Feminist Literary Criticism: From Anti-Patriarchy to Decadence

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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. 396 Fall 2007
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. Modern Age 397
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Feminist Literary Criticism: From Anti-Patriarchy to Decadence

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