennett the words patriarchy and women
are useful constructs in a power-struggle,
but they have no referents in nature, biology,
or objective reality.
Her view goes back to Simone de
Beauvoir, who in The Second Sex presented
women’s nature as something
constructed by patriarchy, but so cunningly
done that the construction looked
like nature and was thought to be unchangeable.
Such a denial of nature is
now current in feminist ideology. Ruth
Robbins, in her recent work Literary Feminisms,
lists among the oppressions women
have endured by being “formed under
patriarchy,”
physiological oppressions which attack
women by virtue of their bodies (childbearing
and rearing defined as “women’s work,”
or the fact that women are physically less
powerful than men, and can be subjected to
violence and rape). 6
Note well that Robbins accuses patriarchy
of having defined “childbearing” as
“women’s work” and thus having deceived
unsuspecting females for millennia. Without
this construction, who knows if
women would ever have stumbled on
motherhood? Similarly, in the recently
published Cambridge Companion to Feminist
Literary Theory, Nancy Armstrong
declares that the “power” women had
over “child-rearing” in the nineteenth
century was “in no way natural” to them. 7
Not natural because for feminist critics,
every phase of motherhood (except abortion)
is a patriarchal conspiracy to oppress
women. Welcome to the paranoia
that passes for “truth” among these ideologues,
“where there is no rational universe
to know.” 8
Ironically, despite their fierce opposition
to a patriarchy consisting of white
males, feminist critics from the start have
mostly followed the teaching of three
white European males—Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. In
1986 Elaine Showalter warned that “the
feminist appropriation of Marxism was a
form of dependency on male models.” By
then, however, Marx had already been
replaced by the above three French nihilists.
From that point on, the dependency
of feminist critics on male models became
even more pronounced. Lacan had
pride of place on their altar because of his
assault on the Western “humanist notion
of self as unique and individual.” He viewed
both characters inside a text and people
outside a text as “functions within language,”
and thus made it impossible for
his adherents to consider biological differences
as “foundational.”
In his light, Julia Kristeva sees light and
exclaims, “woman as such does not exist.” 9
Enlightened in her turn, Sharon Marcus
demands a change of language to give
women more power over rapists. Instead
of the old “rape script” that shows woman
as “violable, and fearful,” she wants a new
“script” where the “female body” is “born
into a discourse that figures it as potent”
and a possible “agent of violence.” 10 If
Marcus can really believe that a different
“rape script” will strike terror in the heart
of a rapist, she must have the sort of faith
that moves mountains. If only it were not
placed in such an apostle!
In like manner, Nancy Armstrong argues
that “if literate members of modern
culture do in fact think of themselves as
novels, and have for at least two centuries,
then novels must influence events.”
I fear I have lived a sheltered life, because
I have never met one of those literate
people who “think of themselves as novels.”
Armstrong believes so fervently that
we are a function of language that she
thinks literate people had to start by accepting
a linguistic world divided between
men and women before they could
“inhabit those categories, marry, throw
parties, spend their money, and repro-
394 Fall 2007

duce themselves in both children and
novels accordingly.” 11 In this passage, she
puts children and novels on a par as texts
in which literate people reproduce themselves.
This is no laughing matter. Ideological
feminism is not a harmless eccentricity,
but wields great power in the universities
of the West. For years now, burning incense
before the above-mentioned
French gurus has led to “respectable career
opportunities” in universities “open
to progressive perspectives.” 12 In sum,
though women today regard the term
patriarchy as an outdated bogey, cadres
of feminist critics entrenched in academe
brandish it as the execrated name of the
common enemy. The word patriarchy for
them has, in effect, the same power that
the word “popery” had in seventeenthcentury
England as a rallying cry to unite
those who would otherwise be utterly
divided among themselves.
Replacing the Great Canon
Feminist critics want to replace the great
canon of Western literature because, they
say, it was mostly men who composed
those works and male critics who vouched
for their greatness. It would be one thing
to add to the great canon the works of
those deserving women whose memory
had been effaced because of prejudice.
But this task, far advanced by now, is not
radical enough for the feminist ideologues
who want to eliminate the canon altogether.
Rita Felski dismisses the great
canon as “strikingly narrow,” a “restricted
diet” prepared by “white men” whose judgment
of beauty was prejudiced and whose
language was full of “gendered meanings.”
True, the great works have been praised
as “universal,” but Felski replies that feminists
have “a hard time with the notion of
universality.” Firmly rejecting the view
that “we are all pretty much the same,” she
asserts that the differences between us
are in no way “superficial; they go all the
way down.” All the way down? She explains
further that there is no “universal
essence of the human,” no shared humanity
beneath the diversity. No wonder she
is glad to say that the literary worth of the
great canon is no longer “eternal and
unshakable,” 13 for as R. V. Young points
out, the great works are about our shared
humanity: they remind us “of our specifically
human nature, with its measure of
rational and spiritual freedom from the
constraints of the material order.” 14
After the great canon has been
deconstructed, how does a feminist critic
go about making a counter-canon? On
what basis does she decide what to include
and what to exclude? Since the
1990s various sub-cultures have been
clamoring to be given a share in women’s
studies and complaining about the prominence
of dead white females like Austen,
the Brontës, Eliot, and Woolf. How to
satisfy them all? Linda Anderson remarks
that since “diversity has no limits, the
desire for inclusivity was also bound to
founder on its own impossibility.” But
Ellen Rooney is more optimistic: she believes
that “fragmentation” among feminists
merely leads to a “dissemination of
feminisms” and “the diaspora of feminist
discourses,” because, “when feminism
divides, it multiplies.” She sees the feminist
project as vast and invulnerable—
“so large, so diverse, and so entrenched
that it simply expands to accommodate
each new debate.” 15
Rita Felski, however, offers some sobering
advice to feminist critics. She warns
them not to explain why they select certain
works and exclude others from their
canon. They must make “tacit value judgments,”
not explicit ones, and must be
“wary about spelling out the basis for
such judgments” for fear of being “accused
of elitism.” Silence might seem the
better part of valor in the face of Rashmi
Varma, who angrily complains that “While
conferences, faculties, curricula, and feminist
social science in general did open up
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to women of color, the category of race
was consistently consigned to a subordinate
position, and institutional structures
that privileged white dominance remained
in place.” For Varma, the revolution
is not going far enough fast enough,
even though, as Young observes, “the
accumulated wisdom of centuries of
Western Civilization” is being steadily
replaced in colleges by “culture studies”
that “focus on marginalized groups and
trendy social issues.” 16
Felski grieves that “What began as a
stirring challenge to a sacred canon of
great books has as its none-too-happy
endpoint a paralyzing anxiety about any
explicit act of evaluation.” Even so, she
sees the present impasse as inevitable,
because an explicit evaluation of literature
would mean erecting a hierarchy,
and “hierarchy means patriarchy.” 17 Ah,
patriarchy again. But is it true that feminists
can never establish an objective,
ascending order of merit in literary works
without letting patriarchy in through the
back door? This looks suspiciously like a
political maneuver, an appeal to the bogey-man
to silence the clamor for inclusion.
One might well ask at this juncture
whether it would be fair for feminist critics
to make only tacit “value judgments”
when including or excluding works from
their canon. Critics are surely bound to
make their criteria explicit so as not to be
thought prejudiced or arbitrary. Besides,
what’s good for the goose is good for the
gander: feminists have long accused the
“patriarchy” of tacitly hiding “masculinist”
prejudices under the cloak of objectivity.
Felski admits there are intractable divisions
among feminists, but she hopes
that despite their differences, women can
still “enjoy, empathize, or learn from works
of art that explore worlds different from
their own.” 18 Strange. After she has declared
that the differences between
people go “all the way down” and that
there is no “universal essence of the human,”
she suddenly wants women from
diverse backgrounds to read each other’s
works with empathy. Surely, if that could
happen, then these ultra-feminists might
go a step farther and read the works of the
great canon with empathy. Or does her
point about the value of exploring “worlds
different from their own” not apply to the
literary treasures of Western civilization?
Ruth Robbins also sees literature as
historically “specific” and never “transcendent.”
She repudiates the great canon
on the ground that it was only politics
that caused some books to be included
under the rubric of greatness and others
to be excluded. No longer must we allow
the category of great literature to remain
“unquestioned and unexamined.” No
longer must we “tamely” grant those
works the “privileged” status of “universality,
truth and transcendence.” Instead,
we need to create a new aesthetics of
“gender and class.” We also need to let
many “traditions” flourish because traditions
are good—of course, not in the case
of the Great Tradition—when they are
constructed by “sub-cultures and
marginalised groups” like lesbian women
seeking out “their own identities.” Finally,
we need politicized readers who no longer
look for “value in the autonomous text,”
but ask instead “whether the study of
literature needs a concept of value at all.”
Yet, can there really be a literature
without a “concept of value”? French feminist
Julia Kristeva decided to refuse the
term “literature.” But Ruth Robbins warns
that literature is a “privileged term,” so
feminists must lay claim to the “value
attached to the word/concept of literature,”
or they will reposition “women readers
and writers as somehow less important,
more marginal to the claims of ‘real’
literature.” 19 In short, she tells her fellowfeminists
to get rid of “literature” as something
with aesthetic and moral value, but
to keep the word itself. For the word can
serve as a fig leaf to hide their naked
politics.
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Having dismissed the great works as
proper objects of study, ideological feminists
give their scholarly attention to
books that were written by, or for women,
even when these have a merely popular
appeal. Nickianne Moody openly questions
the usefulness of distinguishing
between high and low culture. 20 Massmarket
romances written by women are
now to be critically examined for what
they reveal about female desire. Indeed,
as Felski notes, there is already a growing
body of feminist critical work dealing
with female pleasure in reading. Robbins
remarks that under the rubric of “literature”
her fellow-feminists include works
once banished as “inappropriate, improper,
obscene.” 21 Obscene? Feminist
silence about the objective criteria for
evaluating literature now becomes feminist
loquacity about the desires and pleasures
of women readers, including, as we
will see, the supposed pleasures of sadism
and masochism.
The Celebration of Decadence
Let me begin this section with an anecdote.
I have been a member of the American
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
for around thirty years. Many years
ago I was invited to chair a panel at the
annual conference—it was a panel of three
women who would all give papers on the
works of the Marquis de Sade. I immediately
declined, and in a letter I explained
briefly that de Sade was too decadent to
deserve our serious scholarly consideration
and urged the Society not to allow
a panel on his pornography. Despite my
plea, the panel went ahead without me,
and I was not asked again to chair another
panel—though this turned out to be a
good thing, since I began at that point to
organize my own panels on literature and
religion. A short while later I was cheered
to read Roger Scruton’s very fine essay,
published in the Times Literary Supplement,
in which he accused the scholarly
world of decadence for giving de Sade
serious consideration. At first I wondered
why young feminist scholars would even
consider giving papers on de Sade, but I
soon learned that they were in lockstep
behind Simone de Beauvoir, whose essay
“Faut-il Bruler Sade?” had rehabilitated
the pornographer as a serious writer. Following
the lead of de Beauvoir, Kristeva
incredibly ranked de Sade as on a par with
Shakespeare and Racine. 22
Certainly, the Western world has seen a
seismic change in sexual morality in the
last generation, but what many people do
not realize is that the decadence pervasive
in the mass media is also found in parts
of our universities. Take the lack of concern
for truth. Judith Bennett, a medieval
historian, urges other historians to “avoid
heteronormativity” in their works. 23
Surely, if truth matters, how can historians
avoid the reality that it was indeed
the norm for two millennia of Christian
history for sexual intercourse to be limited
to a man and a woman in marriage?
What she is advising is that homosexual
politics should trump historical truth.
Bennett says she was troubled at first
to discover that there were only fifteen
known lesbians in the “entire medieval
millennium.” In that case, how could she
avoid heteronormativity in telling the
story of medieval women? She solved the
problem by inventing a new word—lesbian-like.
Presto, she could link to her fifteen
medieval lesbians all the women
whose lives “offered opportunities for
same-sex love”—all the nuns living in
“single-sex communities” and all the
women living in the single state—the stillto-be-married,
the spinsters, and the widows.
Thus, without a qualm, she dragooned
a multitude of women into a big imaginary
lesbian tent. The word lesbian-like, Bennett
says, facilitates the “development” of a
“usable past” for lesbians and the “reform”
of women’s history. 24 Reform? This
is hardly reform. It’s a re-invention of the
past with no regard for truth.
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Bennett tells us in passing that she
“first had sex with another woman in 1973.”
What business is that of ours? And note
the phrase had sex. Must she speak of her
private conduct in such a coarse way? Is
there to be no difference any more between
professional writing and tell-all
television shows? By the way, she is hardly
an obscure figure in the Canadian academy,
for she was recently asked to revise
a textbook on the Middle Ages and add
“more women’s history.” She did it, she
says, but only because it is “the best deal
we can get, for now,” though it leaves the
“master narrative” intact. 25 Naturally, she
wants to revamp the “master narrative”
and erase heteronormativity from all of
medieval history. And who in Canada will
tell her no?
There were feminists before Bennett
who wished to dragoon all women into a
big imaginary lesbian tent, as for example
Adrienne Rich, who proposed a lesbian
“continuum” that included the relationships
between mother and daughter, between
sisters, and between friends, and
who even urged women to rethink all
their connections with other women as a
form of “resistance to their sexualisation
by patriarchal culture.” 26 Of course, if we
were only a function of language, then
vastly enlarging the meaning of the word
lesbian would change a lot. But we are not
a function of language. History in reality
is not just a word-construct that can be
arbitrarily deconstructed and reconstructed
by “discursive practices.” We
betray our ancestors when we give public
monies in support of such a mockery of
history.
A prime example of the contemporary
celebration of decadence in women’s studies
is Rita Felski’s appreciation of the
“lesbian picaresque.” This is a new genre
exemplified by, among other works, Jane
De Lynn’s Don Juan in the Village and
Michelle Tea’s Valencia. Felski regrets that
these works have not “made as much of a
splash as they deserve,” but she remedies
this by giving them careful scholarly attention.
In these novels, there is no veiling
of the “nitty-gritty details” of what
lesbians do in bed. Rather, sex and violence
are here “inextricably intertwined”
and the “soothing rituals of sadomasochistic
sex” can be found. Soothing rituals of
sadomasochistic sex? The implication is
that she approves of these perversions. In
Don Juan, Felski says, the lesbian protagonist
is unembarrassed about her rampant
“lust” for women; she fills the chapters
with the details of her anonymous onenight
stands, and expresses a yearning for
the “calm purity of utter degradation.” 27
Purity of utter degradation? Is this a work
that should be taught in a classroom?
Such authors resemble suicide bombers
hellbent on self-destruction and on the
destruction of as many as they can reach.
Come to think of it, suicide bombers are
not so bad, since they kill only bodies, not
souls.
Ah, but Felski appreciates “the ebullient
glee with which these novels kick
over the pedestal of female virtue.” The
pedestal of female virtue? There’s nothing
left to kick in the West but a few
broken pieces of that pedestal. How can
Felski enjoy a glee in what is obviously
diabolical? She remarks blandly that we
are faced today with the “routinizing of
transgression,” because “subversion” like
this has become the “daily grist for the
academic mill.” 28 Who would not weep to
hear that pornography is routine fare now
for young people in the universities? Instead
of fearing an imaginary “patriarchy,”
feminists would do well to fear the
abyss opening at their feet. They will be
held accountable someday for leading
into antisocial and criminal actions those
they were trusted to educate.
Another example of the contemporary
celebration of decadence in women’s studies
is found in Leila J. Rupp’s essay, “When
Women’s Studies Isn’t about Women:
Writing about Drag Queens.” 29 Rupp, the
chair of Women’s Studies in the Univer-
398 Fall 2007

sity of California at Santa Barbara, discusses
in these few pages the research for
her recent book about drag queens, telling
how she and her partner spent considerable
time at a club in Key West, Florida. 30
Rupp celebrates the “bawdy shows” where
drag queens wander into the audience
“to grope and fondle men and women,”
use foul language, and mimic sex acts on
stage. Rupp even describes in detail the
night she joined the drag queens and
reports that she felt “powerful disguised
as a man dressing as a woman.” 31 For this
research, Rupp received financial support
from women’s studies at Ohio State,
and her book was published by the University
of Chicago Press.
Rupp says her book is useful for teaching
students “concepts of social constructionism”
because a drag queen is a unique
“gender category.” Women’s studies, she
says, need to open up to “ambiguity and
contradiction: tittie queens with breasts
and penises, transgendered men with
male chests and no bottom surgery having
penis-in-vagina gay sex with gay men.”
And yet, she wonders whether women’s
studies can “hold together” if we are “uncertain
what our central concepts mean,”
or whether “they exist at all”? 32 I can only
reply, I hope not.
There is a direct line connecting Simone
de Beauvoir—who first took up the perversions
of de Sade as a subject for feminist
literary criticism—with Ruth Robbins,
Judith Bennett, Rita Felski, Leila Rupp,
and all the other feminist ideologues who
use their learning, university positions,
and even public funds to subvert literary
and moral values. What began as a tiny
movement in the 1970s has become a
grave danger to the young, especially to
young women. And since college students
are the leaders of the future, what is at
stake now is the very foundation of Western
society and civilization.
1. Rita Felski, Literature after Feminism (Chicago
and London, 2003), 5. 2. Ruth Robbins, Literary
Feminisms (New York, 2000), 265. 3. Judith M.
Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge
of Feminism (Philadelphia, 2006), 54, 80. 4.
Ibid., 151, 155, 57, 56. 5. Ibid., 80, 60, 9. 6. Robbins,
15. 7. Nancy Armstrong, “What feminism did to
novel studies,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Feminist Literary Theory, edited by Ellen Rooney
(Cambridge and New York, 2006), 105. Eight of the
thirteen contributors to this volume are American.
8. Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation and the
Sublime (Oxford and New York, 2006), 4. 9.
Robbins, 38, 113, 115; Kari Weil, “French feminism’s
écriture féminine,” in Cambridge Companion, 160.
10. Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting
Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,”
in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists
Theorize the Political (1992), cited in Ellen
Rooney, “The literary politics of feminist theory,”
Cambridge Companion, 89-92. 11. Armstrong, Cambridge
Companion, 106-108. 12. Mann, 4. In footnote
5 on this page we read that the link between
“loyalty to postmodernism and academic acceptance”
was noted earlier in Susan Bordo’s Unbearable
Weight (1993), Naomi Schor and Elizabeth
Weed’s The Essential Difference (1994), and Barbara
Christian’s “The Race for Theory,” in Radically
Speaking (1996). 13. Felski, 14-16, 141. 14. R.
V. Young, At War with the Word: Literary Theory and
Liberal Education (Wilmington, Del., 1999), x, 101.
15. Linda Anderson, “Autobiography and the
feminist subject,” in Cambridge Companion, 127;
Linda Rooney, “Introduction,” Cambridge Companion,
14-15. 16. Felski, 165; Rashmi Varma, “On
common ground?: feminist theory and critical
race studies,” in Cambridge Companion, 245; Young,
11. 17. Felski, 165. 18. Ibid., 42. This is especially
strange because, on page 139, she ridicules those
who defend great literature on the ground that “it
is a way of being taken out of yourself into a different
world.” A few pages later, she uses the very same
argument to make feminists from different backgrounds
read each other’s works. 19. Robbins,
126 (citing Kristeva), 117. 20. Nickianne Moody,
“Feminism and popular culture,” Cambridge Companion,
177. 21. Felski, 54; Robbins, 9. 22. Simone
de Beauvoir, “Faut-il Bruler Sade?” in Privilèges
(Paris, 1955), 11-89; Kristeva is cited in Robbins,
126. 23. Bennett, 119. 24. Ibid., 110, 118, 123, 125-
27. 25. Ibid., 114, 135-37. 26. Robbins (citing Rich),
202. 27. Felski, 109-13. 28. Ibid., 78. 29. Leila J.
Rupp, in Exploring Women’s Studies: Looking Forward,
Looking Back, edited by Carol Berkin, Judith
L. Pinch, and Carole S. Appel (Upper Saddle
River, N.J., 2006), 57-67. 30. Leila J. Rupp and
Verta Taylor, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret
(Chicago, 2003). 31. Rupp, 64. 32. Ibid., 59.
Modern Age 399