Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Why I'm Still Writing Women's Literary History
by Devoney Looser | ns 71-72
Recently several colleagues asked me to defend my scholarly work. One of my areas of expertise is early modern women's writings, and these colleagues apparently found that troubling. Indeed, what they wanted from me was less a defense of my scholarship than my participation in a funeral for women's literary history. These colleagues wanted a prediction about when the moment for studying women's writings apart from men's would be over—well and truly over. In fact, wasn't it already over, they asked? Hadn't gender studies in effect forced women's studies out of the lexicon? Wasn't a separatist approach to women's writings a fad, passé, reductive, erroneous? Shouldn't women writers always be studied alongside men? Wasn't studying female authors as a group like studying your subject in a vacuum?
Sometimes it is good to be challenged; I like a challenge. But it is no cakewalk to respond to someone who asks you the scholarly equivalent of "Are you still beating your wife?" You might respond, "Let me put a new spin on this and convince you why this field is relevant." Or you could take a reactionary tack, claiming, "Not everything that is worth doing is new." Refusing the terms of the question becomes part of the challenge.
Theirs was not a particularly original line of questioning, and women's literary history is not the only literary subfield addressing such concerns. Those in subfields that consider texts by or about marginalized groups could tell similar stories. Any scholars of subfields that have found their subject inserted in the headline, "Is x dead?" know the phenomenon of which I speak. No doubt many of us have participated in exchanges like the one I have just described, on one side or the other. (Where women's literature is concerned, there is even something amusing about our once-ghettoized area now being accused of turning exclusionary—a bizarre kind of progress in the reasons for its supposed irrelevance.) But the virulence with which my interlocutors grilled me was new to me, and the fact that one of them was a woman who had herself published books with the words feminist and women in their titles was also new.
How did studying women's writings and women writers come to be imagined as old? It is true that the field is about as old as Shakespeare criticism, but no one seems to be complaining that studies of Shakespeare are old—or at least not all of them. We might ask more broadly, "Why are supposedly old methods so often considered lousy methods in literary studies?" Or, "How does a literary methodology come to be perceived as old, and why does its age matter?" (Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions offers an interesting take, but it was published in 1962, so do with that what you will.) Why weren't my colleagues asking me instead, "What's new in the study of women's writings?" Or, "What important work remains to be done in women's literary history?" Of course, they weren't asking those questions because they thought they already knew the answers: "Nothing" or "Nothing much."
I write here to advocate for both the old and the new in literary studies generally and in women's literary history specifically. This is, then, a credo that has its origins in a defense. (That in itself is nothing new for the genre of the feminist credo, histories of which are still being written.) I believe that writing women's literary history helps us better understand why we continue to have conversations like the one I had with my colleagues. It helps us to understand why the question "Are you still beating your husband?" (or spouse or partner) sounds so strange.
Women's literary history is part of a larger feminist project that attempts to make sense of how, when, and why we think words mean something different when they come from a man rather than a woman. Profound changes have occurred in the past several decades in literary and cultural studies scholarship—and to a significant but lesser degree, in textbooks and classrooms—but we still don't know all that we should know about how we got to where we are today. In women's literary history, we still don't know a lot of basic facts—the life circumstances of women writers, what they wrote, what they published, and how their works were read and by whom. No doubt this is true about many male writers as well. But the fact is that we still don't know a lot about highly successful women writers, whether we define success as critical, popular, or commercial. This is simply not true, to the same degree, for men's writings.
It is important to acknowledge, then, that the writing of women's literary history is old. But it is not old in some kind of "back in the day" netherworld of the recent past. It builds on a foundation that dates back centuries, not decades. This is not to denigrate the important work that was done in the 1970s and 1980s. In A Literature of Their Own (1977), Elaine Showalter traces women's literary history back to the beginning of the Victorian era and examines its contours forward. Thanks to the opening of that door, we know now that women's literary history goes back much further than the 1840s. We also know that it is not a Whig history, not a progress narrative. We have begun to describe how, at some moments in the past, the study of women's writings was as controversial and contentious a subject as it has been in our own day. At other times, it was not.
Women's literary history remains vibrant because of the growth it has experienced since the late 1980s. Scholarship from that period fused the then-rapid developments in feminist literary theory with historicisms, old and new. Women's literary historicism has been punctuated by watershed moments, if not full-blown paradigm shifts. One of these was the publication of Margaret Ezell's Writing Women's Literary History (1993). That book was at least in part responsible for prompting a sea change, though an early reviewer deemed it repetitious, self-contradictory, and irascible (Gilbert 234). It now seems almost amusing that Ezell's contributions to more effective and nuanced feminist historicizing were dismissed as ahistorical (Gilbert 237). I mention this to show that not every feminist welcomed such work and that conversations within women's literary history have been—and are—productively contentious. Ezell enjoined us to look beyond what we might want, or hope, to see in our forays into the study of women writers in the past. She enabled us to recognize patterns in our scholarship that were not accurate to the texts that we were (or, in some cases, that we should have been) studying.
What Ezell did, especially in her "The Myth of Judith Shakespeare," was make it not only acceptable but imperative to look outside then-dominant feminist critical models, two of which she identified as the "shrinking-violet female author" (52) and the intrepid proto-feminist author. She made us see that, though we might follow Virginia Woolf as a literary critic of great powers, to follow her as a literary historian was perilous. Women writers in the past ought not to be slotted as either feminist heroines or patriarchal victims, Ezell argued. We needed to be more effective literary historians than Woolf in order to advance the field. There was perhaps no one better situated than Ezell, whose graduate training was in history and in literature, to redirect second-wave feminist literary criticism, to bring it into conversation with emerging historicist and textual methods. Ezell moved us in a direction that Jean Marsden has called "Beyond Recovery."
To go beyond recovery is not to eschew it but to recognize that the ways in which we once recovered women writers' texts are no longer tenable. Aware of emergent identity issues of class/race/sexuality/nation/age, we must make sense of formerly unknown and unread (or little-known and little-read) female authors and texts in multivalent ways. Aware that we ought not just to be looking for women writers whose politics match our own, we try to see more clearly the full range of women's writing and publishing in a given era. Instead of discovering in those writings hidden feminist messages or instead of ignoring or downplaying anti-feminist writings by women, we describe their complexities, contradictions, and contours. Fortunately or unfortunately, there is much work yet to be done to write women authors back into the literary historical record. Now is not the time to fold the study of women's writings back into some larger, indiscernible gender-mass.
Instead, we ought to be asking ourselves, "Why must gender studies be the trump card to women's studies or feminist studies?" For some, the desire may come from a well-meaning place—to be more inclusive. But it is a misperception to see today's women's literary history as a separatist endeavor, even if it sometimes still ought to strive to be a more inclusive one. Precious little feminist literary criticism on women's writings investigates women entirely apart from men. In most cases, it would be impossible to leave out the male publishers, reviewers, mentors, and family members in a woman writer's circle, not to mention the famous male and female contemporaries her work was likely in conversation with.
Placing women writers at the center of our literary histories clearly makes some critics nervous. But if a single-sex concentration were no longer a viable critical option, what would remain? Would gender parity be the ideal, so that our studies would consider half male-authored and half female-authored texts? Or is it representativeness that we want to achieve—replicating whatever proportion of men to women authors existed in the literary past? (Of course, in some eras, we'd still have a lot of work to do to determine that formula.) Perhaps critical perfection is 60 men / 40 women? 70/30? 80/20? What would proportional representation in literary and cultural studies scholarship look like, and what insights would it offer us? No doubt it would be an interesting experiment. We might even say that the past several decades of literary scholarship have been giving proportional representation a whirl. Witness the meteoric rise of the obligatory chapter (often the last) on women writers and/or other marginalized group in the scholarly monograph. But if that period of literary criticism is now behind us, what has followed in its wake?
Maybe the notion is that, with the arrival of gender studies, we have somehow become the opposite of gender blind. We see gender everywhere in literary texts. Ergo, women writers need not be singled out for study because they, too, are everywhere. But here is the sticking point. They are not yet everywhere in our accounts of the past.1 Despite their massive political and categorical differences from each other—which still need to be charted and described with greater care—women writers ought sometimes to be considered together. This is needed not because they necessarily thought of themselves as part of a group. (As we are learning, some did and some didn't.) Not all of them even wanted to be known as "women writers." But they ought to be considered together because, when their sex was known, they were so often embraced and dismissed by readers and critics in ways that demonstrate significant patterns. These patterns appear to be based at least in part on sex.
The reception of women writers as a group seems to have changed dramatically, decade by decade, from one region or country to the next, and from one genre to the next, from what we now know. We are still putting together the data that would help us create better descriptions of these relationships. They are important because they allow us to understand the cultural field into which all writers were entering and to which some of them at least were responding. It may sound tautological, but we need to study women writers together because in the past critics assumed them to be part of a category and judged them categorically. Such judgments may have made a difference in how all authors packaged their work, what they were able to publish and what they weren't, and what was well received and what wasn't—in short, how texts were read and valued. These patterns of reception based on sex (and sex and race, sex and class, sex and age, sex and nation, sex and sexuality, etc.) may have made a difference in what the category of literature itself was, is, and is becoming. Writing women's literary history, then, is an unfinished disciplinary, sociological, and political project, as well as a literary and historical one.
To set such work aside now would be unfortunate. But as we now know, if it happened, it wouldn't be the first time. We have begun to put together the story of how the category of "women's writing" has emerged at signal moments in the past, as if in an archeological dig, and thereafter been obscured, dirt heaped upon it as it went out of fashion. For example, the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century has been called by Clifford Siskin an era of a "great forgetting" of women writers—a concept that Betty A. Schellenberg and others are working to reconsider and refine. We are in the process of documenting how eighteenth-century British women writers were for a time both newly professionalized and, in some genres, culturally dominant. A generation or two later, these once-dominant writers had become difficult to trace. It seems mindboggling that by the mid-nineteenth century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning could not locate any literary "grandmothers" among British poets.2 There were many forgettings and rememberings where individual women authors are concerned as well. One of the most dramatic rememberings was the 1970s feminist "discovery" of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), but other figures are no doubt yet to be unearthed.
With the monumental explosion of information (and full-text search capabilities) in online databases, we have new ways to be more capacious—and less selective or capricious—in writing women's literary history. That emerging information is allowing us to do things such as document precisely when novels that can be identified as published by women outnumbered those identified as by men and to locate when that trend reversed itself. It is permitting us to look at women writers' reception and to compare the vocabulary used across a wide range of sources, to notice new patterns, and to test the accuracy of what we thought we knew. Our challenge is not to raid this mass of data to fashion cherry-picking answers—selecting the juiciest bits absent any discernable context. We must instead continue to attempt to read both widely and deeply in the face of this explosion of information. We must try to render branches, if not the whole tree, where women's literary history—and its place in literary history tout court—is concerned.
In an interview that appeared in the pages of this journal in 2006, Toril Moi expressed the opinion that "the idea of a field called feminist literary theory is probably over" and that now we have "various gender theories, theories of sexuality, queer theories, and you have postcolonial, transnational, and other theories—a series of fragmented, multiple set of fields with specific expertises." I don't share Moi's sense of the death of the field, but I do agree that the fast and furious changes in feminist theorizing that characterized the 1970s1990s seem, for the moment, to have slowed to a trickle. From where I sit, however, this slowing down in theory production is no cause for alarm. Perhaps it means that the theories that have enabled our work are still working. There is, after all, no concomitant slow-down in knowledge production. I rarely hear colleagues complaining that the books coming out in their fields don't have anything new to say. In my own areas of expertise, eighteenth-century women's writings, the history of the novel, and feminist age studies, there are certainly exciting new things to report.
What worries me, however, is the way in which this fragmentation that Moi rightly identifies has led to smaller and smaller collectives within humanities scholarship. There seem to be fewer works of theory or literary criticism that large numbers of us are reading in common. Even within women's literary history, though we have journals and conferences that bring our work together, we seem to be less often reading scholarship that falls outside of our own chronological, generic, or other more modest niche.3 That has created new obstacles for all of us in terms of audience, mutual understanding, and knowledge sharing. We might even say that these obstacles lead to the kinds of myopic conversation I had with my colleagues.4 The challenge for those of us who write women's literary history, then, is to convince those of you who don't that our work is for and about you and your work, too. This may be old news, but it is au courant as well.
Notes
1. I'll set aside the difficult question of the present here, for the sake of argument, but obviously, there is a great deal to say on that matter, too.
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2. Barrett Browning wrote, "England has had many learned women... . and yet where were the poetesses? ... . I look everywhere for Grandmothers and see none. It is not in the filial spirit I am deficient, I do assure you—witness my reverent love of the grandfathers" (X: 14). I discuss this quotation in terms of its implications for women writers, old age, and literary history in my Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 17501850. On the poets that Barrett Browning might have located, see Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry.
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3. I include myself in this trend, and I applaud venues like The Journal of Women's History, which has instituted a "Book Forum" that seeks reviewers from outside of an author's immediate subfield to start a conversation about her/his book's methods.
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4. I have probably misunderstood what's new, what's old, or what matters in the subfields that some of these colleagues are working in as well.
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Works Cited
Backscheider, Paula R. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, and Robert Browning. The Brownings' Correspondence. Ed. Philip Kelley and Scott Lewis. 12 vols. Winfield, KS: Wedgestone P, 1984.
Ezell, Margaret J. M. Writing Women's Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Gilbert, Sandra M. Rev. of Writing Women's Literary History by Margaret J. M. Ezell. Modern Language Quarterly 56.2 (1995): 234-7.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962.
Looser, Devoney. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 17501850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008.
Marsden, Jean. "Beyond Recovery: Feminism and the Future of Eighteenth-Century Studies." Feminist Studies 28.3 (2002): 657662.
Moi, Toril. "What Is an Intellectual Woman?: An Interview with Toril Moi." Conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams. the minnesota review ns 67 (Fall 2006): 6582.
Schellenberg, Betty A. The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontλ to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
Siskin, Clifford. The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 17001830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.
Williams, Jeffrey J. "What Is an Intellectual Woman?: An Interview with Toril Moi." the minnesota review ns 67 (Fall 2006): 6582.
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