a literature of their own elaine showalter pdf

I think that, instead, the female literary tradition comes from the still-evolving relationship between women writers and their society. It also suggests permanence, a deep, basic, and inevitable difference between male and female ways of perceiving the world. The theory of a female sensibility revealing itself in an imagery and form specific to women always runs dangerously close to reiterating the familiar stereotypes. I am also uncomfortable with the notion of ‘female imagination’. My fear that this book was going to be about bogus essentialist notions such as “feminine aesthetics” was thus eased as early as page 12: In this history of British Women Writers “from Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing”, Elaine Showalter responds to Mill by suggesting that if women’s literature differs from men’s, it’s because for much of its existence it has been the literature of a subculture of a group that existed apart from mainstream social and intellectual circles and as such could not help but respond to its own marginalisation. As it is, they have not created one, because they found a highly advanced literature already created.I have a lot to say about this passage, but I’ll leave it for when I host the discussion on Mill for the Year of Feminist Classics in February. If women lived in a different country from men, and had never read any of their writings, they would have had a literature of their own. Why is the Roman literature, as critics proclaim to satiety, not original, but an imitation of the Greek? Simply because the Greeks came first. If we turn from pure speculation to literature in the narrow sense of the term, and the fine arts, there is a very obvious reason why women’s literature is, in its general conception and in its main features, an imitation of men’s. Contrary to what it may appear, the title of Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own is not a reference to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Their Own – it’s rather a response to the following passage from John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women:

A literature of their own elaine showalter pdf