Report from a phallocrat - radical feminist critical movement

National Review, Feb 24, 1989 by Jeffrey Hart

YOU'RE JUST NOT going to believe what follows, but I assure you it's true. If your son or daughter is at college and has anything to do with literature, the chances are good that that student will run smack into the radical feminist critical movement. Feminists are the most energetic school of literary exegetes on college faculties today. In fact, they constitute a kind of faculty within the faculty. They are powerful in a myriad of professional organizations such as the MLA, which bends to their wishes.

What unites all segments of the feminist school is the assumption that women are oppressed and need to be "liberated." They debate among themselves, of course, the nature of the oppression and the shape of liberation, and these debates can be cruel to individuals who get read out of the movement as backsliders or worse. Jobs are involved.

The best recent survey of the feminist material is an essay by Peter Shaw of Columbia in the autumn 1988 American Scholar. I am indebted to it as well as to my own observations at another Ivy League college.

In an earlier phase, during the Seventies, feminists debated such questions as whether literature ought to show women being oppressed or, alternatively, whether it ought to seek out or invent role models that would encourage women to be liberated.

There is a terrible problem with putting the issue that way, which gives political mission primacy over aesthetic value. And, in fact, good writing has been completely defeated and explicitly disavowed by today's radical feminist critics. When you do this, of course, you open the door to works of low literary value that might be thought politically useful.

Annette Kolodny tells us how to go about the current mode of post-Stalinist deviation hunting. The question is put: "What ends do these judgments serve and what conceptions of the world or ideological stances do they (even if unwittingly) help to perpetuate?"

I treasure that "even if unwittingIy"-it's worthy of Madame Defarge. But marvelously, another critic, Toril Moi, has discovered Annette Kolodny herself aiding the enemy by her positive use of adjectives like "vigorous" and "rigorous," which Miss Moi finds suspiciously masculine. Commissar Moi also convicts Patricia Beer of "traditionalism," a hanging offense. Miss Beer argues for value-free scholarship-that is, not bending the facts to support a liberation program.

Then there is the problem of the French critic Jacques Lacan, who has raised the vexing literary question of the penis. Lacan is basically a Freudian, though he takes time out for Marxism. The great beauty of being a French critic like Lacan is that you can use Freudian themes without bothering to ask whether they are true or not. You just posit a theory, and spin on from there. The evidence? Phhht! Lacan, anyway, has argued influentially that the phallus is the "primary signifier." He means that the phallus is the primary seat of cultural and artistic energy, and the pen is the writer's symbolic equivalent of a penis. What Lacan makes of the word processor I dare not ask.

Lacan's baseless penis = pen idea poses deep problems for Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and the rest. After all, they complain that we are living in a patriarchal "phallocracy," and they like to make up puns like "phallacy." "Manglish" is to be replaced by "sispeak," and on and on along the road to "gynocracy."

But what do they do with Lacan and that penis? Forget about it? Not a chance. The answer is, the vagina needs to be "valorized"-made a feminist alternative to the phallus.

Helen Cixous, Peter Shaw informs us, has made a Kleinian analysis of the mother's nipple, but for her trouble is now excoriated by the feminist commissars for permitting a superficial reconciliation between penis and nipple.

Still, if the female genitalia are to be "valorized"-well, which part? Here our mob of scribbling feminist nuts splits into factions. Luce Trigaray, perhaps speaking for the "mainstream" of this kind of criticism, champions the vulva. But this view has been attacked from the feminist Left as covertly masculine-that is, males have "devalorized" the clitoris. The vagina itself, independently of vulva and clitoris, has its own faction. Which side are you on, Trotsky?

THIS KIND OF criticism is an utter waste of time. Jane Austen, the Brontlis, George Eliot did not write as Women, but proudly as authors, seeking universality as much as Dickens or Tolstoy did. Indeed, our academic grievance-mongers fundamentally misconceive the nature of art, which works to transcend differences of race and gender. "Good night, sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." We do not attend a performance of Hamlet as whites or blacks, men or women, but as human beings; and all great art, to the extent that it is great, possesses this capacity of transcendence.

Annette Kolodny, Toril Moi, and the rest of the sispeaking gynocrats should be teaching at the Academy in Lagado.