Welcoming a New Hollow: on Elaine Showalter's "Towards a Feminist Poetics"

I have dealt with examples of both feminist critique and gynocritics in past English courses and personal readings, but what I had never considered were the limitations present in works of feminist critique. The woman as a reader was not something I had considered. I have closely read works like Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (by himself) and Melville’s Benito Cereno – all novels pertaining to levels of feminist critique, but until now I have failed to recognize the pitfall-like fissures in what I now recognize as certain male-constructed histories. Paradise Lost is Milton’s take on Genesis, the creation story, in which Eve is the central female figure, the mother of all mothers, sisters, daughters, etc., and she is depicted as a passive, narcissistic creature, who is easily persuaded by Satan to bite the infamous apple and – under his influence – forces Adam to do the same. Gustavus Vassa’s ‘Narrative’ features brief images of women, always represented as passive animals or as slaves among slaves. Melville’s depiction of the enslaved women aboard the San Dominick is much alike Vassa’s, but aboard this ship, the slaves enslave their captain, and the women are still given little or no respect.

Men have not been exposed to the same level nor amount of historical oppression and angst as the female, and authors use the examples of women in these stories to promote social, historical, and political change. We see that male authorship as a sole voice in the literary canon presents historical and ideological boundaries, and we can recognize a language that is more noisy than informative. What gynocritics provides the scholarly ivory tower of literature with is a frequency that can be interpreted more freely. It essentially rips a hole in the bodily head of literature, out from which can emerge a new voice, one that analyzes and interprets from a perspective of the socially oppressed. The Other gains a voice, and the reader can accept the language as authoritative without worrying about an essence of tyranny.

The more gynocritics that ascend into the known realm of the literary, the more easily and readily we align ourselves with their poverties of innocence, their stories of patriarchal enslavement and destitution; and the more authority-like these figures become. Authority is a powerful device to be wielded, and sometimes authors will abuse it to sneak things past their readers, toying with and exploiting their passivity. Yes, the gynocritics will leave hollows in their wake, but once disturbed, the soil of authority is at least less dense, and passive readers that tumble into these empty spaces need only embrace the practices of critical thinking and close reading to gain the strength required to dig themselves out. With the rising of (any) new voices in the verbal community of literature, readers should only see more necessity in close reading, for it is their only tool and comfort in the world of obscurity that is literature.
By Tom Beedham