“Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Elaine Showalter

Elaine Showalter surprised me in this essay. I did not expect her to critically evaluate feminist criticism of the past and synthesize a new suggestion regarding what form this criticism should assume. The one passage that impacted me the most is as follows: “Nonetheless, the feminist obsession with correcting, modifying, supplementing, revising, humanizing, or even attacking male critical theory keeps us dependent upon it and retards our progress in solving our own theoretical problems.” The quote really helped me to answer one of the questions I posed in my blog site, which I posted after reading excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” I have often wondered if feminist theory continues to be helpful after generations of considering how women can distinguish themselves in history and present times. That being said, my past question was, “With the coming and going of each generation since Woolf first published "A Room of One's Own," do we take greater heed to her lecture?” In other words, are women writers trying to move past the dependency upon male critical theory and are they trying to finally progress in the solving of our own theoretical problems, as Showalter writes?
I have often been dissatisfied with the continual dependency upon male critical theory. Therefore, I rejoiced when I read Showalter’s essay, which brought up her idea of “gynocritics,” or the study of women’s writing as our primary subject rather than looking at men’s writing. I loved her emphasis on finding the distinction of women’s writing from all other kinds of writings. When we focus on defining women’s writing based solely on its characteristics, and not defining it according to what women’s writing is not, I begin to agree with Showalter: that “we may never reach the promised land at all; for when feminist critics see our task as the study of women’s writing, we realize that the land promised to us is not the serenely undifferentiated universality of texts but the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself.”