Elaine Showalter on the feminine, feminist and female phases relating and linking women writers

 

Elaine Showalter is an influential American critic famous for her conceptualization of gynocriticism, a woman-centric approach to literary analysis. Her work 'A Literature of their Own: British Novelists from Bronte to Lessing' discusses the female literary tradition which she analyses as evolution through three phases. Taking her title from an observation of John Stuart Mill in 1869

"If women lived in a different country from men and had never read any of their writings, they would have a literature of their own."

 

Showalter suggests that women themselves were slowly growing aware of their separateness and leaving a record of that awareness in their works. Showalter contents that all literary subcultures can be traced through three major phases: first a phase of "imitation" and "internalization" in which the subculture adopts the values and the literary forms of the dominant tradition - a phase that extends from the widespread appearance of the male pseudonym in the 1840s to the death of George Eliot in 1880; next a phase of "advocacy" and "protest" in which the subculture rejects prevailing values and begins to declare its autonomy - a stage which Showalter associates with the years between 1880 and the winning of the vote in 1920; and finally a phase of "self-discovery" - a turning inward and a search for identity which begins around 1920 and continues to the present when women's writing entered a new phase of self-awareness. Having survived a culture's equivalent of childhood and adolescence, Showalter's model implies that the female literary tradition now approaches its maturity.

Showalter labels three stages of development, the "feminine", the " feminist" and the "female". She points out that although women writers since the beginning have shared a "covert solidarity" with other women writers and their female audience; there was no expressive community or self-awareness before the 1840s. Even during the feminine phase, women writers did not see their writing as an expression of their female experiences. Yet the repressive circumstances gave rise to innovation and covert ways to express their inner life and thus we have the mad woman locked in the attic, the crippled artist, and the murderous wife. Despite the restrictions, the novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot talked about women's daily lives and values within a family and community.

In the feminist phase which denotes political involvement, women writers questioned the stereotypes and challenged the restrictions of women's language, denounced the ethic of self-sacrifice, and used their fictional dramatization of oppression to bring about social and political changes. They embodied a "declaration of independence" in female tradition and stood up to the male establishment in an outspoken manner. Challenging the monopoly of the male press, many feminist journals came into being, and some like Virginia Woolf controlled their own press.
The female phase was marked by courageous self-exploration and a return to more realistic modes of expression. Post-1960 writers like Dorris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, and Margaret Drabble undertook authentic anger and sexuality as sources of creative power while reasserting their continuity with women writers of the past.