110 American Literature
Makes de facto the case for art as vision as it shrinks from pressing equivalent claims, suggests that we have only begun to appreciate the intricacy of gender variables as forces in literary history and that to understand them to the fullest the elements of commonality and difference between the literary production and experience of women and men of the Romantic era will need to be sifted with a more rigorous comparatism than has yet been tried. The result, I suspect, would be affirm the basic accuracy of the feminist depiction of Romantic ideology as a patriarchal construct, but with a number of enriching qualifications. Fuller attention would be paid, for instance, to the participation of formative female influences (such as Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Ann Radcliffe, and- despite her praises of rational discipline over undisciplined sensibility- Mary Wollstonecraft), the valorization of stereotypically feminine traits of though and expression, the empowerment that that valorization gave to some women writers of the period (through the legitimation of heart-religion as opposed to doctrinal legalism, for instance), and the de-masculinization of art as a field of endeavor from the standpoint of male writers, especially in America. The net effect of these complications might in the long run be the reinterpretation of Romantic ideology as a vehicle of transition from solidly patriarchal control of literary institutions to a more open literary marketplace.
We cannot expect this kind of re-envisionment to complete itself until the two earlier projects in gender-oriented literary studies have defamiliarized our view of the old canon and familiarized our view of the literary values and traditions more or less distinctive to women’s writing. But it cannot be too early to imagine the shape that such an effort might take. Let me attempt, then, to suggest some of the ways in which a comprehensive rewriting of American literary history might be assisted by the important contributions of feminist revisionism to date.
First, those contributions can help us toward a profounder explanation of the causality of literary history than is afforded by the formalist-poststructuralist succession in American literary criticism, which has provided us with powerful methodologies for approaching texts individually and synchronically but which does not encourage extra-textual explanations of how literature is con-