The Extra 103
Writing and feminist scholarship has made to the basic structure of my Columbia chapter on the Transcendentalist movement.
A merely pragmatic objection to feminist endorsement of such consensus-seeking enterprises can be met by the pragmatic rejoinder that it is better for a little more attention to be paid by our anthologies and literary histories to women’s and minority contributions than no attention at all. The sheer allotment of more space to women’s writing constitutes at least a rudimentary acknowledgment that we must change our settled habits. Given the vastness of the project of putting all literary history under the sign of gender, an elegant reformulation may take many years.
A more fundamental concern, however, as Kolodny also points out, is that the drive to reformulate the canon bespeaks a conservative hankering to restabilize. One reason why we respond to the call for a new and improved American literary history is that we yearn to recover the sense of common purpose the profession supposedly once had- an impulse at odds with that of feminist scholarship, which “asserts as its central critical category not commonality but difference.” Kolodny forces us to ask whether our interest in canonical redefinition actually boils down to the desire to neutralize the challenges of women’s and ethnic studies so that we can continue to teach our beloved Melville-Twain-Hemingway centered course on the American novel while doing our bit for women’s writing with a week or so toward the end on Jewett and Cather.
That indeed is a real peril. Before reacting to it, however, one must ask whether the opposition of feminist scholarship to canon-oriented thinking is inherent or historical. On this point, the answer seems quite clear. Although as long as the sexes are socialized differently some aspects of men’s and women’s literary achievement will remain mutually unassimilable, feminist oppositionism in American literary studies has drawn most of its energy from a specific historical imbalance: the acceptance as normative of a number of traits extrapolated from a limited number of (mostly) male literary texts, such as the theory of the cult of wilderness in
Kolody, p. 293.