104 American Literature
American writing, which in its exposition from D.H. Lawrence to Leslie Fiedler presumes a male author and a male experiencer.
The immediate remedy for this imbalance is work like Kolodny’s The Land Before Her, which provides an archaeology of the literary experience of the frontier for American women to set against the better known tradition of male romance. In the long run, however, something more intricate than an oppositional model will be needed to ensure that women’s writing unjustly deemed subcanonical is taken seriously outside the curricular and scholarly domains of Women’s studies, and- more significantly- to ensure that either the old canonical texts or the newer candidates for canonical inclusion or re-inclusion (like the Panther captivity discussed by Kolodny, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, recently promoted by Penguin from its American Library to a Penguin Classic) are studied as fully as their potential warrants. Essentially, the two genders’ literary experiences, like their social experiences, are inseparable; and in their inseparability they illuminate each other more often positively than negatively.
The present state of literary research does not permit us to see this well enough. It’s understandable that the great majority of work still be focused either on the traditional male-oriented canon, since that is mainly what still counts in the journals and in the curriculum; or on the new female canon, in an attempt to establish its integrity and distinctiveness. As a result we have good studies, for example, of the masculine bildungsroman and of women’s developmental fiction, but as yet no attempt of comparable seriousness to coordinate the two clearly interrelated traditions into a single picture.
Just as the critique of androcentrism- the first major wave of feminist revisionism- has helped give rise to the intensive study of the distinctive traditions of women’s writing, so both of these movements will no doubt help give rise to an increasingly vigorous
Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Seltzer, 1923); Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960). The masculinist assumptions of this and related work are unpacked in Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly, 33 (1981), 123-39.
The Land Before Her (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984).
See for example, Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974) and Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction (Ithaca Cornell Univ. Press, 1978).