Feminist Literary Criticism: From Anti-Patriarchy to Decadence

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then, however, Marx had already been
replaced by the above three French nihilists.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