'A Room of One's Own,' personal criticism, and the essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994 by Anne Fernald

G. Douglas Atkins's book does not attempt to suggest what one might mean by personal criticism. It is understandable that he has left such a gap. "Personal" is exactly the sort of word that gives people trouble: it is so common that we can come to feel that we just know when something is personal, hardly aware that there may be almost as many ideas of what is personal as there are people. This difficulty makes all the more important an attempt to define the "personal" in criticism. Without explaining, we will not be able to recognize personal criticism, learn to know its uses and problems, and decide how fully we want to incorporate it in our own work.

In light of the many current exhortations that literary critics be more personal in their writing, it is crucial that we be self-conscious about our invocations of the "personal." Many--perhaps most--of us enter academic life out of a love of literature, an enthusiasm for reading and talking about ideas and language, but our writing does not easily reflect that original enthusiasm. We want our reading of articles--a duty of academic life--to be enlivened by the idea (fictional or not) that their authors have enjoyed writing them. We want to write for an audience of readers, not of specialists.

What makes writing personal? Autobiography and confession, diaries and letters carry the implication, central to their forms, that there is an unusually thin veil, if veil there be, between reader and writer. Still, this does not explain the sense we have of knowing one diarist or letter-writer better than another. One very general principle seems central to creating personal writing: an interest in showing the process of the work, in revealing contradictions, enthusiasm, and misgivings. It was precisely this interest in documenting uncertainty and change that led Montaigne to give his writings the name "essai." From the beginning, essays have been written to guide the reader through doubts and false beginnings, and even essays written to convince or persuade do so by leading the reader through the process by which a conclusion was reached. This spirit of essayant permits and even encourages later writers to add their thoughts to the conversation.

Personal criticism is not autobiography. It opposes itself to more theoretical writing, a more systematic approach. To call for personal criticism is to ask critics to write essays, not articles. In Estranging the Familiar Atkins offers a distinction between articles and essays that provides a beginning point: "Unlike that done in article form ... literary commentary done essayistically reflects the critic's passionate engagement and expresses his or her involvement in the commentary" (39). The difference between the terms "personal criticism" and "essay" lies not in meaning but in connotation. For many, "essay" suggests a tired, bell-lettristic excursus, fusty and irrelevant. "Essay" may also suggest the mind-numbing exercises that we wrote as students. And of course not all essays are literary, or even critical. In contrast, "personal criticism" connotes a passionate and candid critique written from a self-consciously individual perspective. Nonetheless, throughout this study I have resisted "personal criticism" in favor of "essay" for several reasons. First, the best essays have always done what personal criticism claims to do. Second, much recent personal criticism--especially that which calls itself "autobiographical literary criticism"(1)--trades on a fantasy of the literary critic as celebrity, so that if we learn anything it is not about Jane Eyre or reading novels but about the critic's personal life. If these essays scrutinize anything, it is the author's life. Furthermore, essays have a more comfortable relation to argument than does personal criticism. That is, essays horror the minute articulations of a point of view, while personal criticism has made the very acknowledgment of subtlety into a polemical stance. When personal criticism announces that it is judging a text by individual rather than theoretical criteria ("This one time, I've taken off the straitjacket, and it feels so good" [Tompkins 138]), it reveals itself as the naive latecomer to a conversation that the essay has been engaged in for centuries.