Title: Elaine Showalter - Wikipedia
Headings: Elaine Showalter
Elaine Showalter
Contents
Personal life
Career
Critical importance
Gynocritics
Criticism and controversy
Feminist theory and criticism
Hysteria and "modern" illnesses
Popular culture
Academic teaching
Summaries of major works
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References
Further reading
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Content: Showalter says, "women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature" ( New, 139). Rejecting both imitation and protest, Showalter advocated approaching feminist criticism from a cultural perspective in the current Female phase, rather than from perspectives that traditionally come from an androcentric perspective like psychoanalytic and biological theories, for example. Feminists in the past have worked within these traditions by revising and criticizing female representations, or lack thereof, in the male traditions (that is, in the Feminine and Feminist phases). In her essay Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981), Showalter says, "A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race, nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women's culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space" ( New, 260). Showalter does not advocate replacing psychoanalysis, for example, with cultural anthropology; rather, she suggests that approaching women's writing from a cultural perspective is one among many valid perspectives that will uncover female traditions. However, cultural anthropology and social history are especially fruitful because they "can perhaps offer us a terminology and a diagram of women's cultural situation" ( New, 266). Showalter's caveat is that feminist critics must use cultural analyses as ways to understand what women write, rather than to dictate what they ought to write ( New, 266).